Three Cunard Queens in New York

On Sunday, January 13, all three of Cunard's great cruise ships: Queen Elizabeth 2, on one of her last voyages before going into retirement as a floating hotel in Dubai; Queen Mary 2; and Queen Victoria, on her maiden voyage, all entered New York harbor.


Above is Mary, docked at Pier 17, Brooklyn, located in the Red Hook neighborhood. This shot was taken at about 7:15 a.m. from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

That afternoon, I took the subway to West 59th Street in Manhattan, and walked over to the Cruise Ship Terminal, where QE2 and Victoria were docked.



Here's the bow of QE2, with the funnel and upper superstructure of Victoria looming over the pier to the south.


QE2 was bunkering at the time of my visit. This view shows the clean, "shipshape" lines of her superstructure (in contrast to those of newer ships like Victoria). It's hard for me to believe this ship has completed forty years of service, including being pressed into duty as a troopship during the brief but bloody Falklands War. Note the shadow of Victoria on QE2's superstructure.


Above is a view of Victoria. To my eye, the design of her superstructure, with the decks cantilevered outward like an inverted wedding cake, is not as pleasing as that of QE2. Improvements in hull design and more effective stabilization have allowed naval architects to design ships that look more and more like landlocked resort hotels. This has been a boon for the ships' owners, who can accommodate more passengers and provide more commodious public spaces in their vessels.

Note the small, twin-hulled boat just below Victoria's bow.

Here the boat, evidently used by crew members to inspect Victoria's waterline, is being hauled up by crane, to be stowed inside the ship's hull.
Finally, below is a view of Victoria's bow, with QE2's funnel in the background.

That evening, the ships left their docks and gathered near the mouth of the Hudson, just north of the Statue of Liberty, where they remained during a fireworks display before departing on their voyages. Unfortunately, lacking a tripod, I was unable to get any good photographs of this event, which I watched from the roof of my building.


This Dutch Site has animated views of QE2 and Victoria arriving at their piers, and also still photos of the fireworks. To see the latter, click on the word vertrek near the bottom of the page, then click on volgende to advance from one photo to the next.

Farewell to "The Third Bridge"

Two mornings ago, while on my customary early run through Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO, I paused to take a photo of part of Osman Akan's "The Third Bridge" illuminated by the rising sun. "Third Bridge", which was installed last October, was due to be taken down today.

Johnny Podres, 1932-2008

"Millennium," yes; "pandemonium"!
Roy Campanella leaps high. Dodgerdom

crowned, had Johnny Podres on the mound.

- Marianne Moore, "Hometown Piece for Messrs Alston and Reese"

I've told before how and why the Brooklyn Dodgers became my first love in baseball, and that 1955 was my first remembered and defining World Series. So it's with particular sorrow that I read that Johnny Podres, winner of game seven of that Series, and of the Dodgers' first championship, and that over the hated Yankees, died today at seventy-five.

I'm glad, however, to see that Johnny's fellow pitcher from the '55 team, Don Newcombe, still lives, along with teammate Tommy Lasorda and former Dodger GM Buzzie Bavasi.

Update: Arch, in a comment on my parallel post in WikiFray, says Bob Gibson is for him what Podres was for me. I couldn't find a poem about Gibson, but I did find another blog with a link to an MP3 of my favorite baseball writer, Roger Angell, talking about Gibson. Anyway, Arch, I've got to admit: Gibson was simply the greatest pitcher of his era, and probably one of the five or so best of all time. Oh, yeah, and as I've said before, if I had to pick a team purely on aesthetics, the Cards would be my choice.

"Free Fouad" update: please sign the petition.

An earlier post called attention to the plight of Fouad Al-Farhan, a Saudi citizen and blogger who, just over a month ago, was arrested and is being held in an undisclosed location without any publicly announced charge against him. His only offense, apparently, was criticizing some government officials. This action appears to run counter to King Abdullah's own declared intent to allow greater freedom of speech and the press.

Ahmed Al-Omran, publisher of the excellent English language blog Saudi Jeans, has linked to his blog a petition to free Fouad. The link to the petition is here. Please follow the link and consider adding your name to mine and to the almost 900 (as of the time I write this) people who have signed and submitted it. Note that you may edit the words of the letter to suit your own taste or convictions (wimp that I am, I changed "demand" in the first line to "respectfully request", noting that it was addressed to high Saudi and U.S. officials).

Get to know Andrew Olmsted.

