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August 2001 |
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Saturday 4 August The central heating is back in working order! (See the previous entry.) This morning, I removed the two battens from the wall, after carefully testing to check that the screws were not electrically live. I pulled out the masonry plugs with a pair of pliers and looked into the cavity where I suspected that I had drilled through the cable. Sure enough, I could see a bare wire. I decided to leave it until after lunch before thinking about what to do next. But by one of those coincidences that may or may not indicate an overruling Providence, the phone rang just after lunch, and it was one of the electricians that Mary had contacted. He wanted to know if it was convenient for him to come round straight away. I didn't catch his name, so let's call him Bob. He is about my age, coming up towards retirement. That's often a good sign in a craftsman. The older ones are usually very conscientious, and do a good job without overcharging for it. There are times when it's best to swallow your pride and let a professional repair the mess that you have made, so I was glad enough to let Bob come and pick up the pieces. He chipped away at the plaster around the screw hole, and found that the cable was directly embedded in the plaster, without any conduit to sheathe it. This means that the wiring for the heater was installed by a cowboy, but it was good news in two ways. First, it made me feel better about having drilled through it. If it wasn't properly shielded, it's hardly my fault that I didn't know it was there. It made me feel better still when Bob told me he had done that same sort of thing many times, including drilling into a gas pipe. The second good thing about the wiring being exposed like that was that it was much easier for him to repair it than if it had been shielded. All he had to do was to sever the cable where I had drilled into it, and insert a little junction box with a short connecting cable to bridge the gap. It only took him about half an hour to do this and replace the fuse that had blown, and now everything works again as it should. He is coming back on Monday to make good the plaster, and then all that will be needed is a couple of coats of paint. I could do the plastering equally well myself, but Bob seemed to want to. I figure that since he has done such a good job, I don't mind paying him a bit more to do the extra work. Best of all, I have found that I still have a left over can of the paint that I used when I last painted the utility room, six years ago. So I should be able to redecorate that corner of the room without leaving any trace of this whole tiresome episode.
Christine and Simon are taking part in some competition in which they have to identify a number of phrases from a few numbers and initial letters. For example, the clue "52 = W in a Y" has the answer "there are 52 weeks in a year". In the competition, there are 70 of these clues. Christine and Simon could solve about two thirds of them, and they then enlisted our help for the rest. Mary and I are both pretty good at crossword puzzles, and we managed to solve most of the remaining clues. Some of them were fairly straightforward, such as "F 14 = S V D" (February 14 = St Valentine's Day). Others kept us guessing for longer, like "40 A = D at T" (40 all = deuce at tennis). We were left with five clues which baffled us. These were
We were brooding over these yesterday evening, and Mary realised that the answer to no. 3 is Marilyn Monroe = Norma Jean Baker (which was MM's real name). But we couldn't make any progress with the others. As I went to sleep last night, I was wondering what R G might stand for, in clue no. 2, and I hoped that my subconscious mind would keep on riffling through some of its data banks while I was asleep. I woke very early this morning, around 5 a.m., with the phrase "roman god" in my mind. Hmm, R G of L. Could that be "Roman god of love"? No, I thought, Pan is the god of love, and that doesn't fit the clue. I was still half asleep, but then it suddenly occurred to me that Pan is the Greek god, and Cupid is the Roman God of Love. So that solves clue no. 2. We're still totally stuck on the other three clues, so if you can cast any light on any of them please let me know. The way the brain works is very mysterious. Large parts of it, including those that process vision, sound and language, take place at a level that is totally inaccessible to the conscious mind. If you have a difficult decision to make, or are unable to make headway with a problem, there is a lot to be said for "sleeping on it". During the hours of sleep, the brain keeps on processing information even though it is not consciously directed, and it will often come up with something relevant that will give a useful new perspective to the situation. Since it's not consciously directed, it's equally liable to come up with something really stupid. But I often find that if I'm completely stuck with a crossword puzzle (or on a more serious level, with a piece of mathematical research), if I put it aside until the next day then some key element will somehow have fallen into place and the answer will be obvious. On the other hand, unlike some people I don't get any benefit from dreams. I scarcely ever remember my dreams at all, and when I do, they don't seem to have any relevance to my waking life. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend the book How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, which is full of fascinating and surprising insights, as also is his previous book The Language Instinct. I'll try thinking about "M C = F of F" tonight, and see if the answer has come by morning.
