2009 annual letter

The Engstrand Chronicles and Other News Vol. XV

December, 2009

            The Christmas tree is up and Thanksgiving is over, so it must be time to send out my letter.

Three different friends last year used the same word to describe my 2008 letter:  a “downer.”  (I agree, it was, and I almost didn’t send it, but I’m a creature of habit and the letter accurately represented my state of mind.)  Another friend, however, wrote back that she appreciated the honesty—it was the first letter she had received, she said, in which someone didn’t report they had sold their house for more than it was worth, made a killing in the market, and saw their kids win a Nobel and a Pulitzer prize.  She went on to add, though, that most of the 2008 letters were more somber than in years past.  One can understand why.

In any event, I could say that I decided to get back to normal.  Except that I didn’t “decide” anything.  It has just happened, very gradually.  But I did decide to make up for lost time with this letter.  So you have available some post-New Year’s reading, if you wish it, or you have a little extra paper to put with your recycles.  I seem unable to write a causerie, only tomes.  I’ve scattered through the letter a few self-portraits by Elliott and a few photos that some of you have already seen.

* * *

Elliott, responding after I told him and his friend Zach that since neither one of them can cook at all, they really need to get partnered with women who like to cook:  “Unfortunately, with the change in gender roles, no one likes to cook and we’re all screwed.”

One night in August, however, I encountered a male who can cook.  My friend from 7^th grade, Steve Richardson, promised to return a dinner favor he and I had had bestown upon us earlier in the summer when he was visiting from NC to deal with matters related to his mother and her house.  So when he was back in town, we arranged a return dinner for my friends Jay & Signe.  Well, he cooked a fabulous meal with exquisite presentation!  Jay & Signe and my friend Frances Lawrenz, from the University, all agreed that Steve could come and cook at their houses any time he wished.  I liked hosting this kind of dinner:  all I had to do was provide the wine and set the table.

* * *

I must note with great sadness the passing of my friend Bob Antila.  We met him in the early 1980s, and shortly thereafter he persuaded Pat and me to serve as volunteer hosts for the Aquatennial (at that time, festivals around the country and world sent their festival dignitaries to visit other festivals, and the visitors were paired with local volunteer hosts to get them to events and show them the area).  We were fortunate enough to host visiting Australians in 1985, from the Gummi Festival in Wagga Wagga, Australia.  Our guests, Brian and Margaret Partridge, and the other Australian couple visiting at the same time, Rowland and Stella Evans, became good friends, and we later visited both couples in Australia—and remain in touch to this day (the wonders of email).  We also met another local couple, Pete and Judi Haberstick, who have remained good friends.  For those friendships I have Bob to thank. 

In addition to his passion for golf, he also had a passion for bridge—in which his passion exceeded his skill, a description that unfortunately applies to quite a number of us who play the game.  We played together before and after he and Denise met and were married and while they still lived in the Twin Cities, and we were glad for a short time to have them as members of the 6-couple bridge group that I am charged with having initiated in 1977.

Bob was a friend who was always there when one needed a friend.  Even though we sometimes didn’t share the same political views, neither of us took the differences too seriously because the friendship was worth much more than agreement on all things political.  I always remember, and sometimes quote, Bob’s observation that “I’d rather be lucky than smart.”  At least at one time in his life, Bob was both lucky and smart:  Lucky enough to meet Denise (I may have had a hand in the meeting, but I can’t remember for sure now and I don’t want to claim responsibility when it’s not mine) and smart enough to marry her.  Although they have lived away from the Twin Cities for a number of years, I have visited them on occasion and they have returned on visits, so we have remained in frequent touch.  I shall miss deeply, among other things, his wry humor and his warm good friendship.  My world is lessened by his departure from it.

* * *

My friend Mike Unger invited me to join him at a St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concert last winter when he was a bachelor one weekend because his wife was out of town.  Except it wasn’t just the SPCO, it was also the London Sinfonietta.  There were two pieces on the program, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #5, the Emperor, and a piece premiered in 2007, “Songs of Wars I Have Seen,” by a composer named Heiner Goebbels.  Although I’ve been to many concerts over the years, a couple of things occurred to me during this one. 

First, I am perfectly happy to hear a Mozart or Corelli or Boyce or Haydn or other Baroque piece performed in a concert—but I can also put their works on at home for company or a dinner party and it is not intrusive.  One cannot put something like the Emperor, or any of Beethoven’s symphonies, on as “background”—they demand to be listened to. 

Second, I must have listened more closely to it this time than I have before, because I heard at least twice in the Emperor the opening notes to the West Side Story song “There’s a Place for Us.”  Leonard Bernstein was a trained classical musician; I wonder if he picked up that flight of 6-7-8 notes and made a song out of it. 

Third, I am not a great fan of contemporary classical music; as I may have related before, I joke with the kids that I don’t listen to much music written after 1900 (that’s not really true, but I think they mostly believe it).  “Songs of Wars I Have Seen” wasn’t bad, and as I said to Mike afterward, if I listened to it 20 times, there would be elements of it that I might hum (to myself, in the shower, because the kids shriek if I start humming anything).  But I’ll never listen to it 20 times.  It was an hour long, and included readings from Gertrude Stein as well as lighting changes on the stage (from blue to the yellow of the incandescent light from the 1930s lamps scattered among the orchestra to a harsh white), and some it was discordant (to my ears).  I told Elliott about the concert when I got home, and the best analogy I could draw was that Beethoven to Goebbels is like Presley to Metallica.

I have concluded that that is one of the great differences between contemporary and older classical music:  You can’t hum or whistle the new stuff.  That same observation may be equally valid—to whatever extent it is at all—to the difference between some modern music that Elliott’s/Krystin’s generation listens to and the rock that I listened to 40+ years ago.  The old rock can be hummed; much modern music that the generations behind me listen to cannot.  (No, I am not saying all of it cannot be, but much of it cannot, from what I have heard.)

On a related theme, I found a website that listed what it identified as the top 100 most popular pieces of classical music based on their use “in pop culture - movies, commercials, cartoons, songs, video games and ringtones.”  For each one they included a short audio excerpt.  I tested Elliott (Krystin didn’t want to do it).  He recognized 89 of them, which I thought was pretty good for someone who doesn’t listen to classical music except when I play it.  But of course it’s ubiquitous in pop culture.  Elliott floored me on one of them:  #70 was “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto.  Elliott rattled the name off without any hesitation.  I don’t think there is one person in 1000 in the country who would know that, and I’m not one of them.  (But there were other titles he didn’t know that he should have, so there are gaps in his classical music knowledge.  About which he cares not one whit.)

Of the 100, I didn’t recognize four pieces.  Elliott recognized one of the ones I did not, “Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes (whom, I must confess, I had never heard of).

Later in the year, Mike and I bought cheapo season tickets to the SPCO.  The first concert was one I loved because it had all the kinds of music I like:  2 Mozart pieces, a Vivaldi, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.  It was interesting to hear a chamber orchestra do a Beethoven symphony, because those are big muscular pieces that need a cast of thousands to perform.  But they pulled it off, even if, had the same piece had been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, there would have been twice as many players on the stage.  I was reminded again that Beethoven’s pieces are not background music. The guy who gave a short talk before the concert about the pieces we were going to hear described Beethoven’s Fifth as “the least misunderstood piece of classical music.”

At a later concert I heard Hector Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ (the childhood of Christ), a rarely-performed piece that is somewhere between an opera and an oratorio.  I will confess that I’ve never been a big Berlioz fan, but this piece was wonderful.  There are parts of it I could readily listen to any time.

I do wonder, however, if there is not inflation in ovations as well as in other parts of life.  Audiences seem to give performers standing ovations at any turn.  I’ve always thought standing ovations were to be reserve for truly spectacular performances.  Apparently that’s not true any more.  It seems that the performers at the majority of any kind of performance (music or theater) I’ve been to in the last couple of years have received standing ovations.  Maybe the quality of performances has increased and I just haven’t noticed. 

* * *

I was talking with Krystin and Elliott one time early in the year and Elliott was expressing dismay at the amount of time teachers, in some classes, have to spend just settling the class down.  Krystin made some comment about disruptive people in the work setting.  Elliott announced that he thought in every classroom and business setting there should be some big guy standing in the corner with a big stick, and any time anyone got out of line, the guy would go bop them on the head with his stick.  I may counsel him that Human Resources should probably not be his chosen profession (although I can imagine that HR people from time to time would LIKE to adopt that approach with some employees).  I sent the story to a friend in Human Resources at the University, who wrote back “I love it.  Perhaps we could come up with a classification series for this role--junior stick handler and senior stick handler or perhaps junior bopper and senior bopper.  And if it were a really big college one could also hire an Assistant to the Senior Stick Handler.”  I told her I wanted to be a “senior bopper.”

* * *

My friend Maria Bales and I were exchanging emails at one point, and she related that their elderly and beloved dog had died.  They still had the cat, she noted, but went on to observe (quite correctly in my view) that dogs are for companionship while cats are for comic relief. Cats are funny but they sure are dumb. And as Elliott pointed out, unlike dogs, cats have no sense of shame. Not smart enough, IMHO.

At the same time, I do have to say that my two cats are affectionate and loyal pets.  They are with me almost wherever I am in the house.  (And if I’m not there, they will hang around one of the two kids.)  They sleep on me if I’m reading or napping on the sofa—and Bela sometimes on his back with his paws out and in all directions.

I did learn one small surprising fact.  Sometimes Bela (the male) chases Jenny (the female) around the house and up and down the stairs, to the point that Jenny starts sounding like a tomcat in a fight, with screeching and hissing.  (They can’t do much damage to each other because neither has front claws.)  I always have assumed that my sweet, innocent little girl Jenny was getting chased and harassed by the aggressive male Bela.  Elliott told me, however, that he has seen Jenny approach Bela completely unprovoked and smack him across the face.

* * *

I was on a date last February at a small local restaurant in south Minneapolis.  My date had excused herself to go to the restroom.  Some guy about my age came up from behind me, leaned over the table, and said “you’re the most boring person on the planet and she’s lucky to have you,” and was out the door.  This all took about 5 seconds or less.  I was still trying to figure out if I knew the guy by the time he was gone.  I didn’t.  Obviously some wiseacre who likes to give people something to talk about.  Odd use of the conjunction “and” in the sentence.  I know he couldn’t have overheard our conversation--I was facing away from him and while the restaurant was not extremely noisy, there was the murmur of conversation and waiters removing dishes and so on.  When I related the incident to my date, she was kind enough to say that I wasn’t boring at all!

* * *

            I subscribe to this odd once-per-day email service by the name of delanceyplace.com.  Every day there’s a message about some topic that is completely unpredictable—one day it might be about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, then about the football huddle, then about presidential inaugural addresses, then beef, and so on.  One of them I excerpt in part here, because it interested me as someone who writes a lot:  “There’s the objection to nouns being used as verbs. These days, impact comes in for especial condemnation:  The new rules are impacting the efficiency of the procedure.  People lustily express that they do not ‘like’ this, endlessly writing in to language usage columnists about it.  Or one does not ‘like’ the use of structure as in I structured the test to be as brief as possible.”  OK, I’m certainly guilty there—I have long been put off by the use of “impact” as a verb.  Seems that my position may be hard to defend, at least on historical grounds.  The author of the book being quoted goes on:  “Well, okay--but that means you also don’t ‘like’ the use of view, silence, worship, copy, outlaw, and countless other words that started as nouns and are now also verbs.  Nor do many people shudder at the use of fax as a verb.”  I’m not enough of an historian of words and the language to have realized that those words were originally only nouns.  So I guess I need to be a little more flexible and mindful of the evolution of the language.  (But I still don’t like “impact” as a verb!)

            Another point the delanceyplace piece touched on is the use of “they” as a genderless pronoun (for example, “if a student comes before I get there, they can slip their test under my office door”; many, including me, normally object because “student” is singular and “they” is plural.  The alternative, which I use with some distaste because it is so awkward and wordy, is “if a student comes before I get there, he or she can slip his or her test under my office door.”  There are distinguished antecedents for using “they” as a genderless pronoun going back to the 1400s and including Shakespeare, so I’m having second thoughts about not using it that way.

            I passed along the delanceyplace message to an English professor faculty friend of mine who’s an extraordinarily great writer.  His response was rather tart:  “Using ‘they’ with a singular antecedent is often convenient, as you say.  No one can stop you from going with it, so why not?  I usually try to rewrite so I don’t get stuck in such a place. . . .  One thing for pretty sure:  the media are the model of expression, and since they are slipshod, those who follow them will be even more so, and that’s the way it is going.  We have lived in a mass culture since the Victorian-Edwardian age, and lucid English is at a premium.  It is always worth cultivating and encouraging, nevertheless.  Why write crap when there are alternatives?”

He went on to comment that “lots of infelicitous practices can be justified by appealing to one ‘authority’ or antecedent or another.  What one likes or doesn’t like is not a criterion of merit but an expression of preference (the philosopher David Hume differentiated between preference and taste, the latter involving the exercise of critical judgment).  The better-educated are a better guide to usage than the worse—if there can be agreement on who is which.  Where the better-educated differ, one goes with what one’s own judgment (not just preference) determines.”  So I guess I need to exercise my taste, not my preference (in Humian terms).

* * *

            “I am a stranger to untroubled certainties.”  I just love that statement because it describes my view of the world so well on political, social, and economic matters.  I found it somewhere on the web but now I can’t find it to provide the appropriate attribution.  Anyway, it’s not original with me.  Our last president, Mr. Bush, had a Manichean world view, and his certainties led us in all kinds of directions that have not served the nation well, in my opinion.  Those on the religious right, and others who share that kind of dogmatism, are also driven by certainties.  A somewhat more sarcastic way to describe those who have untroubled certainties is to say that they never let the facts get in the way of their beliefs.  I suppose the attraction of the phrase arises because where I work, where we are mostly so well aware of how much we do not know that most certainties are foolish.  And on the scientific side of the house, all “certainties” are in fact provisional, subject to further confirmation or disconfirmation. 

