Walking the Berkshires

Lincoln v. Rather Results

The Lincoln vs. Rather Color Commentary Showdown attracted substantial interest earlier this week.  Here's the breakdown of who said what:

The Rather quotes were all culled from his election night coverage broadcasts in 2000 and 2004.  Rather really said:

1.  "If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun"

4.  "Don't taunt the alligator until you've crossed the creek."

6.   "don't know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon"

9.   "Mother is right, looks can be deceiving."

...and a whole buch of other goofy things I couldn't use but you can read here.

The rest were pure Lincoln.

The key distinction is that Lincoln was using his folk metaphors to impart wisdom, while Dan, I fear, was just being folksy.

Baboons in the Belfry: Life at The Wildland - Urban Interface

You think you've got problems.  As North American wildlife populations expand into new niches that include suburban backyards, and new housing encroaches farther into wildlands, bears at birdfeeders and deer in the begonias have become increasingly common.  But while beavers may flood our manicured lawns and raccoons vie with skunks for our garbage, at least we don't have to contend with resident baboons.  Things are getting hairy in the suburbs of Cape Town, as this "fair use" excerpt of a transcript from reporter Steve Curwood's story at Living On Earth reveals:

"CURWOOD: Residents of Welcome Glen enjoy a tranquil village life, with picturesque views of the ocean and the Cape of Good Hope. But on garbage collection days, the streets here can be chaos.

[HOSE SOUNDS]

CURWOOD: Chris Schulz rolls out his garden hose.

SCHULZ: We just hose them. They are scared of water. On dirt day they come out and they're a menace.

[HOSE SOUND]

CURWOOD: Curbside trash bins provide an easy meal. Baboons tip them over to nibble on table scraps.

[SCREECH SOUND]

CURWOOD: With piercing, deep-set eyes, rounded snouts, and wiry gray fur, the animals look like tough guys. A fully-grown male can weigh a hundred pounds. Rob and Elizabeth Venter have a slingshot ready as the troupe moves their way.

R. VENTER: That's "George."

E. VENTER: No it's not "George," it's "Eric."

R. VENTER: Well it's either "George" or "Eric." It's one of the two alpha baboons. They're really big and they attack you. One time one of my friends held up a big stick to it, and "George" grabbed it out of his hand and chased him down the road with the stick.

CURWOOD: Baboons have long foraged in gardens and garbage dumps. But in recent years, animals like "George" have grown more adventurous, seeking supper inside people's homes.

E. VENTER: He's very aggressive. And he came into my back sliding door, and suddenly he was right there on my kitchen counter in front of me. And I just said: "go, go" like that. And he went: "argh" to me.

CURWOOD: Did he hurt you?

E. VENTER: No, I jumped back, then I ran out of the house, and called for help. And a neighbor came in with a shovel and he went out. But it was very, very scary."

As the former surrogate father of a 3 month old Chachma baboon, about the size of the little one riding atop its mother in the photograph at left by Terry FitzPatrick, I can attest to the challenge of living in close proximity to baboons that have become habituated to human environments.  Our orphan baboon lived with us for nearly a month during our last year in Namibia, but we couldn't keep her in the house at night because we would not have had a single possession or food item left unpawed if we had done so.  She hated sleeping outside (baboons are extremely social creatures) and would hang by her toes from the roof of our little house and punch out the window screens.  We finally ended up locking her in the tiny bathroom off the back stoop at night and felt like very bad parents. 

She used to eat the thorny seeds that stuck like caltrops in the soles of my sandals, and once killed a scorpion that chose to share our evening campfire.  The little heart breaker was closely bonded to me but because Viv gave her food - a sign of subservience in baboon society - she considered herself the alpha female of our little troop, which as you can imagine did not go over very well with my wife.  I had to chuck her into the 20 gallon washtub we used as a bath when she bared her fangs and hissed at Viv one afternoon and her response to that water was rather like a cat's.  The garden hose method of baboon proofing the neighborhood described in the Living on Earth report might have some limited utility.

