Authors known by their initials

This Sunday's NYT crossword asked for the second "R" in "J.R.R. Tolkien," to which I drew a blank. It reminded me that decades ago in college I compiled a list of authors known by their first two initials. I've never updated it. And I suspect I've left out quite a few...

A.A. Fair, A.A. Milne, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., A.E. Houseman, C.P. Snow, C.S. Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, E.B. White, e.e. Cummings, E.M. Forster, G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, H.L. Mencken, H.P. Lovecraft, J.B. Priestley, J.D. Salinger, J.M. Barrie, J.R.R. Tolkien, P.G. Wodehouse, T.E. Lawrence, T.H. White, T.S. Eliot, V.S. Pritchett, W.H. Auden.

Commencement address by J.K. Rowling

I should save this for next spring or summer, when college commencements are underway. The traditional item to post at that time of year is the "Wear Sunscreen" piece. This one is equally good, and I don't want to wait to post it. It was given by J.K. Rowling at Harvard's commencement this year. An excerpt of her address is HERE. The full text of her prepared comments is HERE, along with a video of the live presentation. What I have copied below is an excerpt of the excerpt to whet your appetite; I encourage you to plunge into the fulltext...

"On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure.…

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension...T hey had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships...

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure... …[B]y any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass….

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default...

Given a Time-Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two..."

(reminder - fulltext and video HERE. If your time is limited, that link is more uplifting and informative than the rest of my blog...)

Reconsidering the concept of "race"

“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.”

To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say, ‘Oh, okay—métisse—you are mixed.’ Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white.

In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to métisse, to tubaab [Wolof for “white/European”]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. ‘Tubaab,’ they say when they greet me.”

(Credit to Harvard magazine)

"Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice."

I found that aphorism (from Will Durant) in the book Krakatoa; the Day the World Exploded. It's an excellent book that I can recommend without hesitation. The eruption of Krakatoa is, of course, one of the signature geologic catastrophes in this history of mankind, producing the loudest sound ever heard my modern man and altering weather (and briefly climate) worldwide.

I won't repeat the details here. Those unsure of their interest in the subject can glance at the Wiki entry. Here are some other tangentially-related gleanings from the book:

“…the Guild of Pepperers, one of the most ancient of London’s city guilds, was established at least before 1180... formally registered as an importer of spices in large, or gross, amounts: its members were called grossarii, from which comes the modern word grocer.”

Alfred Russel Wallace’s middle name is a misspelling as a result of an error by Usk’s registrar of births.

“…in the center of the ballroom [in Batavia, pre-eruption] was a fountain gushing not water but pure eau de Cologne…”

Eau de Cologne: A perfumed spirit invented by an Italian chemist, Johann Maria Farina [1685-1766], who settled in Cologne in 1709. The usual recipe prescribed twelve drops of each of the essential oils bergamot, citron, neroli, orange and rosemary, with one dram of Malabar cardamoms and a gallon of rectified spirits, which are distilled together. – definition from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1959.

Perhaps the main reason the book is such a pleasant read is that it's author is Simon Winchester, author of the (even-more-interesting) The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Adaptive Eyewear

This is an truly impressive innovation -- Harry Potter-style glasses with expandable lenses attached to syringes full of oil. The user "inflates" or deflates the lens until the refractive index compensates for the user's visual defects.

The video above shows the process in 6 minutes, or you can read about it HERE and HERE.

I was immediately reminded of the non-electric refrigerator and the merry-go-round water pump. Low-tech, inexpensive solutions to common problems. Bravo to the developers.

The risk of ordering a cake online

"Apparently the store in question had an online ordering form, which then linked directly to the edible-ink printer." (Image and text credit to Cake Wrecks)

Is fascism returning to Italy?

"Fascism" is of course a controversial term, thrown about much too loosely. Properly speaking it refers to the promotion of nationalism, militarism, and authoritarian measures at the expense of individual liberties. (To be totally correct it should refer to WWII-era activities, with current ones being called "neo-fascist.")

So it was with a measure of skepticism that I saw the term used today in a Telegraph article about the state of affairs in Italy today. That is, until I read the details:

As soldiers prepare to be deployed on Italian streets, a city mayor has been accused of Fascism after he passed an edict banning groups of more than three people congregating in parks and public gardens.