* * *

            Unless you’ve lived in a cave the last few years, cut off from the world, you are aware of the enormous popularity of Facebook, the Internet social-networking website. (To save keying and space, hereafter it’s FB.)  I have known about it for some time because the kids use it constantly, but I’d not put myself on it.  (When on FB, one can send a message to other people also on it asking them to be your “friend.”  I once opened a FB page a couple of years ago, just to see what college kids are using and what it was all about—and within minutes I had a message from some guy I’d never heard of asking to be my “friend.”  My first thought was that this guy needed to get a life—and quickly exited FB.)   But one of my very-long-time friends Denise told me last year that she’d gotten on it and found it a marvelous way to stay in touch with relatives and friends.  (One thing one can do—does—on FB is post thoughts or news about yourself  to your own page—your “status updates”—and that posting is immediately distributed to all your FB friends.  Your friends, in turn, can post responses to your message, and so on.  So it is a way to be in touch with a group of people all at once, a sort of mini-collective conversation.) 

I was talking with the kids about the FB phenomenon one evening and Krystin persuaded me to go back on.  As it followed immediately on Denise’s urging, I did so.  (Astonishingly, within a day, I received a request to be a friend on FB from an Australian friend who’s even older than I am!)  Several months later, however, I still quite haven’t figured out if it’s a piece of modern technology that is useful for me—or if it is, how.   Some people jump into new technology with abandon and start using it effectively immediately; others of us only dip our toes in the water and take (sometimes quite) awhile to decide to use it.  I am in the latter camp—I’m not against all this technological wizardry but I’m slow to adapt to it.  I have acquired several FB friends and even found a high-school classmate to whom I provided information about our 40-year class reunion in August.  (I also discovered that about 10% of my high-school class is on FB, but none of them people I had ever known very well.)  While I have done no posting, it has been interesting to read (most of) the posts from my “friends.”  You are now reading my FB-equivalent posting, except that mine only comes once per year and in print whereas one can post daily or more often on FB, and you can’t post online comments in response to my “posting.”  (I wonder if someday, caught in the winds of technological change, I will post this annual review to my FB page, thus distributing it automatically to all my friends.  I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to get to that point—or that enough of my equally-antiquated friends will have FB pages to make it an effective means of communication with them.)

The advent and spread of FB has also led to the creation of (at least) two new verbs:  one can “friend” someone on FB, and so also can one “defriend” someone.  According to the Urban Dictionary, to defriend is “1. To remove someone from your Livejournal, MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking site.  Doing this is often seen as a passive-aggressive move, telling the person without telling them that you no longer want to be friends.  It’s also commonly a response to drama.  Defriending someone often causes more drama.  There are sometimes valid reasons for doing this.”  Or it is “2. A sarcastic/joking reference to definition (1).  Said to a friend who’s being mildly irritating, joking that their behaviour would cause the speaker to ‘take them off their friendlist.’“  Lordy, lordy.

But I learned in mid-November that that’s not the word approved by the language meisters. 

The New Oxford American Dictionary (Oxford University Press) has announced the winner of its annual “word of the year” contest: unfriend.  In a post on Oxford University Press’s Web site, Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford dictionaries, explained the choice.  “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year.  Most ‘un-’ prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar ‘un-’ verbs (uncap, unpack), but ‘unfriend’ is different from the norm.  It assumes a verb sense of ‘friend’ that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!).”

* * *

One evening in April I had a message on FB from a friend from days in student government at the University in the 1970s, a woman I had not seen for 35 years, Kathy Kelly.  I’d always liked her, and we’d worked together as students on issues of one kind or another, but I’d completely lost track of her.  We’d both gone off and gotten married, had kids, and led our lives.  I told Krystin, “OK, now Facebook has been worth it, just to find an old friend.”

Getting reconnected with Kathy recalled to mind an event she had once arranged for a group of U of Minnesota students.  Kathy was elected President of the National Student Association (NSA) when she was an undergraduate, so spent a year in Washington.  A group of us from the U of M went to the annual NSA meeting in (I think) 1974.  While we were there, Kathy got the Minnesota delegation (and perhaps some others, I don’t now recall) invited to a reception at the Romanian embassy.  (The only embassy reception I have ever attended—not the circle in which I normally move!)

While at the reception I met Angela Davis (the then-Communist/Black Panther activist) and Nicu Ceauşescu, son of the then-dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu.  I was completely unimpressed by both of them; Davis was spouting Communist propaganda lines and Ceauşescu was an arrogant ass.  Davis, to her credit, went on to a respectable career as an activist and professor.  Ceauşescu, on the other hand, according to Wikipedia, “had a reputation of being a heavy drinker and a playboy since high school.”  A Romanian defector to the U.S. “alleged that he [Nicu] scandalized Bucharest with his rapes and car accidents. . . .  He was also known for losing large sums of money gambling around the world. . . .  He was also arrested in 1990 for misuse of government funds under his father’s regime and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Released in November 1992 because of cirrhosis, he died of the disease four years later, aged 45, in a Vienna hospital.”  I almost never wish anyone ill, but based on my interactions with him 35 years ago, in this case my thought was “good riddance.” 

We have learned, especially since the fall of the Iron Curtain, that the Ceauşescu regime was one of the most brutal in Eastern Europe, and it was an ecological disaster for Romania (a situation from which the country has not yet recovered).  In retrospect, I’m almost embarrassed to have been hosted by the Romanian government, but of course we didn’t know how bad it was, and the United States government maintained diplomatic relations with Romania, so we assumed it was perfectly acceptable to attend such a reception.

In remembering this event, I finally asked Kathy, now 35 years after the event, how on earth she managed to get this group of Midwestern university student yokels invited to a Romanian embassy reception.  She told me.

The story goes something like this:  NSA was a pariah in the international student community ever since it was exposed by Ramparts magazine (a rather respected leftie rag) that the International Desk of the organization received funding from the CIA.  The International Desk ceased to exist and NSA concentrated on domestic affairs (BIG exception: the war in Viet Nam). So, when I was elected president of NSA, I decided to start trying to re-enter the international student community.  As part of that initiative, I led a delegation to the Soviet Union to meet with Communist student leaders.  We also invited the major international student organizations to send delegations to our National Student Congress, entirely as a matter of form, and were dumbstruck when Nicu responded.  Evidently he must have been looking for an opportunity to see the United States.

I didn’t think too much about it, because preparing for the Congress is a lot of work, until I got a very irritated call from the White House.  Evidently, you do not just invite the son of a world leader, no matter how repugnant he may be, to just pop over for a visit.  It is, as I was quite frostily informed, a matter of state, requiring all sorts of protocol, the first step of which is to inform one’s government that you have extended such an invitation.

Anyway, he was a lout. Central casting could not have come up with a more perfect son of a hideous dictator.  

The Romanian embassy held a reception in his honor and told me that I could send so many delegates. Naturally I chose the Minnesota delegation.

* * *

            In one of her Facebook entries, Krystin wrote the following: 

 

“Your,” meet “you’re.” Many people seem to think that you are one and the same in use and meaning, and it has caused conflict between the two of you, and to help settle this centuries-old epic battle, I would like to apologize on everyone’s behalf for your commonly mistaken identities.

I teased her that she’s good with grammar but she has a weakness for run-on sentences, and that that the second sentence could easily have been split in two.  She retorted that she knew it was a run-on but that she purposely wanted to keep as one sentence.  OK then.

I also warned her that if she’s going to join the grammar police, she better make sure that EVERY SINGLE WORD she puts in emails and on FB is perfectly ordered, appropriate, and with the right punctuation, or she’ll never hear the end of it from friends who catch any mistake she makes.  I love to take gibes at my friend Geoff Sirc, interim Chair of the English Department, every time he makes a mistake in an email—not because he makes claims to perfection in emails (which he most emphatically does not) but because he’s chair of English, and an English professor.  English professors should NEVER make mistakes in writing, and certainly not the chairs of English departments  J

* * *

According to a news release from Penn State, “Americans tend to have fewer close confidants today than they did two decades ago -- but that isn’t because they’re all huddled over their computers.”  They released a Pew report that “suggests that the Internet and other new communication technologies have, if anything, a modestly positive effect on the size and diversity of people’s friendship networks.”  I would not have guessed this:  “The study found that using the Internet is associated with having more, not fewer, intimate friends.”  But I had surmised that this was true:  “And Internet users are generally no less likely than nonusers to maintain face-to-face ties with their neighbors. . . .  So the common fear that old-fashioned kinds of social capital will evaporate as people spend more time online doesn’t seem to be warranted.”  I’ve certainly found that to be true.  Just because I use the Internet a lot doesn’t mean I see my friends any less.  For in-town friends, it’s a way to send on interesting materials and check in unobtrusively; for out-of-towners, it’s a way to stay in touch more than the visit every two or ten years.

What I am less certain about is how my kids and their generation (and the ones behind them) use the Internet vis-à-vis how often they see people in person.  I know that Elliott communicates with friends a lot on the web—but I also know that there are other guys in this house a fair amount of the time and that he goes off to visit friends frequently.  Krystin uses FB a lot—but she also goes out with friends.  So the Pew findings correspond with my experiences.

* * *

            In getting back in touch with Kathy Kelly, and because of my 40-year high-school class reunion, I sometimes have the feeling that I’m moving back in time.  Several of us who were student-government types at the University have begun getting together for lunch a couple of times a year.  One of my high-school classmates, Bill Merriman, who now lives in Florida, emailed me after we had received the reunion invitations to ask if I could arrange a poker game if he came up for the reunion.  I said “sure,” even though I haven’t played poker in 25 years (at least) and had not seen nor heard of several of the guys with whom we played poker in high school for an equal number of years.  But I found them (one of them was on the committee arranging the reunion, so he was easy), and everyone said “deal me in.”  (It helps, of course, that we all stayed in the Twin Cities.)  But these events have given me an odd sense of déjà vu.

            The poker game was a lot of fun, it was great to see the guys again, and I won $12.  It was odd, however, that none of us had changed that much in terms of personality and behaviors; apart from the fact that we all look just a little bit older, the mannerisms and chatter made it almost seem as though we just picked up from our last game 40 years ago.  (Well, except that we all had kids to talk about—kids who are roughly the age now (or even a little older) than we were when we were playing poker 40 years ago.  That’s scary.)

* * *

The kids and I were in a 90-minute ride to Wisconsin and back for a short family gathering last spring, and while driving back we got into a conversation about vulgarities in the English language.  The question that came up was where in some hierarchy of vulgarities/obscenities does “bloody” rank in the UK?

We assumed that f**k is at the top of the list, but then down the line (in terms of being slightly less objectionable in polite conversation) there is damn, hell, sh*t, and the various terms alluding to the sexual-reproductive organs of men and women.  The kids’ understanding was that “bloody” is a term in the UK (and perhaps Australia?) that would cause a parent to scold a child if the child used it.  Here, “bloody” has no particular significance except that everyone knows the Brits and Australians use it for emphasis.

            Since we didn’t know, I emailed a couple of good friends in Scotland and one in Australia to ask.  One Scottish friend wrote back and told me that “I certainly would not have used bloody in front of my children when they were small.  However, I would not have considered it as bad as the other words you quoted!  It is not an expression that I associate very much with young people.  I think it is used more by people of my generation.  It is often used with hell which would be considered swearing and frowned upon if children used it but it would not be so bad if used for example as ‘bloody rude’ or ‘it’s bloody cold’ or ‘what bloody awful rain,’ etc.  Individual families probably vary very much in what they accept but it is certainly not polite!”  Another Scottish friend wrote back that “I think ‘bloody’ has changed over time. Yes, when I was a kid, I would have been pulled up (even thumped) for using it, but I don’t think anyone bothers much anymore, except in the politest of company.”  My Australian friend wrote back in the same vein:  “Bloody is a very mild word in Australia, even used in genteel circles. Do not know about UK standards but think it is regarded as much the same as Australia - mild.”

A friend of mine with whom I had dinner the same night as the drive from Wisconsin said he’d rank “mother***ker” and “c**t” above “f**k” in vulgarity.  I agreed.  He also observed, I think correctly, that if Elliott or Krystin used “bloody” in conversation, their peers would think they were putting on airs.  Both of them agreed.  One of my Scottish friends also wrote that “Top of the hierarchy is definitely c**t.  After some recent problems with it, I’ve heard that the BBC have appointed someone for each individual TV/radio station to decide whether it can be broadcast” and the other said “the first of these ones is not one I have heard used much [c**t]. The middle one, like you, nobody I know would use [mother. . . ].  Number 3 [f**k] just might be used occasionally by someone I encountered and certainly is very common in young people and on TV.”

And here a comment from a very distinguished English professor friend of mine who spends a lot of time in the United Kingdom.  “It is now extremely common to hear f**k from men and women, cheerfully salting their conversation among friends with it, and I mean eminently respectable and well-educated people, and I am talking about the UK, London especially, not the U.S., where the middle (especially) and upper classes tend to be puritanical.  I don’t think ‘bloody’ would offend many, these days, in the UK (and no one here), but during my first year at Oxford [a number of years ago], I was sitting in the cinema with a friend and said ‘bloody’ something to him, and a woman behind me shushed me very briskly, she having her 12-14-year-old son in tow (who no doubt used the term himself, away from mum).  As I imagine you know, the objectionability of ‘bloody’ is religious originally, being a contraction of “By our Lady,” the BVM; it probably still has that resonance for older generations, but surely not the younger.  Workmen use it all the time, so do lots of others, but I haven’t really paid attention to classes that do and don’t.

“One good measure of the currency and vitality of f**k is Gordon Ramsey’s constant use of it on his restaurant shows on BBC America. . . .  He goes in and rescues restaurants on their last legs by shaping up the operation comprehensively, working especially on attitudes and menu—but the second is called “The ‘F’ Word,” his very favorite; he uses it all the time and is bleeped but easily lip-read and everyone knows it’s there; and he uses sh*t, too, and ‘Jesus Christ.’ Such compounds as “motherf*cker” aren’t used much if at all in the UK except possibly by blacks, with whom it originated here.”

