I'm mellowing in my old age

Someone on Wordcraft posted this link to an article showing various health and safety signs. The thrust of the article is that these signs represent the nanny state cosseting us from imagined dangers. Usually I too am in the first rank when it comes to mocking over-zealous health and safety or "political correctness gone mad" but I looked at it and couldn't really see any great objection to most of the signs.

"Please be aware of wasps nesting in this area" sounds like a reasonable warning to me, wasp stings can be dangerous - especially to children. If you know there are wasps in the area you could set your picnic somewhere else and avoid the problem. If they don't tell you, how will you know.

"Climbing into this bank..." may be a bit over the top but kids do stupid things. A warning might make them stop and think, unlikely I'll grant, but possible.

"Surfaces may become slippery when wet" is just a more polite way of saying "Watch out! This surface is wet."

The only ones that seem totally pointless to me are "This flower bed is covered by CCTV" and "Seats may become wet" and the first of those could just be because they have previously had trouble with vandals.

Maybe I'm just going soft in my old age but there doesn't seem to me to be any intrinsic problem with warning people of potential dangers that they may not have spotted.

And after typing all of that I'm wondering myself who this imposter is and what's happened to the real Bob Hale. Still, is there really anything wrong with a "better safe than sorry" attitude?

Oh dear.

Sign in Stratford, birthplace of the English language's most famous writer.

Remembering only monsters

I did a lesson today based around a short documentary film about Albert Schweitzer. With my morning class I had a preliminary discussion about what was to come and wasn't at all surprised to find out that none of them had heard of him. However afterwards, in the staffroom, I was shocked to find out that only one of the other teachers had heard of him and even she was only vaguely familiar with the name.
So in the afternoon class, after establishing that no one there had heard of him either, I asked how many people knew of Hitler. They were more or less contempories with Hitler being born 14 years after Schweitzer and dieing twenty years before him. Naturally everyone had heard of Hitler. Similarly everyone new Idi Amin and most knew Pol Pot. They even volunteered more names to add to the list - Mussolini, Saddam Hussein.

Then we watched the film, viewing it in sections, answering questions about it and discussing the issues raised. Finally I had them write their own brief biographies from their notes. It all worked very well.

Now, I realise that you know all about Albert Schweitzer already so you can skip this bit, but just in case anyone doesn't...

Albert Schweitzer was a German doctor who spent most of his life working as a medical missionary in Africa. He received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953. The newspapers of the day called him "The Greatest Man Alive". He was a passionate anti-war and anti-nuclear weapon advocate. He wrote books on medicine, theology, philosophy and music. He was a renowned concert organist. He devised a philosophy based on the principle of "reverence for live". He died in 1965, aged 90 having worked almost up to the end. He was a truly remarkable man.

And my unscientific straw poll found nobody who had heard of him.

It seems that good men are forgotten while the monsters - the Adolf Hitlers, the Idi Amins - are remembered through the ages; that you become better known by killing people than curing them. There must be something in the human psyche that draws us to this darker side of history, or perhaps it's just that we never learn about it in school and never even find out that it's there to learn.

It's not, as todays lessons showed, for lack of interest. They were two of the most successful lessons I've done this year. They paid attention to the DVD, answered the questions and were eager to discuss the issues raised. Four of the students asked me after the lessons if I could give them any information about buying biographies of Schweitzer or even any of his works, though I suspect that for the moment they would find them very heavy going.

That's what I call a great lesson outcome.

I just wish people knew more about the world's good men than its bad men. I suppose I can live in hope.

Metro Voices and walking round with my eyes closed

I've been asked to do another reading for City Voices. Well, not quite. There is a second regular venue opening up right in my home town of Bilston, Metro Voices. On Thursday 23rd July at 7:30 I will be reading selections from my descriptions of a recent visit to North Korea. Of course with the speed with which the situation over there is changing, I may have to rewrite it before then.

One interesting thing is the venue, the Cafe Metro. What's interesting is not only that I have never heard of it, but that when I looked it up it seems, according to the map to be no more than a dozen yards from my regular pub. This isn't the first time this has happened. Some time ago I was having a drink, and intending to have a meal, in that pub with some friends. Unfortunately there was a power cut so we had to change our plans. Another of my friends was coincidentally in the pub and he suggested that we should try an Indian restaurant on the High Street. I was unaware of any Indian restaurant on the High Street but sure enough, when we followed his directions, there was one. Granted it was hidden behind a fairly nondescript door in a fairly nondescript wall but it was there and I had walked past it thousands of times without noticing it.

I wonder how many other things there are that I have sleepwalked past all my life.

Alice in Wonderland. Again?

And it seems, if this report is to be believed, to be some kind of sequel.

Well I thought I knew the book.

I've been following the news of the forthcoming Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland movie with the interest that you would expect.
The Internet Movie Database has an extensive cast list, and it worries me for a number of reasons. I'm not too concerned that it includes The Jabberwock and Tweedledee and Tweedledum, characters from Through The Looking Glass, as most of the other screen versions have also used them. Just too iconic to miss out, I suppose. I am concerned that they (the Tweedles, that is) are, according to the cast list, performed by Matt Lucas who has never done anything at all that I can stand. Maybe his just voicing the digital images won't be so bad.
They aren't the only Looking Glass characters either. The cast list also includes the Red Queen and the White Queen, though neither the King nor Queen of Hearts. Clearly this one isn't going to be terribly faithful to the book.

Slightly more concerning is that I know the books probably as well as anyone you will ever encounter. If I were on Mastermind with Alice as my specialist subject, you wouldn't be seeing many passes. So why, out of forty characters listed are there no fewer than twenty-eight that I have never heard of, twenty-eight that are simply not in the book at all?

Makes you wonder just where Burton will be going with it, doesn't it.

With all that said I love this conceptual art.

This post has been ******ed

I do so love the way that Governments like to dress up unpleasant truths in words they think that we won't understand. The Americans gave us "extraordinary rendition" meaning "state sponsored kidnapping" and now we have had, from our own Government, "redact", a technical publishing term so obscure that I had to look it up.
In case anyone hasn't bothered to consult a dictionary, the primary meaning is "to prepare for publication". What this normally means is to proofread, structure and edit. What it means in the hands of the Government is to wipe out great swathes of information that they would rather we didn't see. Unfortunately, thanks to the Daily Telegraph we've seen a lot of it already and you can bet that the parts that we haven't seen they'll get round to in due course.

Until then we'll have to settle for the Government redacting things out of existence.