the education issue

I've only had a Statcounter account for a year or so, so I don't know at what point schools and universities started accessing this blog in large numbers. But that they do is gratifying. For a couple of months through Statcounter, I've been keeping a track on what schools authorities and boards, universities and other educational institutions and charities have been accessing the blog, and what posts have been the most popular. This has led to me keeping a rolling tally of the last 50 universities etc to access the blog, down on the bottom of the sidebar to the right.

I blog about popular culture against the background of Judaeo-Christian faith traditions and conservative political views and, when I'm not writing about things like cookies (see the previous post) try to research topics exhaustively. I write for the only person you can honestly write for - myself - and am glad that, alongside several online friends I've made like Linda Pam and Revd Bosco, academic instutions have chosen to follow the blog, some quite regularly. I hope you all continue to enjoy it.

I've posted a full top 30 over on the Top 30 from the Fen site; here's the top ten. (Note: it would be mischevous of me to mention which posts were accessed by the Houses of Parliament and the US House of Representatives, so I won't.)

Underage smoking is more stupid than criminal An unorthodox but time-honoured way to discourage an underage smoker, using inclusion instead of stigmatisation. Accessed by schools authorities internationally.

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Was the presidential election a set-up?When Goulong Li went head-to-head with Tom Chigbo for the presidency of Cambridge University Student Union, university dons took the unprecedented move of briefing against Li in local and even national newspapers, professing their shock at his opinion - which he had spoken freely for a year and a half - that homosexuals could be "cured". But the point at which he lost the election may have been when, during the filmed hustings, he took his Bible from his pocket. This post was very popular in both Cambridge and universities across the US.

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Cannabis policy's in no more chaos than usual As Frank Nutt's supporters predict Bad Things for drugs policies in the wake of his removal as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, I find myself in the unusual position of supporting the government on his sacking.

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Abigail Blackburn and the truth about pregorexia Celebrity culture eats its own children, and nobody profits more than editors like Abigail Blackburn. Written about a documentary by singer and model Louise Redknapp, the post has been enduringly popular within and outwith educational establishments.

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Anne Frank In the display on Anne Frank in Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital - the foundation was delivering diversity training - we saw the world famous picture of Anne staring into a future she would never see. Accessed by some universities, but predominantly by schools.

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Norman Tebbit and the art of Risk Former Conservative Party chairman Norman Tebbit showed a magisterial understanding of the concept of risk when he suggested voters could elect smaller parties as a reaction to the MPs' expenses crisis. Councils, schools and insurance companies take note.

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Fatal Misconception - the struggle to control world population Indira Gandhi's first government collapsed in chaos because of population control measures drawn up by white westerners, but eugenics has returned. Very popular in India for reasons that become obvious, but also internationally, and by some surprising institutions.

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Good taste back on the horizon - how mad are you? A documentary recreating David Rosenhahn's 1972 experiment involving "pseudopatients" admittied to a psychiatric ward - with surprising results.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows From Harry Potter through such stopping points as Odysseus and back - but contains spoilers: big ones! Both unis and schools seemed to like this one.

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Chlamydia, koalas and killer sex education The government is attacking the epidemic of chlamydia in young people on two fronts: firstly, by grafting it onto its campaign to delay early sex; and secondly, by handing out condoms to the population it's trying to delay early sex within.

cookies...

I heard from Linda over at Don't Poke the Baby that she's having a cookie party tomorrow, and for those whom a trip to the States would necessitate wet feet, she's decided that the cookies can be virtual (geddit?)

My older daughter Minora was going to copy down a diabetic cookie recipe and at the same time post some of her Manga drawings, but she's caught the bugs that are doing the rounds and her own blood sugars are going up and down quicker than the Grand Ole Duke of York's minions.

So I searched through the internet and found a compromise: a diabetic recipe for oatmeal cookies, so you've got something from her, and something that sounds Scottish - so much so that Samule Johnson defined "oats" in his dictionary as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people" - without there being a danger of any terrorists being released from prison.

Without further ado, here's the recipe from the Information about Diabetes website. (Please note: recommendations can be different from country to country, so if in doubt please check with your diabetes nurse.)

