Unequally Yoked
I can’t believe I have two entertaining cricket links to share this week. (Is this World Cup hipster counterprogramming?). First up. our boys in white and gold are taking on their Anglican counterparts in an ecumenical cricket match:
On 12 September a party of Vatican priests, deacons and seminarians will leave Rome for what is arguably the papacy’s most daring incursion on English soil since St Augustine arrived in AD597 – a four-match tour of the country that gave the world cricket and Henry VIII.
Vatican officials were keen on Monday to emphasise that St Peter’s CC’s “Tour of Light” would proceed in a spirit of generous ecumenical goodwill. But the Vatican’s team of left-footers will include no less than three right-arm fast bowlers and, along the way, they will a chance to hurl hard leather-covered wooden balls at the men whose job it is to look after the arch-heretic’s successor. On 17 September they are due to play the Royal Household’s XI at Windsor.
And, in great moments in Cricket History, J. M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) apparently put together a cricket side in the 1880s that included Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, and A. A. Milne.
Among the team’s greatest hits:
- Right before the first game, Barrie discovered his teammates trying to decide which side of the bat to use to hit the ball.
- One French player thought that when the umpire called “over,” the game was literally finished.
- Barrie described a player as “Breaks everything except the ball.”
- Barrie had to write the team a book of advice which included asking them not practice before matches since it would only give their opponents confidence and “Should you hit the ball, run at once. Do not stop to cheer.”
Poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only one on the team who was actually a good player, and was described by Barrie as “A grand bowler. Knows a batsman’s weakness by the colour of the mud on his shoes.”
If you want to learn how cricket works, generally, and have four hours to spare, I strongly recommend the Bollywood musical Lagaan, which involves a plucky group of Indian villagers learning cricket to beat the English and get a punitive tax lifted. Also, song and dance numbers.
Ars Technica had a nice feature this week on the design of car controls (one of their writers wondered why they’ve changed so little since the Model T days).
The very earliest automobiles used tillers to control their steering, but by the turn of the century the nascent car industry settled on using a wheel to control the steering, perhaps taking inspiration from boats. With the driver’s hands busy steering (and changing gears via a lever), pedals soon found favor as the optimum method of controlling the brakes and engines. Along the years, concept cars have appeared with alternative ideas, often involving aircraft-inspired joysticks. Nearly two decades of Gran Turismo and its ilk have trained gamers to control cars using d-pads, buttons, and triggers. Then there’s the even more outlandish stuff like prone driving positions, a la Batman and his Tumbler Batmobile. Have we learned anything during the last hundred-plus years of driving that makes more sense than Edwardian-era human-vehicle interaction?
…The issue comes down to precision and feedback. For one, a wheel with several turns from lock to lock allows for much more accurate control than a stick with an inch or two of travel from side to side. For aircraft, that isn’t much of a problem, but aircraft don’t have to parallel park, squeeze through busy city streets, or cruise along in the middle lane of a motorway with traffic on either side.
I really enjoyed their reporting, and I continue to hope that my knowledge of how to drive a car may remain purely abstract.
Earlier this week, I wrote about anti-homeless laws and architecture, and, in reply, Christian H. sent me this example of pro-homeless design. These benches, installed by a Canadian shelter, fold out to provide shelter from the elements, and revealing contact information for more services.
Over at Aleteia, Eve Tushnet writes about prisoners, another class of people we keep wishing would just vanish. Eve has some hypotheses about why we keep shrinking away from these kinds of problems.
[I]n Christian thought the social status of “prisoner” takes on deep theological meaning, and this meaning exists separately from any facts about the prisoner’s personal history. Whether she actually committed the crime for which she was imprisoned; whether that “crime” should ever have been illegal; whether her sentence was mild or outrageous; whether she ended up in prison because of her own selfishness and cruelty, because of mental illness, because of her bravery in the face of political tyranny, because of hopelessness, because of misplaced trust, because of her own sin or other people’s—none of that is relevant to her theological status. What is relevant is her powerlessness.
And so prisoners turn up in the corporal works of mercy, one of which is “visiting prisoners,” and in the Gospel passage from which this command of charity is taken, Matthew 25:36. “I was in prison, and you visited me.”: God Himself is in prison, because He is in all forms of weakness and suffering, regardless of the personal history of the sufferers.
American culture often glorifies criminals, largely because criminals can attain and wield power. Henry Kissinger famously said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and there’s a familiar thrill for moviegoers in the cracking of the tommy gun, whether it’s being wielded by Al Capone or Elliot Ness. Glorifying criminals is a normal impulse of fallen human nature. Empathizing with prisoners—honoring rather than despising them for their powerlessness—goes against our cruel instinct to separate ourselves from the humiliated.
I’ve read a lot of depressing pieces about how colleges turning to adjuncts shortchanges teachers, but this Guernica piece does a great job making the toll on the students clear and disturbing.
No one ever says this, probably because adjuncts don’t want to advocate themselves out of a job. But being adjuncts makes teachers do a worse job than they would do otherwise. When I was adjuncting at Columbia, I remember calculating the maximum number of hours I could spend on my class before I reduced my pay rate to under $15/hour. It was less time than I would have liked to spend, but I couldn’t work for less than that. So I taught differently: I assigned fewer drafts, I held shorter and less frequent conferences, I read student essays faster and homework assignments hardly at all. When I realized I was not going to be able to do right by my students, I stopped classroom teaching. In part, this anecdote is just that—a little story about me. It depends on the particulars of my financial situation and personality. I didn’t want to have a job in which my time was so undervalued that I felt I was either doing a poor job or giving my time away as a gift. But it’s also not just about me. Others have written about how the circumstances of adjuncting force them into grade inflation, or into designing easier courses so that they’ll get better student evaluations.
These takes took a depressing turn once we stopped talking about cricket, so, to cheer you (and me) up, I’ll finish on a World Cup story about two very strange game commenters.
Bennett and Davies are less sports analysts than cultural observers, looking for amusing ways to frame the most compelling story lines of the tournament. They have, for instance, taken a special interest in Mexico’s stout coach, Miguel Herrera, who is driven into such a state of hallucinatory ecstasy when his team scores that he’s been known to end up on the ground, locked in an embrace with one of his players.
“There it is, more happiness than any Englishmen has felt in my entire generation,” Mr. Bennett said during a recent broadcast.
“Including Benny Hill,” Mr. Davies added.
…Both men are English expats who live in New York, and their home country, eliminated after its first two games, is the butt of a lot of jokes. A lowlight reel of the team’s miscues was accompanied by a brief history of the decline of the British Empire: “Sturridge misses! Cornwallis evacuates Yorktown: 1781. Sturridge misses again! India was given back: 1947.”
For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!
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