I recently did, if only by reading his words, and that's as much, unfortunately, as I ever will. He's dead. He was a blogger, like me, until a sniper's bullet found him a few days ago. A major in the U.S. Army, serving in Iraq, he had prepared a final message, which he entrusted to a friend to post to his blog in the event of his death. It's here, and I offer it without further comment on my part, which would be superfluous.

Well, OK, I will add this to the many good things being said about him: he was a Yankee fan who converted to the Red Sox. And, as he noted concerning the brevity of his life: "few of us are destined to make more than a tiny dent in history's Green Monster."

He suggested that the reader of his final post "put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984)"; so, for you, Andy, here's Joan Jett:



Kudos to Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings for being the caretaker and publisher of Andy's final post.

Update: Hilzoy has posted this on Obsidian Wings:

A member of Andy Olmsted's family has just written me to say that if people want to do something in honor of him, they can send donations to a fund that has been set up for the four children of CPT Thomas Casey, who served under Andy and was killed while trying to help him. The address is here:

Capt. Thomas Casey Children's fund
P.O. Box 1306
Chester, CA 96020

Thanks so much.

College football wrap-up: Tigers truimphant.

A thoroughly bizarre season, which started with a huge upset, and saw my alma mater rise briefly to glory in the AP and USA Today polls before falling to 23rd and then getting pounded by Oregon in the Sun Bowl, has come to what for me is a somewhat satisfactory conclusion with the Bayou Bengals' (for whom I've long had a soft spot) convincing victory over Ohio State, a team I've despised since the days of the loathsome Woody Hayes.

New York gets it again, and again ...

A month or so ago I was walking through a subway station when I saw a poster advertising the movie I Am Legend, showing Will Smith leading a German Shepherd along the Manhattan abutment of a ruined Brooklyn Bridge. Its center span is missing, and its main cables droop from the towers into the water. On the Brooklyn side, near where I live, the buildings (including, perhaps significantly, the tower housing the headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses) look intact, but lifeless. Above Will's head, under a gloomy, sepia-toned sky, are the words: "The last man on earth is not alone."

A few days ago, again in the subway, I saw a poster for a movie with the bucolic title Cloverfield; however, the scene on the poster was far from idyllic. It showed a decapitated Statue of Liberty, torch arm still aloft, and, beyond it, fires raging in lower Manhattan in the vicinity of my office.

Legend, it seems, is about a plague; a human-generated plague caused by a mutant measles virus made to combat cancer. Cloverfield is just a good old monster movie, though, no doubt, with more sophisticated special effects than say, the first New-York-gets-trashed movie I can remember seeing, the 1953 release The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, in which a gigantic amphibious dinosaur-like creature, Rhedosaurus, freed from arctic ice by a U.S. H-bomb test somehow conducted with the compliance of the Canadian government (oh, for those halcyon days when Louis St. Laurent was Ike's favorite golfing buddy), makes its way southward to its ancient hunting grounds, now inconveniently occupied by The World's Greatest City. In this respect, Beast prefigures the original 1954 Godzilla, also put into action by a nuke test, in which the creature trashes Tokyo (a 1998 remake had Godzilla attacking New York, thereby bringing things full circle).

I generally avoid movies that feature the destruction of, or even major damage to, the city I live in and love. I did make an exception for The Day After Tomorrow, but only because a friend plays a part in it. I had thought to make a list of such movies. For me, an especially gruesome example is Fail-Safe (1964), in which POTUS orders the thermonuclear vaporization of New York in order to convince the surviving members of the Soviet chain of command that we are sincere in saying that our obliteration of Moscow was just a mistake caused by a communications fiasco.

Anyway, I quickly realized such a list would be unmanageably long and probably still way short of complete. So, I invite you to submit your favorite examples. If you want to submit movies in which other prominent cities get laid waste, feel free. If anyone can confirm or deny the existence of a movie called The Creature That Devoured Cleveland, I'll be grateful. A quick Google search left the question unanswered.

Update: Somehow (probably because it was in the December 26 Times, which was part of a pile of papers waiting for us when we got back from Massena and which were gone through quickly), I missed Sewell Chan's piece on this very subject, in which he includes a list of movies in which New York is obliterated.

Some Stan Rogers for Dawn Coyote.

Dawn replied to my New Year's shout-outs, noting that my post on lake ships made her think of the song "The Mary Ellen Carter", as performed by Stan Rogers.


