that Christmas for young children is a wondrous place.
Here we are on the verge of the first full week of the New Year and soon busy lives will engage with all that 2010 is bringing. So I wanted to share with you something truly magical that happened early on Christmas morning in the Derham house.
Our little four year old woke us at 4 o’clock Christmas morning crying.
“Father Christmas hasn’t come”, he struggled to tell us through his tears.
British governmental ‘skills’ now being applied to British universities
THE GOLDEN GOOSE … Greed and the City killed off the financial golden goose – at terrible cost to ordinary people and the economy as a whole. With the problem compounded by government folly, Britain now faces years of debt and austerity to pay for it all. For the moment, the City is reeling, but at least we still have our Higher Education system, don’t we?
Well, errrrmmmm …… yes, we still have it for the moment.
Oxford University
We do – or perhaps did – have a great reputation for having world class universities. Rich foreign parents – including, of course, a good many whose source of income is highly dubious – naturally seek a good education for their children, which Britain in the past was able to provide and their country presumably couldn’t. For decades, a British degree was seen as a precious cachet of excellence in the international paper-chase.
The best place to live? It’s all down to your neighbors!
No offense to anyone else, but I live in the perfect neighborhood.
My neighborhood is not big; it consists of only one street, a circle; where you enter the street is the same place you exit. There are only about 30 homes on my street. None of them are very fancy or very big. Most of the houses are older. Some need repair. One or two are empty now. No, it isn’t the size of the neighborhood or the grandeur of the houses.
I live close to the University where I work. I could walk to work if I needed to. But I haven’t needed to, except for the one time, when the Presidential debate was held on campus and security closed it down to all but pedestrian traffic. Although it is certainly convenient, proximity to work is not the reason my neighborhood is perfect.
My girls are unlikely to agree just yet with my assessment of our neighborhood. But they are still young, and there are no kids their age on our street. One neighbor does have grandchildren their age who visit sometimes, but that doesn’t really count, they tell me. Off and on, they complain and say they want to move. My 15-year-old wants to live in a city, the bigger the better, the more people the better; my 13-year-old wants to live on a horse farm, the bigger the better, the more horses the better.
But I tell them that some day, when they are married and have children and are busy with life, they will look back on this time in our neighborhood, and will understand what I meant when I told them how very lucky we are to live here.
Because we have neighbors; real neighbors!
They welcome new families with home-baked bread; take in your mail when you are away; call to check on you when you are sick; give you a ride to get your car out of the shop; lend you their extra tall ladder. All without hesitation and without expecting anything in return. And they let me do what I can for them. There’s genuine warmth and support between neighbors on my street. It’s like an extended family.
Maybe even a little better! Why? Because they do all of this without pushing, without invading your privacy, without crossing into your personal space. They are supportive without being nosy. How totally wonderful: to have support when you need it but, as important, perhaps more important, you also have your privacy. I can’t imagine a better combination. I can’t imagine feeling safer. I can’t imagine a more wonderful neighborhood. I can’t imagine a better home. My neighbors are the best.
A few years ago I saw an advert for a small piano sized electric organ in our local shop window.
Great I thought, that will be a good way to introduce some music into the home, and see if I can add pedals to the idea of playing the piano.
It didn’t take long to track down the owner, but unfortunately the organ was in a back room, down two sets of stairs, round a corner, in a house which was isolated and difficult to find. Whereas I should have gone along with a team of
Typical electric organ
people, there were only three of us to move the instrument, but we eventually managed to move the thing out of the house, and into a trailer which we used to transport it to our house.
My wife thought I was mad, but I really liked it because it only had the sound of an organ, not a choice of sounds. It even had stops, not buttons to choose the different pipes you wanted to use.
Actually we were undertaking a great deal of building work at the time thus when our local church’s organ came to the end of it’s life, it seemed a good idea to offer them the chance to have this piece. It was ten times better than the original and sounded wonderful: job done!
However, last year some kind soul left money to the church and it was decided that the churcch could afford a new organ.
It duly arrived and our old one was moved to an alcove at the back of the church: I was asked to remove it.
Where was I going to put it? By chance we had acquired an almost new one ourselves and nobody seemed to want this old but wonderful piece.
We tried Ebay – no luck. Adverts – again no interest. The pressure started to grow.
People were asking me to move that old organ of mine. Letters started to arrive. Could I please take it away – I became the bad guy.
Eventually, I made contact with a man in London who would be happy to take it away for free, but he wanted to hear it play. Whoops! It was already loaded on my trailer!
But I managed to position trailer and load near an electric socket and in broad daylight, with the aid of the mobile phone, I stood and played a range of music! Our customer was happy.
He agreed to come at about eight o’clock one Saturday morning, but actually arrived two hours ahead of time at six in the morning!
