More fun with subtitles

Acorn Media did the subtitles for the Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries, but occasionally a word got away from them.

For instance, "Intendin' to set up camp", with the upper class g-dropping Sayers always gave the Wimsey men (along with their "ain'ts") was rendered as "intendent". And a countryman's "thee" becomes "they".

But quite amusingly, Lord Peter's "Diamonds, with emerald eyes - pukka stones, too" appraisal of the cat brooch became "Diamonds, with emerald eyes - Parker, stones, too" which really is fatuous.

Defective verbs ... for some

Over at Language Log Geoff Pullum critiques a "passive rewrite" of a Wikipedia article by pointing out that many of the sentences were not, in fact, passive. Here's one point:

In Mineola, New York, Kim Richards … was born. [Passive, though not converted from an active: born is a possibly unique case of an English verb that is defective in that it must be used in the passive; the sentence also has an ungainly preposing of adjuncts designed to make it unbalanced and unnatural.]

Ummm. Really?

How about In Mineola, New York, on September 19, 1964, Kathleen Richards (neé Dugan) bore a daughter, Kim, to her husband Kenneth E. Richards.

Sure, it's old-fashioned or formal, and puts the emphasis on the wrong (or at least a different) thing, but it's hardly ungrammatical. (The Holly and the Ivy, anyone?)

Pullum's not the only one - John Lawler says the same thing, though phrased differently:

Other English defective verbs include 'beware' (usable in the imperative only), 'blowdry' (try forming the past tense and you'll see what I mean), 'born' (technically, a "deponent" verb, with only passive forms), and the modal auxiliaries, but they're so irregular anyway that's hardly surprising.

Oddly, to me, the context (why it's "other" verbs) is the verb wake, which he says has no past participle form. I find that very odd, even odder that saying born can only be passive. The MW Unabridged even offers a choice of three past participles:

I admit I use both waked and woken with a distribution I can't quite figure out, but I don't recall ever even hesitating before speaking.

edited to add: As picky notes in the comments, "blowdried" seems perfectly ordinary. Plus, beware, though not seen conjugated or in the past tense, is frequently found in modal constructions such as I would beware of that guy or you should beware of online medical info.

So I'm puzzled. Why do these eminent linguists insist these are defective verbs?

Happy Birthday, Nikolai (Mykola)

Today (March 19, OldStyle) in 1809, in Sorochintsy, a town near Poltava, Ukraine, in what was then the Russian Empire Николай Васильевич Гоголь, Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, or Микола Васильович Гоголь, Mykola Vasylyovich Hohol as he is in Ukrainian, was born. His deft touch with characters, linguistic playfulness, and keen sense of what a professor of mine insisted on calling "the Russian absurd, not the English one!" make him one of the most distinctive voices in all Russian literature.

Or, to put it another way, he's funny. Oh, my word, he's funny.


A number of his works are available on line, such as The Inspector General, The Overcoat, Dead Souls, and a collection featuring The Diary of a Madman, The Nose, and Taras Bulba among others.

Works in Russian are here.

Happy Birthday, Ewan

Today in 1971 Ewan McGregor was born in Perth, Scotland (he grew up in Crieff), and what a wonderful thing that is.

Happy Birthday, Tris

Born today 1888 in Hubbard, Texas, the Gray Eagle, aka Spoke: Tris Speaker. Probably the greatest center fielder ever, he compiled a career batting average of .345 (fourth all-time), and still holds the record of 792 career doubles. Defensively, his career records for assists, double plays, and unassisted double plays by an outfielder still stand as well. His glove was known as the place "where triples go to die."

Goodbye, Earl

I'm a bit late with this, but we've lost one of the greats. Earl Scruggs has passed away (thanks to Fred for this link).

Here are a few samples of his magic. You Tube has plenty more...

Foggy Mountain Breakdown:

Cumberland Gap: Randy Lynn Rag:

Happy Birthday, Gene

Today in Watkins, Minnesota, in 1921, Eugene McCarthy was born. I should have been for him in the '68 election, but I was young and I hated him for being alive when Bobby was dead... Older, I appreciated him more. We need men like him now.

He was also a poet.

BICYCLE RIDER (To Mary)

Teeth bare to the wind
Knuckle white grip on handle bars
You push the pedals of no return,
Let loose new motion and speed.
The earth turns with the multiplied
Force of your wheels.
Do not look back.
Feet light on the brake
Ride the bicycle of your will
Down the spine of the world,
Ahead of your time, into life.
I will not say--
Go slow.

QUIET WATERS

There are quiet waters
where a berry dropped
by a bird flying
starts ripples that
from the center of the pond
spread in concentrics, dying
in silence at the feet of the blue reeds.
I now know where these waters are.

WILLOW IN A TAMARACK SWAMP

There in the savage orange of autumn Tamarack
rusted spikes reeling the slanted, last
of the northern day, down
into the black
root waters,
among the least trees in that least land
in the darkened death camp
of the tribe of trees
I saw you.
green gold willow, arched and graced,
among spines and angled limbs.
captive? queen?
all lost light from the smothering swamp,
alone, you bear back.