Here's Stan again, singing "Make and Break Harbour," from his first album, Fogarty's Cove, with a montage of fishing scenes:


Finally, here's a CBC piece showing the icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier sailing in arctic waters, to the accompaniment of Stan's song, "Northwest Passage":

Cold day at Port Henry.

Taken from a window on Amtrak's Adirondack on December 22, this shot shows the Port Henry, New York railroad station, originally built by the Delaware & Hudson, now part of Canadian Pacific. Beyond the station is an Alco diesel locomotive, ore jenny and caboose of the Lake Champlain & Moriah, a short line that hauled iron ore from nearby mines to a dock at Port Henry where it was loaded on barges for transport to distant steel mills. (For a detailed description of the mining industry in the Moriah region in the late 19th century, see this 1873 article from the New York Times.) I've featured this loco and cars on the blog before, in photos taken during the summer.

Classic lake boats: a dying breed.

In a couple of earlier posts (here and here), I've written about, and posted photos of, the unique ships (called, I've now learned, "boats" by true Great Lakes sailors) built for bulk cargo (usually grain or ore) transport on the Great Lakes. Yesterday, thanks to Tom Turner of NYCMaritime, I received a link to this story by Jim Nichols, in the Grand Rapids Press, about the scrapping of Calumet (photo above, by Dick Lund, from Dick's Great Lakes Ship Photos & More), a particularly handsome classic laker (i.e. one with the wheelhouse and crew quarters at the bow). She was launched in 1929 as the Myron C. Taylor, of the U.S. Steel Corporation fleet, and traded under that name and ownership for most of her life, before being sold and assuming her present and final name a few years ago. With her passing, the fleet of classic lakers continues to diminish; soon, all will be gone except for a few that may be preserved as museum pieces.

I forwarded a copy of the Calumet article to Mark Crawford, who told me he had served some years ago as a crewman on lakers. He replied, sending me a photo of the William B. Schiller (see below), also of the U.S. Steel fleet, on which he had sailed.


Schiller was a particularly fine example of the classic laker type, long and lean, with trim lines and a tall stack, and sporting a bowspirt. According to the records of American Shipbuilding (a company later purchased by George Steinbrenner), she was delivered to her owners in 1910, and went to the breakers in 1978. Sixty eight years of service is remarkable for a ship, though Calumet managed seventy eight.

Of his days as a Lakes seaman, Mark wrote:

I started out working as a deckhand and after a few months was promoted to watchman, the easiest job imaginable -- my work consisted of measuring any water collecting in the empty ballast tanks when the boat was cargoless, providing relief for the wheelsman, making coffee for the pilot house crew, and swabbing the forecastle deck. The rest of the time I would spend reading. My watches were from 4PM to 8PM and 4AM to 8AM, so I got to see almost every daybreak and sunset. I read a massive number of books at the time.

Mark's decision to leave this contemplative life (though one not without danger: he was a Lakes crewman near the time of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald with all hands) meant that the Lakes' loss would be the art world's gain.

Free Fouad!

In Saudi Arabia, it seems, blogging about political prisoners can land you in jail. See the New York Times story here.

Update: As the linked "Free Fouad" site now shows, an NGO called the Committee to Protect Journalists has sent a strong letter to King Abdullah, in care of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., referring to the Saudi government's expressed commitment to greater press freedom, and urging the immediate release of Fouad Al-Farhan.

New Year's shout-outs.

It's time to look back and acknowledge, with thanks, the folks who have encouraged and supported this blog over the past year.

First, enormous thanks, hugs and kisses to Martha and Liz, my wife and daughter, respectively, for their patience with my time-consuming and too-often distracting hobby. (As I've noted in a previous post, David Carr, of the New York Times, had this observation about having a blog: "[T]hink of it as a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention." Liz would much rather I had a Lab.)

Next, kudos to Homer Fink of Brooklyn Heights Blog, and Dawn Coyote of WikiFray, which provide me with alternative fora in which to serve up my half-baked ideas, as well as very productive links to this blog. Dawn, thanks for picking up the ball and running with it when Ender put it on the ground. Homer, I promise to have a column for you, real soon.

Louise Crawford, unofficial Jewish mother of the Brooklyn blogosphere, has been a great supporter of S-AB, giving encouraging commentary and making productive links again and again and again. Special thanks for including a mention of S-AB in this year's Park Slope 100, even though I'm not a Sloper.

Rundeep gets a special mention for having posted one of the nicest things ever written about S-AB, and about yours truly.