A church in Ghana
The man brought his wife, dressed in her national dress, explaining that they wanted the organ for a church in their village back in Ghana. They had never ventured outside London, so this visit to the country was a major event. They joined us for breakfast and we showed our children a map depicting where the organ would eventually go.
The man was built like an ox and he and his wife together were quite happy to lift the instrument and put it in the back of their vehicle.
Thanks to Naked Capitalism, we posted an item on the 19th December about an unknown wild-life ranger working in the wildlife refuge area of Lanseria, South Africa. Here was one of the pictures included in that Post:
The Post finished with an appeal to anyone that knew the name of this Ranger. Many of you did and responded; thank you!
The heads of US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may each receive pay packages of up to $6m (£3.7m) for 2009, depending on company performance.
Now I’m not an American nor do I really understand the issues BUT when taxpayers put in $111,000,000,000 of THEIR money into these organisations (that’s $365 for every man, woman and child on the US Census!) and so many of those same US taxpayers are up the proverbial financial creek without a paddle, there has to be a better way of rewarding top bosses (of US publicly owned corporations) than the option of $6,000,000 each!
But the regulator which decided the pay levels said the awards were 40% lower than before the government bailout.
The sums involved reflected the need to attract and retain talent, it argued.
Frankly, I just don’t believe that there aren’t many other incredibly capable business leaders who would do these jobs for a fraction of six million dollars. (The present incumbents are Michael Williams at Fannie Mae and Charles E. Haldeman Jr. at Freddie Mac who will receive a base of $900,000 in 2010 with the opportunity to earn $5.1 more if “certain targets are met“.)
Read the article here – I’m going to lay down in a dark, quiet room for a while!
Tim Clodfelter of the local Winston-Salem Journal wrote a very interesting piece on the future of brick-and-mortar
Tim Clodfelter
video stores and video rental places such as NetFlix and Red Hat.
I happened to be quoted in the article as an economist (the comment about “reducing the average cost every time we watch a purchased video” was supposed to be a joke!), but actually met up with Tim in my role as mom and pseudo-agent! Let me explain.
My 15-year-old daughter was standing in a very long line of young ladies waiting to audition for the Coen Brother’s remake of True Grit. Tim was there to get the story on the open casting. I asked him over hoping he would talk to my daughter. He and I got to talking instead; he found out that I was an economics teacher, and pulled out his notes on the Video Store story. He ended up talking to me and several other parents in line, all of whom had a different approach to viewing movies. The resulting article follows with permission to publish on Learning from Dogs.
“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.” ~Mark Twain
It is a bit intimidating to try to write a piece on the importance of good writing. I feel self-conscious about my writing as I write about good writing. After all, a post on good writing should be written especially well. Then again, maybe a poorly written post will do even more to illustrate the importance of good writing. I will have to leave that up to you, the reader.
I have been teaching graduate and undergraduate students for over twenty years now. I have read and graded thousands of papers and essays during that time. I can count on two hands the number that were exceptionally well written. In each case, I sought out the students to compliment their writing, and to encourage them to keep honing their writing skills.
I doubt my words of encouragement had much effect. This, I know from personal experience.
Years ago, in my third year of graduate school, I got a paper back from a professor with the words “You write well” written in the margin. I was crushed. I had worked so hard on that paper: reviewing the existing literature, developing the research design, and trying to make a substantive contribution to my field. I yearned to hear something tangible about the quality of the research, the cleverness of the method, or the importance of the findings. Instead, I got “you write well.” I honestly thought that the professor had said that because he couldn’t think of anything positive to say about the content of the paper.
Years later, something happened that made me realize how wrong I was. I had taken a teaching job at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, even though I had yet to defend my doctoral thesis; it’s called “ABD,” or “all but
Merton Miller
dissertation.” I had traveled to Chicago to meet with Merton Miller, my thesis chairman, about polishing up my dissertation and scheduling the defense. As I waited outside his office door, I couldn’t help but notice how distracted Professor Miller seemed. He had always stood at a tall wooden lectern to write, but this day he paced to and from that lectern, rubbing his head, adjusting his shirt sleeves, writing, erasing, then erasing some more.
He was at the lectern when I entered his office for our meeting. I congratulated him again for winning the first Nobel Prize in financial economics and asked him about the upcoming trip to Stockholm. He was taking his wife and daughters on the trip, who were very excited. He, on the other hand, was not ready for the trip. He was worried, he said, because he was not going to have sufficient time to revise his acceptance speech. He had only edited it seven times thus far, and his magic number was eight. Not six, not seven, but eight rewrites were what he needed to be satisfied with his writing.
Professor Miller was known as one of the most gifted writers in all of economics. His writing was disarmingly simple and clear. It flowed like a piece of music. It seemed effortless. Everyone, myself included, assumed that he was just a naturally talented writer, lucky to have been blessed with that skill. Everyone was wrong. I learned that day that Professor Miller worked hard at writing well. He was well into his 60’s, had written hundreds of articles and had won the Nobel Prize, but he was still working at writing well.
