Ich Fahre, Fahre, Fahre
In case anyone wonders what I’ve been doing lately, here are some pics to give a clue. Hint: I like to drive.
Oh, I’m also trying to pick up the pace on my thesis.
Hope you are doing in the best of the mood!!
A friend sends this along in email.
Hi Chris,
Hope you are doing in the best of the mood!!
I came across your resume on the job site and i feel it’s a good match for your skill’s. If you feel the same do send me your most updated profile asap, so that we can have the ball rolling.
Some spam is just too good to keep to one’s self.
Obit Lit
Some of the best writing seems to come from British obituaries. Take this obit of Count Gottfried von Bismarck from the Telegraph.
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.
When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour” charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.
That’s just a sample. Read the whole thing for the literary value if you like. You can’t make this stuff up. (Via)
Shape Up
It’s time for me to get in shape again, in some manner of speaking. And being the gadget freak that I am, I bought a pair of Nike+ running shoes with an iPod Nano, and am hoping that it helps me establish (and achieve) my fitness goals. The shoes are extremely comfortable, so I certainly don’t feel like I’ve cut myself short just to get the techno stuff.
I started off using the Nike+ thing on a couple of walks in the evening with my wife. I now have one short run on record with the device too. I’m so out of shape, even a run of about 0.75 miles puts me at the limit.
The discipline of running regularly, or at least of getting regular exercise, might spill over into other parts of my life too. Take my thesis, for one thing. I have not exactly been a picture of diligent pursuit on that count. Speaking of which, I’m going to the Stanford library today to consult some reference material, including the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, the Notitia Dignitatum, and at least one volume of Alberto Ferreiro’s bibliography on the Visigoths in Gaul and Spain.
Popular Medievalism
It’s summertime, and for some people that means it’s time for the local Renaissance Faire, which usually contains more medieval elements that renaissance ones, as John Gravois observes in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Gravois interviewed Prof. Richard Nokes for the article, who has more observations on the link between academic medieval studies and what he calls popular medievalism.
I have only been to one Renaissance Faire, probably fifteen years ago, held somewhere north of the Golden Gate in Marin County. I enjoyed it. Although I wasn’t studying medieval history at the time, it dovetailed with my interest in Olde Things. I especially enjoyed the demonstrations of blacksmithing and other forms of manual labor, and had a blast watching the horses in a joust. (A year later, I was taking dressage lessons in Los Altos Hills, which I kept up for about two or three years until switching to the cheaper mountain bike.)
As the term implies, popular medievalism shows that medieval topics survive outside of academia. Should this translate into increased funding for medieval studies? It could lead to that conclusion and is one that Prof. Nokes himself takes. In practice, it hasn’t worked out that way. Our former history department chair, now dean of the college, once remarked, perhaps jokingly, that it was strange to see so many students in Silicon Valley, the center of technology, enrolled in our undergraduate medieval history survey. I couldn’t (and can’t) understand that viewpoint.
Some people gravitate to medieval studies, at least initially, because they have a romantic idea of the past, especially in contrast to the world of computers and office cubicles, a world that seems to alternate between dog-eat-dog competition (but usually less violent than that of Clovis’s world) and bland conformity. Once immersed in medieval studies, it becomes apparent that human nature hasn’t changed much, even if materially much has changed in the last 1500 years. I think it was John Lewis Gaddis who said, in The Landscape of History, that one reason to study history is to escape one’s own provincial and self-centered views of the world, to connect one’s perspectives with the experiences of humanity at large, to grow up.
But however it ends, the beginning of medieval studies for some people involves a trip to a Renaissance Faire, or immersion into the world of Dungeons-and-Dragons, or involvement with the Society for Creative Anachronism. Others might nurture their love of things past with a visit to northwestern Switzerland, where John Howe, artist on the Lord of the Rings films, brings Middle-Earth to life for the Saint-Ursanne La Fantastique festival. You might even decide to become a medieval arms fabricator with the construction of a trebuchet. In any case, it seems clear that the middle ages aren’t dead yet.
iPhone Day in Pictures
I’m not getting one of those today. I’ll wait. But at lunchtime today, I went to two local malls and took these photos of the phenomenon. Need I mention that Woz himself was there? I snapped a few pics of him at the Valley Fair mall in San Jose.
I Could Not, Would Not, Stand in Line
Nope. Not gonna do it. I’m not standing in line for one of these. But I’ll read about it, experiencing the Apple fan-boy excitement through surrogates.
(Yes, I see the irony of this post coming on the heals of one on global poverty.)
Marxist Birds
Over at the Gypsy Scholar blog, Prof. H. J. Hodges has some thoughts on a recent fashion faux pas perpetrated by Cameron Diaz in Peru, and comes to the conclusion that ethics trumps aesthetics. It’s a sensible position, although seldom articulated. As a bonus, the famous San Francisco ferral parrots fittingly make another appearance on the web. (A mouthful, isn’t it?)
Welcome to the East
If Mel Brooks or the Marx Brothers were funny and, perhaps, therapeutic in their send-ups of National Socialist Germany, I suppose it could be healthy to make fun of life under the East German Stasi, which seems to be the point of the Ostel in Berlin. David at Cronaca wonders whether the rooms have hidden cameras and microphones.
Me? I’m not sure I’d want to stay there. Would you?
(Oh, and I hate to think of the keyword searches on the web that will bring people to this post.)
Birds Gone Wild
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, having taken care of the pressing issues of our day, recently instituted a ban on the feeding of the city’s wild parakeets.
Now, I have never seen these birds, but feeding them seems to have become popular with tourists. So why the ban? What’s the harm? Apparently some busy bodies fear these wild birds, long indigenous to San Francisco for some years, “fear the parakeets will become too domesticated to feed on their own.” The irony doesn’t stop there, though.
Chief among the ban’s supporters is Mark Bittner, a 55-year-old writer and formerly homeless musician whose own feeding of the birds was made famous in a 2005 documentary film, “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.”
Mr. Bittner, whose wife, Judy Irving, shot the film, said he did not want to ruin other people’s fun but was simply concerned about the birds, who he said could be snatched or might bite unfamiliar feeders. He said he stopped feeding the parakeets in 2006.
This has understandably ruffled some feathers. Will bird feeders defy the law, starting a life of crime? If they do, says one supervisor, the city is prepared to deal harshly with them by sending in the police to write citations.
Sunnyvale, 40 miles to the south, has a flock of wild parrots that I often see (and hear) flying over the nearby hardware store, and sometimes over my house. I’ve never noticed anyone tending to our flock, turning them into slackers and panhandlers like their kin up north, but you can’t be too careful. Maybe I should start lobbying our council to pass a law, just to be safe. We could even start a special police force to patrol the neighborhood, keeping man and bird apart.