The first fruits of all your crops

Tithing is a very big thing in American churches and I was scarcely aware of the word prior to my arrival in this fair country lo these many years. I think the English church goer gives of the change that might be rattling around in his pocket; in America whole sermons are devoted to expositions of how to calculate a tenth (10 %). It's on the gross, before tax, inclusive of everything. Tithing enables the poor overworked pastors to have a little security in their retirement, witness the Rev. Jeremiah (biblical) Wright shuffling off to his $1 million golf course "parsonage" courtesy of the Trinity faithful; or the fella over at Harvest Bible Chapel moving, with much less publicity, into a $4 million shack.

I was just reading about the Obamas' publication of their 2007 income, which enjoyed a healthy bump over 2006. A whopping $3.9 million net on book sales, which just goes to prove that the world is full of dopes. We are always being urged to read; the public responds by spending masses of money on completely worthless books enriching a few frauds, vagabonds and swindlers (The Secret). Read a good book, like a novel or something. Come to think of it, perhaps that's what Audacity of Hope is.

Anyway, I noticed that, among the charitable donations, the Obamas yielded $26,270 to Trinity, which is almost exactly 10 % of their combined $260,735 salaries. Giving at the tithing level. The Rev. Wright should be thrilled you think to receive $26 K from one member. But wait, God says 10 % of the total: books aren't excluded; so I reckon the Obamas are in the hole to the tune of about $390 K. They could just about pay for the modest little retirement parsonage by themselves.

In fact it is the practice in many churches to make the 10 % rule the entry level minimum stake and encourage giving above and beyond for long-term senior members. So I could see a rounding up to about half a million would be in order here.

I noticed that Michelle has gone part-time at UofC Medical Center, her income plummeting to about $100 K. That is a cool part-time job - a job that is suitably vaguely defined and illusive of purpose. I would like that kind of part-time gig to fill in the idle hours between classes. Those gigs are hard to find, although one or two of my COD colleagues seem to have managed it.

Go to Bruges

The Savvy Cyber Professor's pick of the week in the movie scene is "In Bruges," which he and Dulcie caught last night in the caught-in-a-timewarp Glen cinema, the only reason to visit the ghost town that is Glen Ellyn of an evening, unless you include the Tap and Grill (or whatever it is), which was once the Firkin and Fox before its swift and unexpected demise while we were away last August, and where one can buy a pint of Alpha King for $4.50. I was a little surprised when Dulcie broached the idea since I knew the film to be somewhat violent; amateur online critiques did not bode well either (which we later realized derived from the undoubted dumbness of their scribes). Anyway we went, and enjoyed it unreservedly, laugh-out-loudly. The writing is as sharp as a knife and delightfully lacking in PC, with plenty of jokes about dwarfs and midgets and other protected species. Did I find myself laughing when Colin Farrell decks a woman with a punch? Well she was coming at him with a bottle he would say in justifying the action. The violence is contained and pleasantly predictable, enabling most of the film to be enjoyed by the squeamish. Bruges is a beautiful city (the Venice of Belgium - you what?) and, though I didn't ram it down Dulcie's throat, I did visit it once in my youth and enjoyed a Stella in the square, where much of the action occurs. I was a particular fan of Flemish painting (I hear you skeptical at this point) and there is plenty on offer in Bruges. The joke is of course that our heroes don't want to be there. Bruges is easy to get lost in one suggests, trying to understand why they are there. So is Croydon the other responds. I know. I have. There is a delightful conceit in that the film contains a subplot of our heroes stumbling upon a film being made in Bruges, the star of which is a dwarf - no one's made a film in Bruges one of the staff says (or something like). Fiennes makes a delayed entrance, and is really a relatively minor figure, with a London accent that sounds comically like a cross between Peter Cook and the Geico lizard. See it; it's a definite winner.

Driving with your trousers down is okay in private

Why do they entertain us so, these rich and powerful men? Following on the heels of the revelation of Eliot Spitzer's dabblings with "escorts" comes a far more racy expose, literally, of FIA supremo Max Mosley. To be honest, the main shock about the Spitzer thing is the amount he was prepared to pay for the service of "ladies of the night." Another reason was the titillating speculation about which other famous people had accounts with the same company (the Duke of Westminster, whoever he is, was on some lists). After all, another elected official recently bit the dust for the same reason, but he paid only $150. Was Spitzer a bigger fool for paying $5K for the act or doing it at all? Max Mosley would be passionately arguing that Eliot had done no wrong, as he now is about himself; and therein lies the rub.