KILROY

Kilroy is gone,
the word is out,
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who wrote his name
in every can
from Poland to Japan
and places in between
like Sheboygan and Racine
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who kept the dice
and stole the ice
out of the BOQ
Kilroy
whose name was good
on every IOU
in World War II
and even in Korea
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
the unknown soldier
who was the first to land
the last to leave,
with his own hand
has taken his good name
from all the walls
and toilet stalls.
Kilroy
whose name around the world
was like the flag unfurled
has run it down
and left Saigon
and the Mekong
without a hero or a song
and gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Romney's number one enemy... and his response

Well, as a teacher of Russian, I'm glad (for certain values of "glad") to see that Romney thinks Russia is " without question our number one geopolitical foe".

On the other hand, I'm confused. I thought Romney thought that "The Iranian leadership is the greatest immediate threat to the world since the fall of the Soviet Union, and before that, Nazi Germany."

Or was it generic "terrorists": “These people have declared war on us. They've killed Americans. We go anywhere they are and we kill them."

Or Latin American leftists: "We need a Latin American policy that frees Cuba and that eliminates a threat of people like Hugo Chavez."

Or atheists: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

Or even, maybe, China: "on day one, I have indicated, day one, I will issue an executive order identifying China as a currency manipulator. We'll bring an action against them in front of the WTO for manipulating their currency, and we will go after them."

Anyway, things may be looking up for our student base. At the very least, we can turn them loose on Medvedev's quips:

Медведев «конструкцию типа «враг номер один» охарактеризовал как «идеологическое клише», которое «пахнет Голливудом и определенными временами». Ромни и остальным участникам президентской гонки в США российский лидер рекомендовал как минимум две вещи: во-первых, при формулировании позиции все-таки включать доводы рассудка – использовать голову – это для кандидата в президенты невредно; а во-вторых, посматривать на часы – сейчас 2012 год, а не середина 70-х годов, и к какой бы партии кто бы ни относился, он должен принимать во внимание политические реалии»

(Phrases like "number one foe" Medvedev characterized as "ideological cliches" that "reek of Hollywood and a certain time period." The Russian leader recommended at least two things to Romney and the rest of the participants in the US presidential race: "first, when formulating his positions to take reason into account and use his head - that's never going to hurt a presidential candidate; and second, to look at his watch - it's 2012, not the middle of the 19702, and no matter which party someone belongs to he has to take political realities into account.")

Final Four

Well, it's all number 1 seeds - UConn, Baylor, Stanford, and Notre Dame.

I guess I want ... Stanford over Notre Dame in the final game.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Mario!

Today in 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa was born. One of the great writers in the Latin American Boom, author of several brilliant novels (especially The Green House), Varga Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru, winning the first round but losing the run-off to Alberto Fujimori. He lives in London most of the time, returning to Peru for several months each year, and continues to write - his latest novel is 2006's The Bad Girl.

His semi-autobiographical account of his courtship and marriage, Aunt Julie and the Scriptwriter (it's only fair to say that Julie wrote her own book, What Little Vargas Didn't Say, in response) was made into one of my favorite movies, the quirky (and fairly unknown) Tune in Tomorrow.

No, I haven't, actually

I'm reading Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild, which is about the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. I was pointed at the book by the commentary to Amazing Grace, where they referred to it but said it wasn't any good for them, since its argument is the William Wilberforce gets far too much of the credit - and since they were making a movie about him, you can see their problem. I'm about halfway through and finding it fascinating.

But he mentioned the Brookes slave ship diagram, and this is what he said:

You have seen this diagram. Rare is the illustrated schoolbook of world history, or book or television documentary about the slave trade, that does not show the famous top-down schematic view of the Brookes, with the slaves' bodies as close together as anchovies in a can.

But I hadn't.

I looked it up when I got to work, and I'd never seen it either.

I wonder if that's a feature of my age, or where I went to school - a liberal town, but still in Tennessee - or where he did (New York), or what. But although we studied slavery, I don't remember that "iconic" image.

You?

Dunk is Enough

I concede - no, proclaim: Britney Griner is an immensely talented player. But if I never see another woman dunk a basketball again, it will be too soon. (I felt just the same way when Candace Parker did it.)

I hate the dunk and everything it stands for.

Look, I'm old enough to remember when the men played a tight, beautiful game under the basket. (How old? Well, I remember Bob Cousy. Just the end of his career, but I remember him.) It used to be five men playing as one; now it's four playing for one. It used to be a team, it used to be passing and teamwork and ... well. I hate the NBA's game now. (I've been known to say there's nothing wrong with it that raising the basket two feet wouldn't fix.) I don't like the men's college game much, for that matter. And it's not just the dunk, but the dunk is the symbol.

I don't want to see the women's game go the same way.

Happy Birthday, Robert

T0day in 1874 Robert Frost was born in San Francisco.

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

THE HOUSE had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

More Frost here

Happy Birthday, AE

Today in 1859 Alfred Edward Housman was born in Worcestershire, England.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

more Housman here

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: (Ahem - forgot to add this!) It Ain't Half Hot Mum - I am enjoying this, formulaic though it is.