INGREDIENTS

To serve 24:

1/2 cup Margarine, (1 Stick)
1/4 cup Sugar
1/4 cup Brown sugar
Dry sugar substitute equal
To 1/4 cup of sugar
1/4 cup Egg, whites
1 tsp Vanilla
1/2 tsp Black walnut flavoring
1/4 cup Water, at room temperature
1 1/2 cup All-purpose flour
1 tsp Baking soda
1/4 tsp Salt
1/2 cup Black or English Walnuts chopped

Preparation:

Cream margarine, sugars and dry sugar substitute
together at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add
egg whites, flavorings, and water, and mix at medium
speed for 30 seconds, scraping down the bowl before
and after adding egg whites, flavorings, and water.
Stir flour, baking powder, salt, oatmeal and walnuts
together to blend, and add to creamy mixture. Mix to
blend. Drop dough by 1 1/2 T onto cookie sheets that
have been sprayed with pan spray or lined with
aluminum foil. Press each cookie down lightly with the
back of a tablespoon dipped in color water. Bake at
350 for 12 to 14 minutes, or until cookies are lightly
browned. Remove them to a wire rack and cool to room
to temperture. Yield: 24 Food exchanges per serving: 1
STARCH/BREAD EXCHANGE + 1 FAT EXCHANGE Calories: 122
Fat: 6g, CHO: 15g, PRO: 3g, NA 120 mg, Cholesterol: 0
Source:

Desserts for Diabetics by Mabel Cavaiani, R.D.

Shared by: Kathleen's recipe swap page - email recipes@ilos.net


I'm hoping Minora will be a bit better tomorrow, and will be able to upload one of her Manga drawings. Linda, I hope your real and virtual cookie parties go really well together - give my best wishes to Pam!

climate change and Copenhagen - no sacrilege intended

The principle has been known for centuries:

The greater thy carbon footprint, the more severely shalt thou be taxed, unless thou hast good connections. Therefore be not lifted up by any offsets that thou hast; but rather fear concerning the allocation which is given to thee. If it seemeth to thee that thou knowest many things, and understandest them well, know also that there are many more things which thou knowest not. Be not high-minded, but rather confess thine ignorance. Why desirest thou to lift thyself above another, when there are found many more learned and more skilled in climate change than thou? If thou wilt know and learn anything with profit, love to be thyself unknown and to be counted for nothing.

I hope my many online friends from the Roman Catholic Church and other churches will maintain their prodigious patience with me: no sacrilege was meant in my adapting the text of Thomas à Kempis' The Imitation of Christ, Book I, Chapter II, paragraph 3.

What à Kempis was writing about, of course, was how to live an ascetic life as a Christian, especially if one was cloistered. But his book has become a classic hailed by individuals and groups across the Christian spectrum and is therefore sure to be raided by the votaries of the new religion.

I'm happy to admit that there are some truths in James Lovelock's theory that some of earth's systems contain compensatory mechanisms - that's how volcanoes work, why the Himalayas are getting taller, and what makes winds to blow my aerial over whenever there's a good rugby game on. (And I have to profess admiration for a man brave enough to suggest that the way to preserve the rainforest in the Amazon basin from development is to bury nuclear waste there.) What gave his theory of what one might call natural checks and balances legs, though, was a suggestion from his fellow villager William Golding, as they walked to the pub, that he swap the various long-winded names for his theory for one word: Gaia - "wide-bosomed Earth" in Hesiod's Theogony. Thus began a series of books and free lunches.

But what we're experiencing right now - in Britain at least - is a dearth of information about what's happening at the much-vaunted Copenhagen conference (Cop15 - the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009) at which, we're told some Hard Decisions are going to be made, mostly by people who will not bear their brunt. That's not me being waspish: I've just listened to Matt McGrath's short broadcast from the conference with heavenly ideals, describing the very earthly consequences of herding 34,000 delegates into a centre built to hold 15,000:



But how to convince the people? Affecting to present the facts is the refuge of last resort, especially in the age of Web 2.0, as real facts have an annoying habit of being brought to light. I would highlight veteran climate-change blogger and meteorologist Anthony Watts, of Watts up with That who consistently teaches the apostles of manmade global warming the lesson that every bully learns sooner or later: eventually you meet somebody who's not prepared to back off.

Again faith finds its treasures ransacked. In his Spiritual Exercises, Jesuit founder St Ignatius of Loyola advises in Exercise number 47 of a type of meditation that consists of seeing "with the sight of the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate". Just so, in the age of what my Mum used to call "the god in the corner", the collective enhanced imagination feeds us adverts where a factory chimney spewing out fumes is recontextualised to become a car exhaust-pipe; a child asks her father whether the bedtime story of a dying earth will have a happy ending and is told to wait and see; and even an advert for a credit card (MasterCard) goes through the prices of various "green" items then delivers the punchline "Helping Dad save the earth: priceless". One advert, whose disingenuousness is even more sickening than its imagery, shows polar-bears falling from the sky in an attempt to get us to fly less (public service note: so many flights took delegates to Copenhagen that some had to park in Sweden until the city's airport could take them).