Well it took a week, but it worked. Two years ago, I quoted the last two lines of that old nursery rhyme in this journal, in the entry where I talked about the birth of our first grandchild on a Sunday. It's a bit soon yet to tell whether Tom will grow up to be good or gay (or both). But when I woke up in the early hours of this morning it was the first line that was going round in my mind. Sure enough, it's the answer to one of the outstanding clues mentioned in the previous entry. Yes, "M C = F of F" is Monday's child is fair of face. I wouldn't want you to think that I have been thinking hard all week about the competition. In fact, I have sat down and thought about the three remaining clues for a few minutes from time to time, but they certainly haven't been at the forefront of my mind. Last night, I wasn't thinking about the competition at all as I drifted off to sleep. But some part of the brain must have been fretting away at it. It was a warm and sultry night, and I woke up in the small hours (which is something I scarcely ever do) feeling uncomfortably hot and sticky, and with the phrase "fair of face" in my mind. Mary and Liz think I'm a bit weird. They're quite right, of course. It's nice to have Liz staying with us until Wednesday. She has come home to chill out for a few days and think about the future. She is having a bit of a difficult time with her boyfriend, and she needed to get away to unwind and to talk things over with us. Mainly, she has been talking with Mary, but she also wanted to know what I thought about the situation, and we talked it over in the car as I was driving her to a friend's house where she is spending the evening. I'm very pleased that she values her old parents' opinions enough to want to know what we think she should do. Personally, I very much hope that she and Paul stay together. They seem very well suited to each other. But the relationship is definitely going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment. I don't want to say any more than that about it.
Meta news: Tom has moved his web site from Angelfire (which was causing him all sorts of aggro) to Geocities. You'll find it here. But you'll have to be patient while he adjusts all the links to work on the new site. Having recently relocated this site I know what a nightmare that can be. And it only made it worse when Bruce smugly told me how easy it would have been to change the links if only I used FrontPage. :)
It's time to wrap up the discussion on Michael Warner's book The Trouble With Normal. I discussed Chapter 1 here and Chapter 2 here. An email from a reader who sent a thoughtful critique of some of the themes from the book prompts me to come back to it one more time. (Thanks, Bob!) The fact it, I have been finding it harder and harder to read this book. I'm not the only one. QueerScribe told me "I got so disgusted with Warner's axe-grinding and poorly-organized writing that I didn't get past Chapter 2 myself," and other readers also seem to have been put off by the style of the book. However, I did want to deal with Chapter 3, the heart of the book, in which the author explains why he is opposed to gay marriage. His argument in a nutshell is that marriage (any kind of marriage, not just gay marriage), by elevating the status of those who are married, automatically lowers the status of those who are not married. As with previous chapters, the author develops some interesting arguments around this thesis, but he presents them in such a tiresome way that almost everything he says provokes resistance and disagreement. I wanted to illustrate this by referring to some extracts from Chapter 3, but I find that I have a little problem here. The problem is that I have lost my copy of the book. The last time I remember reading it was on the train coming back from a day in London last month. I am pretty sure that I must have left the book on the train. Maybe I subconsciously did this on purpose, to save myself from having to read any more of it. I have to admit that it is a relief to use this as an excuse from devoting any more time to a detailed review of the book. If I can't discuss Warner's views on marriage then I am left with trying to sort out my own opinions on the subject. These are of course biased by the fact that after 35 years of being happily married I can't help being strongly in favour of the institution. The way I see it, marriage exists at three levels: personal, social and legal. At the biological level, I like the classification of sexual behaviour used by Bruce Bagemihl, whose book Biological Exuberance I reviewed a couple of years ago. He classifies sexual activity into five main categories: courtship, affection, sex, pair bonding and parenting. His book is concerned with homosexual behaviour in the animal world, but the classification applies equally well to human sexual behaviour. In that context, marriage is just another word for pair bonding. In many species of birds and mammals there is a very strong instinct for two individuals to form a lifelong partnership. The partnership is usually heterosexual, but for reasons that are still not understood in terms of natural selection most pair bonding species also have a significant homosexual population. So it is with humans. At its simplest, personal level, a marriage is just a commitment between two people to spend their lives together. I have heard that that is exactly what marriage meant in Anglo-Saxon Britain, before the church got in on the act and tried to make marriage into a sacrament, and before governments began to surround marriage with legal rights and restrictions. Marriage also has a social dimension. It is not just a private agreement between two individuals, but something that they want the rest of society to acknowledge. As far as Mary and I are concerned, we expect to be treated as a couple, and we don't like it if one of us is invited to take part in some social occasion without the other one being included. But this is where Michael Warner's opposition to marriage starts to come in. If marriage is regarded as the norm, then those who by choice or otherwise don't have a partner are going to feel discriminated against. That was certainly the case with my parents' generation, when social norms were more rigid, and unmarried adults were looked on as being distinctly deviant. Maybe it's less of a problem these days, when lifestyles are more varied and many marriages end in divorce. The third aspect of marriage is the political and legal side of it. Governments encourage marriage by giving married couples all sorts of benefits, in taxation and pensions legislation for example. Basically, this is because it is in the state's interest that people should live in stable "family" units. Michael Warner might not like that, but it seems fair enough to me that the government should encourage social stability in this way. What most governments have failed to do up until now is to extend these benefits to a wider class than just heterosexually married couples. In my opinion, any legal advantages given to married couples ought obviously to be available to gay as well as straight couples, and also to other units such as single parent families, communes and kibbutzim. Some European countries have begun to go in that direction, but as usual Britain drags its feet. If governments won't change legislation so as to recognise non-traditional forms of marriage, can individuals take the law into their own hands? Bryan has been looking at this possibility. He says
That sounds like an interesting idea to me, one that might help to force the pace of social change. It's not the complete answer, of course. Members of an LLC would presumably be able to operate a joint bank account, for example, but they might not be recognised as each other's next of kin by a hospital. There is a long way to go before society recognises marriage in a sufficiently wide sense. And as Michael Warner justifiably complains, there is a long way to go before married couples recognise the social discrimination faced by those who are not married.
