Podcast Reviews - 3 - History podcasts for your delight

More Podcast recommendations for those who like podding while you do other things.  Me, I listen to podcasts when I drive, when I cook, when I clean, when I draw diagrams and, as of this weekend, when I’m painting the house.

I’m ambling slowly through the History of Rome in the company of Mike Duncan.  (Website including earlier episodes / the later ones are on on iTunes). This is a polite and courteous podcast, with the occasional flash of sly humour.  Duncan’s telling the entire story from the She-wolf to the Goths (there’s got to be some sort of Death Metal reference there, surely?).  He’s got as far as the late Republic.  I get rapidly bored by most narrative history and prefer analysis and commentary and there’s just enough of both to keep me interested.  In fact, I think I’ll re-run the lot when I’m painting the house, because I listened to a lot of these while mildly distracted, and they and I deserve better than that.

12 Byzantine Rulers.  (Website / iTunes). Another ancient history podcast.  The downside of this one is that it’s not a complete history of Byzantium and it’s a little hard to keep track.  The upside is that it’s Extreme History, and it’s rather fun.  Full of beautiful heterai who become empresses, fathers hurling their sons from city walls and emperors as satisfyingly mad as any you’d find in third rate science fiction.  It’s not science fiction though, it’s history and it’s true.  Lars Brownworth tells these sensational stories without too much sensationalism.  I could have done with more about Byzantine culture and I’d have preferred fewer gaps in the record, but that’s a compliment really.

Binge-Thinking History.  (Website / iTunes) Tony Cocks starts with the premise that the American Constitution didn’t spring out of thin air and looks for its intellectual antecedents in medieval and renaissance England.  I like his gentle and discursive style and I enjoyed his take on the history of the king, power and the people.  Enough analysis to keep the attention and enough information to tell me stuff I didn’t know already.  He then goes rather geekily on to the Battle of Britain, which I didn’t enjoy quite as much, but I’ll happily listen to whatever he does next.

Shakespeare-upon-ipod.  (Website / iTunes) A conspiracy theory in doublet and hose.  Please don’t assume that this podcast successfully puts the case that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare.  Mark Anderson doesn’t put up any of the arguments against, which are considerable, and the case is most definitely ‘not proven’. However, I found these podcasts dirtily compelling, like pot-noodles, and they certainly contributed to my understanding of the 16th and 17th C context of the plays.  But I like my arguments balanced not biased.

History Center.  (Website / iTunes) These seem to have stopped, which is a shame.  These deliberately set out to compare the present and the past, and discuss topics like Iran, war journalism and spying as well as more anodyne stuff like food or Abraham Lincoln.  They caught my attention, even the ones which were clearly the soundtrack for tv shows about photographs.  They are insightful, analytical and subversive and, to my delight, they come as close to criticising the Bush regime and the war in Iraq as, I suspect, public broadcasting ever does in the USA.  Unexpected and informative.  Highly recommended.

The BBC History Magazine Podcast. (Website / iTunes) I rather like this.  It is designed to up the circulation of the printed copy of the BBC History Magazine, but the subjects are varied, the interviewees are grown-up academics, the interviewees are intelligent, and the thing holds together well.  It’s the only multi-topic podcast I listen to, because most of the others irritate me but this one I enjoy.

The National Archives Podcast.  (Website / iTunes) I’ve mentioned these before.  There are three main categories here, ones about how to track down records in the archives, ones about the archival records for specific people, and ones about particular historical documents.  The latter two groups in particular are fascinating.  Eclectic is the only possible word, you are never entirely sure what you’re going to get or who the speaker will be.  The one on Orton and the one on Jermyn stand out, but the standard’s high throughout.  I do recommend them.

Hard Core History.  (Website / iTunes) The marmite of history podcasting: you either love Dan Carlin or hate him.  His approach is almost entirely analytical with just enough narrative to hold things together.  I can appreciate that not everyone would like Carlin’s opinionated and partial view of the historical world, but I love his energy and passion.