Read (yes, out of order so I could embed a video below): The rest of the Secret series, a funny and gripping YA. Started Bury the Chains, about the abolition movement in 18th century England

TV: Once Upon a Time. Red is cool. Gold Diggers of 1933 - omg how the hell did Ginger Rogers sing "We're in the money" in freaking pig latin?? And full pig latin at that - erway inay uhthay onmayeehay... check it out below! And I do love those elaborate Busby Berkeley numbers that (a) could never have been staged in a Broadway theater and (b) have to be viewed from above anyway.

To stand your ground, you have to, well, stand

From That Blog Is So Takei:

But let’s be clear about one thing: The “Stand Your Ground” law as applied here is a red herring. The police report itself notes that this was an “unlawful” killing, and that Zimmerman pursued Trayvon even though the police told him to stay away. He didn’t “stand his ground” against an attacker–he followed him, and then a confrontation ensued. That takes this violence outside of even that ill-conceived law. Indeed, ironically, if anyone had the right to “stand his ground” and shoot, it would have been Trayvon. But all this poor boy had was an iced tea and skittles.

Check out the whole entry. It's spot on.

Happy Birthday, Patrick

Patrick Troughton was born on 25 March, 1920 in Mill Hill, Middlesex. He had a long and varied career, but to me (and millions) he will always be The Second Doctor...

Happy Birthday, Christopher

Christopher Clavius was born today in 1538 or maybe 1537, depending on when you count the year beginning, which was not Jan 1 back then. That's not the only thing we don't know for sure about this astronomer and mathematician - his surname may have been Klau, Clau, or even Schlüssel.

But he gave the world the Gregorian calendar - named after the pope who used it, not the man who created it. So goes the world, doesn't it?

Elite Eight

After a rough first half, the Lady Vols came back to definitively win their regional semi-final against 11-th seed Kansas, 84-73.

Next stop is Baylor or Georgia Tech, who are playing later today, on Monday in the Elite Eight.

Red-tailed hawk nesting

Very sweet nest cam for Red-Tailed Hawks at the Cornell Lab. Three eggs, hatching date mid April. (When they pull back, sometimes you see little vignettes on campus. I just saw a student running like mad for the bus stop. He just made it. Yay!)

Five years later

I don't regret voting for Obama back in November 4 yrs ago. I also don't regret voting for someone else in the primaries. I'll do that again this year (even though it's only "Uncommitted"). I might vote for somebody else in November - depends on a lot. Not Romney of course or Santorum or anyone from the GOP. But maybe a real Socialist, or a Green, or somebody.

Because Obama and Holder are in many ways impossible to distinguish from W and Gonzales on civil liberties. Not civil rights, where they're ok. Civil liberties. Like this decision to allow the government to retain data on people with no connections to 'terrorism' for five years. Yeah. And not just "retain", but access any government database even if counterterrorism is not the purpose of that database. To quote:

prompt access to all federal information and datasets that may constitute or contain terrorism information. NCTC may access or acquire datasets that may constitute or contain terrorism information, including those identified as containing non-terrorism information, such as information pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism and other information maintained by executive departments and agencies that has not been identified as terrorism information,

And after that access, they can hold the data for five years, instead of three months. Because, gee, maybe someday it'll be useful.

Obama 's prosecution of the Endless War is even in some ways worse than W's. The number of "extrajudicial" killings - by drones mostly so there are no American lives at risk, except when they're the targets of course - is appalling. As is Obama's asserting his administration's "right" to kill anyone, including American citizens, without trial or notice or review.

Obama 's war on whistle blowers - from Bradley Manning to Peter van Buren to Abd al-Ilah Haydar Al-Sha’i (Shaye), a reporter in Yemen who relentlessly covered the drone killings - is chilling. W set the Iraq pull-out date and Obama tried to change it. The reason he didn't is that the Iraqis (an invented "people" if ever there was one, and who have never quite gelled as a "nation") found something that united them: not letting U.S. personnel stay in Iraq and be immune no matter what they did. No, Obama didn't build that insanely huge diplomatic compound, from which a viceroy might rule an obedient client state and run wars in neighboring ones, but he clearly didn't want to let go of the dream.

And now check this Executive Order: National Defense Resources Preparedness. It certainly reads as if the government is claiming the right to confiscate any property and induct any person at any time the president wants. What the hell? If we're not readying for war, what's up with that?

Look, I think he's better than the available alternatives. But I do wish we had a 50% rule and a "none of the above" option.

My expectations have been set

Slight problem with my cable (the on-screen guide merely says "to be announced" for every channel) so I went to the on-line help chat. I was amused by the analyst, Ishtar. She clearly knew what she was doing, but her English was idiosyncratic. The best example:

As early as now, let me set your expectation that we need to perform troubleshooting steps to fix your issue.

Rose? Not Rose.

Learned something from World Wide Words today. The name "Rosemary" is a reanalysis of ros marinus, ocean dew (the herb's original name).

I already knew that "Rosamund" wasn't rosa mundi, rose of the world, but instead hros + mund, horse-shield (compare Edmund, Raymond, Siegmund). "Rosalind" and its variants are not rosa + linda, lovely rose but instead hros + linde, tender horse (although in both of those cases it's probably not accurate to think of them as meaningful compounds; they're more likely to be simple combinations of elements used to make names).