Allan Tremmel is a high school and college friend I'd lost contact with until he discovered S-AB, and I heard from him for the first time in at least twenty years. Since then, we've corresponded by e-mail, mostly about my having ended up where he started out (Brooklyn), but also about our old common interest, astronomy. In addition, he's put me in touch with other high school friends. A happy, healthy and prosperous 2008 to you and yours, Al.

Old Fray friends Twiffer and Persephone have been faithful readers, and Twiff has posted frequent and incisive comments (but, face it, T., you'll never get me to like the DH rule). This year, though, they especially distinguished themselves by bringing Li'l Macduff to life.

Other Fray folk who have been S-AB supporters include august, Grant Miller Media, Keifus, John McG (who gets special thanks for giving me my first "Digg"), Archaeopteryx, Hipparchia (who gets special thanks for "tagging" me for the Pharyngula mutating genre meme), TenaciousK (who I am delighted to see has resurfaced and with whom I share my March 19 birthday), catnapping, The Dread Pundit Bluto, topazz (who, alas, appears to have ended her blog), and (though he'll no doubt deny it) Schadenfreude.

No discussion of Fray friends would be complete without mentioning the return of Moira Redmond. Moira, I promise I'll be back for at least an occasional Fray post in the near future.

Other Brooklyn bloggers rating special mention for their support are The Changeling of Bed-Stuy Blog, EJ of BK 11201, Brooklyn Beat of Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn, Xris of Flatbush Gardener, Bob Guskind of Gowanus Lounge, Rob Lenihan of Luna Park Gazette, Miss Heather of newyorkshitty, and Gary of runs brooklyn/brooklyn runs who, even though he's moved away and stopped adding to his excellent blog, still visits SA-B regularly from his new home in Iowa.

Other bloggers who have been supportive include Heights neighbor TS, who is one of two contributors to Instaputz; Brain Tracer, who believes in the psychic power of MP3 players (a topic on which I may post ere long); Joe Martini, of Give 'n' Go; Mother Jones, R.N., of Nurse Ratched's Place; N. Pepperell, of Rough Theory; rhea, of The Boomer Chronicles; El Cabrero, of The Goat Rope; whoever does Going Like Sixty; and, of course, the always faithful Sometimes Saintly Nick.

Resolutions? You want resolutions? I think Chaylene may have the right idea (though, as expected, El Cabrero has more considered thoughts on the matter).

Sampling the Sam Adams Brewmaster's Collection

Two days ago I bought a twelve pack of the Samuel Adams "Brewmaster's Collection", in which you get a couple of bottles of the flagship Boston Lager, along with two each of five specialty brews (this collection is obviously a seasonal one, consisting entirely of dark, full-bodied brews thought especially suitable for cold weather consumption). Today I tried one of each of the five heavyweights, with these results:

Honey Porter: Typical rich porter flavor, with, as advertised, a hint of honey. This had spent several hours in the fridge, and might have been better served just slightly chilled.

Black Lager: Rich but bland; might also have benefited from less refrigeration.

Scotch Ale: According to the label, this is made with peat-roasted barley like that used to make Scotch Whisky. The smoky flavor comes through, but the hops are a bit strident.

Irish Red: Great hop/barley balance; a well-crafted ale.

Brown Ale: Fascinating counterplay of caramel and citrus. My favorite of the lot.

Christmas eve thoughts of a wanna-believer.

Two Sundays ago, at a festive mass of lessons and carols, the Grace Church choir sang this:

Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long.
And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took,
As clerkës finden written
In their book.
Nor had one apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Then had never Our Lady
A-been heaven's queen.
Blessed be the time
That apple taken was.
Therefore we may singen
Deo gratias!

This wasn't the first time I'd heard this Chaucerian-era song, but it was the first that I'd focused on its meaning: that Original Sin, the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, was an occasion for thanks to God, because it allowed for Mary to become queen of heaven. In other words, no Fall, no need for redemption, and consequently no need for Mary to give birth to God's son so that he might, by sacrifice on the cross, atone for humanity's sins.

So, what if Eve hadn't fallen for the serpent's persuasion? One of the punishments inflicted by God for her and Adam's transgression is, "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." Were the primordial couple thus to be immortal so long as they refrained from this defiance of divine authority? Another punishment, inflicted on Eve, was painful childbirth. Does this mean that, absent the Fall, she would have been the beneficiary of a divine epidural? Or does it mean that the original intent was for her never to have children; indeed, for her to be Adam's helpmate, but not his bedmate? According to Genesis, after the Fall, they first were embarrassed by their nakedness before each other. This introduces a notion of sexual tension that hadn't existed before. Somehow, we seem to equate "original sin" with sex, but Genesis avers that it was the acquisition of knowledge; specifically, the knowledge of good and evil.

