Two steps of decency

A couple of months ago, I sent A Conversation With … Emily Wilson PhD, Contemporary Interpreter of the Iliad, on Listening, Hearing, and Communicating to a couple of friends-for-fifty-years who were uniquely appropriate for the article: she read Classics and he read medicine in college and they got married.  A few weeks later they were in Ireland for a Class Reunion and we got to meet in Tramore. They gave me a copy of Emily Wilson's 2018 translation of The Odyssey . . . and some rather fancy Canadian tea.

I had a very expensive education with access to a pretty good library: top-heavy with Thackeray, light on thrillers. As a teenager, I read E.V. Rieu's 1946 translation of The Odyssey, which was the 1st volume published as a [eventually black-covered] Penguin Classic.Teenagers are frankly Scarlett about the niceties of translation: so long as the story rips along. I know the story in some detail but have no Greek. At about the same time I also read HDF Kitto's The Greeks in its Pelican edition. The Greeks was a key text for Robert Pirsig [Blobit 2017] in the writing of ZAMM Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Kitto: "Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send, and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all rounder; he has surpassing aretê.” That should resonate with Heinlein's Specialization is for insects analysis of what a piece of work is a man [Withnail]; and also with O'Grady & Pyke's I could read the sky. We are all, even the dullest of us, complex creatures: so it is invidious to label /summarize anyone as dull or narcissist or scientist. 

Wilson devotes the first 91/583 pages to setting out her stall with as much baggage as she is aware of. It is also helpful to have a classicist's explanatory insight on how Archaic Greek life and certainties differ from those of our own time. "Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass-murderer, and a war hero". Some of those descriptors [migrant homeless disabled] have a particular charge for our modern selves in contrast to the inhabitants of EV Rieu's immediate post-WWII world of 80 years ago.

As we see above Kitto is keen to lay out the nuance of aretê ἀρετή = virtue / excellence. Wilson spends as much effort on xenia ξενία = hospitality: the rights and obligations of hosts and guests. Perhaps in these troubled, othering, times we all need to reflect more on xenia than aretê ?? When somebody, anybody, rocked up to the door Greeks were obliged to give the stranger bath, bites, bevvies and bed.  An integral part of the process is pompḗ Πομπη = safe escort to the next destination. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus' son Telemachus goes off to glean some intel from his father's fellow warriors who have, like, actually returned home. Nestor provides the chap with a chariot and his own son Pisistratus as guide for the onward journey to Menelaus and Helen's palace in Mycenae. Hypnopompic same root.

They say that, when B&B's became A Thing in Ireland in the 1950s there was some [presumably bitch behind the back] outrage that people would charge money for accommodating wayfaring strangers [♪Riannon Giddens♪] who needed a bed for the night. In that world Two steps of decency required a host to see their departing guest to the door - to the gate - to the bus-stop . . .

Irvine's foot

Because things come in threes it is fortunate that we can now add Sandy Irvine's foot to Capitaine Legionaire Danjou's [wooden] hand and maybe Galileo's finger. But knock yourself out: Susie Dent has written a whole book on famous body parts Vital Organs . . . also on YT [45m].

Andrew Comyn Irvine was last seen on The Blob in 2021. . . or with George Mallory near the summit of Everest on 8th June 1924. They found Mallory's body in 1999. But Irvine had the camera which might retain the evidence that the intrepid Brits had made it to the highest point of the World a generation before Hillary and Tenzing. Now they've found Irvine's boot with what's left of his foot inside.
Q. How did they know that it was Irvine's boot?
A. Because the sock had his name tag on it!
They'll do a DNA test and compare it to his grand-niece Julie Summers who is also author of his biography Fearless on Everest The Quest for Sandy Irvine (2020, £20) But any reasonable person would consider it case closed. Sandy's sister Evelyn married his school-friend Dick Summers. It is claimed that Irvine had a fling with Marjory Summers the step-mum of Dick Summers; or something - I'm frankly Scarlett about illicit interwar bonking, given the reg'lar old-fashioned forensic evidence in this case.