Not to belabor this, but I will anyway.  My faculty friend also wrote that “I was going to write to say that the word most taboo there and here, I think, is “c**t.”  I heard it very rarely if ever in the UK. . . .  One thing to be noted about the use of most of [these] words is that they are used most often if not almost exclusively as intensives, especially in the UK, with no reference intended at all to their specific meanings, although some account may be taken unconsciously of those meanings in using one curse rather than another; variety and sound in context are probably as much the criteria as any others.”  He also discovered this entry in Wikipedia (which I did not bowdlerize, since it is a direct quote) that is directly on point:

The relative severity of various British profanities, as perceived by the public, was studied on behalf of the British Broadcasting Standards Commission. . . . The results of this jointly commissioned research were published in December 2000 in a paper called “Delete Expletives”.  It listed the profanities in order of decreasing severity, the top ten being cunt, motherfucker, fuck, wanker, nigger, bastard, prick, bollocks, arsehole, and paki in that order.  About 83% of respondents regarded cunt as “very severe”; 16% thought the same about shit and 10% about crap. Only about 1% thought cunt was “not swearing”; 9% thought the same about shit and 32% of crap.

And then in July came this little pearl from delanceyplace.com: 

Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain.



The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.



Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. ‘Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it,’ says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: ‘I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear,’ he adds.



How swearing achieves its physical effects is unclear, but the researchers speculate that brain circuitry linked to emotion is involved. Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half.  [Who would have guessed?]

In extreme cases, the hotline to the brain’s emotional system can make swearing harmful, as when road rage escalates into physical violence. But when the hammer slips, some well-chosen swearwords might help dull the pain.



There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.”

Frederik Joelving, “Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief,” Scientific American, July 12, 2009.

So there you have it:  patterns of vulgarity use and the possible redeeming value of using them at the right times.  All simply because we were curious about the extent to which “bloody” is still a vulgarity that is beyond the pale in polite company in the UK and Australia.

* * *

            Last spring Elliott re-watched the 3 “Jurassic Park” movies and I watched parts of them with him.  We had a question:  Is it possible that one of the (several) faulty premises in those movies is that dinosaurs could breathe and function in the atmosphere as it now exists (about 21% oxygen), when the one they lived in would have had 30-35% oxygen?  If so, and if someone ever were to create a dinosaur, assuming they could find the required DNA and then actually “build” one, the creature would have to live in a controlled environment. 

            A friend in the biological sciences referred me to an article on the web.  Peter Ward wrote that

the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago is perhaps the most celebrated scientific story of modern times.  Surprisingly, though, no one pays much attention to an equally intriguing mystery.  What was it that triggered the rise of the dinosaurs in the first place and then allowed them to dominate life on Earth for the next 160 million years?  The answer that is emerging is a surprising one:  oxygen. . . .  Recent findings indicate that oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere have fluctuated throughout its history. . . .  Periods of lower oxygen have coincided with every mass extinction we know of. . . .  Reptiles first appeared about 300 million years ago, during an oxygen high, and their lungs were adapted accordingly. They are called septate lungs and are small, rigid and sac-like.  In a world with 30 per cent oxygen, septate lungs were perfectly adequate.  By the end of the Triassic, however, those small and simple lungs were not so great. . . .  A brand new respiratory system appeared in what until then had been an obscure and not overly successful group.  The secret was to add a system of supplementary air sacs next to the lungs, and the group that invented it was the dinosaurs. 

He doesn’t go on to conclude that a change in oxygen levels in the atmosphere led to the extinction of the dinosaurs; the most likely explanation of the extinction is a meteor impact near the Yucatan peninsula.  What the changes in oxygen in the atmosphere do suggest, however, is that dinosaurs might not be able to breathe effectively with a lower level of it.

* * *

There was an interesting social development in the family last January.  Elliott’s friends have always been males, he and they all video-game geeks (nerds even, perhaps), whose social life was games and movies.  I didn’t think they were aware there was another sex.  He told me, however, a few days beforehand that a friend was coming over one Saturday night (not unusual) to play games and watch movies (the usual routine).  In this case, however, the friend Erin was female.  That was fine, if a surprise.  I was out for the evening, and when I came home Elliott and Erin were on the sofa watching a movie; she was somewhere between “sitting next to him” and “snuggled up to him.”  I felt like I had barged in on something, so I took my laptop down the basement and did email and played on the web.  (The social spaces in our house are all contiguous, in a large circle, so there is not a lot of privacy for the development of close relationships.)  

The next morning, Krystin told me that on Elliott’s Facebook page (the social networking website for the 18-28-year-old age group that, as far as I can tell, is used almost universally among that cohort across the country and significant parts of the world), his social status was now “in a relationship.”  Heavens!  He had noticed girls!   (Elliott later informed me that Facebook rules (1) permit one to say one is in a relationship, but (2) do not allow naming of the other person in the relationship without that person’s consent.  In this case, Elliott told me, Erin had consented, so they are listed as “in a relationship” with each other.)  I guess any guy and girl decide, by conscious choice, that they are “in a relationship” and then explicitly agree to put the announcement on Facebook.   It is clear to me that the initiation of relationships, and how the fact of a relationship is communicated to friends, is somewhat different now than it was when I was in high school and college.  To put it mildly.  (At the same time, I had also resumed dating, after a period of apathy about the process, but my approach was one that someone in his 50s would use—although match.com, the online dating service, is certainly a novel and wonderful addition to the dating process even for us old farts.)  Elliott hasn’t told me if she can cook.

I related in an email the foregoing story to my long-time friend Regents Professor Ellen Berscheid, one of the leading experts on and “founding mothers” of the field of the scientific study of close and emotional relationships.  Ellen wrote back promptly:   “‘To put it mildly’ is right!!  Time for me to retire.”  Which she will do next spring.

Elliott and Erin subsequently parted ways—affably, he tells me—and he became connected with another young woman.  But that relationship also did not last for a long time.  For the time being it appears that guys, games, movies, and Magic are his preoccupations.  (Magic is an enormously complicated “card game” that I can’t even begin to explain, with many different kinds of cards carrying different strengths and creatures and landscapes, and it is played by groups of people.)

* * *

            I have, in the past, scorned the idea of interstellar space travel and meeting aliens, and taken the position that unless there is away to travel at speeds vastly greater than the speed of light (about 663,000,000 MPH), there is no way humans are going to get around the universe nor is there any way that aliens could get to us.  (I am told by my faculty friends in Aeronautical Engineering that the best we can do on rocket speeds in space is perhaps 85,000 MPH, and you can do the math to see how slow that is in comparison.)  Traveling at the speed of light, the closest planets that might be habitable are 20 light-years away (that is, it would take 20 years to get there if we could travel at the speed of light—and thousands of centuries if we are traveling much slower than the speed of light). 

As an aside, astronomers estimate the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, but because space is expanding, they can observe objects that are about 46.5 billion light-years away.  And this is only possible because, “while Relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such constraint when space itself is expanding.  This means that the size of the observable universe could be smaller than the entire universe; there are some parts of the universe which might never be close enough for the light to overcome the speed of the expansion of space, in order to be observed on Earth. . . .  Some parts of the universe may simply be too far away for the light from there to have reached Earth, but despite the expansion of space, at a later time could be observed.”  (Wikipedia, “Observable Universe”)

            Anyway, last May there appeared an interesting little news blip on Yahoo News entitled “The warp drive, one of Star Trek’s hallmark inventions, could someday become science instead of science fiction.”  The article went on to say that “some physicists say the faster-than-light travel technology may one day enable humans to jet between stars for weekend getaways. . . .  The science is complex, but not strictly impossible, according to some researchers studying how to make it happen.”  The writer explained how such travel speed might work.  In short, Einstein’s General Relativity holds that the speed of light is the absolute speed limit within the time/space universe we live in.  But, so the theory goes, perhaps it is possible for time/space itself to travel, or some piece of time/space.  So you’d be moving at interstellar speeds—but inside the bubble you would not seem to be moving at all.   There even seems to be some evidence that the phenomenon has occurred already.  However, the science—to say nothing of the engineering—of developing such travel is non-existent.  Not likely in my lifetime. 

(And in case you were dying to know, “the observable universe contains about . . . 30 to 70 sextillion stars, organized in more than 80 billion galaxies, which themselves form clusters and superclusters.”  (From the same Wikipedia article—and I checked with an Astronomy faculty colleague about the accuracy of the article before citing it here; he told me it was correct.)

            So my thesis that aliens couldn’t come here may have a hole in it.  But I’ll still make this argument:  if there are intelligent aliens with a civilization advanced enough to have figured out how to travel across interstellar and intergalactic space, they aren’t going to come all the way to Earth and make crop circles on some poor farmer’s fields nor will they immediately head to Roswell, NM, upon arriving. 

* * *

In a related vein, Elliott was astonished to have me agree to go with him to two movies in one week, inasmuch as that’s about as many movies as I normally see in a year.  So we saw Star Trek (his third time) and District 9 (his second time), both in the futuristic/sci-fi/aliens category.  (These movies only work, of course, if one suspends disbelief, because of the laws of physics as we understand them.)  District 9 was only barely sci-fi, however.  The interesting thing about it was its portrayal of aliens—fantastically advanced technologically because they have a huge ship that travels through space—as rather put-upon forlorn creatures marooned by accident on Earth and subject to all the unpleasant behaviors that humans can demonstrate.  Elliott suspects that the movie probably depicts more accurately than others how humans would actually interact with other beings if they were on earth—and the depiction isn’t a kind one.  The movie was set in South Africa, and filmed by a South African, so the only thing one can wonder is if the reception would have been different if the beings had been marooned in France, say, rather than South Africa, which has a rather brutal cultural tradition dating back to the original Dutch settlers, the contest between the British and the Boers, and then apartheid.  In this case, the aliens were the equivalent of Blacks in apartheid South Africa, sequestered and ill-treated.  Star Trek was Star Trek.  The movie got a lot of good reviews and it deserved them.

* * *

The most obnoxious gardening task at this house is cleaning out the dead raspberry canes in the spring.  Every year I do this and every year, without appropriate gardening gloves, I end up with a number of thorns in my hands.  Then I spend part of the rest of the day picking out the thorns, which I mostly notice later when they catch on something and send a little jolt of pain up my hand.  My raspberry patch is also being taken over by violets--which, my horticulture faculty friend Emily Hoover told me, is no threat to the raspberries (could anything threaten raspberries?).  So I had barely-leafing-out raspberry canes sticking up out of a field of purple flowers (and even some white violets, which I’ve not seen before).

The fruit came late this year.  The temps this spring were so cool that everything was delayed, Emily told me.  I thought I was going to end up with dozens and dozens of pints of raspberries, but Emily said the cool weather also stunted the growth of the berries, because I only ended up with about 25-26 pints.

* * * 

This sounds sort of Erma-Bombeck-ish, but it’s true.  I had 10 single dress socks (mine) and about 2 dozen single sweat socks (kids and mine) by the clothes dryer.  I had no idea what happened to the mates to all those socks.  Where did they all go???  It’s not like I took off my socks and left one of them places, nor, I believe, do the kids.  Somewhere in this house there was a pile of socks.

About a month after I wrote the preceding paragraph, I laid down the law to the kids:  neither of their bedrooms had been vacuumed for several months (because one could not even SEE the floor), so I told them that on a Saturday, either they would clean up stuff or I’d come in and pile it all on their beds.  Krystin did a good job and got her floor all cleaned up; Elliott got most stuff put away.  But he didn’t pick up clothes behind his bedroom door—and there I found a pile of my socks.  I said “Elliott!!!”  He said they came in with his laundry and he never got around to giving them back to me.

                 

* * *

At one point during the year I seriously considered a job in Los Angeles, at one of the Claremont Colleges (a consortium of small, elite, private colleges).  But I was troubled about the prospect that neither Krystin nor Elliott wanted to come with me (for perfectly understandable reasons:  all their friends and social networks are in the Twin Cities).  I was also troubled by being new in a place where I knew no one, in contrast to Minnesota, where my friends and networks are almost life-long.  When I mused about these concerns in an email message to a friend (raised in Minnesota but no longer living here), he wrote an interesting response.

Kids aside, my main concern, apart from quality of life and cost of living, about your going to LA was/is that all your regular circle of friends and colleagues live hereabouts, and while I’m sure you’d readily make new ones, you’d likely for a while have big patches of time without your usual social contacts. . . .  For someone as social as you are it could be devastating.  What’s more, the women you are likely to encounter there, even many associated with the University, have rather different acculturation.  Frankly, I think they’d pin your ears back a bit.  I don’t say this critically -- there’s nothing whatever wrong or subpar with being a highly educated lifelong Minnesotan -- merely that you are very much at home in your current context and network and expectations of others -- and could be rather uneasy with lifelong ”California girls” of our age who might not share your expectations and mores. 

I am not disowning the influences of Minnesota on myself -- they are profound, lasting and pervasive -- and I am not claiming superiority of some kind, merely some perspective.  Minnesota is a highly normative society and all those mutual expectations and implicit social customs are so much part of the warp and woof of daily life here it takes living elsewhere for a long time and then looking back to realize just how pervasive they are.  Recall, for example, the recent study which showed that males in Minnesota are by far the most shy in the context of dating, of any in the United States.  As it happens women seem to find a tincture of that to be charming in a man—so I have been told—and probably a bit of ‘wildness’ in them might make them more intriguing to you, but ultimately going from Minnesota to megaopolis southern California is probably a much greater cultural leap than if you moved to Scotland where the traditional British reticence is a pretty good surrogate on the surface for what we have here.

            Oddly enough, I happened to be seeing a woman who grew up in part in California, and she met Steve.  They both suggested that California women “would eat me for lunch” or some such.  Apparently I have no character and no spine.

* * *

Our house had two graduations this year, Krystin from the University and Elliott from South High School.  They agreed that they would have a joint graduation party, so they did.  Fortunately, it turned out to be a beautiful day, so people could spill out into the yard.  Oddly coincidental, both graduations were in the same building, Northrop Auditorium on the University’s Minneapolis campus.  That Krystin’s ceremony would be there is unremarkable; that Elliott’s was was more interesting.  The high schools seem not to have graduation ceremonies in the schools any more.  I am sure that when I was in high school, we graduated on the grounds of Washburn.  But maybe I do not remember correctly.