One little baboon was more than our household could handle.  I can only imagine what a troop of twenty or so might mean for suburban Capetonians.  Just as there are ways of living in bear country, there are ways to make one's home less attractive to baboons and to respond when confronted with them.  The outlook isn't that great, though, for peaceful coexistence.  In the end, either the people will have to go, or the wildlife.  South Africa has a shameful history of displacing (non-white) people to make way for game preserves.  This time, the chances are better that the wildlife will be forced to give ground.

Healthier Mosquitoes, Healthier Kids: A New Weapon in the War on Malaria

The AP reports:

"Researchers have developed a malaria-resistant mosquito, a step that might one day help block the spread of an illness that has claimed millions of lives around the world."

Malaria is a scourge that kills nearly 3 million people worldwide every year, the vast majority of them in Africa and overwhelmingly children.  My wife got the falciparum strain while we were in Namibia and it nearly killed her. 

A team of researchers lead by Assistant Professor Jason Rasgon at Johns Hopkins University's Malaria Research Institute hopes to develop a transgenic mosquito that will resist malaria infection, would be less likely to transmit disease and more likely to out compete those that are carriers. 

"Working with the mouse form of malaria - not the human type - Rasgon's team was able to genetically engineer mosquitoes that were resistant to malaria.

Malaria infection does exact a toll on mosquitoes and in laboratory work they found that the resistant insects were able to out compete nonresistant mosquitoes.

Starting with the same number of resistant and nonresistant mosquitoes, they found that after nine generations the resistant type made up 70 percent of the population - raising the possibility of replacing regular mosquitoes with resistant ones that don't spread disease.

However, Rasgon stressed that in the lab work the insects were infected with a higher amount of the parasite than occurs in nature, and a larger proportion of the mosquitoes were infected.

"This was proof of principle," Rasgon said in a telephone interview. "The next step would be to work in a system more epidemiologically relevant" but still in the lab.

"We're not anywhere near a field release," he said. Now they need to turn their attention to working with human malaria and trying to engineer a mosquito resistant to that."

You can read more here, courtesy of Glenn Reynolds, and also here.

There may yet be unanticipated consequences of releasing a transgenic mosquito into the environment, as is often the case with aggressive, invasive species, but this would appear to be a situation where the benefits for human health should far outweigh the risk of intentionally introducing a super mosquito.

"Tight as the Rusted Lugnuts on a '55 Ford" Lincoln vs. Rather Color Commentary Showdown

Culled from the vaults of folk witticism, Walking the Berkshires proudly presents the Abe Lincoln vs. Dan Rather Color Commentary Showdown.  Each contender is well known for having the common touch and making a rich use of country-style idiom.  We invite you to identify which of the following quotes are Rather's and which are attributed to Lincoln.  Some of Dan Rather's best material cannot be used here, as its modern references would give him away, but can't you just see Lincoln describing Sherman's March as "sweeping through the South like a big wheel through a cotton field"?

1.  "If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun"

2.  "Every man must skin his own skunk."

3.  "short and sweet, like an old woman's dance."

4.  "Don't taunt the alligator until you've crossed the creek."

5.   "like an ox jumped halfway over the fence." 

6.   "don't know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon"

7.   All the little colt revolvers would have grown into horse pistols."

8.  "like a man letting rooms at one end of the house when the other end is on fire."

9.   "Mother is right, looks can be deceiving."

10.  "he can hold a leg while someone else skins."

Leave your answers in the comments.  The winner will receive the plaudits of a grateful nation and our endorsement for a color commenter tryout with the minor league team of your choice.  Unless Dan already has the job.

Update (3/21/2007)  Answers here.

Hilltoppers

This is an image of someone's dream house, but to others it may seem like a nightmare.  There it perches overlooking the Housatonic Gorge like some modernist Rhineland castle, commanding the view from above as well as dominating it from below.  An access driveway has been blasted in switchbacks up the rock face. 

It's a big house and it makes a big statement, and there's no getting around the fact that it sets most folks' teeth on edge: a bird's eye view that just flips the bird. 