And of course, a number of Rose- names in English originally came from the Germanic hrod, fame - the name was around long before the flower came to England. An example of that is "Roswitha", hrod + swinþ, fame-strength. "Rose" itself began life in England as "Roese, Rohese", from hrod + heid, fame-kind, though Latin "Rosa" probably contributed to its rebirth as a popular name.

Happy Birthday, Harry

Harry Houdini born today, 1874, in Budapest. Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) began his career as a magician and became an escapologist - perhaps the escapologist. He certainly pioneered the PR-tie in and brought more than a little sex appeal to the trade as well. But in his later years he devoted his energy to investigating spiritualists - and debunking them. The Randi of his time, he used his knowledge of stage magic to unmask the tricks such frauds used to deceived their audiences. Since his death, yearly seances have been held (he'd told his wife, Bess, how to recognize a genuine message from beyond so that she would not be taken in, and she steadfastly refused to fall for those who claimed to have received one) - but to date, Houdini has not escaped from death. As he predicted...

None remember(s)

Oh, Alex. Don't apologize. "None of us remembers" is just fine. So is "none of us remember", of course.

Gabe does the heavy lifting if you're inclined to argue...

Happy Birthday, William

Today in Oxfordshire, England, William Smith - the "Father of English Geography" - was born. (I can heartily recommend The Map That Changed the World by the brilliant Simon Winchester.)

Wikipedia summarizes his life's work thus: As he observed the rock layers (or strata) at the pit, he realised that they were arranged in a predictable pattern and that the various strata could always be found in the same relative positions. Additionally, each particular stratum could be identified by the fossils it contained, and the same succession of fossil groups from older to younger rocks could be found in many parts of England. Furthermore, he noticed an easterly dip of the beds of rock- small near the surface (about three degrees) then bigger after the Triassic rocks. This gave Smith a testable hypothesis, which he termed The Principle of Faunal Succession, and he began his search to determine if the relationships between the strata and their characteristics were consistent throughout the country. During subsequent travels, first as a surveyor (appointed by noted engineer John Rennie) for the canal company until 1799 when he was dismissed, and later, he was continually taking samples and mapping the locations of the various strata, and displaying the vertical extent of the strata, and drawing cross-sections and tables of what he saw. This would earn him the name "Strata Smith". As a natural consequence, Smith amassed a large and valuable collection of fossils of the strata he had examined himself from exposures in canals, road and railway cuttings, quarries and escarpments across the country.

Restore Our Future

Mitt Romney's super PAC is running anti-Santorum ads. They weirdly (to me, but I'm not their target audience and probably this plays really well with them) accuse him of voting once with Hillary Clinton oh gasp!

The thing is - they only have one freaking ad, and they play it every commercial break during Wheel and Jeopardy! and I am already so sick of it...

Happy Birthday, Edith

Today in 1936, Edith Grossman was born today in Philadelphia. She's one of the great translators from Spanish - her Don Quixote, which came out in 2003, is considered one of the, if not the, best translations (Carlos Fuentes called it "truly masterly") and was a best-seller - and I loved it, though I don't speak Spanish so can't judge it as a translation - and Gabriel García Márquez calls her "my voice in English". She has also translated Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and Álvaro Mutis. In 2003, at the PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, she said:

"Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."

Or, as she put it in an interview with Guernica:

Yes, I think we have to be faithful to the context. But it’s very important to differentiate between fidelity and literalness. Because you can’t be faithful to words, words are different in different languages. You can’t be faithful to syntax, because that changes from one language to the other. But you can be faithful to intention and context. Borges allegedly said to one of his translators, “Don’t translate what I said. Translate what I meant to say.” That is, in fact, what a translator does. Because languages are very resonant and various levels of diction and styles of discourse echo in the mind of the native reader and native speaker. I always think that my job is to find the English that will resonate like the original Spanish for the English speaking reader.

And here's a bit about translating García Márquez for the first time, from a piece in Criticas:

“I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.”

Happy Birthday, Johann

Today in 1685 in Eisenach, Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach was born. The world would be a poorer place without him.

One of my favorite CDs for the office is The Goldberg Variations, scored for a string quartet. But it's hard to go wrong picking something of his.

He spent a large part of his life as a playing musician - an organist, mostly - and much of his composed music was considered too old-fashioned or too ornamental. He changed jobs a lot, until 1723, when he became a choirmaster in Leipzig where he remained until his death in 1750. Most of his jobs were for one church or another, in fact, but he happily wrote secular music when he worked for Prince Leopold of Cothen - until his wife (the prince's) disapproved of such a frivolous expense as chamber music. But whatever kind of music Bach wrote, he did it gloriously.

Yes, because ...

The headline reads Fury in Israel at Remark Linking Gaza to Toulouse .

Of course the Israelis are furious. They've perfected Othering when it comes to Gaza, yet it's such a fragile state that it can bear no scrutiny. Ever. So of course they're furious - even though, as it turns out, the headline wasn't talking about the gunman's statements that the killings were to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest French military involvement deployments abroad, but rather remarks made by the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, in which she spoke of

"young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances. The Belgian children having lost their lives in a terrible tragedy, and when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we see what is happening in Gaza and Sderot, in different parts of the world — we remember young people and children who lose their lives."

And apparently that kind of statement simply cannot stand.