I'm sure that most of my readers, all three of them, have no clue as to the identity of Max or what the FIA is. I tried to explain to Dulcie that the FIA is a really important world-wide organization involving motorsports and car manufacturers; but in response to her interrogation about what they actually do, I was unable to provide an answer. Like a lot of organizations dominated by rich men, they probably sit around and chortle a lot about nothing in particular while spending a lot of money in the process.

Being the biggest fan of F1 in COD and perhaps all of DuPage county, I am very familiar with Max since the FIA presides over F1. Last year was the infamous Spygate scandal involving McLaren stealing stuff from Ferrari (I know in this country that Spygate refers to the New England Patriots taking pictures of other teams (how dull) but that was really very small beer compared to the $100 million fine that Max and his kangaroo court imposed on the hapless McLaren and heavy-but-humble Ron Dennis for what appeared to be scarcely proven indiscretions using information that a disgruntled Ferrari man had given their lead designer since fired. It seems that sucking up to the royalty of Ferrari and the patrician Max's (Max is the son of Oswald Mosley, friend of Hitler and founder of the British Nazi party - viewers of Remains of the Day will have glimpsed Mosley's cameo in that film - a fact that plays heavily into this story) hatred of working class Ron Dennis probably had more to do with it).

This lead-in is getting way too long and most readers will have already given up. Like get to the point WTF. Anyway, the bottom line, pun intended, is that Max got caught up in a really racy, pun intended, kinky sex thing involving several prostitutes and spanking and alleged Nazi role-playing. It even made it to NPR and I sat transfixed in the car park listening to the report. It was introduced with the disclaimer that the subject might be offensive to some viewers. I'm thinking that should apply to all NPR broadcasts but that's probably a little unfair. Why single out a spanking story for that appellation, while lots of rants on Christians pass un-commented on? The News of the World posted video allegedly showing Max engaging in some S&M with a group of prostitutes with, the News alleges, Nazi themes. The scientist in me demanded proof; so to You Tube I went; and there it is, a grainy minute or so. (Isn't it strange how the blurry bits always seem to coincide with the more important areas in the shot? And I thought picture quality is meant to be good in this digital age). We don't get the whole thing, but there is indeed someone who looks uncommonly like Max (though I haven't seen him elsewhere without trousers) getting his bottom thoroughly thrashed.

Tellingly, Max doesn't deny it happened (well how could he?); though he does respond immediately that he has received scores of messages of "support." (Subtext: rich powerful men do this sort of thing all the time). His protest is that what he does in his private life is own business; and anyway it wasn't "illegal." (The latter justification reminds me of that used by people, usually men, who do bad things to others, like beating their wives or engaging in sexual perversity, when they say in their defence that the Bible doesn't say it's wrong or maybe even the Bible says it's right - like women "obeying" their husbands.) The only thing he denied was the Nazi bit. He doesn't intend to resign from the FIA claiming his private behavior doesn't interfere with his ability to do his job. Bill Clinton could resonate with that I think; and he may have a point. After all, as far as can be told, nothing more offensive than a lollipop has ever been popped into any one's mouth in the Oval Office during the tenure of the Current Occupant, and look what a hash has been made of it in the meantime.

Contrary to what Max is claiming, there is a groundswell of concern among the car manufacturers and teams that Max has to go having been caught with his trousers down. However, their expressed concern is more over the Nazi role playing than the kinky sex stuff. The implication there is that, provided they weren't imitating the SS, then the rest is really okay and so carry on Max. I don't understand that distinction; what is the difference? One is morally wrong yet the other is morally okay? Degrading women is degrading with or without SS frills. All moral questions aside, one simply marvels in disbelief that the likes of Max have such delusions of grandeur, such fabulist self-images, such hubris that they have no sense of shame. On the other hand, we would be the less entertained if they did.