School’s out

Woo Hoo!

School’s Out for Summer!

It isn’t of course, I still have my day job to go to,  but I have just finished an assignment from hell: 4000 words on a subject so vague that they served waffles in the coffee-breaks.  It is one of those topics which should be impossible to fail (ha!) and at which it is certainly impossible to excel.  “This is as long as it’s broad” I said between waffle-breaks; “do you want us to consider the subject in width or in depth, because we can’t do both.”  In depth, he said, and so I’ll be criticised for not mentioning this, considering that or discussing the other.  Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  No high marks possible here.

But enough.  It’s done.  Just proof-reading and proof-reading and proof-reading to do between now and Monday when I post the bastard; “fly-fucking” as my Danish friend described the tedious process of moving a comma from, one side to, the other.

It’s May.

It’s magical marvellous May. The leaves are fresh, the lambs are running races, the cherry blossom is out, there is more green everywhere, every day.

If I could be whoever and whatever I could, I would be 35 and weigh 10 stone in May forever.  Today the temperature was perfect, warm in the sun and fresh on the skin.  I have a garden to weed, a house to paint, curtains to sew, books to read, scarves to knit, weddings to dance at, pots to plant, parties to go to, wine to drink, laughter to share, friends to delight in, and a whole blissful summer to do it all.

I’ve not felt this giddy when sober for years.

X marks the spot

I do like voting, and today I made a point of going into the village hall and putting my X on the spot.  I have a clear memory of accompanying my Ma to another village hall several decades ago and watching her vote in a general election when I was knee-high to an opinion.  And then, four years ago, I was able to take someone to vote for the first time ever and see his excitement in taking part in the democratic process.  He expected queues, in a local election, bless him.  But in fact he had the right of it.

Voting matters.

It is the one thing that really frightens politicians.  For that reason alone, it matters.  But it matters for other reasons too.

People don’t believe there’s any point.  The anarchists used to say that if voting changed anything, it would be abolished.  The truth of that was brought home in London in the mid 1980s when Thatcher abolished the GLC and knocked out the only effective opposition, “Red” Ken in the glory days of County Hall.   The only act in recent western history that was worse than the abolition of the GLC was Bush’s theft of the Florida votes in 2000, and for the same reason.  It was politicians pissing on the electoral process.  It was politicians pissing on us.

Voting matters.

If it didn’t, Thatcher would never have abolished the GLC.  If it didn’t, Bush wouldn’t have needed to frig the results in Florida in 2000.

Voting matters.

This year, of all years, all over the world.  Most of the time, I will freely admit, it makes bugger-all difference to anything, but even so it matters because it’s the only way we have of reminding the bastards that it’s us they work for.

Surely this is the most interesting year for elections in decades, with the Obama / Clinton stand-off in the USA, Mugabe rigging the election in Zimbabwe and still failing to win, and our two most bizzarely characterful politicians arm-wrestling for London.

So today I voted, in an empty village hall with the spring sun shining benignly down on an idyllic view.

I voted because women died so that I can vote.

I voted because so many Kenyans were killed because they voted.

I voted because Mugabe so clearly lost, even though he’s claimed a victory.

I voted because that’s how we got rid of Portillo and Kinnock.

I voted because politicians hate elections.

I voted because I can.

The Privilege meme

I picked this up from the Singing Librarian, and decided that it was an interesting quiz to do.  Charlotte and Z have done it too.

It was devised by PhD students at Indiana State University - Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka. If you participate, they ask that you please acknowledge their copyright.

My parents were what’s now termed asset rich and cash poor. We lived surprisingly frugally in a great big house so we looked flash on little cash, and it’s left me slightly uneasy about privilege ever since. That, and the combination of being raised by women who spoke like Celia Johnson while growing up surrounded by the inverted snobbery of the 60s and 70s. I notice that today’s young hackerati are perfectly comfortable describing themselves as “middle class kids”, but I still feel slightly embarrassed and uneasy about it.