People resent its visibility, the absence of screening and the way it looms over the landscape.  Others find it out of character with what they are accustomed to seeing on the ridge lines of Litchfield's mountains.  Conservationists are dismayed at the way it fragments the forest and ridgetop, particularly because it abuts a large part of the Housatonic State Forest and the Appalachian Trail.  There are competing values at work here as well, especially the tensions between rural and urban, old aesthetics and new, second home-owner and longtime resident. 

Then again, it is perfectly legal.  To paraphrase W.P. Kinsella's famous line from "Shoeless Joe"; "If you zone it, they will build."  Many people considered slopes like this too steep for residential construction - and if you are an emergency responder trying to reach this house up that driveway, it may be too steep to bring help in time - but unless regulations prohibit it, the only building constraint is money.  This house was built during the late 1990's real estate boom, and a $300,000 driveway suddenly was not considered a serious obstacle for a multimillion dollar house.   Connecticut is a home rule state and towns have significant discretion in what their regulations permit.  You can't blame the fox because the hen house door was left open.

When I was growing up in Dutchess County, New York, where the low, rounded hills were still cleared for agriculture and had not reverted back to forest, folks who built grand houses on the crests were called "Hilltoppers."  Those wide views were attractive to wealthy city dwellers used to vertical living.  The dairy farms of the county either went to equestrian facilities or mansions, and the same thing is happening across Litchfield County today.   

The mountains here are steeper but not inviolate, and Litchfield's rolling hills are rapidly being subdivided and developed.  As we build farther from village centers, higher up the slopes and deeper in the forests, the landscape changes.  Perhaps in a few decades houses like this will seem normal here, like the Eastern Forest without its American Chestnuts.

"Running the Circus from the Monkey Cage."

The Carnival of Principled Government is at Principled Discovery.  There's a nice link to a selection of political cartoons from America's first century from the Library of Congress collection.

Early Modern Notes, founder of the History Carnival, hosts its 50th edition.  Big changes are planned for this carnival in the coming year, including a shift from bi-weekly to monthly publication and a new History Carnivals Aggregator.

There's even a Carnival of Top 10 Lists for those who can't get enough definitive statements based on arbitrarily limited subjective criteria (and what's not to love about that?).  My Top Ten Flicks for Costume Flicks is among the posts in the current edition.

Elizabeth at 5,000 Ft Above and Centuries Away

As I was unable to enter the graveyards of my ancient kin, I am instead taking taking a remote look at those venerable stones and the street where my Grandmother once lived.  Google Maps takes me to 454 Westminster Ave., Elizabeth, New Jersey, and as I switch on the satellite view and zero in I see housing projects lining the East side of the street and vacant lots like missing teeth on the other.  There is an older house, though, there where 454 ought to be, and I can almost see the gables of the old Ogden home, now inevitably divided up into apartments.  I did not search for this street when I was in Elizabeth on Wednesday, but here I hover at 5,000 feet, searching for something familiar in the blurred lines of a house last lived in by members of my family near seventy years ago.

Had I been able to pass through the padlocked gates of the 1st Presbyterian Church, I would have found many names that are familiar to me as the family genealogist but which mean very little to other passersby on Broad St.  One of the volumes in my library was published in 1892 and is dedicated entirely to Inscriptions on Tombstones, Elizabeth, New Jersey.  Here is an engraving of the monuments of my 7th Great-grandparents, Jonathan and Rebekah Ogden.  Jonathan emigrated to America in 1640 with his twin brother David and older brother John Jr., along with the family patriarch John Ogden Sr. and his wife Jane Bond.  He was a Deacon in the church and a prominent citizen, so it gives me no end of pleasure to read that he also was indicted May 13, 1699, for breaking open the jail and releasing two prisoners, and again the following year for "riotously taking the keys from the sheriff and freeing yet another prisoner.  The Ogden genealogy explains this aberrant behavior as a simple case of Englishmen standing up for their rights even in that early time, and indeed there was deep dissatisfaction among many Elizabethtowners with the Proprietors' administration of colonial affairs.  Then again, as my Great Uncle Archie and his uncle Ned were fond of saying;" Maybe it ain't so!"