During a visit to Chengdu, China, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, described Ms. Ashton’s remarks as "unworthy." He added that the children Ms. Ashton should have been thinking about were “the children of southern Israel who live in constant fear of rocket attacks launched from Gaza,” according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Yes, because Israeli children living in fear is worse than Palestinian children dying.

Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch

Maybe not "this is in fact why the internet was first created", as Josh Barrie opined over at The Independent, but on the other hand ... Maybe. Yeah. Maybe.

Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch. Do go there - there are more!



(As Red notes in her post about sudden fame, In the interests of balanced reporting, it's only fair to point you all towards hedgehogs who look like Martin Freeman.)

З днем народження, Іване!

Іван Степанович Мазепа - Ivan Mazepa - was born today, in what is now called Mazepyntsy, near Bila Tserkva in Ukraine around 1640. The usual English spelling of his name is Mazeppa, which is from the Russian.

Mazepa was an ambitious Kozak (Cossack) officer who rose quickly through the ranks in the post-Pereyaslavl Left Bank Hetmanate (the 1653 Treaty of Pereyaslavl between Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyy and Tsar Alexey I of Muscovy was fraught with misunderstandings from the beginning). Mazepa began as a loyal ally of Russia (as Muscovy was now called under Peter I, the Great), and became hetman in 1687 after accusing his predecessor, Samoylovych, of planning to break the treaty and secede from Muscovy. In 1702 Mazepa crossed the Dnipro (Dneiper) and annexed large portions of Right-Bank Ukraine after Semen Paliy's failed uprising against the Poles, establishing him as a wealthy and powerful ruler.

But the Great Northern War wasn't good to Russia - the Swedes and Lithuanians were a serious force back then - and Peter I decided to take steps - steps Mazepa saw as threatening the Hetmanate's autonomy. Peter I began sending Kozaks to fight in foreign wars, instead of leaving them to defend Ukraine against Tatars and Poles (as the treaty stipulated). Kozak soldiers were neither equipped nor trained for modern warfare, and they were often commanded by Russians and Germans who often did not much value their lives. They suffered loss of morale, and heavy casualties, while at home a Russian force became an oppressive occupier.

In 1708, Polish King Stanislaus Leszczynski, an ally of Charles XII of Sweden, threatened to attack the Hetmanate. Peter I refused to defend Ukraine, expecting an attack on Russia proper by Charles XII. In Mazepa's opinion, this blatantly violated the Treaty of Pereyaslav, since Russia refused to protect Ukraine's territory and left it to fare on its own. As the Swedish and Polish armies advanced towards Ukraine, Mazepa allied himself with them on October 28, 1708.

The Russian army responded by razing the Kozak capital Baturyn, killing the defending garrison and all of its population. The Russian army was ordered to tie up the dead Kozaks to crosses, and float them down the Dnieper River all the way to the Black Sea with the goal of scaring all the people loyal to Mazepa who lived along the river.

The Battle of Poltava, June 29, 1709, was won by the Russians (a victory which shook Europe and established Russia as a true imperial force and power player in European politics), and this destroyed Mazepa's hope for an independent Ukraine. He fled along with Charles to refuge in Bendery, among the Turks, where he died soon afterwards. The tsars began to dismantle the Hetmanate, and by 1764 the largely puppet remains of it were abolished.

Mazepa's legacy during Russian rule of Ukraine, and Soviet rule thereafter, was one of treason and revilement. He was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, Tchaikovsky's opera "Mazeppa" casts him as the villain, and any positive view of him was "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism", a serious crime in Soviet days. But since Ukrainian independence the hetman's memory has enjoyed a resurgence, and he is recognized as a national hero.


He's even on the money.

One more thing

From Glen Greenwald:

Note, too, that in the case of Sgt. Bales (or any other cases of American violence against Muslims), people have little difficulty understanding the distinction between (a) discussing and trying to understand the underlying motives of the act (causation) and (b) defending the act (justification). But that same distinction completely evaporates when it comes to Muslim violence against Americans. Those who attempt to understand or explain the act — they’re responding to American violence in their country; they are traumatized and angry at the continuous deaths of Muslim children and innocent adults; they’ve calculated that striking at Americans is the ony way to deter further American aggression in their part of the world — are immediately accused of mitigating, justifying or even defending Terrorism.

Othering is insidious.

Great Backyard Bird Count results are in

Some of the results from last month's Great Backyard Bird Count (I've italicized those I saw):

Most Frequently Reported Birds
Rank/ Species/ Checklists
1 Northern Cardinal 48,875
2 Mourning Dove 47,975
3 Dark-eyed Junco 43,842
4 Downy Woodpecker 38,324
5 American Crow 36,109
6 House Finch 35,883
7 American Goldfinch 34,829
8 Blue Jay 34,006
9 Black-capped Chickadee 33,260
10 Tufted Titmouse 32,223

Most Numerous Birds
Rank/Species/Individuals
1 Snow Goose 3,259,469
2 Tree Swallow 3,060,171
3 Red-winged Blackbird 1,722,294
4 Canada Goose 932,110
5 Common Grackle 578,628 (they weren't here then, but I spotted several dozen today!)
6 European Starling 514,121
7 American Robin 345,313
8 American Goldfinch 321,365
9 Mallard 311,965
10 American Coot 308,397

Pointless "news". No, worse than pointless

The CBS Evening News led with a "story" about Bale's wife, and childhood friends, and all those people who thought he was wonderful and one guy who said lots of people have financial troubles... I'm all for realizing that the Endless War has broken our army, and a lot of our soldiers along with it. But I'm noticing something.