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.

Sandhurst counts, presumably.

3. Mother went to college.
4. Mother finished college.

She was told she hadn’t studied hard enough to return for her second year, which left her with no good argument to put for me when I… Oh, never mind.

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

Well, my sister’s a solicitor and I’m stepping out with a doctor.  Oh, and my father-in-law was a university lecturer. I have to conclude that we’re as professional and middle class as all get out. So, despite the Americanisms, yeah, I guess.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.

Had more than 5,000 books in my childhood home, though I doubt it was up to 50,000. As Scout says in To Kill a Mockingbird: “I did not love to read; you do not love to breathe”.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent.

Until I was over 18, graduating from Winnie the Pooh through to Jane Austin.  One of the formative experiences of my life.

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18.

Private lessons I assume - my parents very sweetly paid for piano lessons and riding lessons.  Pigs were more likely to fly than I was ever likely to play the piano, and ponies and pony-girls just intimidated me, so it was a lovely gesture but a complete waste.

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.

No.  The failure of the piano lessons and riding lessons probably put them off.

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.

I don’t know what or who “people who dress and talk like me” are, and I never watch tv anyway.  Um. My family could have stepped out of an Agatha Christie in many respects (those Celia Johnson voices) or Morse, or the Midsummer Murders even. Is being a murderer with be-a-u-tifully en-unc-i-at-ed vowels a positive representation or a negative one?  You decide.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.

No freaking way.  Credit cards for teenagers?  No. Absolutely not. My parents had more than enough problems preventing their own costs from turning into debts to give us little debt-lets of our own.

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.

Local Education Authority Grant.  I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was.

16. Went to a private high school.

Er.  Yes. It was pants though. A very nice school for the sweet but unintellectual daughters of doctors. Loathed it. Still get flashbacks.

17. Went to summer camp.

Mmm. Opera camp. Just typing it makes me blink in amazement.

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.

Nah.

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.

Do guest-houses and pubs in English and Scottish seaside towns count as “hotels”?  They do, don’t they.  In fact my parents were pretty frugal with regards to summer holidays, and we tended to lig off family and friends who lived nearer the coast than we did.

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.

Hah! No. None of it was.  It was either second hand (school uniforms) hand-me downs (I had two big sisters) or home made.

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.

Surely a 10 year old Fiat 127 doesn’t count?

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.

But all painted by relatives. Pretty good, some of it, though.

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.

I’m not sure what this means.  We were a three generation household, grandparents, parents and kids.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.

Mmmm.

25. You had your own room as a child.

Mmmm.

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.

I can remember being shocked by people who had TVs in their rooms at uni.

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.

I’d never even been abroad before I was 16. In fact the first time I went to Europe I was 28 or so and married.

31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.

Oddly enough, they didn’t, but that was more a matter of their own philistinism than anything else.  I think it was “educational” and so they delegated it to the school to do that. My Ma read a lot of pretty middle-brow stuff, and that was it.

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

I remember once, aged 5, being held in front of an open internal door and being told that I could feel the heat coming out of the room (I couldn’t) and that I should learn to shut doors. I also remember having baths by candlelight because of a mixture of powercuts and fuel prices.  I remember frost on the inside of the windows, though that was only one winter. I do remember lying in bed for an hour because it was too cold for me to want to get up. I may not have known how much the bills were, but I was very aware that fuel costs money, and still am.  I cannot leave a light on in an empty room to this day.

So 16 yeses out of 34.  I was raised and educated with middle class values but my parents were surprisingly uncultured: lots of books, but no trips to the theatre, art galleries, museums or concerts.  Privately educated, but definitely on the cheap.   There wasn’t, as I said, a lot of spare cash to go round.  However, I am irredeemably middle class. I’m nervous around plumbers and comfortable with lawyers, and I guess that proves it completely.

Oh well.