Later in Genesis, though, we get an explicit equation of knowledge with sex, in the statement, "Lot knew his wife." From this we get the nudge-and-a-wink expression, "know in the Biblical sense." "Carnal knowledge" is in fact an archaic legal euphemism for sexual intercourse (and also the title of a 1971 movie, starring Ann-Margret, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Jack Nicholson; written by Jules Feiffer and directed by Mike Nichols).

The connection between knowledge and sex is one to which I've alluded before here, and one that's been troubling my mind of late in connection with my fraught relationship with Christianity. I am ever mindful of the tension between belief and intellectuality, and of my resistance to accepting, in the words of the Holy Father (for me, an Episcopalian, a persuasive but not infallible authority), propositions that are not empirically falsifiable. My aversion to "faith" in the sense of unjustified belief, which carries with it as a corollary the spurning of those strands of inquiry which might cast doubt on such belief, is grounded on a visceral resistance to the circumscription of the pursuit of knowledge.

I refer to myself as a "wanna-believer" because I do wish I could believe, not in a Bible-as-literal-truth sense, but at least in a sense that could impart more meaningful content to the liturgy that I practice. With that, I wish you all a merry Christmas.

12/25 update: Did Ted Burke write this poem as an answer to my post? I'd like to think so. Even if, as seems more likely, he didn't, I still like it (as George Plimpton so mellifluously said in that Dry Dock Savings Bank ad in the 1970s) eNORmously.

Yes, I'm still alive.

I've survived my first attempt to teach a continuing legal education seminar to a class of other lawyers (got to be a tough audience); even got some applause at the end. The topic? Oh, yeah: "Ethical issues and the use of the internet." Any questions?

Meanwhile, my wife, the archivist, has given me the schedule for the lectures in the spring 2008 session of the Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar at the Weill Cornell Medical College. They all look very interesting. For those of you in the New York area, these lectures are at 2:00 p.m. on the day indcated, in the Baker Tower Conference Room F-1200, 525 East 68th Street.

January 2, Bradley Collins, Ph.D., Parsons School of Design, "Dysfunctional Holy Families: Loss, Rage and Desire in Renaissance Images of the Virgin and Child."

February 6, Dana Rovang, Doctoral Candidate, University of Chicago, "Habeas Corpus: or, why John Haslam will never get his due."

February 20, Sabine Arnaud, Ph.D., Texas A&M, "An imaginary and fantastick sickness? The narrativization of hysteria in eighteenth century French and English medicine."

March 5, Rev. Curtis Hart, M.Div., Weill Cornell Medical College, "William James' 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' Revisited." (No mention of whether nitrous oxide will be provided.)

March 19 (my 62nd birthday!), Siovahn A. Walker, Doctoral Candidate, Stanford University, "Heaven and Hell as Places in the Mind: Three Twelfth Century Witnesses."

April 2, Sander Gilman, Ph.D., Emory University, "Jews and Alcohol: Genetic and Social Explanations for Jewish Immunity to Alcoholism." (This brings to mind a quip by Al Coblenz, erstwhile part owner of the late, great Lion's Head: "We get an interesting clientele: Jewish drunks, Italian intellectuals and Irish lovers.")

April 16, Barbara F. Leavy, Ph.D., Cornell Weill Medical College, "Did Laius Kill Oedipus? The Continuing Debate."

May 21, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ph.D., Princeton University, "A Brief History of Common Sense." (It would have to be.)

More Bothy Band.

While I'm sure that my earlier post was enough to convince you of their greatness, here they are, circa 1977, doing one of those amazing, I-dare-you-to-sit-still tunes, this one called "Drunken Landlady":

And this is Michael O'Domhnaill singing "Tiocfaidh an Samhradh" ("Summer is Coming"), accompanied by Kevin Burke on fiddle and Donal Lunny on guitar. From the comments on YouTube, I get the sad news that Michael has died. Enjoy his voice, which lives on.

Update: More about Michael here.

First snowfall of the season.

From the foot of Montague Street, looking westward to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the harbor and lower Manhattan.


From the Promenade, looking eastward along Montague Street.