Getting Krystin to go to her graduation ceremony at the University (11:00 on a Sunday morning in May) was a trial.  She didn’t want to go.  Elliott was more phlegmatic about going to his.  Krystin wanted to pout that morning.  Fortunately, she got over it.  It was a picture-perfect day, we got a few good pictures, the commencement speaker (Peter Hutchinson, former candidate for Governor and now President of the Bush Foundation) was funny, and Krystin got a picture with the immobilized President of the University, Bob Bruininks (who broke his ankle the week before her graduation).  She acknowledged later in the day that it was an OK function that I made her go to.  Elliott later had the same reaction about his:  it was OK I made him go.  (And in each case, I had fun talking with the other, who attended each other’s graduation with me.)  But as a general observation, I must say that my kids’ generation gives little credence to the proposition that there are certain life passages marked by ceremony and ritual in which we should want to participate. (Or, to phrase it more accurately, my kids don’t seem to give much credence to the proposition.  I suppose I shouldn’t generalize their views to all of their peers—but I bet it’s not inaccurate to do so for at least a chunk of them.)  If it’s not fast and exciting, forget it.  They do put up with funerals, but I wonder what theirs will be like.  (I wonder what I thought about such ceremonies and rituals when I was their age.  I just don’t remember.  I know I didn’t go to my college graduation ceremony—but that was a time when the College of Liberal Arts put little thought or effort into it—or such was our impression as students.)

 The party and the cake

Morrill Hall is the main administrative building of the University, and immediately adjacent to the Northrop Auditorium, in which I have worked, off and mostly on, since 1975.  The kids have been in it many times.  Krystin’s picture was taken about 11:00 in the morning, with the sun behind us.  Elliott’s was taken about 5:00 in the afternoon, with the sun shining in our faces.

The graduate, her dad, and the University President

 (who was seated because he had broken his ankle a few weeks earlier)

            My long-time friend Steve Richardson was in town after Krystin’s graduation to start getting his mother’s house ready to put on the market (she moved to a nursing home).  He was kind enough to take the two kids out for dinner to celebrate their graduations.  We went to a very good restaurant, Porter and Frye, and had a wonderful meal and conversation.  But I register the same complaint about it that I think I register with just about every restaurant I’ve been to in the last number of years:  with a wood floor, no drapes, bare walls and windows, and a flat hard ceiling, the noise and talk reverberate to the point that it is difficult to hear a conversation at one’s own dinner table.  I don’t want to feel like I’m dining in a morgue, but I’d also like not to be surrounded by such a din.

Sunday, May 17 (Syttende Mai), with downtown Minneapolis on the right

and the University’s Weisman Art Museum on the left.

* * *

            For those of you who have some affiliation with the University of Minnesota, here’s an oddball factoid for you:  The remodeled Coffman Memorial Union was among the first student unions in the country to have an escalator.  The director of the unions told me we were first, but then decided to check with professional colleagues in the Association of College Unions International.  She came back later with a message that she could not be sure we were first, but we remain one of the few and certainly among the first.

* * *

I slogged through What Hath God Wrought:  The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848, one of the volumes in the Oxford History of the United States.  I wrote “slogged through” not because it is not well-written (it is), but because that period of history is one that is, frankly, fairly boring.  The Indians were treated very badly by the Jackson and subsequent administrations, the Erie Canal was built, President James Knox Polk duped Congress and the country into a war (nothing is new under the sun) with Mexico to get Texas, California, and New Mexico, southerners grew increasingly offensive (and defensive) about slavery, and Morse developed the telegraph.  And a few railroads and tracks got built.  I found one paragraph arresting, however (emphasis in italics is mine):

The consequences of the election of 1844 [when Polk was elected] went far beyond Texas annexation, important as that was.   If Henry Clay had won the White House, almost surely there would have been no Mexican war. . . .  Although he would have faced a Democratic Congress, President Clay probably would have strengthened the Whig party through patronage and renewed its commitment to the American system.   In the South, he would have encouraged moderation n the slavery issue, including acceptance of an alternative future characterized by economic diversification and, in the long run, the gradual compensated emancipation which he advocated all his life.  There might have been no reason for the Whig party to disappear or a new Republican party to emerge in the 1850s.  After the Civil War, the great newspaper editor Horace Greeley declared that if Clay had been elected in 1844, ‘great and lasting public calamities would thereby have been averted.’  More recently, some historians have carefully examined the likely consequences of a Clay victory in 1844 and concluded that it would probably have avoided the Civil War of the 1860s.  We too readily assume the inevitability of everything that has happened.  The decisions that electorates and politicians make have real consequences.

Just think about how different the world might be if the outcome of the 2000 election had been different.  Or 1968, when we got Nixon rather than Humphrey.  Some others I’m not sure it would have made as much difference—although I suppose American historians would jump on me for saying this.  But I doubt there would have been significant large differences between Ford and Carter, or between Garfield and Hancock in 1880, or even between Wilson and Hughes in 1916. 

To those of us living in the 21^st Century, Polk is one of the more obscure presidents.  But he was also “one of the most aggressively expansionary presidents in U.S. history, and his actions brought vast new areas of land, including Texas, the American southwest, and the American northwest into the possession of the U.S.”  According to Walter R. Borneman, who wrote Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, “unabashedly proclaiming the policy of the United States to be one of continental expansion, Polk welcomed Texas into the union, bluffed the British out of half of Oregon, and went to war with Mexico to grab California and the Southwest.  Yet a change of just 5,000 votes in New York would have elected Henry Clay president instead. Clay appeared content to let Texas remain independent and Oregon remain in British hands.  How different the map of the United States might look today if that had happened.”  Interestingly enough, Borneman writes, one of those most outspoken in opposition to Polk’s warmongering was Abraham Lincoln, “who challenged Polk to name the exact spot where American blood had been spilled as his pretense for war with Mexico.”

* * *

Reading about Polk, and realizing how little he is known, even though he added more land to the present-day United States than any other president, led me to explore the historians’ rankings of the presidents.  It turns out there have been several such rankings.  The first one was in 1948, conducted by historian Arthur Schlesinger; the most recent one was this year, by CSPAN.  Siena College has done several such polls.  I looked at the results of 14 of them conducted between 1948 and 2009.  In all cases, they polled presidential historians.  The Wall Street Journal did polls in 2000 and 2005, using “an ideologically balanced group of 132 prominent professors of history, law, and political science” because they thought the earlier polls had too many “liberals.”  Some of the results are what you would expect:  in all the polls, Washington, Lincoln, and FDR generally rate as the top three (with different polls ranking them differently among the top three—in the Wall Street Journal polls, FDR is #3 and Washington is #1 while in others, the Lincoln is first and Washington 3^rd).  Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt jockey for 4^th and 5^th.  Of the polls that I looked at, Lincoln had the most #1 rankings.  Four presidents rank near the bottom in all 14 polls:  Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Warren Harding (with James Buchanan and Warren Harding in a tight race for last place).  And what of my friend President Polk?  He generally ranks between 9^th and 12^th best—a ranking I would guess most Americans would be startled to learn.

            And our most recent ex-President?  Depends on who you ask.  The 2005 Wall Street Journal poll place George W. Bush at 19^th; the 2009 CSPAN poll placed him at 36^th out of 42, besting only Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Harding. 

            There seems to be a recency effect, even among scholars.  The presidents who rank in the 6^th through 10^th place (again, with each varying with the poll) are generally Woodrow Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan.  I personally have reservations about all of those, particularly Kennedy and Reagan.  I don’t think the Kennedy administration accomplished all that much; the Reagan administration accomplished a number of things for which I think we are now paying the price. 

* * *

At one point Elliott was playing a video game and told me he (his character) was in the National Archives, where various of the Founding Fathers were still alive—as robots.  Except that “Thomas Jefferson was in for repairs.”  Video games sometimes engender strange English sentences.  I would never have conjoined “Thomas Jefferson” and “repairs” at any point in normal discourse that I can think of.

* * *

Here’s an odd piece of research that I don’t find intuitive.  According to a study out of North Carolina State, “parenthood is pushing mothers and fathers in opposite directions on political issues associated with social welfare, from health care to education, according to new research from North Carolina State University.”  It seems, said one of the authors, that being parent “seems to heighten the political ‘gender gap,’ with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues.” The authors used data from the last presidential election who have children at home (those with grown children were not included).

Moreover, women with children at home were more liberal than women without.  This, one of the authors points out, “is a very different understanding of the politics of mothers than captured by the ‘Security Mom’ label popular in much media coverage.  But men with kids are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without kids.”  Men with kids did not differ from men without kids in their attitudes towards Iraq.”  Sarah Palin, the “Hockey Mom,” did not attract more votes from parents than those who are not parents, even when looking only at Republicans.  The fact that the party aligned itself with “family values” appears to have made no difference to voters.

The authors have done earlier research on this issue and conclude, with the more recent results, that “the trend is strengthening for men with children to become more conservative, while the trend for moms to become more liberal is holding steady.”  They wrote that “It appears that the Democratic position, that government has a role in addressing social problems, appeals to women with children . . . whereas men with children are drawn to the Republican arguments that government should not play a major role on social welfare issues.”

            I must admit I am nonplussed by those findings.  I would have guessed that parenthood—irrespective of whether for a mom or a dad—would have made people more likely to support a government role in addressing social problems (e.g., providing support for child care and schools, health care, etc.).  Why men would become more conservative and women more liberal is a puzzle (at least to me.)

* * *

I think I have this complaint every year and then I forget from one year to the next.  As usual, I took many of my houseplants outside when the spring weather came.  Some of them, however, are temperature-sensitive; the leaves of the peace lilies and my Mom’s hibiscus turn brown if the temperature gets below about 50 degrees.  By the end of the first week in June I had hauled the plants back in the house twice--and kept them in for two nights that first weekend.  It’s irritating to have to schlep these heavy pots and plants in and out.  To add insult, it was so cold the first Sunday in June that I finally broke down and turned the heat back on in the house.  Sometime, I told myself, I should go look at historical records of temperatures in the Twin Cities; maybe it always gets down into the 40s some June nights.

So I did.  Here are the data, the number of days (actually, of course, probably nights) in June from 1997 to 2009 with low temperatures below 50 degrees:

1997    1

1998    7

1999    8

2000    7

2001    4

2002    2

2003    1

2004    2

2005    0

2006    1

2007    0

2008    0

2009    6

So there were more cool nights in June this year than in the immediate past! 

On that same weather vane (J), many people I know groused about how cold last winter was (2008-09).  I told them they were all turning into a bunch of wimps (if they’d lived here all or most of their lives—I forgave the foreigners who were transplanted from some warmer place).  I bet with the natives that the winter of 2008-09 was about the same as the winters we grew up with, walking to and from school 3 miles each day.  (OK, maybe for me it was just a block in elementary school, a few blocks in junior high school, and perhaps a mile to high school.) 

Nobody took me up on my bet so I had to go find out for myself.  Professor Mark Seeley at the University of Minnesota Department of Soil, Water, and Climate was kind enough to send me data on the mean temperatures for the state for the snow seasons of November through March from 1894-95 through 2008-09.  I calculated the mean winter temperatures for two periods:  1950-1970, the period that many who read this letter would have been walking to school, and 1990-2007, and then looked at 2008 and 2009.  Here are the averages for those periods and years:

17.3 degrees     1950-1970

20.4 degrees     1990-2007

17.0 degrees     2008 (that is, winter 2007-08)

16.4 degrees     2009

            So I was right, not to say that I told you so; we have become wimps.  It was substantially colder during the winters I was in K-12 schools, walking back and forth each day, than the winters of the last 17-18 years.  2008 and 2009 were a return to the averages of the 1950-1970 period.

            One winter in the 1990-2007 period I can remember quite vividly:  1996-97, the year we remodeled our house.  For part of the winter the back of the house, and the roof, were torn off and there was no insulation other than the interior plaster walls and ceilings.  It got close to -40 at least a couple of times during the period when the house was torn apart, iirc, and I had to use a blowdryer on the pipes in the basement to melt the water that had frozen inside them (fortunately, the pipes didn’t burst).  That year the mean winter temperature was 14.9, well below the averages even for 1950-70.

* * *

            iirc, Elliott tells me, is texting shorthand for “if I recall correctly.”  Of course, it also stands for, among many other things, “if I really cared,” “If It Really Counts,” “International Inter-Society Research Committee (on Nuclear Codes and Standards),” “Internet Information Research Center,” “Interstate Insurance Receivership Compact,”  “International Interpretation Resource Center,” and, my favorite, “Isn’t It Really Cool.”

 

* * *

Even I, a lifelong professional in higher education, sometimes wonder what prompts colleagues to do certain kinds of research.  For example, the following two items seem to demonstrate a keen grasp of the obvious. 

MMM … CHEAP BEER:  When drinks are cheap, patrons tend to consume more of them, according to a survey of 804 patrons exiting seven bars adjacent to a large university in the Southeast. But as prices rise, patrons still drink—just not as much.  Researchers at San Diego State University’s Center for Alcohol and Drug Studies will publish their findings in the November issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

WHAT DID I DO WITH THAT CHEAP BEER? No matter how much the drinks cost, consuming too many of them causes one’s mind to wander, researchers have concluded. Further, say psychology professors at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California at Santa Barbara, alcohol makes it less likely that the drinker will even notice that his or her mind has wandered.  Participants in the study—half of whom had consumed alcohol and the other half a placebo—were instructed to signal if they zoned out while reading War and Peace, by Tolstoy (above). The paper, “Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering,” appeared in Psychological Science.

Both of these seem to fall in the “well, duh” category. 

* * *

            I thought this was quite interesting, especially because we (or I at least) have tended to think that human circumstances have improved steadily, if unevenly, since the time we came down from the trees and out of the forests.  (Excerpt from another delanceyplace.com piece.)

The economic plight of the average man . . . was not better than that of his hunting and gathering ancestors.  After 1800 the economic well-being of men in some societies skyrocketed upward, and the well-being of others plummeted.