The infinit’th monkey

Why do people get so aeriated about the question of who wrote Shakespeare? I’ve been listening to the Shakespeare-on-ipod podcasts (website / iTunes) and finding them increasingly unsettling.  Which is, surely, rather odd?  What does it matter who wrote the plays?  What matters is the plays themselves.  You’d think.

It does matter, though.  The traditional version is that a relatively uneducated midlander walked to London some time towards the end of the 16th century and, once there, he fell in with a rag-tail bunch of players and hustlers and wrote poetry of such startling humanity and expressiveness that it tops anything anyone else has ever written, anywhere.  Ever.  (Personally I find the plays bloody hard work, and only manageable on stage performed by really good players, but there you go).

The traditional version is demotic.  The Bard was of the people.  He was one of us.  The infinit’th monkey.  So the argument which says that whoever wrote the plays and sonnets must have been better educated, more aristocratic, had more political access and been better travelled than Shakespeare, is an argument which means that Shakespeare is no longer Everyman.  He’s no longer one of Us.  He’s one of Them.

I think the fact that it’s a conspiracy theory in doublet and hose is a side issue even though conspiracy theories are designed to be unsettling.  We like certainties, us monkeys.  If we didn’t, then we’d accept the answer “nobody knows” and conspiracy theories wouldn’t gain any credence.

You see, the dispute over who wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare is about History, and evidence, and whether or not there’s enough of it to know for sure that a thing happened or didn’t happen. Its not just about the 16th and 17th centuries, it’s about History as a whole.  There’s the unsettling implication that most historical “facts” are merely hypotheses and ones which cannot be tested at that.

What history and science have in common is their reliance on evidence; but there’s no direct evidence to tell us who wrote the plays and sonnets and no possible experimental test.   What’s important isn’t who wrote the plays and sonnets, it’s that there isn’t enough evidence to answer the question.  This suggests that just about anything you learned in a history lesson could have been made up.  Now that’s subversive.  It’s also probably true, which makes it spectacularly unsettling.

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If you want to know more, then Wikipedia has an accessible and well written entry on the dispute, and several on William Shakespeare himself.  By contrast, the Shakespeare-on-ipod podcasts focus on the pros of de Vere and the cons of “Shaksper”: unfortunately Mark Anderson argues from incredulity - he cannot believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, he fails to mention anything that counters his argument and doesn’t admit that he’s speculating.  By contrast, the Shakespeare Authorship site is more credible because it’s much clearer about the limitations of the evidence.  What recently re-ignited my curiosity about the subject was the (reduced) summary of the authorship question by the Reduced Shakespare Company.

Emily’s EcoJustice Challenge - are you up for it?

I tumbled across Emily’s EcoJustice Challenge when reading Charlotte’s blog. Please read Emily’s whole post, in the meantime, I’m cutting to the chase and quoting verbatim.

So, here is how this challenge will work. The first step is for anyone who wants to participate to pass the link onto at least five other people (or even if you don’t plan to participate, if you like the idea, please pass it on). If you have a blog of your own, this can easily be accomplished merely by linking to this site in a post on your own blog. Below is a list of things you can choose to do. Once every quarter between now and April 21, 2009, I will add to this list. Your challenge is to choose something from this list, to experiment with it, and to post about it here. Or, if you’d rather not post, that’s fine. You can just choose what you want and leave comments on this blog. You can choose to implement as many or as few from the list as you would like. You can choose to stick with one (or more) for an entire quarter, or you can mix and match (one — or more — this month, a different one next month, etc.). My hope is that by the end of the year, at least one item from the whole list will have become a way of life for you and your family. And if you’re already doing some or all of these things, come up with others you want to do, share them with us, and post on them instead.