That evidence [see L] gave me a frisson. Part of my very expensive education required me to leave home for about 3/4 of every year and go boot camp with hundreds of other chaps. Laundry still had to be done in those institutions and we were requested-and-required to supply the commissariat with 12 handkerchiefs [remember them?]; 12 shirts; 18 collars; 12 pantses; and 12 vests. WTF collars? Yup we had to attach the collar to each shirt with a pair of studs; also cuff-links. These had to come back to the correct locker, so each item was labelled with Cash's name tapes. As you see Irvine's [mother?] chose the default colour. In our family, for reasons lost in the mists of fading memory I was B.T.SCIENTIST in black, my brother's name tapes were blue and my sister's green. At about the same time (as Charles Windsor was playing The Pirate |King at Gordonstoun) Cash's won the right to say 'Manufacturers of Woven Name Tapes to Her Majesty the Queen.' 

PS MeFi commentary on foot of the story. Interesting idea: check Mallory and Irvine's pockets for [top souvenir] rocks rather than cameras.

Mid Oct Sun Aye Noe

Dang! Entirely missed the aurora borealis on Th 10/10

• ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪
  
• Mark Knopfler & Ruth Moody - Wherever I Go
  
• Kodo drummers - well fit
  
• Hayde - Wayfaring Stranger
  
• Home Free - Man of Constant Sorrow
•  0.4146825098 prime nerd land
  
• Mark Huneycutt flies again after Helene 
• E-scoots banned on trains - Lithium fire risk
• MegaProject California Delta Conveyance ≋≋
  
• MiniProject Mossy Earth make a wetland in Portugal
• Really, do we need another golf-course?
  
• Career change after mislaid job application
  
• Some centenarians are not 100
  

evidence based

Pundits can be a pain in the fundament. I am a big fan of the BBC podcast Sideways which allows Matthew Syed to talk about people who march to a different drummer; who look at the world that standard media and Jan Modal might consider a bit out there. If we all think alike, it may be cosy and non-confrontational but it might also be bzzzt wrong. The podcast is fun because it explores some peculiarity of the human condition, develops some makes-ya-think ideas,ties everything up with a Message and signs off after 30 mins. Malcolm Gladwell, with his breezy certainties, and tidy stories, is an exemplar of the genre. As some wag had it "My take on Gladwell: his books should have been magazine articles and his magazine articles should have been tweets." 

But now I've read Matthew Syed's second book Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes (2015). It's a book in form but it's really journalism in substance. Which is fine - chacun à son goût métier - so long as you don't expect reporting on science to be, like, science. Scientists are generally really crap at explaining their ideas to ordinary folks; so there's defo a niche for Syed and Gladwell and Jared Diamond [whose breezy hypothesis about the end of civilization on Easter Island was just demolished on MeFi]. Diamond also had theories about the end of Viking Greenland [blob].

Syed contrasts the response to mistakes were made in the aero and health industries. But there are many examples from business and politics. Key message is that some corporate cultures make it very difficult to admit error so there is no learning opportunity. Nobody likes to be wrong and we tend to double-down if errors are pointed out. If management mistakes are re-framed as "shit happens" and "nothing to do with me" then the errors repeat. 

When a plane goes down, by contrast, investigators will go to extraordinary lengths to work out why. The black box for Air France 447 Rio-Paris flight was recovered from the mid-Atlantic floor 4,000m below the surface, 2 years after the plane crashed. Despite the headlines, air-travel is famously safe: and this is because pilots and engineers fess up when things go pear-shaped. Reports are filled and submitted and collated and analysed. Most importantly, international warnings, recalls and advisories go out to minimise the chance of something similar happening again [ever]. Here's another near [1.3m = 5ft] miss story analysed in the book]There has been much recent 737-max criticism of Boeing for turning a premier engineering company into a shareholder's company. 

