Kieran Healy

You Old Romantic, Me

Until this afternoon, a Google search for the phrase ‘Valentine Poem’ promptly returned this elegaic masterpiece high on the first page of results. (I know this because its been the most popular search referrer to my website for each of the past ten days.) Written last year by one of the leading poetic talents of his generation, I think it’s a lot better than the crap it got displaced by—but whoever said democracy makes the best choices?

Conservatives in Academia

I’ve never found the argument that conservatives are discriminated against in academia terribly compelling. But it does seem like an interesting case, if only because in making it common or garden conservatives are forced to admit the existence of institutionalized inequality, something they are usually loath to acknowledge. Andrew Sullivan just bumped into this question. (Via Pandagon.) He raises and then dismisses the most parsimonious explanation for this inequality, namely that conservatives are just not as clever as liberals and so don’t get hired. He quotes a tongue-in-cheek line from a Duke Prof, who says “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia.” Andy is not persuaded, of course. But why not?

Transcripts

Eugene Volokh notices an error in a transcript. My friend Bethany had a bunch of interviews transcribed professionally for her dissertation and now offers Transcription Bloopers: 29 Reasons Not to Waste Your Money. Choice examples include:

table(fig). {font-weight:bold;center}_|As Spoken|As Transcribed|
|(. 20th century |((. Planting some tree |
|(. Class oppression |((. Fast depression |
|(. Enrich each other |((. Rate each other |
|(. Serbian oral epic |((. Servient oral ethic |

Errors of this sort in transcripts are at the intersection of Mondegreens and the strange phenomenon of the media always happening to desperately misreport stories you know something about personally.

Textile 2

Gotta love Brad Choate and his Textile 2 plugin[1], which makes it a breeze to write nicely formatted XHTML for your blog. fn1. Even footnotes. Brad developed Textile for Movable Type from Dean Allen’s original implementation.

Hell is Other Pupils

I love America. Across its vast, extraordinarily diverse area, weird or stupid stuff happens all the time. And the media are usually there to make it into a national story:

A second-grade girl from Pittsburgh was suspended this week from her public elementary school for saying the word “hell” to a boy in her class. But 7-year-old Brandy McKenith says she was only warning the boy about the eternal comeuppance he could face for saying: “I swear to God.”

“I said, ‘You’re going to go to hell for swearing to God,’” Brandy was quoted as saying in an article that appeared on the Web site of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review on Wednesday. School officials were unavailable for comment. A Pittsburgh Public Schools spokeswoman told the newspaper that the student code prohibits profanity but does not provide a clear definition of what profanity is.

The Five Standard Excuses

If I were less tired, I would write a post exploring the applicability, in our post-WMD world, of The Five Standard Excuses for any Failed Government Project described by Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. I conjecture that some varietal of each of them will be found in talk about Iraq as prior certainties about Saddam’s monstrous armaments evaporate. The excuses are as follows:

1. There is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything but security prevents its disclosure. (The Anthony Blunt excuse.)
2. It has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limit.
3. It was a worthwhile experiment now abandoned, but not before it provided much valuable data and considerable employment. (The Concorde excuse.)
4. It occurred before certain important facts were known and could not happen again. (The Munich Agreement excuse.)
5. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual now being dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures. (The Charge of the Light Brigade excuse.)