Poll or pole tax: a loser no matter which way you spell it

Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest prime ministers of the modern era, or probably any era for that matter. The shadow she cast upon future leaders of the Conservative party was so great that they were shrivelled by it. Only the boyish Scot appears to have been successful in throwing it off, perhaps not coincidentally because folks got fed up with so many years of Tony Blinton, now awash in cash; though his success in that department pales into insignificance compared with his mentor Bill; after his retirement and conversion to Catholicism. But I digress.

Despite her success and power, Maggie came a cropper when she stubbornly attempted to impose the poll tax against the wisdom of most party members. Now another form of pole tax has bitten the dust in Texas, though perhaps it is of less consequence, since there are only 162 strip clubs where this $5 a head tax would have applied. It was declared unconstitutional because there was deemed to be no connection between indigent health care and strip joints.

Whither basic science?

There was a column in the Tribune this week written by a physicist from U of I which echoed a podcast I heard on Scientific American of an interview with Robert Rosner (head of Argonne National Lab) on the fate of basic scientific research in the U.S.A. and the consequences of it demise. Physics in general and Argonne in particular took a beating in its funding at the hands of our far-thinking Congress, with a number of high-energy physics projects getting chopped.

I could have written the article, although I might have dispensed with the somewhat patronizing couple of lines explaining atoms for a layman, in the sense that it mirrored my own thoughts on the role of science in the development of society. There are two issues here. Is there a sane thinking person alive that disagrees that science is essential for the future prosperity and well-being of the planet? I realize that there are some anti-technology types out there who argue for a return to the simple life and, indeed, Al Gore strikes that pose in his book (which I haven't read of course). But I did say sane thinking. As the article and Rosner both argue, future technology emerges from basic research over a long period and in often unpredictable ways. Examples of the transistor, laser and magnetic resonance all attest to this, having dramatic impacts on every-day life decades after the first laboratory demonstration. The sort of bean-counting short-term financial planning that dominates industry these days could not possibly have foretold those developments. I have had personal experience working with lasers and magnetic resonance which resonate (so to speak) with the arguments for basic research for its own sake. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) dates back to the 30's. However, it wasn't until magnetic technology developed that the technique really took off in the 70's and 80's, and I spent some early research years applying NMR to structural problems. Even then, the wiggly traces on a long sheet of graph paper, which might have profound significance for an arcane topic of chemical interest (and which would provoke hostility from the more synthetically minded chemistry brethren), seemed a long way from every-day importance to society. Yet in 1984 I attended a lecture, at Argonne in fact, on the then fledgling magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The cross-sections of the body obtained using this technique seemed nothing short of miraculous. Now of course MRI is completely routine, 70 years after the first mention of NMR. The nuclear was dropped to avoid scaring the patients. I don't think Bloch, Purcell, Bloembergen and co envisaged MRI machines in hospitals at any time.

Lasers came much later, in the fifties, again very much as research toys. Now of course they are everywhere, in multitudes of applications, in all sizes and powers and colors (of radiation). I don't think Charles Townes thought about DVD players or optical communications or LASIK any time during his work. I spent an interesting few years growing crystals for making new types of laser. I was engaged in that work at Amoco back in the day when those sorts of companies still invested in basic research largely for its own sake. I rather knew the game was up when a group of management consultants hired by Amoco rolled through assessing our capabilities. One of them was a smooth-talking confident youth, a graduate of Cambridge, who had taken a direction in business management. Amoco, recognizing the "error" of their ways, consequently chopped that activity. Shortly thereafter, Amoco itself became subsumed into BP, the higher-ups no doubt pocketing some decent coin. Short term gain, long term damage. I think I am correct in saying that the chairman of Exxon made more money last year as an individual than was spent on all of Amoco's basic research in 1993. Is that progress?

Okay, so support of basic research is essential for producing new technologies that are not predicted from the outset. The other concern is the damage done to the future of science by the lack of people entering it. What is the motivation when they read in the paper that the money is going away? Why should young and intelligent students flog away for years at a hard subject (there is no denying that as much as we try to make it attractive) when prospects are poor?