When you tally up the number of avoidable iatrogenic deaths it is, according to Syed quoting a 2012 epidemiologist referring to a 2000 report,  equivalent to two full jumbo-jets falling out of the sky every 24 hours [USA data]. An arresting image, indeed. But more recent analysis on much larger samples specifically looking at the problem of medical error finds that two full jumbo-jets might be 10x - 20x too high.  Nevertheless even if only 5% of deaths in hospital are due to mistakes, it's still too high. And, Syed sez, nobody is comparing notes; let alone sending reports, analysis and conclusions to a central repository. Au contraire, when they killed my father in 2001, his hospital records mysteriously disappeared. We see this all the time: when babies die or are incapacitated in/by hospitals, parents usually have to lawyer up to get to the bottom of it. Mostly, they just want an explanation, an apology and some assurance that no parent will have to suffer like them in future. It's ugly and makes it all about the compo; as if a €million will get their baby back.

Afrique. Later on in the book  Syed re-tweets a story from Tim Harford [multoprevo] about evaluating interventions to better educate young Kenyans. Aid agencies have $50 billion to spend in Africa each year. Harford's useful way of evaluation such large numbers if to divide them by the relevant population. If distributed evenly, that's  a little less than $1 a week each. Anyway, the study in Kenya was effectively a controlled experiment or randomized controlled trial RCT. They found that 

• lurrying textbooks [in English] into schools made no difference
• lo-tech flip-charts with engaging brightly colour pictures ditto brrrp! 
• otoh, dosing all the kids (and the teachers?) with anthelmintics to reduce the parasitic worm burden perked everyone up, ready to learn and less likely to pull a sickie. Result: demonstrable improvement in the LOs Learning Outcomes.
  

Don't believe a word of it until it's been replicated in Cameroon! Nevertheless it's probably better if you read (some of) this book than spending the equivalent amount of time restlessly swiping left-right or slack-jawed watching youtube. As Gladwell said of his own works "The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs—they lead you to the hard stuff." Which is characteristically too clever by 'arf.

!! But why waste time with secondary sources when you can get the key ideas from the horse's mouth? I have been recently quite the fanboi for Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast. Mindscapes#1 was with Carol Tavris the co-author of  Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) [2007] on Mistakes, Justification, and Cognitive Dissonance. Also on YT.
Five years and 200+ episodes later Carroll returned to the theme in Mindscapes#233 with Hugo Mercier (co-author  of The Enigma of Reason [2017] on Reasoning and Skepticism. Also on no pics YT. In my reality, I absorbed these two hour+ blasts of erudition within a couple of days of each other. So it was a bit like binge-watching House on lupus in an all-night session.

Stick it to the man, dessert edition.

RIYC?? In the early 90s, a couple of friends of my sister left the Woo of Findhorn to settle and make a living in Ireland. They bunked with us for a few weeks. But as soon as they got some gig work, they left our spare room and rented a teeny tiny flat in Dun Laoghaire. One Saturday a few weeks later, we piled into the car for a surprise visit to our new pals K&L. For a jape, we paused at the garden centre at the bottom of our rural Northside lane and bought a massive sack of spuds as a house-gift. They were delighted to see us, gave us tea and we all went on a promenade along the East Pier. That Winter, The Boy got well into D&D and wanted to attend a session in Dun Laoghaire after school on Tuesdays. K&L, well obvs, offered to give him a bed for the night and make sure he brushed his teeth before going back to school in the morning. And it was so.

For a while L was working the night shift as a waitron in the Royal Irish Yacht Club. It was a club, for rich people, so the tips didn't appear as a golden rain and the management paid only minimum wage. But, at the end of the shift, the staff could take home any unsold desserts as a gratuity. "rrrr, thank ye for my wages, marster". K&L, whose ancestors had left in the 20thC and 19thC respectively, worked real hard at re-anchoring their dynasty in Ireland. But it just didn't come together in pre-Tiger Dublin and so they pulled the plug and went on to British Columbia. When we went to help them pack for leaving, they presented us with a neat stack of 6 RCSI dessert bowls. L had never been in a hurry to return the receptacles for her dessert 'bonus'. I guess I was, wearing my épater les bougies bonnet, happy enough to fence her loot.