Check out Brain Tracings

Every once in a while I find a blog I think rates special mention as well as a place on my blogroll. The latest is Brain Tracings (Saw This and Thought of....), the creation of an American woman living in London. Her blog is quirky and eclectic, and replete with the sort of off-the-wall connect-the-dots kind of observations I love. Besides, we have similar tastes in music.

Oh, yeah. She did me the honor of putting S-AB on her blogroll before I ever saw Brain Tracings. Trust me, though, this isn't just an instance of, "You scratch my back...."

Please be patient, my friends.

Real life is about to interfere with my blogging time, again. I'll try to post when I can, but it's likely to be a bit spotty until after December 12.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this view of the Manhattan skyline, as seen at dusk from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Near the left, with the pointed top, is Cass Gilbert's masterpiece, the Woolworth Building. Near the right, surmounted by the gilded statue Civic Fame, is McKim, Mead, and White's Municipal Building.


12/2 update: I've learned, via Technorati, that this post and my earlier one about my 10,000th visitor (as well as Louise Crawford's nice post in OTBKB about that), have been linked to in a blog called Gay Stars. As best I can tell, this is because GS aggregates lots of stuff that's not necessarily gay-oriented, including anything that includes the word "boomer." In any event, anything that improves my Technorati authority is greatly appreciated, so, thanks! (Some time back, I saw that my blog was linked to something called Voyeur Porn, and found this was because the author had done a search for "Judy Star" that led him to this post, evidently because of the mention of Fairport Convention's first woman singer, Judy Dyble and the use of the word "star" elsewhere in the post. Mr. Voyeur published the link with the note, "Frankly, not what I was looking for, but you might find it an interesting read.")

A day on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Under a overcast sky, the rising sun illuminates lower Manhattan buildings.


Early in the afternoon, the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia's container vessel Saudi Abha, having just left Red Hook Container Port, turns in the East River to head out Governors Island Channel toward the ocean.


Governors Island and the Bayonne to Staten Island Bridge against the backdrop of a brilliant sunset.

Visitor number 10,000 is from Bexley, Kent, England.

You visited my blog at about 9:30 p.m. your time on 26 November. Your ISP is NTL Internet, your OS is Windows XP, and you browse with Internet Explorer 7.0. To claim your prize (a CD of vintage American R&B), please send me your snail-mail address either by comment to this post, or by e-mail (use the link on my blog profile). Congratulations!

The Hillary action figure is safe.

Postscript to my screed on consequentialism.

I posted earlier on this topic here. Aaron tells why, if you're shot down over enemy-occupied territory, it's much better to take shelter among consequentialists than among deontologists here.

Aaron might similarly appreciate my post here.

Visit number 10,000 is rapidly approaching.

Even with slow traffic over the Thanksgiving weekend, S-AB is likely to reach the 10,000 visit mark in a few days. If I can identify my 10,000th visitor (I'll post location of origin and whatever other identifying details I can get from my Sitemeter, so that you can reply by comment to my post or by e-mail), I'll send you as a prize a practically virgin CD, Rang Tang Ding Dong, by the Cellos. They were a five man doo-wop group of the 1950s who produced a small but interesting body of work. Originally called the Marcals until someone, probably Charles Merenstein of Apollo Records, advised them that being named for a popular brand of toilet paper wasn't a great career move, they had one charted hit, "Rang Tang Ding Dong (I'm the Japanese Sandman)", but this CD collection also includes such unheralded gems as "Juicy Crocodile", "The Be-Bop Mouse", the dreamy ballad "You Took My Love" and two versions of the jumping "What's the Matter For You?"

My Sitemeter now (Tuesday, November 20, 4:00 p.m. EST), stands at 9,854. Visit early and often.

"Values voting" in Australia?

According to this article in today's New York Sun, the Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, holds a solid lead in the polls over the Coalition led by incumbent Prime Minister Howard, with only a few days left until the election. This lead, the article says, can be traced back to a surge of Labor support following a visit to New York by Mr. Rudd, in which he and Col Allan, the Australian Murdoch protege who edits the New York Post, went out for a night of heavy drinking, culminating in a visit to Scores, where bouncers threatened to eject Mr. Rudd for touching the dancers and other "inappropriate behavior."

There's a great animated comment on this by Nicholson in The Australian, here.

Evidently, "values voting" Down Under can have different implications than it does here.

