February Bloggings
A corner of my own.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
February 19, 2002 9:00 a.m.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Derbs are off on a ski vacation for a few days, so this week's postings will consist entirely of two blogs I blogged over the weekend. This is the first of the two. I am sorry to blog twice in one week, violating my previous vows on the subject. By way of compensation, and in response to overwhelming public demand, I have put some Derb photographs on my personal website, under "Photographs".]

f you could take out a patent on a phrase, I would have done it with my "Underperformin' Norman" the other week. Norman Mineta may be the first Cabinet officer to be laughed out of office since... Who? Anyone know? There was that weird surgeon general of Clinton's who wanted us all to masturbate for peace... But I don't think Surgeon General counts as Cabinet-level.

And if you could take out a patent on an idea, I might have a claim to this one. Nearly two years ago (actually 3/15/00 — I looked it up in the e-group archive) on the Human Biodiversity e-group I posted the following:

Having spent 14 yrs on Wall St I should know better than to suggest stocktips, but... I just heard an item on the radio news about an outfit out west somewhere that is setting up as a pet-cloning enterprise. Love your pet? They'll take a DNA sample and, when Fido has passed away, clone you an identical copy. This is a winner, even at the prices proposed ($50,000 and up). As the owner of a much-loved pooch, I would go for this if I had the money. A lot of people do have, and will. If this outfit goes public, buy.

Well, now someone has actually cloned a very cute little kitten. Call your broker.

I've been reading Littlewood's Miscellany, a collection of observations and donnish anecdotes by the Cambridge mathematician John Littlewood (1885-1977). Concerning the outbreak of the First World War, Littlewood noted that: "All the sensible and enlightened people said one thing, and all the damned fools said the other; and the damned fools were right." This is something that occurs to me often. It is, of course, not original: It occurred to Saint Paul 2,000 years ago (I Corinthians 3:18-20). However, in the present age of universal education, when anyone whose voice gets heard at all has a string of academic credentials after his name, we have a problem that neither Littlewood nor Saint Paul had to contend with: How can we reliably tell who the damned fools are?

A few days ago I wrote a piece in which I implicitly compared the suicide bombers of the Middle East with "the terrorists of Sinn Féin/IRA." I got the inevitable sprinkling of e-mails from readers carefully explaining to me that the SF/IRA lads, far from being amoral psychopaths, are in fact brave selfless patriots; and that the real terrorists in Ireland are the thuggish dead-eyed sadists of Her Majesty's armed forces, crushing the helpless Catholic folk of Ulster under the iron heel of British Imperialism. I don't normally use boilerplate in replying to readers, but for cretins of this stripe I make an exception. They all get the same answer, which reads as follows: "Dear [Name], Thank you very much for explaining that to me. Yours sincerely, Marie of Roumania."

Writing about my INS interview, I noted that my oath ceremony — the point where I actually become a U.S. citizen — is to be held on April 19th. Numerous readers e-mailed in to tell me that this is the date of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and is in fact celebrated as Patriot's Day in Massachusetts and Maine. I knew about the events, of course (Emerson's wonderful poem "Concord Hymn" is number 3 on my 36 Great American Poems CD) but not the date. I think it's way cool that I'll be taking my citizenship oath 227 years to the day after "the shot heard round the world". And if you think I included this paragraph just as a barefaced plug for my CD, well, shame on you. As if I would!

I'd like to offer a nomination for entry into the list of ailments recognized as diagnosable by the American Psychiatric Association: pastor anxiety. This is the state of mind a person falls into when perfectly satisfied with the minister of his own congregation, but despairing of the state of his church in general. I think we Episcopalians are especially susceptible to pastor anxiety. My own minister suits me perfectly. He gives plain, no-nonsense sermons in literate English, milks the incomparable Anglican liturgy for all it's worth (introducing the Lord's Prayer, for example, with the spine-tingling "We are bold to say..." rather than the feeble and colorless alternative offered in the prayer book "We now pray..."), and is personally a model for the Christian life: honest, courteous, hard-working, self-denying, and a devoted family man. The Episcopalian church at large, meanwhile, is in a sorry state, the playground of all kinds of cranks, freaks, and ideologues. To judge from Rod Dreher's pieces in National Review, the Roman Catholic Church is trending in the same direction. So what happens when my pastor moves on to some higher position in the Church — as, if there is any justice, he deserves to? Who are we going to get? Some crop-haired lesbian playing her guitar in the pulpit while her fricatrice works the aisles handing out Greenpeace pamphlets? No wonder our kids are converting to Islam. Pastor anxiety — coming soon to a church near you. Time to revisit that old John Mills, Dirk Bogarde movie The Singer Not the Song.

Lancastrian note. In a December blog I boasted of my Lancastrian antecedents, and offered some pointers to help readers understand the strange, rich culture of Lancashire. Well, here's another tidbit from Littlewood's Miscellany. This particular story rests on the fact that Lancashire dialect switches the long "u" and the short "u," so that the word "put" is said with a short "u," while "putt" is said with a long one. Well, one of the Cambridge colleges hosted a visiting lecturer with a strong Lancashire accent, who gave an address about the Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs, pronouncing the name as "F*cks" throughout his talk. Afterwards, one of the organizers took him aside and gently pointed out the correct pronunciation, with a long "u." "Yes, I know," replied the Lancastrian, "but I couldn't very well say it like that, could I? After all, there were ladies in the audience."