The ban will not affect courting couples who flock to parks and gardens in the northern Italian city of Novara, where Mr Giordano holds power, but if anyone is caught in a group of three or more they face a fine of 500 euro (£350)…

Around 3,000 troops are expected to begin patrolling streets of major cities - including Rome, Milan, Naples, Bari, Palermo and Venice - on Monday as part of a government clampdown on crime…Soldiers will also patrol alongside regular police officers, but they will have no powers of arrest and can merely stop, search and identify anyone who arouses suspicion. They will carry small arms, but not machine guns.

Prime Minister Berlusconi was the one who authorized the troop deployment, but it was just one mayor who has banned assemblies of three or more people. Perhaps it won’t spread. But it does give one pause…

Every mother has a favorite child...

What beer is for

The Worst Movies Ever Made

Wikipedia has an entry devoted to films that "have achieved a significant level of infamy through critical and popular assertion as being among the worst films ever made. The films have either been cited by a combination of reputable sources as the worst movie ever, with lesser consideration given to those films merely listed as "worst of the year", or been on such a source's list of the worst movies of all time. Examples of such sources include the Golden Raspberry Awards ("Razzies"), Roger Ebert's list of most hated films, Rotten Tomatoes, and the Internet Movie Database's "Bottom 100" list.

A View to Die For

The photo above shows homes in Bonifacio, on the southern end of Corsica, perched on top of a cliff that is being eroded by the Mediterranean. This is one of four towns featured in a photoessay on scary clifftop communities. (Click image to enlarge)

Curious Dutch orthography

In Simon Winchester's book Krakatoa I ran across the following sentence: "In November 1880 [King Willem III] made a surprise appointment: Frederik 's Jacob, a fifty-eight-year-old former sailor, mapmaker, and sugar manufacturer... was to go to Batavia as governor-general."

In other places, this same man is referred to as "Mr. 's Jacob" and "Governor-General s' Jacob." The "s" is clearly not a middle initial, and appears to be an abbreviation or contraction - but of what?

So I searched the 'net today and found a Dutch Wiki entry for Frederik s'Jacob (with the apostrophe after the "s") - AND a ?Javanese Wiki entry for Frederik 's Jacob (with the apostrophe before the "s."

TYWKIWDBI has had 21 visits from people in the Netherlands in the past month, and 6 from Jakarta. Can anyone explain for me what the 's (or s') represents? Thanks in advance.

Update:  A hat tip to Paul, who offered what I consider to be the definitive reply:

"Frederik s'Jacob was my great-great-great-grandfather.  I share the surname.

The s' is for pronunciation. The family (then Jacob) originated from Chateaudun in France, but moved to Holland. The Dutch would pronounce the name 'Yacop', so there were various attempts to restore the French pronounciation (with a soft J). Sijacob and Sjacob were tried, but the name was finally registered as s'Jacob."

Parents want to ban "Fahrenheit 451"

The book, written by Ray Bradbury, is almost universally viewed as one of the great commentaries on book banning and the suppression of free thought, although Bradbury says that at the time he wrote it he was thinking more of how television was destroying reading habits.

Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

... Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony... [Ballantine] is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

What the parents in Texas are complaining about are the "damns" and "hells," references to drinking, cigarettes, and beer (!), and a negative view of firemen (!!!). Fortunately the students at the school are more enlightened than the parents and are signing petitions to have the book retained.

"Free Tibet" flags... made in China

"Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags...

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning." (Text and image credit to the BBC)

World's smallest snake discovered

"The world's smallest snake, averaging just 10cm (4 inches) and as thin as a spaghetti noodle, has been discovered on the Caribbean island of Barbados.

The snake - named Leptotyphlops carlae - is the smallest of the 3,100 known snake species… Researchers believe that the snake - a type of thread snake - is so rare that it has survived un-noticed until now…

In contrast to other species of snake - some of which can lay up to 100 eggs in a single clutch - the world's smallest snake only produces a single egg…

"If a tiny snake were to have more than one offspring, each egg would have to share the same space occupied by the one egg and so the two hatchlings would be half the normal size." The hatchlings might then be too small to find anything small enough to eat.

This has led the researchers to believe that the Barbadian snake is as small as a snake can evolve to be.” (Text and image credit to the BBC)