The Bothy Band

The Bothy Band was one of my favorite traditional Irish groups. Here's an example to show why:

The Bothy Band lasted barely four years (1975-79), but made much marvelous music in their time together. After they broke up, Donal Lunny (bouzouki) returned to Planxty, and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill (keyboards and vocals) and her brother, Micheal O'Domhnaill (guitar and vocals; spoken intro on the video above), emigrated to the U.S., where they have performed in several groups. Others in the group were: Paddy Keenan on uilleann pipes; Matt Molloy (later to join the Chieftains) on flute; and either Tommy Peoples or Kevin Burke, depending on when the video was made, on fiddle.

Update: More Bothy Band here.

On quantification, and keeping score (not a sports post).

The week before last, the New York City Board of Education released "A" through "F" letter grades for almost all (some were deferred for more evaluation) of the City's public schools. While something like 60% of schools received an "A" or "B", some of what are thought of as very successful or greatly improved schools received lower grades. I've already weighed in on this subject in Brooklyn Heights Blog (see comment thread under this post); however, I felt the need to say something more considered and philosophical about this issue.

Unsurprisingly, Louise Crawford beat me to the punch in OTBKB , with these astute words:

Report cards are reductive things. As [is] ... reliance on quantitative ways of assessing things. Numbers, numbers, numbers.

How high did you score? How much did you sell? How much do you make? How much? How much?

It's the American way.

But why is it the American way? Brighter people than me, like Alexis de Tocqueville, David Reisman and Philip Slater, have addressed this question. I'll recount three commonplace observations that, like most conventional wisdom, are useful if not complete explanations. Perhaps most familiar is the notion that Americans are obsessed with scorekeeping because we don't have a rigid class or caste system that simply assigns social status at birth (though anyone who thinks class is unimportant here should consult Paul Fussell). The fact that we can be both economically and socially mobile makes us keen to measure where we are with respect to our fellows.

The second notion is that Americans are attracted to quantification because we distrust subjectivity. To most Americans, subjectivity means favoritism, whether that be the favoritism in-groups employ to perpetuate their power, or the favoritism out-groups get by using the political process to obtain what in-groups see as unfair advantages. Somehow, reducing things to numbers, or to letter grades supposedly based on quantitative measurements, dispels these suspicions.

The third is that life is just too damned complicated for us to deal with all the complexity of evaluating the choices available to us in any meaningful way, so we look for shortcuts. "Experts" are happy to provide directions that will shorten our decision-making journey. Despite our inclination to distrust others' subjective judgment, we can trust these experts because they dress their conclusions in supposedly "objective", quantitative garb.

Paul Tibbets and consequentialism.

A while back, I was planning a post on the topic of consequentialism; essentially, the belief that the ethical measure of an action or inaction is its consequences, at least as reasonably foreseen by the actor. My take on this was that we are all consequentialists in the last analysis. Those who claim to be deontologists; that is, those who believe that the ethical nature of an action depends upon whether it is in accordance with a duty incumbent upon the actor, whether that duty is believed to be ordained by divine command or, as with Kant, arising from our status as free and rational beings, are really saying that we are too shortsighted to evaluate fully the consequences of actions, and that, therefore, we must yield our judgment to hard and fast rules. In other words, deontology could be said to be consequentialism with a strong gloss of epistemological modesty.

For example, while a consequentialist may argue that destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells is ethically OK because it provides the means to alleviate great human suffering, while causing no pain to the pre-conscious embryos (this is a utilitarian argument, utilitarianism being perhaps the best-known form of consequentialism), a deontologist might argue that such an action violates an overarching duty to respect human life from the moment of conception. If pressed to give a reason for such a rule, however, the deontologist might invoke a "slippery slope" argument, that is, if we allow this, we are taking the first step on a downhill path that may lead to the cloning of malformed embryos with minimal brain function, to be raised in vitro simply to grow organs to be harvested for transplant, and, beyond that, to the use of viable humans with substandard mental function for the same purpose. Or, she might give a more far-reaching, "Burkean" answer: by calling into question a time-honored notion of what's good and proper, we are disturbing a complex system of societal mores, and this may have consequences well beyond what we have anticipated. Note, however, that both of these arguments appeal to consequences, and therefore are consequentialist. (I now know that John Stuart Mill anticipated this argument in his preface to Utilitarianism almost a century and a half ago.)

