Here’s a wonderful clip from the BBC’s Mongrel Nation, a series of educational shorts in which Eddie Izzard illustrates an episode from British history by placing himself in some kind of embarassing public situation.
In this one, he explores the common ancestry of Germanic languages by first learning some phrases in Old English and then visiting the Netherlands to try them out on a Frisian Dutch person.
(click to see the interactive map)
It was as unseasonably sunny and warm today as it was unseasonably cold in New Orleans earlier this week, so I decided to explore the northwest corner of the city. The route you see there took me about 3½ hours to hike, but next time I’ll just start from the bridge, since that’s where the trail and the scenery got interesting. The dramatic views of the Pacific and the bridge definitely make it a worthwhile hike for a clear day.
The last time that I boarded an airplane was the very day of the alleged liquid explosives scare. (On that day we ended up just checking all our bags for simplicity’s sake.) As I’ve been packing and shopping for my first air trip since then, I’m surprised that more toiletry makers haven’t added sub-3oz TSA SKUs to their product lines by now. Even the empty plastic bottles that Walgreens had were all 4oz. Is it a conspiracy to keep people buying new supplies at their destination, or just a demonstration of how long it takes to retool the production lines? At least the plastic bag makers know what’s up:
That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
Every couple years, it seems, the New York Times puts out a big feature summing up the current scientific views on food and health. For me, the biggest surprise from the latest one is the idea that discussing diet in terms of nutrients, rather than foods, is a political compromise that’s hurting public health.
“It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by ‘nutrients,’ which are not the same thing…Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early 19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout identified what came to be called the ‘macronutrients’: protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished…”
Apparently, the Reagan-era National Academy of Sciences was harrassed by accusations that it favored particular sectors of the food industry over others. (It was producing research suggesting people should eat less meat.) Talking exclusively about nutrients was a way to avoid crossing powerful special interests while keeping their findings honest–or so people thought.
The problem is that our current understanding of nutrients is very limited compared to our understanding of foods as a whole. You can take a solid piece of advice regarding a whole food, try to break it down into what individual nutrients are doing, and get the explanation utterly wrong–because our concept of what’s going on in there biochemically is still rapidly evolving.
The full text of Obama’s official campaign announcement is pretty good stuff. But what I find really remarkable is the fact that he apparently wrote it himself. The last President to write his own speeches was Calvin Coolidge. (To be fair, this is probably the only nice thing you can say about Calvin.)
When I was in high school, each of my two newly-formed stepfamiles began to argue for opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Interestingly, I don’t recall either of my parents taking a special interest in the subject while they were still married–make of that what you will.) It took about ten years, but I eventually found a helpful and pleasantly objective history book, visited Israel myself, and was even lucky enough to bump into an NPR reporter on a tour bus there who let me follow her around while she interviewed people in the street (fortunately for me, via interpreter). I don’t mean to suggest that this gives me any authority to speak about the conflict itself, but at least I’ve now got an opinion of my own. And, out of respect for the actual experts, I’m sure as heck not gonna tell you what it is.
Now, while I’m proud to say that there are many positive aspects to reaching out and engaging people in a dialogue on the subject, a pleasing lack of interminable warmed-over email-forward arguments is conspicuously not among them. Even if we no longer waste trees with this stuff, we’re still burning perfectly good coal. And the quality of the debate rarely advances past the level of a post-Thanksgiving-dinner family squabble.
And that’s why I’d like to share with you this fine example of an interminable warmed-over email-forward argument. Not as something to be actually read and studied, but as a sort of flying drone thing to practice your lightsaber skills on, if you’re so inclined. Because, well, after putting up with a decade’s worth of this kind of stuff, I do feel like I’m getting to be an expert on reading about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I’ve developed a rule for myself that I find very useful. If you follow it, you could drastically reduce the amount of time you have to spend wading through a lot of boring and profoundly unhelpful writing. I hope this tactic will preserve your interest, stave off confusion or outright despair, and let you build an informed opinion if you haven’t already. The secret is, before you actually devote time to reading the linked article, you scan it. Look for the following words:
I should emphasize that these words don’t need to be present as part of any particular case for either side. And I’m definitely not suggesting that we should agree on whether oil, Wahhabism, or the Ottoman Empire play any particular historical role. Instead, the mere presence of these words is a sign that the author has actually given the topic some serious thought. In my opinion, any discussion of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that fails to mention at least one of those three things will, most of the time, turn out to be absolutely worthless. Simple as that.
Or, every Doctor Who intro sequence ever–spanning the past half-century of TV in just under seven minutes.
This also serves as a neat illustration of the tug-of-war between novelty and nostalgia. Notice how the titles are steadily “upgraded” with the new technology of each decade. We reach a dance-remix-and-flying-3D-text climax sometime in the mid-’90s–and then, photorealistic computer animation having become commonplace, we make an abrupt about-face, heading back to the classic ’70s we’re-zoomin’-through-a-tube version.
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