The 1st Presbyterian Churchyard contain the graves of numerous Ogden ancestors and allied families.   Among the most prominent are General Elias Dayton, commander of the 3rd New Jersey Continentals and Later the Jersey Brigade; General Matthias Ogden, commander of the 1st NJ continentals, and his brother Governor Aaron Ogden.  Over in St. John's graveyard is Jonathan Dayton, son of Elias and Signer of the Constitution.  His granddaughter, Susan Dayton Beasley, married Aaron Ogden's son, Elias Bailey Dayton Ogden, and they were my Gr-gr-great grandparents.   

Someday I'll return to Elizabeth, this time having made arrangements to have the gates unlocked and to wander amid the stones of Old Elizabethtown and the graves of my ancestors.  The nearest I can come until then is here at 5,000 ft. up and centuries away.

Back to my Roots

My grandmother's was the ninth and last generation of her family to grow up in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  Our ancestor John Ogden in 1664 was one of the four original patentees of Elizabethtown, the first English settlement in the Garden State.  The Ogdens were prominent members of the community for the better part of three centuries, but times and fortunes changed and by 1942 the last of our immediate family had left for greener pastures.  The city is now the 4th largest in New Jersey and the surrounding area heavily industrialized, though my grandmother recalled that the rail yards and tanneries were as odorous in her day as its refineries today.

On impulse, I took a side trip to Elizabeth while driving to Philadelphia on Wednesday. I had no map, nor a clear idea of where to find the landmarks of my grandmother's hometown.  I figured that the center of town would be a good place to start, and as I drove through a succession of rundown neighborhoods I kept an eye out for the spires of St. John's Episcopal Church, where many of my Revolutionary-era ancestors are buried.  I turned right on Broad St. and found myself heading for the Town Hall and suddenly there was the church, and across the street the Presbyterian church where my great uncle Dayt was married in 1942.  I pulled into a parking space, and stepped out into the unusually warm sunshine of a balmy late winter day.

I knew that this was not my grandmother's Elizabeth, but it really sank in as I stood by the historic graveyard and found not only its gates locked and barred but padlocked chains across the entrance to the church itself, presumably to keep vagrants and vandals off the premises.  It also kept me from the bones of my kin, including Jonathan Dayton, Signer of the US Constitution, and brothers Aaron and Matthias Ogden.  There are oxidized plaques on the church walls and several other buildings downtown placed by patriotic Elizabethans more than 100 years ago to honor their forebears who fought in the Revolution, but they are not the names of today's residents and it is not their history. 

Modern Elizabeth is nearly 50% Hispanic and 20% African-American.  18% of the city population lives below the poverty line.  It has New Jersey's largest Urban Enterprise Zone.  Its official city website plays up its historic attractions, but on Wednesday I was the only tourist on Broad Street outside the padlocked cemeteries looking in.   Part of me was disappointed, but this is not my city and I am not entitled to special treatment just because my people were once is citizens.  The cemeteries here belong to the dead, and the rest of Elizabeth to living Elizabethans.  I got back in my truck and headed back to the highway.

Past is Prologue

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts..."

 

"And through this distemperature we see
  The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
    Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
   And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
  An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set."

"A sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins"

"Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?"

"Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind."

"And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds
tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones, and good in everything."

   

(Exit, pursued by a bear)

"Brush Up Your Shakespeare"

More than anything else in English literature, the works of William Shakespeare seem to offer limitless opportunities for reinvention and reinterpretation.  For such canonical material, it is remarkable how freely Shakespeare is adapted and transformed on stage and screen.  Compare this phenomenon to any other great work and the resistance that inevitably greets even modest tinkering with plot and character.  "St. Peter" Jackson took substantial liberties in his film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and met considerable resistance from Tolkien fans - though mercifully cooler heads prevailed and we did not have to endure the extremely bad idea of Aragorn engaged in combat with Sauron "in the flesh" before the Black Gate at the climax, and so a CG troll stood in for the Dark Lord in post production.

