![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I can\u2019t believe I have\u00a0two<\/em> entertaining cricket links to share this week. \u00a0(Is this World Cup hipster counterprogramming?). \u00a0First up. our boys in white and gold are taking on their Anglican counterparts in an ecumenical cricket match<\/a>:<\/p>\n On 12 September a party of\u00a0Vatican<\/a>\u00a0priests, deacons and seminarians will leave Rome for what is arguably the papacy\u2019s most daring incursion on English soil since St Augustine arrived in AD597 \u2013 a four-match tour of the country that gave the world cricket and Henry VIII.<\/p>\n Vatican officials were keen on Monday to emphasise that St Peter\u2019s CC\u2019s \u201cTour of Light\u201d would proceed in a spirit of generous ecumenical goodwill. But the Vatican\u2019s 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\u2019s successor. On 17 September they are due to play the Royal Household\u2019s XI at Windsor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n And, in great moments in Cricket History, J. M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan<\/em><\/a>) apparently put together a cricket side in the 1880s<\/a> that included\u00a0Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, and A. A. Milne.<\/p>\n Among the team\u2019s greatest hits:<\/p>\n Poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only one on the team who was actually a good player, and was described by Barrie as \u201cA grand bowler. Knows a batsman\u2019s weakness by the colour of the mud on his shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If you want to learn how cricket works, generally, and have four hours to spare, I strongly recommend the Bollywood musical\u00a0Lagaan<\/em><\/a>, which involves a plucky group of Indian villagers learning cricket to beat the English and get a punitive tax lifted. \u00a0Also, song and dance numbers.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Ars Technica<\/em> had a nice feature this week on the design of car controls<\/a> (one of their writers wondered why they\u2019ve changed so little since the Model T days).<\/p>\n 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\u2019s hands busy steering (and changing gears via a lever), pedals soon found favor as the optimum method of controlling the brakes and engines.\u00a0Along the years, concept cars have appeared with alternative ideas, often involving aircraft-inspired joysticks. Nearly two decades of\u00a0Gran Turismo<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and its ilk have trained gamers to control cars using d-pads, buttons, and triggers. Then there\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n \u2026The issue\u00a0comes 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\u2019t much of a problem, but aircraft don\u2019t have to parallel park, squeeze through busy city streets, or cruise along in the middle lane of a motorway with traffic on either side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I really enjoyed their reporting, and I continue to hope that my knowledge of how to drive a car may remain purely abstract.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Earlier this week, I wrote about anti-homeless laws and architecture<\/a>, and, in reply, Christian H. sent me this example of\u00a0pro-<\/em>homeless design<\/a>. \u00a0These benches, installed by a Canadian shelter, fold out to provide shelter from the elements, and revealing contact information for more services.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Over at Aleteia, Eve Tushnet writes about prisoners<\/a>, another class of people we keep wishing would just vanish. \u00a0Eve has some hypotheses about why we keep shrinking away from these kinds of problems.<\/p>\n [I]n Christian thought the social status of \u201cprisoner\u201d takes on deep theological meaning, and this meaning exists separately from any facts about the prisoner\u2019s personal history. Whether she actually committed the crime for which she was imprisoned; whether that \u201ccrime\u201d 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\u2019s\u2014none of that is relevant to her theological status. What is relevant is her powerlessness.<\/p>\n And so prisoners turn up in the corporal works of mercy, one of which is \u201cvisiting prisoners,\u201d and in the Gospel passage from which this command of charity is taken,\u00a0Matthew 25:36<\/em>. \u201cI was in prison, and you visited me.\u201d: God Himself is in prison, because He is in all forms of weakness and suffering,\u00a0regardless of the personal history of the sufferers.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s a familiar thrill for moviegoers in the cracking of the tommy gun, whether it\u2019s being wielded by Al Capone or Elliot Ness. Glorifying criminals is a normal impulse of fallen human nature. Empathizing with prisoners\u2014honoring rather than despising them for their powerlessness\u2014goes against our cruel instinct to separate ourselves from the humiliated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve read a lot of depressing pieces about how colleges turning to adjuncts shortchanges teachers, but this\u00a0Guernica<\/em> piece does a great job making the toll on the\u00a0students<\/em> clear and disturbing<\/a>.<\/p>\n No one ever says this, probably because adjuncts don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2014a little story about me. It depends on the particulars of my financial situation and personality. I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019ll get better student evaluations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 7 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n These takes took a depressing turn once we stopped talking about cricket, so, to cheer you (and me) up, I\u2019ll finish on a World Cup story about two very strange game commenters<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bennett and Davies are less sports analysts than cultural observers, looking for amusing ways to frame\u00a0the most compelling story lines<\/a>\u00a0of the tournament. They have, for instance, taken a special interest in Mexico\u2019s stout coach,\u00a0Miguel Herrera<\/a>, who is driven into such a state of hallucinatory ecstasy when his team scores that he\u2019s been known to end up on the ground, locked in an embrace with one of his players.<\/p>\n \u201cThere it is, more happiness than any Englishmen has felt in my entire generation,\u201d Mr. Bennett said during a recent broadcast.<\/p>\n \u201cIncluding Benny Hill,\u201d Mr. Davies added.<\/p>\n \u2026Both 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\u2019s miscues was accompanied by a brief history of the decline of the British Empire: \u201cSturridge misses! Cornwallis evacuates Yorktown: 1781. Sturridge misses again! India was given back: 1947.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n\n
\n
<\/a><\/p>\n\n