To join the blog as a posting member, please send an email to: ecojustice08 AT gmail DOT com with your user name and the email address you’d like to use for the purposes of this blog. I will add you to the list of users. Also, please post on your own blog, if you have one. That’s it. And now, here are your choices for this quarter:

1. Choose one day a week in which you will not use your car at all (barring a major emergency, like having to drive your spouse/child to the hospital for stitches). Before you immediately dismiss this one, because you have to drive to and from work every day, please think about it. Is there no one with whom you could carpool two days a week? If so, the day you’re not driving would be the perfect day not to use your car at all.

2. Choose one “black out night” per week. All lights and all electrical appliances are off by 7:30 p.m. and don’t go on again until the next morning. What will you do without lights, television, your computer? Well, the weather’s getting nice where many of us live. Sit out on the porch/deck and tell stories. Read by candle light. Write letters by candle light. Play games by candle light. You know, people did this sort of thing for thousands of years. My guess is that if you have kids, this will be an exciting and fun challenge for them.

3. Choose two days a week in which you are only going to eat organic and/or locally-grown food. Do you know that inorganic farming is one of the best examples of evolution that we’ve got going these days? All the pesticides that have been used to grow our food have helped to create “super bugs” who are becoming more and more resistant to our chemicals. We’re definitely losing this battle in more ways than one. Talk to the people at your local farmer’s markets. Many of them are growing their food organically anyway; they just aren’t certified, because it’s a difficult and expensive process to be so. Buying locally, of course, cuts down on the oil used to transport food long distances.

4. If you need to go anywhere that’s within a 2-mile round trip radius of your home, walk or bike. Where might this be? The first place that springs to mind for me is your children’s school bus stop. Perhaps the post office is close to your home. The library? For me, it’s both the post office and the bank. If you’re super lucky, maybe you have a farmer’s market that’s close by. Or maybe you don’t live close enough to anything, but you do work close by to that deli, say, where you always drive to pick up lunch.

5. Read that challenging book about the environment that you’ve been putting off reading, you know the one you don’t want to read, because it might make you a little uncomfortable (e.g. The World without Us, Diet for a Small Planet, Affluenza). Read it. Post about it. Maybe implement an idea or two based on what you’ve read.

6. Buy only those things sold in recyclable packaging and make sure you recycle that packaging.

None of it should be too hard, right?

But all of it really is hard, isn’t it?

I’m going for the two options I’m already nearly doing, I’m afraid, which are the organic and local veg and recycling the packaging.  But since I’m already 3/4ths of the way there with those two, I’m also going to go for the lights-out option one day a week because it’s summer and it should be easy.   The thing that would make the biggest difference is if I wangled a transfer and worked in t’city, because I could get there by public transport.  Hmmm.  Small steps, I think, for the time being.

Much missed

About 6 months ago I signed up to the I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue newsletter, planning to attend a recording next time Humph and the crew stopped off a motorway with a 6 in it.  Then last week I got an email saying that the next season of ISIHAC had been postponed because Humph was ill.  It seems the spam mail of destiny, etc.

Here, In tribute to one of the funniest, filthiest, cleverest of gentleman-broadcasters is an illicit recording made earlier this year.  Thanks to the person who posted it, and thanks to Humph, for so much sly good humour over the years.

I didn’t know I’d miss him quite so much.  Monday nights will never be the same.

Choosing art

I had the interesting experience of selecting paintings for an exhibition the other day.  I work for a Great Big Company and the local council contacted various Groups in the Community to ask for volunteers to pick paintings for a Peoples’ Choice exhibition.  (It’s Blairite, but is it Art?)  So I said “that’ll be me then” and volunteered.

There were seven or so of us, and we were given an enormous catalogue of the paintings in public ownership in the county, and told to pick three each and state our reasons.  (The catalogue turned out to be fascinating and desirable in its own right and, since it’s available from Amazon, I’ve just bought myself a copy.  Damn.) The chap was a curator at one of the local museums or art galleries and he encouraged us to be simple and direct in our reasons, giving examples of things that other groups such as school children had said.

Three?

Bugger.