Musings from a Dulwich common room

Oh dear, I had optimistically envisioned a running commentary on my extended tour of the old country but with one thing and another it didn't happen...Too much writing, too much beer, too much time waiting for the number 3 bus (Crystal Palace to Oxford Circus via Brixham), lengthy visits to places with dubious internet access all contributed to what ultimately became a period of silence. Now I am back and intent on making amends; but of course it is possible my three readers have deserted me.

While the arts constitute endangered species in many areas of modern education, given the need for “relevance,” fiscal restraint and vocational training (the needs of the community etc. etc.), Alleyn’s theatrical heritage ensures their ongoing importance at Dulwich College. Through my sister’s official, albeit unpaid, role as the college photographer (a duty she discharges with commendable diligence, though perhaps the ultra-high-tech Nikon that goes with it provides some small compensation), I was privileged to sample the flowering of this artistic tradition on a number of occasions: I accompanied the Dulwich choir when it sang evensong with their hosts at Trinity College, Cambridge; I witnessed performances of the theatre team at the Globe theatre; I attended a recital given by the “Barbershop” chorus in the Dulwich College library. All this in little more than a week mind you.

I was struck, more than anything, not by the exceeding quality of all performances, or the attention to detail, or the dedication of staff and students, or the commitment to excellence – no none of those things as impressive as they all were – but by the unifying theme of the wine that flowed like a social lubricant through each event. At Trinity, the choir master had no sooner completed conducting a moving and complex choral work than he transformed into wine waiter, serving visitors and choir alike; for the theatre event I was recruited to man the drinks table, an apparently essential part of Dulwich’s dramatic experience, that was open before, during and after the performance; drinks dominated the interval at the Barbershop recital, and I distinctly recall one of the soloists clutching a glass of Sauvignon Blanc before her performance…

To a visitor from American education, it will appear all the more improbable given that Dulwich College is a high school. The image of the principal of Naperville North High School extending his hand in invitation to partake of a Chilean cabernet is so unthinkable as to be preposterous. So why is drink (even the word has negative connotations) regarded as an acceptable, civilizing part of the culture at an English high school, while the practices I observed in Dulwich would elicit howls of moral outrage at the American equivalent? Is the old country descending into a mire of decadence and louche behaviour? Is American youth better prepared for adulthood and responsibility by its rigorously enforced segregation from the demon alcohol? Is American youth more susceptible to the dangers of alcohol thereby requiring greater protection? Negative on all counts I think. Granted, there is wailing aplenty on both sides of the Atlantic about the prevalence of binge drinking among the nations’ youth, and perhaps some of that is merited and genuine problems exist; but I humble submit that these troubling excesses have nothing to do with the generally civilizing practice of a glass of wine with one’s school theatre, even in the company of students.

I have yet to comprehend completely the rampant opposition to drink that pervades American educational institutions. I am reminded of a line from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis that chronicles the adventures of a young lecturer at a decidedly white tile (not even red brick) university. At one point he is presented with “the smallest glass of sherry he has ever been seriously offered.” Sadly, I anticipate that tiny thimbleful will exceed by some considerable margin the drink that will be offered me at all events in my COD career. Am I the only one that recoils in disgust at the proffering of a plastic cup of “fruit punch?” Must we endure this kindergartenesque treatment at adult events forever?

My Dulwich sojourn concluded with the staff wine tasting, an event made even more improbable (to American eyes) by the fact it was conducted by a clergyman, who seemed as well informed about the affairs of the vine as he was with those of the soul, though in truth the latter were not strongly tested that night. He chortled about an impending visit to Germany which would mean his deserting his flock over Easter. The penance imposed by his bishop, he purred, was to serve on a committee promoting tourism. Not quite sure how that has anything to do with the matters of the spirit.

We often lament the absence of community at the beloved college, unless one classifies that noisy sterile rectangle in the cafeteria as such. Methinks the conviviality of the Dulwich College Common Room, enhanced as it was by the ready availability of alcohol, could translate successfully to the COD environment. Why should it not be so? I really want to know.

Stop press: new definition of violent crime

I have just learned from a discussion of the impact of the relaxed licensing laws on violent crime that the statistics are distorted by some redefining of violent crimes.

Apparently that man I saw passing water in a New Bond Street doorway was committing a "violent crime." In Glen Ellyn the same dastardly deed would merit a small fine. It seems a little over the top to define one of nature's more natural acts a violent one.