We're spending an awful lot of time talking about him. And not much about the people who were killed. It's part of the whole Othering of the enemy, of course, something we've been doing for a long time to make the Endless War bearable. But it's long past time to just fucking stop it.

Let's remember the sixteen civilians - men, women, and children - who died that night. Maybe a story about their husbands or childhood friends... Or even them.

They had names, too.

The dead:
Mohamed Dawood son of Abdullah
Khudaydad son of Mohamed Juma
Nazar Mohamed
Payendo
Robeena
Shatarina daughter of Sultan Mohamed
Zahra daughter of Abdul Hamid
Nazia daughter of Dost Mohamed
Masooma daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Farida daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Palwasha daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Nabia daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Esmatullah daughter of Mohamed Wazir
Faizullah son of Mohamed Wazir
Essa Mohamed son of Mohamed Hussain
Akhtar Mohamed son of Murrad Ali

The wounded:
Haji Mohamed Naim son of Haji Sakhawat
Mohamed Sediq son of Mohamed Naim
Parween
Rafiullah
Zardana
Zulheja

Happy Birthday, Earl

Born this day in 1891 in Los Angeles, Earl Warren, one of our greatest Chief Justices. In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed him, expecting a conservative; Eisenhower later called the appointment "the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made." But the country is much the better for it.

Warren led the Supreme Court to many landmark decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which banned segregation in public schools; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which ruled that poor people are entitled to a free lawyer in all criminal cases; Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required that a person being arrested be read his or her rights; and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which made interracial marriage legal across the country.

Although he died in 1974, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 by President Carter.

"We Stopped Dreaming"

I remember years ago when Apollo 13 had just come out on video, I was in Saturday Matinee and they were playing it on the store's TV monitors. They had gotten to the point in the movie where the Saturn is lifting off the launching pad. I was just standing there watching, and a man about my age was standing next to me, mesmerized.

"Do you remember that?" he asked me.

"I do," I said. "We saw a couple."

"God, I wish I had," he said. His young son was with him. After a while he came up and stared at the screen, but after a moment he looked at his father and said, "Dad, what's that?"

"That," his father said, "is a spaceship."

His son looked at the screen, with a skeptical expression. "A spaceship? Really?"

"Yes. Really." He paused. "It was a real spaceship." His voice almost broke as he added, "And it was ours."

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Amazing Grace was very good, despite the occasional dramatic license with the facts - and the strange subtitles I noticed when listening to the commentary. Some more of It Ain't Half Hot Mum.

TV: The Middle: I love Frankie getting mad over Mike's hoarding batteries. But I have to say his "At least I'm not having an affair" defense made me think of Buffy's demand to Spike: "You want credit for not feeding on the broken bodies of the victims?" Ed Asner cracked me up, too. Grimm: This show doesn't need a recurring villain except the police chief... Modern Family - "He shoved me! I thought you had your anger problem under control." "The renowned duo Fizzbo & Louis", and the clown car! Snerk! "I guess he has a thing for you, too." The Mentalist - snerk! Jane got punched! Frankly, I'm surprised he doesn't get hit more often. And an extra one (so I really don't know why the DVR missed the regularly scheduled one a couple of weeks ago...), and that was very nice. Also nice to see someone clearly not actually getting chemo (you don't keep your eyebrows, as Jane pointed out) who was faking it. I liked Cho's developing story, too. But he's going to find kicking his painkillers without anybody noticing is hard, at best. Once Upon A Time is developing a lot of intrigue. Red was the wolf? Wow.

Read: Fatal Voyage: The Wrecking of the Costa Concordia, pretty interesting. The Heart of Haiku: Jane Hirschfeld examines haiku and Bashō, and it's wonderful. An Unexpected Twist, a very funny short by Andy Borowitz about a medical emergency that nearly killed him - and yes, I did say "very funny". Envy by Yuri Olesha - a darkly comic look at the early days of the Soviet Union. A Whole Nother Story and The Name of This Book Is a Secret, two unrelated YAs that were delightful.

Happy Birthday, Christian

Today in 1690 Christian Goldbach was born, in Königsberg, part of Brandenburg-Prussia.

His famous conjecture:

Every even integer greater than 3 can be written as the sum of two primes

remains unproved (though intuitively obvious), but he's also remembered for the the Goldbach–Euler theorem (also known as Goldbach's theorem), which states that the sum of 1/(p − 1) over the set of perfect powers p, excluding 1 and omitting repetitions, converges to 1. (The perfect powers are 4, 8, 9, 16, 25, 27 - whole numbers which are other whole numbers raised to a power (squared, cubed, etc).) So the theorem is that 1/3 + 1/7 + 1/8 + 1/15 + 1/24 ... = 1.

Whoo! Math! It kills me, but I love it (abstractly).

