Atheism, beautiful women, big pieces of badass military equipment, and physics: What’s not to like about Andy Ross’s blog?

What I actually get from Andy’s blog — other than new vocabulary items like “eisegetical” — is a super-recharging of Englishness. He might actually be Scottish, I suppose — “Ross” is a Scottish name (in fact a Scottish place) — but there’s a quality of concentrated Englishness here that comes down in direct line of descent from C.E.M. Joad and the Brains Trust.

It was Joad, incidentally, who first said: “It depends what you mean by ‘is’.” He was responding to a Brains Trust questioner who had asked: “What exactly is a magnetic field?”

From Joad’s Wikipedia entry:

Joad once boasted in print that “I cheat the railway company whenever I can.” In April 1948, Joad was convicted of traveling on a Waterloo-Exeter train without a valid ticket. Although he was a frequent fare dodger, he failed to give a satisfactory excuse. This made front-page headlines in the national newspapers, and the fine of £2 destroyed all hopes of a peerage and resulted in his dismissal from the BBC. The humiliation of this had a massive effect on his health, and he soon became bed-confined at his home in Hampstead. His fame and broadcasting career were over. However, this event may well be the event that convinced him that he needed to admit that God was God.

The English are very, very strange people. Trust me on this. Or if you won’t trust me, trust Arthur Koestler:

The captain of a ship sets out with a sealed order in his pocket which he is only permitted to open on the high seas. He looks forward to that moment which will end all uncertainty; but when the moment arrives and he tears the envelope open, he only finds an invisible text which defies all attempts at chemical treatment. Now and then a word becomes visible, or a figure denoting a meridian; then it fades again. He will never know the exact wording of the order; nor whether he has complied with it or failed in his mission. But his awareness of the order in his pocket, even though it cannot be deciphered, makes him think and act differently from the captain of a pleasure-cruiser or of a pirate ship … … I felt a growing conviction that [the English nation] lived, in [their] muddled ways, closer to the text of the invisible writing than any other.
—— The Invisible Writing, p.432 and p.519.