Polar bears are interesting. In Sigmund Freud's 1913 apotheosis of racist western ethnocentrism Totem and Taboo, the psychoanalyst defines the characteristics of an animal chosen to embody the tribe:

As a rule it is an animal, either edible and harmless, or dangerous and feared...which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. The totem is first of all the tribal ancestor of the clan, as well as its tutelary spirit and protector; it sends oracles and, though otherwise dangerous, the totem knows and spares its children. The members of a totem are therefore under a sacred obligation not to kill (destroy) their totem, to abstain from eating its meat or from any other enjoyment of it. Any violation of these prohibitions is automatically punished. [Corrected for transcribers' spelling mistakes]

The polar-bear has become a totemic representation for the new tribe which believes that if we do not lower our emissions of greenhouse-gases, the polar bears' deaths will herald our own destruction as sure as Nemesis punishes hubris. The reason I'm so interested by Ursus Maritimus is that Dr Mitchell Taylor, an international expert on the beasties, says that polar bear numbers are higher now than they were when he started studying them 30 years ago. "Anathema sit!" cried those of his colleagues for whom this was in inconvenient truth, and barred him from a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group which was convened earlier this year to raise awareness about how their numbers were falling, and falling because of climate change that the experts/high priests lay at the door of humankind's actions.

Freud's contemporary psychoanalyst of Violet Mary Firth practiced as an occultist under the name of Dion Fortune. Having voiced her admiration for the Rite of Mass, she may have drawn deeply from the wells of à Kempis and Loyola, as she prefaced one of her books with the epigram This is not to inform the mind but train it. The sinister puppeteers of the anthropogenic climate-change panic, which one can only assume to be a deception until reliable evidence proves otherwise, have also learnt well.

And what of Gaia? Having created her consort Ouranos (or Uranus, depending on whether you like Retsina or Chianti), he showed his gratefulness by eating their children. He was made to regurgitate them, of course, but there is a principle involved...That's why one of my favourite images from the early Church is a carving of Jesus using Ouranos' head as a footstool. Poor old Gaia might have applauded the scoundrel's fate, had either of them existed.

case dismissed: Mohammed case thrown out

I don't ask for much, but I must admit it's gratifying to be vindicated. An hour ago I read a tweet from Martin Beckford, the Telegraph's Social and Relgious Affairs Correspondent to the effect that a judge has thrown out a case in which hoteliers Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang were accused of "launching a tirade" against Ericka Tazi, a recent convert to Islam. They had been accused of calling her hijab (full veil) "bondage" dressing, and of calling Mohammed a "warlord" like Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. District Judge Richard Clancy dismissed the case after branding Ms Tazi's testimony as "inconsistent".

This is what I wrote about the case when it all kicked off in September - read the last sentence before the italics at the bottom.

Advent and Christmas: carols and the big wait

I've got a terrible illness which is preventing me from doing most of what I want to do; in other words, in man-talk, I've got a cold. I've been suffering as conspicuously as possible in front of Maxima and the girls, but getting no sympathy. Sometimes I think I'll never understand women...

One of the things I'd wanted to do was go over to the Grassy Old Fen for the annual Service of Carols and Lessons in aid of the Alzheimer's Society, but felt really bad. In addition, the atosphere of mild hysteria that has surrounded the swine-flu outbreak has effectively ostracised everybody with anything more than the sniffles, even though in a parallel outbreak of common sense the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have reintroduced Holy Communion from the Chalice. And not a moment too soon: the Revd Bosco Peters was astounded when news of a no-touch Communsion Host dispenser turned out not to be a joke in bad taste but a real product.

Still, over here in the Draughty Old Fen we still have a Service of Carols by Candlelight to come, which I'm looking forward to. It's good not only to sing songs looking forward to the feast of Christ's birth, but to touch a part of childhood with which those songs are linked that seemed - perhaps not without justification - to be a better time. So it was disappointing to hear that the Bishop of Croydon has denounced traditional carols as nonsense, embarrassing and "Victorian child control", in the sort of negation of one's culture that makes it all the easier for those who wish us harm to tighten their grip yet further the reins of power.