Then I remembered the comment that a teacher had written in the margin of my paper years earlier. The teacher was Merton Miller. And now I knew how much it really meant, coming from him. So now when I see the rare student who writes really well, I make it a point to tell them. Not that it means as much coming from me as it did coming from Professor Miller. But it still means something, because good writing is very important, and it’s worth working for.
Recently while busy in the garden our two dogs started barking. This in itself is not unusual because they sit at the front gate waiting for passers by to stop and talk to them. It can be a horse, or cyclist that sometimes causes them to bark, and our children have grown to show the same awareness as the dogs in who is passing. I didn’t see the cause this time but our young daughter did.
“Don’t worry, Daddy, it’s only an old man!”
Stephanie is only 8 years old, but without meaning any harm had given sufficient information to explain the risk to us and paint a quick picture in a few words as to why the dogs were barking.
Of late for some reason I have been more aware of people who are ageing. This generation do not normally stand around telling stories, this is left to the young who always seem to have something to shout about.
However all older people will have many interesting tales, often almost unbelievable, yet true. They have lived through war, happy, sad, interesting, and hard times. Each has learnt about life through experience that we can not buy.
Recently my ex Mother-in-law passed away. I thought I knew her very well, but it wasn’t until family stories started coming out that we all found out there had been much more in the life of this modest lady.
How it should be.
Christmas is coming and probably there will be family gatherings. This year I am going to try and turn the attention to the older generation, and see if they will open up and give us an insight into their childhood days and memories so that we can give them the respect they deserve, ask them to read stories to the children, ask them to tell their own tales.
Oh and the old man? Yes I did see him again, in church at a Remembrance service, and he had some medals under his coat, so did have a story to tell!
The humungously uninteresting saga of Tiger Woods’ infidelities
The press has been full in recent days of the Tiger Woods saga. I have followed this with a combination of astonishment and disgust and touched on it yesterday’s Post.
Astonishment? Not at Woods’ extramarital adventures. Frankly, I am astonished that anyone could possibly be astonished to learn of his frailties.
I must have been about 13 when I took an interest in John F Kennedy, mostly because of his assassination. As a young teenager I read and listened to the news over the coming months and gradually realised that this great American hero and hope for the future was a serial philanderer. And as I grew up I realised that this is the kind of behaviour that rich and powerful men in particular get up to.
I soon realised that some men simply give in to their sexual drives; integrity, promises and faithfulness just go out of the window. Once again – just like the British MPs who filched public funds by the £1,000s – BECAUSE they can do it (for a while) they DID do it.
This is regrettable for stable marriages and the happy upbringing of children, but it is a fact. And so Woods’ antics were
Paul Newman
not the slightest bit surprising. In fact, what IS surprising is to hear of famous people who have NOT given in to basic urges, the most famous recent example being the much-loved and missed Paul Newman.
No, what astonished and disgusted me was the press interest in Woods’ philanderings. Of course, the media only publicize what they think people want to hear or read about, and this in order to sell more copies and rack up more advertising revenue. And as the media are not stupid, it clearly IS true that many people ARE interested in the sexual antics of famous people.
But what does this tell us about the seriousness of the human race? All this fuss over one more weak, unfaithful and ultimately boring husband when on the same day hundreds of thousands died of treatable disease, when goodness knows how many more tons of ice melted, how many more tons of CO2 were released into the air, how many more victims of the hellish North Korean regime there were?
He’s a famous golfer? Oh dear …. someone good at putting a ball into a hole? This is supposed to be IMPORTANT?
Sadly, the whole episode is just another example of the fatuous obsession with celebrities, as if they are somehow more interesting or important than anyone else. No, my local postman is far more interesting than Tiger Woods, and I don’t think he cheats on his wife either.
And as for comment about the business wisdom of Woods not talking to the press? Oh dear again – one weeps. Why should anyone CARE whether he talks to the press or loses sponsors? Who GIVES a damn? Well, apparently, millions. And this is fairly depressing when there is so much else to worry about. And if big name sponsors of the once “Mr Clean” of world sport are now looking rather foolish, well I for one won’t shed any tears. They peddle fantasy, shallowness and envy; it’s time we had a reassessment of priorities and bit more common-sense and realism.
Please Mr Murdoch et al; give us a break from Tiger Woods; he is just nanoscopically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things and what on earth has his private life got to do with his golf anyway? But I expect we will have to suffer months of reading about the vast settlement his wife will get as his divorce is dragged through the courts and the media. Oh dear, I need a drink ……
Our little four year old woke us at 4 o’clock Christmas morning crying.
Learning from Dogs 