It would have been easy to consult with others and pick a whole exhibition of social history, or local faces, or even specifically non-local work, but it was much, much harder to pick just three.

I resisted choosing damaged pictures just because they were damaged which gives them an added layer of meaning in my pretentious world.  I resisted picking the local views because that was all a bit too obvious.  I resisted two enormous and gloomy portraits of a grimly smug victorian couple which I wanted to pick on the ground that - hey look, these people are so freaking different from people today.

I discovered that when push came to shove I preferred portraits, which was rather depressing.  My brow is higher than that, surely?   I did steer myself away from just picking portraits and resisted the option to show off by going entirely for abstracts.

It was an interesting insight into the world of the curator and the choices involved in putting together an exhibition.  I’ve bought myself a copy of the catalogue of the county’s art collection, and I’m looking forward to the exhibition.  I should love it.  What better way could there be to arrive at an eclectic mix?

Just going outside

In what world does someone who dies of illness or in an accident leave their job “voluntarily”?  Suicides yes, if you push the logic that far.  But if I choke on a carrot in the canteen I haven’t left this vale of tears of my own free will, now have I?

However, I’d be classed as a “voluntary leaver” by most HR statisticians.

Phffah!

Large employers like to keep track of all sorts of things including the number of people they hire, the number of people who “don’t work out” in the first year, and the number of people who leave even though the company would prefer to keep them.  The “involuntary leavers” represent errors of judgement on the part of the people hiring them, and you can see the sense of tracking those numbers.  “Voluntary leavers” on the other hand are the people the employer will be put to the inconvenience of replacing because they have been offered a better job elsewhere, decided to return to full-time education, or left to set up in business for themselves.  Or selfishly gone and died.  Without giving notice.  Where’s their team spirit? (I exaggerate for cheap effect).

What the employer is tracking with these figures is the employer’s wish or intention (volition) not that of the employee.  But HR being the sweet and fluffy discipline it is, it doesn’t spell it out as crudely as that.  Ho no. How much nicer to pretend that what you are measuring is what your employees want.  The caring face of statistics.

War is peace.  Love is hate.  People are our greatest asset. The dead are voluntary leavers.

Who needs thought when you’ve got jargon

A friend of mine who knows my weakness for jargon and my aspirations to critical thinking sent me a couple of texts the other day which he’d garnered from his work.

Purpose
The WhizzyDooDad is designed to provide customers with a variety of resources that, when used as part of a learning program that incorporates learning courses, will effectively apply professional competencies and reinforce learning content from those courses.

Desired Outcomes

• Application of e-learning to real business situations and needs
• Increased competency and productivity through the application of new skills and knowledge
• Leveraged investment made in learning and classroom training
• Increased use of learning/training programs
• Projects or initiatives can be related to and/or integrated with a blended solution.
• Learners have increased potential for actualizing new skills and behaviours “on the job”.
• Learners take on new roles as facilitators and/or observers of skill transfer
• Promotion of a learning environment/culture.

I’ll spare you the rest; I’ll even spare you my sarcastic analysis.  You’re intelligent.  You can supply your own.

My friend rewrote the thing entirely, without any reference to the original. Here’s an excerpt from the new version:

The introduction of WhizyyDooDad means that those of us who work in the department can easily find someone to give practical advice on whether or not an app [ie a software application - AB] is the best choice for a particular task. It also makes it  easy to find out what apps we already use and save money by choosing the ones we already have licenses for, instead of going out and buying something entirely new which does the same thing. We are no longer limited by what we know as individuals and in our local teams - we all share our knowledge.

The second paragraph isn’t particularly elegant, it still includes jargon and the last sentence is fluff, but it is at least clear fluff.

When I pointed out that the two texts say completely different things - the first talks about customers and training courses and the second talks about finding experts and reducing license costs - he shrugged, so far as you can shrug on Instant Messenger. “That’s what happens when you substitute jargon for thought”, he said. Which is a fair point well made. It is still one hell of a leap from Text A to Text B.