We also have an excellent Advent course being put on by St Gallicus' parish by Rector Pellegrina and Musica, the Parish Assistant, and based on the theme of waiting. We've been through the covenants of the Bible, like God's "Rainbow Covenant" with Noah and the Covenant of the Heart spoken through Ezekiel. We've also been through the Binding of Isaac and the story's prefiguring of somebody else who would climb a hill with wood on his back but would not walk away; and the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, indicating what kind of person that would be, if not exactly Who.

There was also an examination of secular sayings involving waiting that Minima, the youngest person there who was thrilled to be told she was an honourary adult, enjoyed. Especially when we came to "a watched kettle never boils", which Minima, in her wisdom, said was true, that the electric kettle seemed to boil quicker when she frogot about it and put her mind on more important things, like High School Musical.

I had to challenge this, and told her about a time in the mists of the past when we didn't have such luxuries. Once, mindful of the saying, I put the kettle on the gas cooker and sat down and watched it until it boiled. Then, just as I was contemplating success, my Mum came in and asked what on earth I was doing sitting watching the kettle.

It made Minima and a few others laugh. And I was glad about this, because the secular time in which Christmas is set is so full of forced bonhommie and warmth that we are in dire need of the real thing. Many people find it a hard time, because for a fortnight it becomes societally unacceptable to say you feel rubbish or that you want people to leave you alone, and possible the less religious one becomes the more guilty one is of this. In Cambridge, if you have mental health problems, most of the services for us that haven't been closed for good are on holiday or reduced hours, so it's really good to be part of a family where I'm allowed to slope off for a while if I feel awful. And out of the house, I must admit I do revel somewhat in the epithet of "bah humbug": it's good to be grumpy.

So when it comes have a happy Christmas, and before then have a good Advent. It's an excellent season to become acquainted with something we're all involved in: the big wait.

world AIDS day - why I never wore a ribbon

CAVETE: contains discussions of and links to explicit sexual matters

Over on Platform 10, David Skelton commented on the lack of people wearing red ribbons for World AIDS Day. One of the two reasons I never wore a ribbon is that I've long finished with the phase when every item of clothing had to have messages appended to it; now, with a cross round my neck and a fish on my lapel, I'm sporting all the iconography I want to.

I suppose something to be thankful for is that the red ribbon is not now seen as compulsory; Ian Hislop famously refused to wear one on the current affairs panel show Have I Got News for You because he "disliked...the compulsory nature of the red ribbon at media events...There are other causes as important as deserving of media attention in this country." Instead, he cut a sheet of paper into an L-shape and pinned it to his jacket - one of his relatives had just died of leukemia.

Another thing to be thankful for is that media outlets who know that prejudice sells papers have stopped ascribing the disease as one that almost exclusively affects homosexual communities, which perhaps gives campaigns like red and alive space to acknowledge that gay men are disproportionately affected (see detail from poster, left).

Other groups who are disproportionately affected are members of sub-Saharan African communities, originating from a part of the world that bears the brunt of two-thirds of the world's 33 million HIV/AIDS cases. Women from these communities, in particular if they belong to communities where it's traditional to breastfeed, can face difficult questions from their peers if they're bottle-feeding their babies.

But the responsibility for passing HIV to them often lies with certain types of African men who see women as property, and ignorantly accept the myth that having sex with a virgin cures AIDS. Jacob Zuma, who became President of South Africa this year, made an astoundingly stupid statement in 2006 that he had showered after having sex with an HIV-positive woman in the belief that this would lessen his chances of catching the virus - but at least he accepts that HIV is the causative organism of AIDS and is allowing palliative anti-retroviral drugs to be given to his people, both of which his predecessor Thabo Mbeki actively fought against. The Focus on Gender feature in The Zimbabwean in August (on page 21 of a 24-page paper) carried a piece about a woman who was gang-raped because a male relative of hers belonged to the wrong political party - then was treated as an outcast by her peers.

Not that in Britain we can claim cultural superiority - the myth of having sex with a virgin to cure a sexually-transmitted diseases, prominently syphilis, has been traced to 16th-century England, and survived into Queen Victoria's time. A disgusting phenomenon of our own times is that called "getting a gift" in Britain and "chasing the bug" in the US, whereby a man who is HIV-negative will deliberately have sex with men who are positive, often in ways that I can't describe even in this post, in order to catch the bug and thereby - either in his eyes or those of others - assume an identity that matters in sectors of gay communities. I say "disgusting" advisedly: when gay lad o' pairts Stephen Fry found out about the practice in his documentary HIV & Me, he couldn't stop his jaw from hitting the floor.