What inspired me to write this was the death of Paul Tibbets, and, in particular, this piece by Bob Greene about him. What struck me was the sheer consequentialism that sustained him after that fateful day over Hiroshima. His bio shows him to be a consummate warrior. Warriors seem to be archetypal deontologists. (I need only recall my last year of college, when my roommate and I had a deal: every time I made him suffer through a Dylan album, he could make me sit through his recording of the greatest speeches of General Douglas MacArthur. I can still hear in my mind the peroration of his farewell address to the Corps of Cadets at West Point: "Duty, honor, country, and the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.") Yet Greene's piece quotes Tibbets as explaining why he never lost sleep over the bombing as being, not "It was my duty", but

because "we stopped the killing." He was at peace, he said, because "I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did."

Here, indeed, is Jeremy Bentham's felicitous calculus at its most stark. Dostoyevsky challenged this kind of reasoning by asking something to the effect: If a world of eternal happiness could be purchased by the suffering and death of one innocent child, would you buy the ticket?

Perhaps the thing about war is, it makes us all buy the ticket.

Paul Tibbets photo - U.S. Air Force, public domain.

11/18 update: Dawn Coyote posted this comment on WikiFray, where I cross-posted the text above:

I don't know if war makes us buy the ticket, or if it just makes us starkly aware that we've bought the ticket. In the increasingly connected world, it takes a determined averting of the gaze to remain unaware of how many of the surpluses we enjoy come to us as a result of deficits elsewhere. Maybe we're all Paul Tibbets these days—if we're lucky, or powerfully motivated to quell our cognitive dissonance.

I'll confess to feeling a bit sheepish about my last sentence. When I wrote it, it was past midnight, I'd had my second snifter of Cognac (a third would have been disastrous, as I've learned through hard experience), and I was just looking for a way to wrap the thing up. It was almost as bad as following the advice Michael O'Donoghue gave to aspiring novelists in "How to Write Good", which was published in National Lampoon sometime in the 1970s. If your plot gets too complicated and you can't figure out how to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, he wrote, simply type the words: "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck."

Anyway, I had great plans to extend the argument to include the contemporary debate over the use of torture. At least I can direct you to a lively discussion here, with thanks to friend and neighbor "ts" of Instaputz for the link.

While I'm giving thanks (we're getting into that week), a great big hat tip to John McG for my first-ever (at least that I know of) "digg." John, I'm trying to figure out the Episcopalian analogue to making a Novena.

All for now, as I am suddenly run over by a truck.

Fog.

Brooklyn Bridge from northern entrance to Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park.


Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn Bridge Park.


Lower Manhattan from northern end of Brooklyn Heights Promenade.


Maple tree behind house on Columbia Heights, as seen from Promenade.

Today, I'm proud to be a lawyer.

I don't blog much about law. It's not that I find my profession uninteresting (far from it); it's just that I need a forum to express my half-baked opinions on other subjects. Every once in a while, though, something makes me want to get up on a soapbox and yell, "I'm a lawyer and, by God, I'm proud of it!" I had that feeling last week when I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times showing a roomful of Pakistani lawyers who had gathered to organize a protest against the government's suspension of constitutional rights and protections and the summary sacking of the Supreme Court. Almost all were men, dressed more conservatively than most male New York lawyers, i.e. in dark suits, white shirts and conservative ties. Two were women, in dark skirts, white blouses and with aqua colored shawls draped from their heads. I later learned that these lawyers, along with many judges, had been summarily jailed with no recourse to any authority capable of, or willing to, enforce any notion of due process.

On Thursday I received an e-mail from Barry Kamins, President of the New York City Bar Association, notifying me and all other members that today, Tuesday the 13th, there would be a rally in front of the Supreme Court, New York County courthouse, to show solidarity with Pakistani lawyers. Today I took the subway to lower Manhattan, dressed, as Mr. Kamins urged, in my most conservative duds, to join the protest. Walking the corridor toward the subway exit, I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned, and was delighted to see two colleagues from the firm with which I have an affiliation, also headed to the rally. As we emerged from the station onto Foley Square, I was delighted to see a very large crowd on the courthouse steps (see photo above).


The highlight of the event was a brief talk by Ali Ahsan (see photo above), a Pakistan-born New York lawyer, whose father is president of the Pakistani Supreme Court Bar and has been imprisoned, and whose mother is subject to an arrest warrant. He said he was grateful that his parents' prominence would assure international attention to their cases, and expressed dismay that many others were not so fortunate. He said the turnout for the rally made him proud to be part of the New York legal community, and read an e-mail message from the University of Lahore Law School faculty and students expressing their gratitude for our support. Finally, he noted that the actions of the Pakistani government should not be countenanced as necessary to combat terrorism; indeed, they were more likely to foment it.