Thus the average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC.  Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their remote ancestors.  The lucky denizens of wealthy societies such as eighteenth-century England or The Netherlands managed a material lifestyle equivalent to that of the Stone Age.  But the vast swath of humanity in east and south Asia, particularly in China and Japan, eked out a living under conditions probably significantly poorer than those of cavemen.

The quality of life also failed to improve on any other observable dimension. Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years.  Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800.  And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery.  Nor did the variety of material consumption improve.  The average forager had a diet, and a work life, much more varied than the typical English worker of 1800, even though the English table by then included such exotics as tea, pepper, and sugar. 

So, even according to the broadest measures of material life, average welfare, if anything, declined from the Stone Age to 1800.  The poor of 1800, those who lived by their unskilled labor alone, would have been better off if transferred to a hunter-gatherer band.

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, 2007.

Never thought about it before, but living might well have been easier 100,000 years ago than it was 250 years ago, at least for a lot of people.  I don’t know why, but when I read this I thought of our trip through the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota, where laborers worked long days by candle light far underground digging iron ore.  The conditions were appalling.  I’d rather have been scrounging for berries or wild animals to eat—and outdoors—than digging for iron ore.

* * *

            Elliott and I went to my brother and sister-in-law’s lake cabin outside Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, over the Fourth of July weekend.  (Krystin had to work and had social plans.)  While there, we went over to my niece’s (their daughter’s) and her husband’s place a few miles away on the evening of the Fourth.  Both they and my brother and sister-in-law had invested a moderate amount of money in all kinds of fireworks (things that are legal in Wisconsin but not in Minnesota).  More by accident than anything else, Elliott and I became “assistant directors of lighting” the fireworks—we were lighting some, as were my brother and his son-in-law.  It was great fun, and it released the little-boy pyromaniac hidden inside all of us.  The audience—family members and a few friends—thought it was a great show, especially when those of us doing the lighting would curse either because we burned a finger tip or because we hopped backwards fast once we had lit some of the pieces. 

            My niece later sent me an email telling me that they had such a good time that Elliott and I were warmly invited to return again next year to help—and that they were going to get even more and bigger fireworks.  He and I have agreed we’ll return to duty.

* * *

            I ran across an article in Orion magazine that struck a chord with me.  Titled “Forget Shorter Showers [:]  Why personal change does not equal political change,” the author argued that being “green” personally or as a household is both irrelevant and ineffective.  He made a number of points.  One, that “personal” solutions to the problems of climate change do nothing to address the systemic problems (the manufacturing system, the use of carbon-based energy sources, etc.).  He maintained that if everyone in the US did everything suggested in An Inconvenient Truth, total US carbon emissions would fall by only 22%--when the scientific consensus, he said, is that it has to drop by 75% all over the world.  In the case of water, one can take short showers, but 90% of the water used in the US is consumed by agriculture and industry, not homeowners.  Of the leftover 10%, half is used by municipalities (e.g., to water golf courses).  So even in places with a shortage of water, reducing household consumption will have a negligible effect on the problem.  In the case of energy, about 25% of consumption is by individuals; the rest is commercial, industrial, corporate, agriculture, and government.  Same is true of waste:  even if everyone in town managed to reduce their household or personal waste to nothing—recycled/reused everything—the effect would be trivial, because municipal waste accounts for 3% of total waste produced in the US.  The gist of the remainder of the article was an analysis of why it was necessary to take on the system, not just commit to personal actions—and was not relevant to why I found the article interesting in the first place.

            Many of my environmentally-minded friends would take issue with me, I suppose, but I don’t take strenuous steps to be green, more or less for the reasons cited in the article.  Oh, we recycle everything it’s possible to recycle.  I insist (with only modest success) that the kids turn off lights if they’re not going to be in a room for awhile—although that is as much because I see no need to pay the electric company any more than necessary as it is because it’s green not to use power.  On the other hand, I do not keep the thermostat set as low as 68° in the winter nor do I keep the AC as high as 78° in the summer.  We turn the AC on if the humidity is high, even if it’s not all that hot.  The dishwasher isn’t always completely full when I run it.  I probably use more hot water than I should in the laundry, and Elliott’s philosophy of showering is that the shower lasts as long as the hot water does. 

            My grumpy response to the widespread social exhortations to be green is that (1) I didn’t live into the 21^st Century in order to freeze inside my house in the winter and sweat in the summer, and (2) even if I were a saint in terms of being green, (a) it would make no difference in the larger picture because of the statistics I cited above, and (b) my personal decisions are even more irrelevant to the larger picture when Joe and Jean Schmuck down the street are paying no attention to admonitions to be green and living more comfortably as a result.  So why am I sweating when they are not?  My response to the philosophy of being green is the same as my response to the people who (sometimes sneeringly) urge that I send in additional money to the government if I believe that taxes should be higher.  My small $200 or $1000 or whatever will make no difference whatever to the state or federal budget; the actions have to society-wide, not just personal.  The same is true of being green.

* * *

            I never thought I would think it, but I have decided that Sarah Palin makes Spiro Agnew look good.  Better a petty crook who will do no great harm to the body politic than an ignorant tactless ideological warrior who would.  (See “untroubled certainties” elsewhere in this letter.)  One of my sociologist friends describes Palin as “dark-side lower-middle-class American.”

* * *

            I suppose some of you might find observations and commentary on dating in one’s 50s to be passingly amusing and interesting.  One thing I can say without reservation:  the advent of the Internet dating/networking services is a godsend.  I have probably gone out with 25-30 women over the last couple of years.  There is no conceivable way I would ever have been able to meet that number of single and appropriate women without the Internet services available. 

One writes a profile of one’s self, in most instances provides one or more photographs,  and also provides information about education, religion, pets, politics, job/career, hobbies, reading, travel, vices, food, etc., as well as age and family status (have/want kids, etc.).  In the case of the one to which I subscribe, I receive messages every couple of days with matches, women they have selected who might share enough in common with me to be of interest (done, I am sure, entirely by computer).  I can look at anyone who’s subscribed to the service, I can send an anonymous message to any woman, and any woman can send an anonymous message to me.  (Anonymous in the sense that only self-chosen nicknames are used and messages are sent through the service itself using those nicknames—unless one chooses to provide them to someone, names/addresses/telephone numbers are not available, but everyone can see everyone else’s profile.)  So all the additional information makes it a far more selective process than simply meeting someone in a bar, at a party, at a church, on a blind date, whatever.

            The protocol, as I see it practiced, is that one can contact someone else, and if she (in my case) is interested, she can respond.  If not, she ignores the message and nothing happens.  I suppose it’s a small blow to the ego, but nothing like being turned down for a date when one has screwed up one’s courage to call or ask in person (like when we were teenagers).  Interestingly, I have only contacted a few women in the entire time I’ve been using the service.  But I am contacted perhaps once every week or so by women who are interested in further contact with me.  I look at their profiles and decide whether to respond.  In the majority of cases, I don’t.  (I don’t believe this many contacts come my way because I am such an incredible “catch.”  I think it’s more likely because the male pickings may be slim, and that even at my age the number of eligible males may be smaller than the number of eligible females—or at least the number of eligible males who use the service is smaller.) 

As I wrote earlier, given the information available about everyone, assuming they have not lied (which I have not found anyone doing), it is much easier to select for a social event women who are likely to have things in common with me.  Of the 25-30 women I have gone out with, only two were what I would call clinkers, and even those weren’t terrible.  (In one case, we had agreed to meet to walk along the Mississippi River—and she showed up in pointy-toed, spiked high heels.  I knew right away this woman was utterly lacking in common sense.  The other was a considerably-younger woman who nonetheless wanted to meet me, so I agreed to a walk in Minnehaha Park with her, but every fifth word out of her mouth was “fuck,” so I decided she wasn’t a candidate for a second event.)  The women have been pleasant, professional, articulate, attractive, thoughtful—but none of them engendered (for me) the “spark” that would suggest it worthwhile continuing to see them.  (Well, that’s not quite true—there were a couple of women I was very interested in but the interest was not mutual—after meeting me, they declined to respond to messages thereafter.  So it goes.  As my friend Ellen Berscheid has pointed out to me, Blaise Pascal observed in his Pensées that “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”) 

It has been interesting for me to look back on why I made the decisions I did.  I know that several of the women I met wanted to continue to see me—but I didn’t wish to see them again.  In one case, the woman was allergic to just about everything we eat and could not drink more than half a glass of wine.  In another case, she was just plain sexist—her expectations about the male role came right out of the 1950s.  In yet another, after a couple of dates, I concluded she was just boring—very nice, but boring (even more boring than me!).  In another the photo was a little misleading:  she was cute in the picture but in person appeared old enough to be my mother. 

I told my therapist I discriminate on the basis of physical appearance—and I thought she was going to get upset with me.  I quickly reassured her that by that statement I meant only that it was hard for me to get past the face of anyone who didn’t rate at least “4” or “5” on that proverbial scale men supposedly use to judge a woman’s appearance.  About average is fine, I told her; I do not delude myself that I’m a 9 or 10, so it’s silly for me to think I should date or become involved with a woman who is a 9 or 10.  On the other hand, I am just vain enough that I can’t bring myself to go out with someone whose face would make my cats run out of the room.  My therapist accepted that as reasonable.  I also discriminate on the basis of education and politics and religion.  I won’t date anyone who hasn’t got a college degree (one of my relatives says that’s snotty, but I just think the cultural/knowledge gaps would be too great, especially because virtually all of my friends have a BA or advanced degree).  I won’t date anyone who defines herself as conservative, because there would be too many disagreements.  I won’t date anyone who says in her profile that “the Lord is central to my life” or some such statement—I don’t have a problem with someone being religious, but it can’t be the focus of her life because that’s not where I am.  (It is interesting to me that a significant percentage of the women whose profiles I see indicate they are “spiritual but not religious.”  I haven’t quite figured out what this means.)  All these “I won’t date”s sound like I’m being extraordinarily picky, but I think it is unlikely I would be interested in pursuing a relationship with a woman who had/did not have those characteristics no matter the venue in which I met her.

I haven’t met anyone who has swept me off my feet, so to speak.  The puzzle in this, something I have discussed with my therapist a number of times, is whether that is because I haven’t met the “right” woman or because I’m not in the frame of mind to recognize her and it wouldn’t matter who I meet—nothing’s going to happen until I’m “ready” for it to happen.  Another legitimate question is whether one meeting with anyone can really determine if a relationship could be in the making; yet another is whether it is silly to want to be “swept off my feet,” which is an image of romantic love that, if not delusional, is perhaps less realistic at my age than when one is 18 or 22 or 25.  I find this puzzle and these questions exasperating but there’s no way I can know the answer, so I just keep doing what I can to meet different women.  I guess I’ll find out sooner or later, and I would prefer it were the former rather than the latter.  It also probably doesn’t help that while I am gung-ho to meet someone, I’m sort of apathetic about actually doing anything serious about it.  Yes, I date, but I wonder if I have the right attitude—whatever that might be.

At one point last summer I was technically dating four different women.  I emailed a friend (woman) of many years about what was going on, and she wrote back “FOUR women SIMULTANEOUSLY?  What kind of Lothario have you suddenly morphed into?  Where is my somewhat shy, slightly proper Scandinavian friend and what have you done with him?”  I assured her I was very puzzled about how this happened and not too happy about it.

Contemporaneous with that situation, Krystin and I had a couple of very long talks about relationships, sex, and the ethics of relationships.  I hope I helped clarify her thinking, and given the accidental juxtaposition with events in my own life, I had more than one conversation with myself about relationship ethics.

In all of this, I am fine if I don’t stop to think too much about where I am and just deal with the hurly-burly of work and life.  In quiet moments, however, when the kids are out of the house and I’m by myself, I sometimes grow weary of work and life (except for the kids) and close my eyes and wish the world away.

* * *

Kathy’s use of the term “Lothario” sent me to Wikipedia.  I realized I didn’t know the difference between a Lothario, a Don Juan, and a Casanova.  Maybe you do, but in case not (from Wikipedia):

Lothario is a character in the play The Fair Penitent (1703), by Nicholas Rowe.  In the play, Lothario seduces and betrays Calista.  The word lothario has thus entered the English language as an eponym:  a lothario is a handsome, seductive ladies’ man.   Don Juan (Don Giovanni in Italian) is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors.  He is a rogue and a libertine who takes great pleasure in seducing women and (in most versions) enjoys fighting their champions.  Later, in a graveyard Don Juan encounters a statue of the dead father of a girl he has seduced, and, impiously, invites him to dine with him; the statue gladly accepts. The father’s ghost arrives for dinner at Don Juan’s house and in turn invites Don Juan to dine with him in the graveyard.  Don Juan accepts, and goes to the father’s grave where the statue asks to shake Don Juan’s hand. When he extends his arm, the statue grabs hold and drags him away, to Hell (a story followed approximately in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni).  Casanova was a live human being, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725 – 1798) a Venetian adventurer and author.  He was so famous as a womanizer that his name remains synonymous with the art of seduction and he is sometimes called “the world’s greatest lover.”  He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with men such as Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart.

* * *

            In the category of “gee, you learn something new every day” was an email message I received from “A Word A Day,” a service to which I subscribe.  I occasionally use the phrase “after you, Alphonse” but had no idea where it came from.  Now I know:  “After the title characters in a cartoon strip by cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper (1857-1937).  Alphonse and Gaston are extremely polite to each other, to the extent that their ‘After you, Alphonse,’ ‘You first, my dear Gaston!’ routine often gets them into trouble, such as when they can’t evade a trolley which mows them down while each insists on letting the other go first.”  So “Alphonse and Gaston” describes “Two people who treat each other with excessive deference, often to their detriment.”  Just thought you might like to know.

            Funny I should come up with this.  The last home game for Minnesota this year was with South Dakota State and it was one of the most pathetic excuses for a football game I have ever seen.  It was an Alphonse and Gaston routine.  “We’d like you to win.”  “Oh no, we’d prefer that you win.”  “Please, we’d be happy if you won.”  What a terrible game.