What is it about the Bard that lends him to such adaptation, more often than not in fresh and revealing ways and not mere parody?  I'm not satisfied with the standard explanation that the "universality of his themes" makes these 400 year old plays relevant to modern ears and audiences.  Anyone who recalls struggling through even the relatively straightforward "Julius Caesar" in High School will also recall that the interpretive footnotes take up more of the page than the actual text and are ultimately more a distraction than a means to engage with the plays themselves.  It's all very well for cracking codes, and it keeps Associate Professors of English gainfully employed and off the streets, but if Shakespeare is really universal then we ought to be able to relate to a performance "full of sound and fury" and find significance.

Which, of course, is what playwrights and filmmakers have done with this material in countless and striking ways.  There are, unquestionably, Shakespeare purists, but sometimes even these take daring steps, such as those who perform the plays with the original Early Modern English pronunciation, rather like performing Bach on period instruments. 

Borrowing liberally from Shakespeare seems fitting for the works of an author who made free use of other material, and when artfully done the result can be a splendid reinvention like Kurosawa's Ran (1985) or  West Side Story (rather than, say, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996), with its rumble on Verona Beach and uneven casting).  Anachronisms often work in productions of Shakespeare, but tend to succeed best when not merely a communication devise aimed at getting teenagers to buy movie tickets.  One thinks of Kenneth Branaugh's Henry V (1989) with it's gritty, slow-motion battle sequence deeply rooted in the time period of Agincourt, yet his narrator Derek Jacobi appears in a dark trench coat.  This one modern element sets the film apart from other, less successful recreations of the events described by Shakespeare that emphasize realism.  Polanski's Macbeth (1971), or the treatment given to Hamlet in Royal Deceit (1997), may well be true to history but they lose something in bringing the Thane of Cawdor and Prince of Denmark down to the level of mere petty lords mucking about in their squalid kingdoms.

Among my favorite and most divergent riffs on Shakespeare are films that manage to be cleverly  irreverent and illuminating at the same time.  One of these is Scotland, PA (2002) - in which my boarding school roommate David Wike has a minor role - and features Mac and Pat Macbeth scheming to rise above their bottom rung jobs at Duncan's Diner in the 1970s.  The weird sisters are three hippies, Christopher Walken plays Officer MacDuff, and the soundtrack is all Bad Company.  It makes no pretense of high art and actually works better than other more serious attempts at placing Shakespeare in other time periods (A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999) comes immediately to mind).

Ian McKellan's screenplay and brilliant depiction of Richard III (1995) is one of the very best examples of Shakespeare re-imagined in another time and place: a highly stylized and eerily familiar jazz age Europe under a fascist Duke of Gloucester.  The opening soliloquy is delivered 15 minutes into the film in which Richard drives a tank through the wall of his enemy's headquarters and then addresses the assembled royals at a victory ball.  There are wonderful nods to history, both of the 1930s and the War of the Roses, including the metamorphosis of the seated boar motif worn by the historic Richard's retainers into the swastika-like emblem of his black shirted legions.

Richard III is fertile subject matter for Al Pacino's wonderful film Looking for Richard (1996).  It is as much a documentary about actors and acting as it is about Shakespeare's play and how audiences receive it.  For that same reason, my favorite Kenneth Branaugh treatment of Shakespeare is not his flamboyantly flawed Hamlet (1996) but his inspired and often comic treatment of an church production of the play in In the Bleak Midwinter / A Midwinter's Tale (1995).

The key to Shakespeare's plays may simply be to remember that they are theater and theater is an interpretive medium.  Nothing is static, not even texts, and the test of a great work may be that it continues to inspire re-engagement and recreation even if some of those inspirations fall short of the mark.  I feel the same way about cover songs, especially those taken out of their original contexts (Dread Zeppelin; Hayseed Dixie, Richard Thompson's medieval reworking of Oops I Did It Again), but that's another story.