Happy Birthday, Nikolai

Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov (Николай Андреевич Римский-Корсаков) was born today in Tikhvin, Russia, in 1844. As one of The Five - along with Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin (Милий Алексеевич Балакирев, Цезарий-Вениамин Антонович Кюи, Модест Петрович Мусоргский,and Александр Порфирьевич Бородин) - he strove to write music that was Russian rather than European. In Russian they're called the Mighty Pack (or Group) - Могучая кучка. He's best known in the West for his symphonies and especially his Scheherazade suite, and for his operas, especially Sadko and The Snow Maiden, in Russia.

In 1905 Rimsky-Korsakov sided with the hundred students expelled from the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he taught, for taking part in the February Revolution. He was fired, and students put on his Kaschei the Immortal (or Kaschei the Deathless) and followed it with a demonstration. His works were subsequently banned. Riots and resignations followed in support until he was reinstated, but his next opera, The Golden Cockerel, was critical of monarchy, imperialism, and by implication the on-going Russo-Japanese War, and it only exacerbated his troubles with the tsarist police and wasn't produced until 1909, a year after his death - and then in an edited format.

This was his teaching philosophy:

Сейчас я буду очень много говорить, а вы будете очень внимательно слушать. Потом я буду говорить меньше, а вы будете слушать и думать, и, наконец, я совсем не буду говорить, и вы будете думать своей головой и работать самостоятельно, потому что моя задача как учителя - стать вам ненужным...

"Now I will speak a great deal, and you will listen very attentively. Then I will speak less, and you will listen and think, and finally I will not speak at all, and you will think to yourselves and work on your own, because my task as a teacher is to become unnecessary to you."

Amazing subtitles

I just watched Amazing Grace, which was very good, despite the occasional dramatic license with the facts. But the subtitles were amazingly (haha) full of errors.

For example, Thomas Clarkson tells Wilberforce that he has friend in France, "our counterparts, and they bring me only good news", which is "any good news" in the subtitles. That good news is Revolution: "The Americans pulled the cork out of the bottle, and now the French share the wine," he says, and invites Wilberforce to come to Paris and "drink some of that wine"; the subtitles tell him to "bring"it.

Later in the film Clarkson (mis)quotes Thomas Traherne's "The Salutation" (he omits the word 'lodg'd': "Strange treasures lodg'd in this fair world appear, Strange all and new to me", but the subtitles have it as "in this fair world up here" (which does, I admit, make his admission to his infant son that he has "absolutely no idea what it is about" funnier, at least). Amusingly, Clarkson's "Oh, bollocks" becomes "Oh, bullocks."

And in that vein Richard the butler quotes Francis Bacon's "It is a sad fate for a man to die too well-known to everyone else and still unknown to himself" but in the subtitles it's "fate from a man".

John Newton tells Wilberforce to be "in the world but not of it" and the subtitles have him saying "not off it". And Newton also says that in telling Wilberforce he lived in the company of ghosts he was explaining to a boy "why a grown man cowers in corners" and the subtitles makes that an ungrammatical "a grown man cowards in corners".

James Stephen says in a letter that "Many children are scalded to death by the molten lava" and the subtitles distressingly say "scolded to death".

Wilberforce tells his wife she can't bring him laudanum because he "poured it all away this morning", but the subtitles say he only "put it all away".

Wilberforce complains to Pitt that "You've read my letter but you've not taken in a word of it." The subtitles say "not taken any word of it."

Pitt points out that as Prime Minister he "can't be seen to openly oppose the King" - or, in the subtitles "be seemed to."

Wilberforce tells Barbara that he's "against flowers in church", but bizarrely (for the Evangelical icon Wilberforce) it becomes "flowers and church" in the subtitles.

When William Pitt warns Lord Dundas that if he crosses Pitt and Wilberforce, he, Pitt, will have to "put a pistol to your head", Dundas responds, "If you do, there will be two pistols, one from each side. But perhaps if I duck, you'll shoot each other." And the subtitles say, "if I dock..."

Olaudah Equiano says he survived the Middle Passage because "Your life is like a thread; it breaks or it does not break" and in the subtitles it "wrecks" or not.

And at the very end Clarence defines noblesse oblige for Tarleton as meaning: "My nobility obliges me recognize the virtue of an exceptional common" and the subtitles replace the last word with "talent."

(Also, they missed entirely why Pitt said Michael Shaw and Edward Hope were "both friends" and didn't capitalize Friends, as in Quakers.)

There are a lot more than this, trust me. The DVD is bilingual for Canada and the subtitles were done in Montreal - maybe by a Francophone? Obviously not someone with a script (not that that's unusual for subtitles; quite the opposite.) Fortunately, there aren't rough accents in it - I had them on for the commentary track and kept noticing "I don't remember him saying that!"

The Grouchiest

Kate Beaton draws the brilliant Hark a Vagrant and she has a new comic up: Doctor Sara Josephine Baker Saves the Babies and Does Other Things. The guy who wants her to go after Typhoid Mary ("But she's so grouchy." "She is the grouchiest.") cracks me up. You should be reading Beaton if you're not!

Happy Birthday, Maxim

Алексей Максимович Пешков - Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, best known as Maxim Gorky (the Bitter), was born today in Nizhny Novgorod - once called Gorky after him - in 1868.