* * *

            This one from delanceyplace.com also caught my fancy.  Historian Stanley Weintraub, author of Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775-1783, has developed what he calls “the first rule of holes.”  Writing about the British and the American revolution, “The real failing of the British, he writes, is that they ‘had no exit strategy other than victory.’  Only after defeat did King George III recognize ‘the first rule of holes:  When you realize you’re in one, stop digging.’“  Something American foreign-policy makers tend to forget.  Of course, the “first rule of holes” applies to personal lives as well.  I can think of a few holes I’ve been in and wasn’t smart enough to quit digging—or at least not soon enough.

* * *

            One of the amusing games in my business is the ranking of colleges and universities.  The most well-known rankings in the US are those of US News & World Report.  But there are a number of other ranking systems used around the world, and those of you with attachments to the University of Minnesota might be interested in how your university ranks on various scales (2008 or 2009, depending on the publication date, and listed in no particular order).

U of Minnesota Rank (the number on the left)

89        (Global)  Ècole des Mines de Paris (number of alumni holding a chief executive post in one of the Fortune Global 500 companies) (tied with dozens of other institutions, all of which have 1) (a weird scale, but there it is—it might be a more valid measure if they looked at thousands of professional/executive staff in a lot of companies, but that would be enormously expensive research)

543      (US only)  America’s Best Colleges (Forbes) (based on the quality of the education they provide, the experience of the students, and how much they achieve—the measurement of which, of course, is not self-evident)

87        (Global)  World’s Best Colleges (US News and World Report, drawn from the London Times Higher Education, which does its own rankings—which also includes employer ratings of graduates, and how the London Times knows much about employer satisfaction with Minnesota graduates is an interesting question)

7          (Global)  Web presence (“measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of universities”) (not exactly a measure useful for students, but an interesting gauge of the number of websites a university has)

28        (Global)  Jiao Tong University (Shanghai) “Academic Ranking of World Universities” (ranks “universities by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution”) (purely based on institutional statistics; again, not something useful for students, a measure of an institution’s elite research productivity) (ranks top 400 universities)

50        (US only)  Washington Monthly, which rates “schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country)” (out of 258 “national universities”)

3          (US only)  The Top American Research Universities, Center for Measuring University Performance, Arizona State University (tied with five other institutions).  (uses “nine different measures: Total Research, Federal Research, Endowment Assets, Annual Giving, National Academy Members, Faculty Awards, Doctorates Granted, Postdoctoral Appointees, and SAT/ACT range) (highly favorable to large institutions, and a peculiar way of arranging the measures; originally developed at the U of Florida; one Minnesota faculty member wisecracked that it was constructed the way it was because that is the only possible way the U of Florida could have gotten ranked in the top 25 or 30 research universities)

181      (US only)  PayScale.com, “with the largest salary database in the world, we’ve put together a package of which colleges and degrees end up paying off most for grads. Toss out greek systems, ignore bowl games and get down to the nitty-gritty. How much are you going to make once you’re out of college and the loan collectors are knocking at your door?”  (rank in median mid-career salary of individuals with only a bachelor’s degree, out of a total of 598 institutions) (the top ten, in order, are Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),  Harvard University, Harvey Mudd College, Stanford University, Princeton University, Colgate University,  University of Notre Dame,  Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, with ranges—medians--of $129,000 for Dartmouth grads to $118,000 for U of Penn grads; Minnesota is $84,500) [For median starting salary, Minnesota ranks 165^th, at $46,500; the top school is Loma Linda University, at $71,400.]

61        (US only)  US News & World Report, National Universities Rankings. (“data from each college for up to 15 indicators of academic excellence [and] each factor is assigned a weight that reflects our judgment about how much a measure matters. Finally, the colleges in each category are ranked against their peers, based on their composite weighted score”) (highly criticized because a big chunk of the ratings are reputational, based on presidents’ and provosts’ views, many of whom probably have no clue about other institutions, and Clemson was recently revealed to have strategically rated its peers lower in order to make Clemson look better)

<50      (US only)  Global Language Monitor (“ranked the nation’s colleges and universities according their appearance on the Internet, throughout the Blogosphere, as well in the global print and electronic media”) (U of M was not in the top 50, which is as far down as they ranked)

            Another “ranking” that came out is by the American Institute for Economic Research, and it developed a “college destinations index,” which ranks cities (in four groups, from large metro areas of 2.5+ million to college towns of fewer than 250,000).  AIER looks at arts and culture, research and development, accessibility, earning potential, entrepreneurial activity, brain drain, etc.  Minneapolis/St. Paul ranked 9^th on the list of major metro areas (above San Francisco on the “arts and leisure” category!).

The most influential rankings, as far as universities are concerned, are those of the National Research Council (NRC), which operates under the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the Institute of Medicine (IOM).  (“The NAS, NAE, IOM, and NRC are part of a private, nonprofit institution that provides science, technology and health policy advice under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln.”) The NRC evaluates departments/disciplines across the country and ranks them; the institutions (or the media) compile all the individual rankings to create a composite institutional ranking.  The NRC rankings only get done about every dozen years, and there has been one due for several years but delayed repeatedly.  Last time (about 1994), Minnesota’s composite rank was about 21 or 22. 

Minnesota’s standing, for a state with a relatively small population, is not bad.  The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (“Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an Act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center whose charge is ‘to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher’“) classifies colleges and universities by several categories, including degrees offered, research, undergraduate/graduate programs, etc.  One category is RU/VH (research universities, very high research activity), of which there are 96 in the US, and RU/H (research universities, high research activity), of which there are 103.

The 96 in the RU/VH category includes institutions with which you are familiar:  Arizona State, Cal Tech, Duke, Florida State, Wisconsin, Michigan, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, etc.  And Minnesota.  The 103 in the RU/H category also includes institutions you will know:  Marquette, Clemson, George Mason, George Washington, Ohio U, Michigan Tech, NDSU, etc.  So being 21 or 22, when being compared to all the elite private research universities and states with much larger budgets and populations (e.g., California, Texas, New York), is pretty good for a small, cold, Midwestern state.

The ranking we at Minnesota like the most, of course, is the Jiao Tong University rankings, which look at the top 500 universities all over the world—and puts Minnesota 28^th in 2008.  Here, if you’re curious, is their list of the top 30 in the world:

1. Harvard

2. Stanford

3. UC Berkeley

4. Cambridge (UK)

5. Mass Inst of Tech

6. Calif Institute of Tech

7. Columbia

8. Princeton

9. U of Chicago

10. Oxford (UK)

11. Yale

12. Cornell

13. UCLA

14. UC San Diego

15. U of Pennsylvania

16. U of Washington

17. U of Wisconsin

18. UC San Francisco

19. Tokyo U (Japan)

20. Johns Hopkins

21. U of Michigan

22. University College London (UK)

23. Kyoto U (Japan)

24. Swiss Fed Institute of Tech (Switz)

25. U of Toronto (Canada)

26. U of Illinois

27. Imperial College London (UK)

28. U of Minnesota

29. Washington U

30. Northwestern U

I think it’s interesting that of the top 30 in this listing, 5 are from the Big Ten and 4 are from the Pac-10 (and, sadly, the 4 in the Pac-10 all outrank the 5 in the Big Ten).  An impressive collection of leading intellectual activity concentrated in two football conferences.

            Didn’t mean to run on about higher education and rankings.  But Americans are fascinated with rankings and ratings, so I thought these might be of modest interest. 

            And by the way, virtually all of us in higher education think these rankings are largely worthless because they cannot get at institutional differences, academic/student climates, mission, differences in disciplines/colleges, student learning, educational outcomes, and a multitude of other factors that affect whether a student will be successful in a place or whether the institution will serve the population it is intended to serve (city, state, nation, or the world).  But everyone plays the damn rankings game, so everybody in higher education pays attention—with distaste.

* * *

Although it may seem like I’m drawing a lot on delanceyplace.com, remember that I’m only using a few of the messages—out of the 365 possible during a year.  Here’s another one.  Satyajit Das is a risk consultant and author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives, a book that received dozens of stellar reviews on Amazon.com.  The Amazon review included this language:  “Traders, Guns & Money throws light on the culture, games, and pure deceptions played out every day in trading rooms around the world, and played out with other people’s money.  It describes the processes by which a small group of gifted, if avaricious, individuals parlay their knowledge of the arcane world of financial products into wealth, leaving shareholders, clients, regulators, and the taxpaying ordinary public to bear most of the risk.”

At one point in the book, Das wrote that “we always got the client to sign all sorts of papers saying that they were sane, doing this of their own free will and had been given a ‘product disclosure statement’ (PDS) outlining the risks of the investment.  The clients generally never read the statements.  [A colleague of mine], in one of his diligent moments, had taken it upon himself to vet my carefully crafted description of one of our products for a PDS.  ‘What is this shit?!’ he thundered.  ‘If I read this crap I wouldn’t know what I was buying.’  I took this as the highest compliment.  A small army of lawyers had vetted the PDS and had passed it as legally correct.  In some countries, regulators had also reviewed it and passed it fit for investor consumption, but it was unreadable gibberish.  The detail was in the drivel.

“Our tax lawyer, a 50-something woman from the most expensive law firm in town, was my role model.  On her wall was a framed excerpt from a judgment in a case concerning a clause that she had drafted.  The judge had commented that he had found the clause to be of ‘stupefying legal density beyond human comprehension.’  She was pleased with her efforts.  I had a long way to go.”

Pretty appalling, huh?

* * *

            Krystin and Elliott went to San Francisco last spring—a sister & brother trip, no parents.  They stayed in a hostel, one that Krystin said is rated as one of the best in the world.  They both liked it.  In a hostel, of course, they share bedrooms; they stayed in a coed room, so were together.  (I have never stayed in a hostel—and doubt I’m going to start now—but they sound like a great deal for youngsters traveling.  Krystin tells me that it isn’t always youngsters staying in them, but they make up the vast majority of the customers.)

  

Their trip to SF was largely uneventful.  They saw the usual sites and did the usual tourist stuff.  That sounds condescending but I don’t mean it that way.  I have come to realize that the common “tourist” attractions in many places are tourist attractions because there is something unique or spectacular or unusually interesting about them.  Notre Dame in Paris is not just another church, nor is Westminster Abbey or Chartres, nor is the Duomo in Florence; Versailles is not just another residence, nor is Sans Souci or Hampton Court.  And so on.  So riding the trolley cars and seeing Fisherman’s Wharf and Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge and Chinatown and looking at the interesting housing and architecture of SF are worth doing—because they are essential elements of SF.  (To be sure, some sites get a little commercial, to say the least, and that may be a distraction, but the sites themselves remain what they are.) 

            This was an interesting experience for me, because it’s the first time the two of them have traveled together—and without either one of their parents along.  In this age, of course, it was possible to stay in frequent touch—by texting.  So I learned from Krystin at the very outset that security in the MSP airport thought her insulin pump might be a bomb and Elliott’s shaving cream might have been an explosive.  Elliott groused that pop and a very small licorice was $6 at the airport.  They texted me almost simultaneously when their plane landed (they know I’m always glad when a flight gets on the ground—even though I have no fear of air travel, I am nonetheless always mildly relieved when that multi-ton tube of metal lands safely and the landing gear doesn’t collapse in the process). 

Elliott was disgruntled at having to buy a sweatshirt in SF—a guy who is NEVER cold, even during the Minnesota winters—this after he texted me from the open-top bus tour they took that “was extremely windy.  Everyone else was shivering in their sweatshirts and I was just relaxing in my t shirt.”

He was more generally irate at the rate at which his money flowed through his hands despite his best intentions to the contrary.  Except that it wasn’t his money—he didn’t even want to go, but Krystin really wanted to (for graduation), and I didn’t want her to go alone.  So he grudgingly agreed to go along, on the condition that he didn’t have to spend any of his money.  (He texted me at one point that “I wasn’t planning on having expenses.”)  He related in one text that he had over-estimated the amount of money he had for food “and now I have to eat cheap”—because he was darned if he was going to spend any of his money on food or expenses out there!  He pointed out to me that I had given them each $100 for food, which amounted to about $20 per day, but that “it’s almost impossible to find a meal for under $10.  And that’s a small meal.”  Later in the trip he said the weather was sunny and warm and that since he had used up all his food money, “I’ll eat scraps off the ground like all the homeless people do.”  (But he also confessed at one point that he didn’t have money left because he “spent it on tourist trap garbage.”  I had given them some spending money, but that disappeared quickly.)  As a guy who collects swords and such, he wrote that “I’m conflicted.  There’s a really cool samurai statue I’ve never seen before and it’s actually metal, not some cheap plastic.  But it’s 60 bucks.  I can’t justify that.”

Elliott also groused that I should have helped Krystin with the itinerary because they finished with Alcatraz one morning and had nothing planned for the rest of the day.  Ah, his father’s son, who plans travel itineraries down to the last minute—he’s too used to traveling with me, where there’s always something next on the list to do.

Krystin, in the meantime, had a great experience, took some wonderful pictures, and kept me posted on events from her point of view.  She was spending some of her own money, by design, so she wasn’t worried.  She also bailed Elliott out on food and paid for his sweatshirt.  All of which, of course, I paid for in the end L   She also said that despite his griping in his text messages, Elliott was actually fun to travel with and that she and he both had a good time.  (And she did a good job with the itinerary, Elliott’s jibe to the contrary notwithstanding.)

* * *

            The kids and I were talking one night about the various gods that different civilizations have worshipped, from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs through the Greeks and Romans and up to the present.  Elliott made the observation that “every couple of millennia we just swap out the gods” (noting that humanity long ago abandoned the Egyptian, Greek, Norse, and Roman gods, among others.  So when, he asked, will we swap out the current ones for new ones?  Probably not a question that would find favor with a lot of people.

* * *

           

            One of the funny little mysteries in forestry research is why most tree leaves in Europe in the fall turn yellow while many in North America and East Asia turn red.  I didn’t know the difference existed.  There isn’t agreement yet among scientists and there are several explanations.  One is that the red pigment helps (chemically) prepare the tree for winter.  Another is that the red helps protect the tree against insects.  But neither explains the difference between Europe and elsewhere.