It's no surprise that the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced recently that HIV is the leading cause of death in women aged 15-44. However, the WHO is not without blood on its hands itself. John Smeaton, Director of SPUC (the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children), points out that WHO's definition of "sexual and reproductive health" includes abortion on demand, which is more a matter of reducing the population of third-world countries on a eugenics basis than of eliminating acceptance of events like the gang-rape of Maidei Changamire in the article from The Zimbabwean I transcribed, who sees the product of that rape as a "gift God has chosen to bestow, despite all circumstances".

So, the other reason I didn't wear the ribbon is because, although a disease in its own right, HIV/AIDS is often also a symptom of ignorance, prejudice and stupidity, and the fight against these goes on 24/7, not just on 1/12.

top ten songs about xmas

The first time I ever did a "top ten", I was such a newbie to blogging that I didn't realise that you could post ten YouTube clips in one post, so my Christmas top ten had two clips on it, and even then I was anxious about whether it would post.

With your indulgence, I'd like to post a Christmas top ten. I realise not everybody agrees with the spelling of Xmas in the title, but I'm happy to use it because X, or "Chi" in the Greek alphabet, is the first letter of Christ in that language and has always stood for Christ, as in the "Chi Rho" monogram that is, among many other things, the seal of St Stephen's Guild of Altar Servers.

10 - Lo he comes with clouds descending

A constant and justified complaint of Professor Calculus' is that we seem to move from Guy Fawkes Night on 5th November to Christmas in the commercial calendar, and Advent gets lost somewhere along the way. My only critique of his view is that Christmas starts just after the summer holidays in some major stores. But here's his favourite Advent hymn, sung by the choir of Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire:




9 - December Song

The title of this song is confusing as it's actually about Christmas. What I like about both song and video is that it uses searing cyber-Dickensian critique to accentuate the value of Christmas for a generation of kids cursed not only with familial breakdown but also the availability of 24/7 communications technology, much of it bearing anti-Christian messages at the traditional times of Christmas and Easter. Enjoy.




8 - The Power of Love

This was Frankie Goes to Hollywood's third single. It followed Relax and Two Tribes, so everybody I knew watched its debut with hands ready to cover eyes. But it was a pwerful retelling of the Nativity, and it worked. EJ Norman released it as a treat for her fans last year: click her pic to see her profile, and watch out for further releases.




7 - What child is this?

The question echoes down through the centuries, from supporters, detractors and the victims of acts He would not have sanctioned. As any parent can attest to, a baby changes everything. This is a collaboration between Andrea Bocelli and Mary J Blige.




6 - I believe in Father Christmas

A perfunctory hearing of this song might leave the listener with the impression that it's anti-Christian, but that's not my interpretation, having heard it for 30-odd festive seasons. It's not exactly pro-Christian, either. Greg Lake's setting of Troika, the fourth movement out of five in Prokeviev's Lieutenant Kijé suite, is an object lesson in getting folk to listen to your words by giving them quality music - hymn writers pay attention, please! Having said that, I can't disagree with Lake's conclusion - The Christmas we get we deserve.




5 - Christmas Song

Gilbert O' Sullivan's assertion that he was dreaming of a peaceful world instead of a white Christmas obviously hit a chord - he's performing here with a choir from a Jesuit girls' preparatory school. I imagine many members of the armed forces posted abroad for Christmas - and their families - agree with him.




4 - Wonderful Christmastime

Paul McCartney provides a masterclass in how to write and perform the classic Christmastime song.




3 - I'll be home for Christmas

Bing Crosby first made this song famous and a favourite in forces serving abroad - here it is performed by the Carpenters, and it has relevance for conflicts in Afghanistan. Please spare a thought and whisper a prayer for the troops out there.




2 - Mary's Boy Child

Harry Belafonte first recorded this song, but it became a worldwide hit with Boney M's calypso version, which is my favourite rendition of the piece. Enjoy.




1 - Silent Night

It must have been fate that flummoxed the organ in Austria's Nikolaus-Kirche on Christmas Eve 1818: it forced Father Josef Mohr to bring a melody he'd composed on guitar to local headmaster Frances Xaver Gruber, desperately hoping that the latter could come up with lyrics. 170 years later, glamsters-turned-popsters Bros gave many of us a plesant surprise with their interpretation.




If you enjoyed this, click here for some more Top ten songs about...