День - это маленькая жизнь, и надо прожить ее так, будто ты должен умереть сейчас, а тебе неожиданно подарили еще сутки. (A day is a small life, and it must be lived as though you were meant to die right now, but you've unexpectedly been given another 24 hours.)

Лишь бы люди начали думать, до правды они всегда додумаются. (If only people start thinking, they'll always get to the truth.)

Когда труд - удовольствие, жизнь - хороша! Когда труд - обязанность, жизнь - рабство! (When work is a pleasure, then life is wonderful! When work is an obligation, then life is slavery!)

In these pictures he's at Yasnaya Polyana with Tolstoy in 1900 (above), then in Yalta with Anton Chekhov in the same year, and then with Voroshilov and Stalin in 1931... Yeah. A complicated guy, Maxim Gorky.

Here is Gorky in Russian and here in English.

Happy Birthday, James

Today in 1751 James Madison was born. Father of the Constitution, I hate to think what he'd be saying now... but here's some of what he said back then:

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The people of the U.S. owe their independence & liberty to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings.

There are more instances of abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

EAS

This is not really useful - an Emergency Broadcast stating:

A civil authority has issued a child abduction alert for the following area:
Maryland
issued at 8:13 pm on March 15, 2012
until 12:13 am

No details, what kind of kid or anything, and Maryland is kind of a big place.

If you're going to broadcast these things, they ought to be a bit more useful, yes?

Preach it, brother

Eugene Robinson asks:

But what do we expect to accomplish between now and 2014, when our troops are supposed to come home?

And this is the bottom line of the answer:

We can be absolutely certain that the Taliban insurgents will still constitute a threat, because—and this is what gung-ho advocates of the war fail to grasp—they live there. To them, Afghanistan is not a battlefield but a home.

As they say nowadays: THIS.

Happy Birthday, Ruth

Today in 1933 Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn. She's now on the Supreme Court of the United States. "Associate Justice Ginsburg, who was once denied a Supreme Court clerkship because she was a woman, co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU and has been a stalwart defender of civil rights on the court."

Read a tribute here

The Ides of March

From the letters of Cicero to Atticus (translated by LC Purser):

But come one, come all, the Ides of March console me.
[sed omnia licet concurrant, Idus Martiae consolantur.]

Ah, my dear Atticus, I fear the Ides of March have brought us nothing beyond exultation, and the satisfaction of our anger and resentment.
[o mi Attice, vereor ne nobis Idus Martiae nihil dederint praeter laetitiam et odi poenam ac doloris.]

For though the tyrant has been removed, I see that the tyranny remains. ... Well, was that the fault of the Brutuses? Not at all, but of those other dull brutes, who think themselves cautious and wise, who thought it enough in some cases to rejoice, in others to congratulate, in none to persevere. But let us leave the past: let us bestow all our care and power of protection on our heroes, and, as you advise, let us be content with the Ides of March. Yet though they gave our friends—those inspired heroes—an entrance to heaven, they have not given the Roman people liberty.
[sublato enim tyranno tyrannida manere video ... ista culpa Brutorum? minime illorum quidem sed aliorum brutorum qui se cautos ac sapientis putant; quibus satis fuit laetari, non nullis etiam gratulari, nullis permanere. sed praeterita omittamus; istos omni cura praesidioque tueamur et, quem ad modum tu praecipis, contenti Idibus Martiis simus; quae quidem nostris amicis divinis viris aditum ad caelum dederunt, libertatem populo Romano non dederunt.]

We ♥ Our Troops

Amy Goodman writes:

The Seattle Times reported earlier this month that 285 patients at [Join Base Lewis-McChord]’s Madigan Army Medical Center had their post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses inexplicably reversed by a forensic psychiatric screening team. The reversals are now under investigation due to concerns they were partly motivated by a desire to avoid paying those who qualify for medical benefits.

Tell me again how much we love our soldiers.

The fact is, there is a quite disturbing fetishization of The Troops and The Warfighters and even The Wounded Warriors in this country. But actual support, as opposed to praise-singing, ramping up the defense budget, and the reflexive, obligatory ribbon magnets? It's in quite short supply.

(And don't even get me started on those who want us to start yet another war - with Iran, or in Syria...)

Like Linus, we love our troops, it's soldiers we turn our backs on.

Birds!

Wow. I've just realized how long it's been since I posted any bird shots! So, here: have some birds!

It's kind of a motley collection, from the past few months, and probably I should ration them out, but I hope to get more as the days grow longer. So: a robin, juncos, a titmouse, white-throated sparrows, house and gold finches, a jay, a downy woodpecker, flickers, geese and ducks, the red-shouldered hawks, and a logcock (pileated woodpecker).

mallards

blue jay

passing through - the resident pair was on the side of the pond, watching suspiciously

blue jay

redwing in full cry

pair of flickers - maybe they can get the nesthole this year

the female red-shouldered hawk

cranes nest on roofs - but geese?

a tufted titmouse

a junco probably contemplating heading back north

a robin

a little downy


a blurry mating shot
I've never seen a pileated woodpecker in such a slender tree-top

resident gander and mallards

a male flicker

house finch

red-shouldered hawk

chickadee

the resident pair of geese

house finch

redwinged blackbird

white-throated sparros

chickadee

goldfinch