Recently an “evolutionary ecology” analysis has led to the surmisal that “the strong autumn colors result from the long evolutionary war between the trees and the insects that use them as hosts.  Insects tend to suck the amino acids from the leaves in the fall season, and later lay their eggs, to the detriment of the trees.  Aphids are attracted to yellow leaves more than red ones.  Trees that expend the energy to color their leaves red may benefit from fewer aphids and fewer aphid eggs.”  So red is better.  But why not in Europe?

A recent theory holds that “until 35 million years ago, large areas of the globe were covered with evergreen jungles or forests composed of tropical trees. During this phase, a series of ice ages and dry spells transpired and many tree species evolved to become deciduous.  Many of these trees also began an evolutionary process of producing red deciduous leaves in order to ward off insects.  In North America, as in East Asia, north-to-south mountain chains enabled plant and animal ‘migration’ to the south or north with the advance and retreat of the ice according to the climatic fluctuations.  And, of course, along with them migrated their insect ‘enemies’ too.  Thus the war for survival continued there uninterrupted.

In Europe, on the other hand, the mountains—the Alps and their lateral branches—reach from east to west, and therefore no protected areas were created.  Many tree species that did not survive the severe cold died, and with them the insects that depended on them for survival.  At the end of the repeated ice ages, most tree species that had survived in Europe had no need to cope with many of the insects that had become extinct, and therefore no longer had to expend efforts on producing red warning leaves.”

            The authors of the theory point to “dwarf shrubs that grow in Scandinavia, which still color their leaves red in autumn. Unlike trees, dwarf shrubs have managed to survive the ice ages under a layer of snow that covered them and protected them from the extreme condition above. Under the blanket of snow, the insects that fed off the shrubs were also protected—so the battle with insects continued in these plants, making it necessary for them to color their leaves red.”  (Science Daily, August 17, 2009)

            So we probably have beautiful fall colors because of bugs.

* * *

            It was with sadness that I finally made the big decision of the early 21^st Century:  I got rid of the house telephone landline.  Sadness, he says, because the number has been attached to this house since 1940, when it was 6946.  (Qwest confirmed that in that day, the house numbers were either 4 or 5 digits, and I recall seeing a note in my great-aunt’s papers referring to her telephone number as 6946.)  Then it became PArkway 9-6946, and then 729-6946, and now of course 612 729 6946.  It is also the only telephone number in my life that has remained the same for my entire life.  But I suppose it is foolish to be sentimental about a telephone number.

            On the other hand, it is also the only number on which we receive fund-raising calls, robo-calls, and notices of medical appointments—and virtually nothing else.  I even thought about keeping the number and using it for my cell phone—but then I’d get the fund-raising calls on my cell phone, which I can do without.

* * *

In an article late summer, The Chronicle of Higher Education noted an article in the New York Times Magazine suggesting that “cool cyberkids” are starting to abandon FB “because too many old fogies have showed up on the social network.”  And because it’s no longer a new toy.  The NYT article, however, was highly anecdotal.  The Chronicle article suggested that some professors have also begun to leave FB—but in my experience, that doesn’t mean much, because there haven’t been that many professors ON FB to start with.  In fact, I’ve seen (locally) a slow trend in the other direction:  faculty members at the University of Minnesota are slowly, often reluctantly, putting up a FB page. 

Several readers wrote in to the Chronicle-- mostly “old fogies,” surely, because what youngster would ever read The Chronicle of Higher Education?  Some old fogies said they were abandoning FB; other wrote that they enjoyed it.  Some of the comments were amusing.  “I explored the novelty, but discovered that the heavy posters (even among my “friends”) seem to be either lonely, isolated, or narcissists -- maybe all three.  It’s not even entertaining.  At least half of my Facebook friends can boast Ph.D.s, but their Facebook posts seem preoccupied with the trivial, causing me to wonder if perhaps they’re not quite as intelligent as they once appeared. I wish that a few would return to writing old-fashioned e-mails, whose complete sentences and paragraphs suggested a brain that was fully operational.”  Another, reflecting an unsurprising professorial bias, wrote that “it has no value besides being a place to play.  There are no real learning experiences going on.”  In a similar vein, another wrote that “to echo someone else’s post, my acquaintances who post frequently on FB really have very little of interest to say.  I’d be satisfied with perusing a blog once or twice a year, in lieu of endless bad photos and updates of insignificant activities.”  Others, including this one, took exception to the nay-sayers:  “Another old fogey who likes Facebook.  There are plenty of other places to read serious material; FB is perfect for sharing daily life and keeping in touch with folks you don’t get to see very often.”

I liked in particular one comment:  “Why does something have to be educational?  Why can’t something just be entertaining and informative?  And why can’t people just relax and enjoy technology?”

I asked Krystin and Elliott what their impressions were.  Krystin was quite clear:  “Nah, I don’t think it is fading at all!  Maybe amongst your generation, many of whom don’t see the point of it, but for my generation it’s still going strong, and more and more people are still joining.”

* * *

            A news report that caught my eye: “A new report, “Cellphones and Brain Tumors:  15 Reasons for Concern, Science, Spin and the Truth Behind Interphone,” was released today by a collaborative of international EMF activists.”  (EMF is electromagnetic fields.)  The report looked at research on cellphones and brain tumors and concluded that they do increase the risk of brain tumors, that studies funded by the telephone industry have downplayed the risks, and the risk is greater for children than adults. 

            I wrote to a couple of faculty friends in public health about this.  They were dubious.  One wrote that “the hyperbole around this always makes me suspicious.  Some people are convinced & for them any evidence is flawed.  As a public health hazard, driving & talking is much more dangerous.”  The other wrote back to agree with his colleague and added that “the EMF issue is difficult because some are certain of the outcomes, before data is collected.  The folks I respect most find ‘no to minuscule’ effects of EMF.  And don’t forget the weatherman test:  do you see rain, if not, it’s probably not raining!  In other words, given the global ubiquity of cellphone use and the declining level of brain/head cancers it is clear the effects of EMF/radiation are weak at best. Other stuff is likely to kill you first. . . .  Brush teeth, wear seatbelts and bike helmets, eat well, exercise, laugh, and drink in moderation :)” 

So I guess I’m not going to worry about using my cell phone.  Because I use it more for text messages than calls, I’m probably more at risk for cancer of the hand than of the brain.  J

* * *

            I sent the two kids some of Ogden Nash’s short poems, which can be quite funny.  One of the most famous ones, of course, is about ketchup:  “Shake and shake and shake the bottle.  None’ll come and then a lot’ll.”  Krystin posted another one her FB site: 

The firefly’s flame

Is something for which science has no name
I can think of nothing eerier
Than flying around with an unidentified glow on a person’s posteerier.

There was nothing wrong with her posting it, but I took her to task (via messages on FB, of course!) for not citing the author.  Theoretically, one of the outcomes of a college education is academic honesty, which includes not plagiarizing.  This is something to which colleges and universities try to pay attention.  At first Krystin just wrote back “oops.”  I suggested she add a note to her FB page, to which she responded, “I will if anyone asks.”  I replied that she should do it without anyone asking.  To which she retorted “Don’t worry about it dad.  Don’t lose sleep over it.  Don’t be upset about it.  It’s fine.  I’m not going to jail for forgetting quotation marks and recognition!”  I told her I was not going to lose sleep or be upset but my college-educated daughter should cite sources! 

She finally gave up.  “Pssssssh ok professor Dad.  (: “  And then she grumped on her FB page that “apparently I’m going to be mugged and beaten and robbed of all my possessions if I don’t acknowledge the author of this quote.  It’s Ogden Nash.  Look him up.  Funny guy.”  (She subsequently quoted Luciano Pavarotti—with attribution.)

* * *

            Later in the summer I learned (by accident) how to do Instant Messaging (IM, as either a noun or a verb) on Facebook.  I came to my computer one Saturday morning and found an IM from the night before, someone asking why I had not been out that night.  I was puzzled (and annoyed) that someone knew I wasn’t out the night before, but I sure didn’t know how they knew.  (I did go over to my neighbors for cocktails, as a matter of fact, but that probably doesn’t qualify as “going out”).  Krystin was sitting there, so I asked her what this message was and how did the person know.  Krystin explained that because I had never gone into the IM function and clicked “go offline,” I had been online ever since I’d gotten on FB—and whoever looked at the IM function on their computer would see that I was online, although perhaps idle, and thus assumed that I was home.  She showed me how to use IM function on FB—and I immediately started using with a number of people and found it great fun.  It is, however, far less efficient than simply talking with someone on the telephone.

* * *

            The word “multitasking” should be abolished from English—or at least relegated to the same category in which “unicorn” resides:  terms for things or concepts that are imaginary.  Most people know a unicorn is imaginary; unfortunately, they don’t seem to know that multitasking is as well.  I had a clear personal demonstration of this one night after I’d acquired the skill of instant-messaging on FB.  I was simultaneously (1) IMing on FB with my friend Kathy Kelly in Madison, (2) texting on my cell phone with a woman I was dating, and (3) exchanging emails with a friend.  I did none of them well and I was exhausted after about 10 minutes of all this activity.  I suspect all three of them wondered what was going on, because I’d have to pause at the texting to do the email, then pause on the email to do the IM, then go back to the texting, and so on.  I finally told Kathy what was going on and said it was ridiculous.  She kindly volunteered to sign off the FB IMing.  Human brains can do one thing at a time, and I don’t think it’s just MY brain!

About the time I was composing this part of the letter there came a release from Stanford University News about multitasking. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; the summary sentence was this:  People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.”

The researchers knew that that “social scientists have long assumed that it’s impossible to process more than one string of information at a time,” but thought that maybe some people can multitask and set out to find out what those people are better at.  “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it,” the lead author reported.  What they found was that the multitaskers got distracted, could not remember things as well, and could not switch tasks easily because they were thinking about the tasks they were NOT doing.

So, multitask to your heart’s content—but know you’ll be doing a worse job on all the tasks than you would if you just did them one at time.  Which is why using cell phones and texting should be illegal while driving.  Eating and drinking soda should be, too.

* * *

            A colleague at the University provided me with a quote that I just love:  The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”

* * *

For all the World War II history I’ve read in my life, I had never noticed two particular dates before—and did so this year only because of the juxtaposition of two little news notes on the web.  September 1, 1939, is generally considered to mark the beginning of WWII, when German forces invaded Poland.  September 2, 1945, was the final end of WWII with V-J Day.  So I guess you could say that WWII essentially lasted 6 years and 1 day.  Of course, bad stuff had been going on in both Europe and East Asia long before September 1, 1939, but those are the usual bookends to the war.

* * *

            I suppose this falls in the “demonstrating a keen grasp of the obvious” category, but I happened to notice a small article entitled “Face Processing Slows With Age.”  The researcher, Guillaume Rousselet at the University of Glasgow (an absolutely beautiful campus, medieval in part, but not as good as the University of Edinburgh), noted that “identifying a face can be difficult when that face is shown for only a fraction of a second.  However, young adults have a marked advantage over elderly people in these conditions.”  He and a team of researchers worked with young and old and looked at cranial electrical electricity to measure the processing time for visual stimuli. He concluded that “our data support the common belief that as we get older we get slower. Beyond this general conclusion, our research provides new tools to quantify by how much the brain slows down in the particular context of face perception.”  He went on to say that “why the brains of some older subjects seem to tick as fast as the brains of some young subjects is, at this point, a complete mystery.”

            I wonder if this neurological decline is related to the one that permits me to recognize a face but be unable to attach a name to it, even though I may have known the person for years.  Fortunately, this doesn’t happen with the people I work daily with, but it is still annoying.  (Eventually I remember the name about 10 minutes later, which isn’t helpful when we’re passing on the sidewalk.)

* * *

I went with a date to see President Obama when he came to Minneapolis to stump for health-care reform.  It was fun; I’ve never seen a sitting president before. Now we’ll see if he and Congress can get something done on health care. There were a few protesters outside; we passed one saying they wanted freedom, not communism. I said to my date “communism, schmomunism, they wouldn’t know communism if it came up and bit them in the rump.”

* * *

                Permit me a few comments about the inaugural football game at the University’s brand-new football stadium.  The comments have little to do with football. 

First, I continue to be struck by the awkward juxtaposition of this enormous, impressive, and expensive (~$300 million) facility, devoted to tossing a bag of leather around, with the stressed central teaching, research, and service missions of the institution.  Those missions have been compromised in recent years by alarming reductions in state funding, and corresponding increases in tuition, even while the University probably contributes more to the common good than any other organization in the state.  All those involved with the project know that the money to build the stadium came from student fees (the students voted to impose the fee on themselves), state funding (because the University gave the State 2500 acres south of the Twin Cities for a nature preserve in return for state assistance in paying the stadium-construction debt), and private funding (a lot of donors, who also gave generously—at the President’s insistence—to academic programs as well as to the cost of the stadium).  So theoretically none of the money was diverted from the funding sources for the institutional missions.  Even given that, however, it seems odd to have this tremendous new facility at a time when those missions are being savaged with budget cuts.  We have increased tuition, reduced faculty positions, increased the number of students (so larger classes and less attention per student), reduced support staff for faculty, and cut activities in hundreds of other ways.

Second, because the opening game in the new stadium was with Air Force, just before the start of the game we had a fly-over of four F-16 fighter jets, flying wingtip-to-wingtip.  It was pretty impressive, actually.  And the four Lt. Colonels who piloted the planes were introduced to a round of applause during the halftime of the game.  I don’t know if the Air Force does that for every Air Force football game; maybe it was in conjunction with the opening of the new stadium.  But I could not help thinking a couple of not-so-positive thoughts.  I wondered how much that little fly-over cost the taxpayers; I assume it costs a bundle every time an F-16 goes into the air.