At last, after a long, boring summer at home, we are off on holiday in a couple of days. We leave for Málaga very early on Sunday morning and we'll be staying there for two weeks. We'll be there for our grandson Tom's second birthday on the 29th. Mary is apprehensive about the journey. She is beginning to show some slight improvement with her allergies, but the flight is likely to be difficult for her if there are smells of aviation fuel or perfume from other passengers. We have arranged for the airline to have oxygen available for her, and I think that she should be able to manage okay. Once we arrive in Spain there shouldn't be too much of a problem because we have been there many times before and know the area well. We have a lot of preparation to do. Because Mary's diet is so restricted we shall have to take all sorts of strange foods, like quinoa and buckwheat, that we might not be able to buy over there. We have also had to warn the hotel not to use any kind of scented disinfectant or "air freshener" (a misnomer if ever there was one) in our room. I hope that the air conditioning does not waft allergenic smells into the room. Before signing off, I want to come back to that competition one more time. A reader, Ed, sent me an email about "AW = S of L", which prompted me to think again about this clue, and I realised that it stands for "Ash Wednesday = start of Lent". (I probably should have said that the competition is a fundraising event by a local church, and some of the clues are vaguely church related. That makes them easier.) Now there is only one clue left to crack: "CC = MA". I thought that might stand for "cricket captain = Mike Atherton", but I'm pretty sure that can't be right. Not only is it very parochially English, but I don't think it's true. I don't have the slightest interest in cricket, but I am fairly sure that Mike Atherton, although he is in the England cricket team, is not the captain and probably never has been. But having thought of that possibility, I find that I can't clear it from my mind to think of other possible solutions. If you have any ideas on this one, please tell me. I have to go now, to get some stuff ready for the trip to Spain. So I'll leave you with this postcard, which a friend of Mary's brought for her a few days ago. When she saw the caption, she said "I can't believe that date says nineteen ninety two."
Come to think of it, I ought not to make fun of American politicians. It's too much like shooting fish in a barrel. But I can't resist closing with this magnificent quote from George W. Bush, in an address to Congress in April: "Mathematics are one of the fundamentaries of the educationalization of our youth." If you don't believe me, do a Google search on the word fundamentaries, which has never been used before or since. I haven't checked educationalization, but I imagine that is also unique. I came across that quote in the DMV Mitteilungen, the newsletter of the German Mathematical Society. It was accompanied by a plaintive little note saying "Übersetzt mir das jemand in's Deutsche?" ("Will someone translate that into German for me?") I'll be back some time in September. ADDED SATURDAY 25 AUGUST. Christine phoned this morning to say that she and Simon have cracked the remaining clue in the competition. "CC = MA" stands for "Cassius Clay is Mohammed Ali". It's so obvious, once you know the answer. We should all have seen it long ago, especially since we already had the similar clue about Marilyn Monroe. So now we have a complete set of answers. The closing date for the competition is not until the beginning of November, and the prizes (for the first three correct solutions opened) are something like £10 gift vouchers. So nobody is going to get rich on the proceeds. While I'm tidying up loose ends, I have to admit I was was wrong about "educationalization" (or "educationalizing" - reports differ on the actual words that the linguistically innovative President used). I did a Google search and found to my dismay that both these grotesque neologisms are apparently in widespread use. I propose as an economy measure that we should halve the number of syllables by reverting to the traditional word "education". That's all for now. The packing is all done, and we'll have an early night in readiness for the taxi which will arrive at 4.30 tomorrow morning to take us to the airport. Then we are off for two weeks in sunny Spain. Woohoo!
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