After they left, K&L borned and raised a chap together who was about the same age as Dau.I and Dau.II. And then, just before Christmas 20 years ago, K had a heart attack and died. We were bereft, it was as if his heart was too big for this world. The only time the three kids met was when L came back to Ireland with her Boy and his father's ashes to scatter at the Home Place in Tulla, County Clare. On that trip L revealed that the sack o' spuds which we'd dumped on them as a joke a decade earlier had been a lifesaver. After the rent was paid that month, they had literally no money left for food. Morto, I was! At the time I was on a crazy tax-free EU-funded gig in TCD and would happily have given them a pound of rashers and a cabbage as well as the spuds! And son-of-K&L? He turned out well.

Vth Column

It's more than 100 years since the foundation of The State = Saorstát Éireann which didn't formally sever the last umbilical to the UK until Easter 1949 when the The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force. The Free State / Saorstát had been minting its own coins since 1922 but they were the same size and denomination as British coins and the latter circulated freely in Ireland, at face value. UK paper money was also accepted in Ireland when I was student in the 1970s; although not vice versa - you'd get very peculiar looks if you proffered £5 Irish in middle England. 

One of the neatest buildings in Trinity College Dublin is the 1937 Reading Room which was commissioned in 1919 to commemorate the 491 students and staff who had perished [in uniform!] in The Great War. The Hall of Honour atrium wasn't finished until 1928. 'NIKH' is inscribed in foot-high letters on the outside portico although 'Victory' rang kinda hollow for the 491 and their grieving families. The functional rest of the building - serving as a Post-Graduate reading room - wasn't finally completed until 1937! 

One of the neatest features of the design is that the massive hardwood doors are studded with bronze pennies [as L]. I've always believed that these pennies all bore the date 1937 because that would be a cool nod to future post-armageddon archaeologists. Similar to the practice of putting coins under the foundation stone of many public buildings when they are a-building. Most recently, in August, I urged Gdau.I and Gdau.II to check out the doors when they went on a city break with their aunties. They were unimpressed! So the next time I had idle minutes in TCD, I went to look at the disappointment myself.

And WTF! There are no Irish pennies, let alone 1937 pennies at all at all. Rather they all sport the profile of GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX FID: DEF: IND: IMP: = George V by the Grace of God, King of all the British territories, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India . . . who died in 1936. I was initially outraged that Trinity was acting up as a Fifth Column for Empire long after that ship had sailed from the 26 counties. For a Republic, there's a lot of this historical inertia about: Royal Irish Academy, Royal Dublin Society, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Irish Yacht Club. But a moment's thought revealed that the doors were probably completed for the 1928 structure and, however bamboozled, those remembered inside died for 'King & Country'. And no, not Brian Ború (941-1014 Clontarf), High King of Ireland.

Lonelio Noleoni

 Grass-widder agane this w/e: just me n the sheep

• Jackie Lennox - Chicken Supper, Mushy Peas and Tanora - Tanora 
• adverse review
  
• is closed forever
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• UnVeg!! Reducing half-a-pig at hometo chops and sausinges
  
• Modular homes ? two bois have a rant
• Not a bike-shed
• TDs behaving badly
  
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• Lee Marvin [→] b under a Wand'ring Star (1969!)
• HeyHo, a Proustian madeleine for me: ole gravel voice grrrrresonated with the miserable lonely 15 y.o. that was me when it came out. Never seen the whole movie.
• Portishead
  
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• Irish Spa Hotels sweep prizes 8/25 incl. #1 = Adare Manor in CondeNast Europe Resorts survey. 6/25 in the list are in Turkey [Asia ahem] so the whole process is suspect
• Not-Streetview: googlecars can't cover the whole planet: entrepreneurs and dogoodniks are filling the gaps.