The fly-over also got me to thinking once again about the glorification of the military in this country.  Mind you, I am among the first to acknowledge that we live in a nasty world and that there are plenty of forces and nations on the globe that would like to do in us and our way of life (I am thinking particularly of the constitutional and political system under which we live).  We cannot do without a strong and effective military.  I also have great respect for those who are willing to serve this country in the military and put themselves in harm’s way to preserve our democracy and my family’s life and rights.  But under the most recent Bush administration, and beginning largely with the Reagan administration, we have been pouring more and more money into defense and increased the adulation and glorification of the military.  (It’s always been interesting that the ones who seem to most emphasize the military and make a big public production of their support for its personnel and actions, are those who have never been in it:  Reagan, GWBush, Cheney, and Ronald Dumsfelt.)  (I was offended during the Bush administration when those who opposed the wars were accused of not supporting the troops.  That was a dumb argument.  I can certainly support providing the armed forces and military personnel with whatever they need to do the job—even while I can also argue that the political decisions that put the troops where they are was wrong and bad.)

As this evolution in the view of the military has been occurring, I have often recalled Dwight Eisenhower’s words:  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”  And while most have heard of the remonstrance attributed to William Tecumseh Sherman that “war is hell,” perhaps fewer are aware of what he wrote in May, 1865, just before the end of the Civil War:  “I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers. . . .  Tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated . . . that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”  Surely the country must remain strong, but we ought not to glorify the ugly business of the use of force, no matter how necessary and ethical it may be.

The practical public-policy question in my mind is one of balance.  I really wonder if it is necessary that the United States have a military budget only slightly smaller than the next eight largest military budgets in the world combined (and one of the eight is the military spending of the entire European Union).  (Figures for military spending around the world are rather unreliable, but as an order of magnitude they are probably close enough for my purposes.  What’s clear is that the U.S. spends far more than much of the rest of the developed world combined.)  Here are the dollar figures (from Wikipedia):

United States                             636,292,979,000

European Union Total               312,259,000,000
People’s Republic of China        70,308,600,000

France                                      68,584,100,000
United Kingdom                       65,149,500,000
Japan                                        48,860,000,000
Germany                                  45,930,000,000
Italy                                          40,050,000,000
Russian Federation                    39,600,000,000

(I assume the EU total excludes the expenditures listed separately for France, Germany, and Italy.)

Is it really necessary to the defense of the United States, and to carry out whatever other treaty and moral obligations we have elsewhere in the world, to spend quite this much money?  There are only three items in the U.S. budget where cuts can be of sufficient size to have an effect on deficits:  defense, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid.  The rest of the federal budget is pocket change in comparison.  We know we’re going to fiddle around some with Social Security eligibility and Medicare isn’t likely to be changed very much as we baby-boomers get older (and make our views supporting it known to Congress).  So the one other place where we can save significant money is the military.  To begin where I started, I wonder if the military needs to have enough money to conduct flyovers at college football games.

* * *

There was an interesting little piece on the web about “The Buzz On An Amazing New Mosquito Repellent: Will It Fly?”  This is a subject of great interest to Minnesotans every summer.  This guy Ulrich Bernier discovered stuff that “seems like a dream come true.  It makes mosquitoes buzz off three times longer than DEET, the active ingredient in many of today’s bug repellents.  It does not have the unpleasant odor of DEET.  And it does not cause DEET’s sticky-skin sensation.”  But it may never get to the market because the costs of development and testing make it prohibitively expensive to turn it into a commercial product.  He and his students used a computer model to test over 30,000 chemicals that have been tried as repellants for the last six decades. 

What I also found interesting was that the study “was partly supported by the Deployed War-Fighter Protection (DWFP) Research Program, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense through the Armed Forces Pest Management Board (AFPMB).”  Who would ever have known, besides someone looking for grant funding for research, that the military has something called the DWFP or the AFPMB?  I can’t even begin to speculate whether this is an example of a military budget that is too large.

I want to note that my back yard, and that of my neighbors with whom I have the occasional cocktail, has been largely mosquito-free for the last several years.  We have little or no grass and we don’t provide any puddles or standing water for them to grow in.  So I don’t need this nifty new repellant.

Unfortunately, what I DID need was a repellant for is raccoons.  I have nothing against raccoons.  They’re just trying to live their lives while I try to live mine.  But I was not happy that the local raccoon population—or some part of it—decided later this summer that my back yard is their outhouse.  I had piles of raccoon manure all around the base of the trees in the yard every morning.  First I tried blood meal, which my horticulture friend Emily recommended I use to stop the squirrels from digging up my newly-planted impatiens.  I spread it around the plants and the squirrels went elsewhere.  Then I had woodpeckers going after a spot on one of the trees where a limb had been removed.  I figured if the blood meal made the squirrels go away, maybe it would work for woodpeckers, too, so I climbed up the ladder and deposited it in the spot they were pecking.  They also went away.  When the raccoons started depositing their unwelcome materials, I thought I’d try the blood meal again.  Didn’t bother the raccoons at all.

So, on the advice of a faculty friend in the vet school, I bought a product I didn’t know existed, much less one that I would ever purchase:  dried coyote urine.  So there I was, one night in September, spreading this white dust all around the base of the trees.  But it worked; the raccoons apparently didn’t like that smell.  Needless to say, I did not stick my nose in the top of the container to learn what it smelled like.  The dust as I spread it I could not smell and I was just fine with that.  I sure hope the stuff is synthetic; I wouldn’t want to be the poor sap who has to collect coyote urine from the animals themselves—or collect materials they just urinated on.

* * *

            A colleague at Penn State, Marie Hardin, came to the University of Minnesota to participate in a distinguished-speaker panel (on the way the media depict women in sport), and made the interesting observation that “more voices in the choir doesn’t guarantee the song we hear is music to our ears.”  I asked for a citation; she said she made it up herself.  I think it’s a wonderful observation, although I haven’t figured out a good time to use it (yet).

* * *

            Michael Gerson, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece in September that coincidentally appeared at the same time I had been thinking about the topic on which he wrote:  the relationship between the advent of the internet and the decline in the civility of our national discourse.  He began by contending that “the transformation of Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s from the nation of Goethe to the nation of Goebbels is a specter that haunts, or should haunt, every nation.”  He points out that Germany during the Weimar period after WWI was a literate and cultured country, but “in the course of a few years, a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies; elevate a single, messianic leader; and keep the public docile with hatred while the state committed unprecedented crimes.”  Gerson maintains that technology was critical to the Nazi takeover, because the “Nazis pioneered voice amplification at rallies, the distribution of recorded speeches and the sophisticated targeting of poster art toward groups and regions.”  Radio was the most important technology, however, because the Nazis provided German homes with receivers and went on to blast everyone with continuing propaganda, and with “information that you were unable to verify or critically evaluate.  It was the Internet of its time.”

The neo-nazi, White supremacist, and Holocaust-deniers use the internet in a way that the Nazis would admire, Gerson wrote, and not only can it provide a medium that fosters subcultures of hate,  in general it can be a “disorienting atmosphere in which information is difficult to verify or critically evaluate [and] . . . and emotion -- often expressed in CAPITAL LETTERS -- is primary.”  Many of the user-originated websites consist of “bullying, conspiracy theories and racial prejudice” and the freedom of the internet encourages the authoritarian and can drive the serious and thoughtful away because of the ugliness.  What the internet has allowed is wingnuts and crazies located in disparate parts of the country and world to find one another and create a community of believers that could not easily exist before the electronic age.

These groups can then begin to have an influence greatly disproportionate to their numbers, it seems to me, by bombarding the “regular” media and other outlets with claims that garner attention, no matter how frivolous, prejudiced, or hate-filled they may be.  Or no matter how erroneous they may be.  Michelle Bachman makes idiotic statements and everyone knows about them immediately—and they take on a life of their own, primarily by bouncing around the internet for a long time after their inaccuracies have been demonstrated.

Gerson quoted ethicist Clive Allen about this web environment, who calls it a “belligerent brutopia.” “The Internet should represent a great flourishing of democratic participation. . . .  But it doesn’t. . . .  The brutality of public debate on the Internet is due to one fact above all -- the option of anonymity.  The belligerence would not be tolerated if the perpetrators’ identities were known because they would be rebuffed and criticized by those who know them.  Free speech without accountability breeds dogmatism and confrontation.”  What also happens is that hatred can make its way into “respected institutional spaces” such as newspaper and magazine websites, which provide links to material that they would never print because they would so offend community standards of decency and tolerance.

The First Amendment bars restrictions on such speech, as it should.  But, Gerson maintains, private sites do not have to publish or promote such trash (e.g., Facebook, the newspapers, YouTube).  Some of them moderate content on their websites; others do not, Gerson notes, and he suggests that they all should, and “whatever the method, no reputable institution should allow its publishing capacity, in print or online, to be used as the equivalent of the wall of a public bathroom stall.”

The day after I wrote the preceding few paragraphs, there appeared in the news a report that a poll was posted on Facebook asking users to vote “should Obama be killed?”  The response options were “yes,” “maybe,” “if he cuts my health care,” and “no.” I didn’t see the poll itself on FB because the FB people—or someone—removed it.  “Included on the list of the top 100 most popular polls on Facebook was a poll responding to the ‘should Obama be killed’ query, and which asked users to vote, ‘Should the creator of “should Obama be killed” be arrested?’“  This is precisely the sort of thing I was thinking of.  Knowing how viscerally and vitriolically the right-wing end of the business world reacted to FDR, I am sure there were some who would have conducted such a poll.  The difference is that now any nitwit can pose it on a place like FB and millions of people instantly know about it.

* * *

            The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had an article last fall reporting that students in elementary school and beyond are no longer learning cursive handwriting.  It continues to be taught, usually in third grade (which is when I learned it), but it is not emphasized or required after that, at least in some school districts.  The “villain,” if you want to call it that, is technology.  “What used to be called ‘penmanship’ is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.”  The article went on to report that national writing tests for 8^th- and 11^th-graders will be on computers in 2011 and for fourth-graders in 2019. 

A professor at DePaul University who’s president of one of the groups of the National Council of Teachers of English is quoted as saying that “We need to make sure they’ll be ready for what’s going to happen in 2020 or 2030.”  She said that students don’t see the point of spending time practicing their handwriting when they rarely use it.  They compose school and other work on the computer and use their cellphones and other devices to communicate with each other.  (I have always thought that one advantage of composing and printing letters on the computer was that they are always at least readable.  Maybe not intelligible, or intelligent, but readable.  Even that, I suppose, is the application of new technology to an older cultural practice, the written letter to a friend or relative.)

One person, who works for a company that produces materials for schools, pointed out that the same argument was made at the time of the advent of the typewriter (an antique if ever there was one!).  She argues that “‘everybody talks about how sometime in the future every kid’s going to have a keyboard, but that isn’t really true.’“  Moreover, unless students begin taking notes on a laptop instead of a notebook, they need to write—and cursive writing is a lot faster than printing.

Reader comments about this article were mixed, some saying knowing how to write is unnecessary in this age while others disagreed.  But a couple made points that I thought were notable. 

Tests are still taken by hand in high school and college – it’s important for kids to be able to communicate clearly in either spoken or written form. A person who can’t write clearly is as at much of a disadvantage as a person who mumbles. Cursive IS faster than printing, so just saying, ‘as long as they know how to print’ is actually a handicap.

And as far as I’m concerned, any student who can write a clear, readable thank you note has a distinct             advantage over the unwashed rude masses when it comes to job interviews and insuring future gifts from Grandma.

Little children don’t know the sense in using a fork or spoon, as long as they get food in their mouth – isn’t that all that matters?

I think today’s students will much better benefit from rigorous typing classes than learning cursive. Having beautiful cursive handwriting abilities won’t mean anything if you type with two fingers.  To not have good typing skills will make children be ‘business illiterate’ as adults.

I agree with the last sentence, although the person clearly does not know the modern lingo.  One does not “type” any more.  One types on typewriters.  One “keyboards” on computers.  I composed this entry in the letter the same night I finally sat down and wrote four thank-you notes that were long overdue.  I did not keyboard them, I wrote them out in longhand on note cards.  Just as I still insist Krystin and Elliott do when they receive gifts.  But I don’t actually see their notes—to those who have received them, do they print or do they write?  (My own “writing” is actually a combination of printing and writing, which I suspect is true for a lot of you as well.)

            I can’t decide if I think the gradual disappearance of cursive writing is good or bad or simply inevitable.  If it’s inevitable, which I suspect it may be, it’s hardly worth worrying about.  The kids differed in their response.  Elliott claims he can print as fast as he can print and argues that printing is more readable.  Krystin writes in cursive and defends its use. 

* * *

            Elliott: “the people who write horoscopes and who write fortunes for fortune cookies all work in the same building.”

* * *

I bet you didn’t know that the time light needs to traverse an atomic nucleus is a yoctosecond, or one septillionth of a second (10 to the -24th power).  That would be 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 second.  I think.  My knowledge of scientific notation is a little rusty.

* * *

Now here is an interesting study.  “People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor.”  All it took was a little citrus-smelling Windex, and the participants in the experiments were both fairer and more charitable in their behavior.  The subjects had not noticed the smell.  So, cleanliness is indeed next to godliness!

* * *

            “The Global Language Monitor documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.”  According to the people who run this Monitor, English reached 1,002,116 words this summer (at precisely 10:22 GMT on June 10, they say).  They also contend that “English gains a new word every 98 minutes (or about 14.7 new words a day).”  I wonder how many of those words survive into a reputable dictionary.  Not many, I bet.

* * *

            Krystin found that she had inadvertently started a quarrel between friends on FB about the extent to which health-care costs in this country are driven by medical malpractice suits.  I went to a wonderful web service (free) called aardvark, where one can submit questions and receive answers very quickly.  So I asked aardvark about the contribution of medical malpractice suits to health-care costs; the answer, with citation of studies and references to FactCheck.org, a service of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and an article in the New York Times by Anne Underwood, their free-lance health-care writer.  The upshot appears to be that medical malpractice adds about .5 to 1.5% (maybe up to 2%, depending on your study)—but it isn’t the huge cost-driver that some in politics would have one believe.  And I doubt anyone would want to eliminate the right of patients to sue doctors who royally screw up because of negligence.  But it appears there simply are not that many frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits.

Having done my job of defending the legal profession, I'll hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a rewarding 2010.