Apparently so. The story goes that the Feds were heavily armed, and taking no chances with these desperate criminals.
Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars.
As you may imagine, this is all about illegally-grown stuff. In this case, laughably, wood.
Yes, that’s right. It really is.
The police came calling, submachine-guns at the ready, on the off-chance that some of the wood had been from trees which someone in Washington being given votes by one pressure group said someone in Brazil being paid by some cartel or other shouldn’t have cut down. Obviously Mr Gibson should have asked permission before making any guitars in the first place.
The company denies it, apparently. They say they did ask permission. Much good it did them.
Network Solutions, the domain name registrar for tertullian.org, are going down and down in my estimation. I asked them on Saturday to transfer it elsewhere. Their response was an email demanding that I call their call centre in the USA. The object of the latter is to hassle people into renewing, of course. I wrote and asked today and got back the same. I then complained to PairNIC, whom I am transferring to, who told me — what Network Solutions could have told me — that the process takes 6 days. Quite a long time, considering that all we are discussing is entering a row in a database table.
Avoid using Network Solutions. It is a key test of a registrar how they handle transfers out. I once had to pay a bunch of scum down in Farnborough to release tertullian.net, the first domain I ever registered. One reason why I have stuck with Network Solutions is that they didn’t make a fuss. The fuss they are making now ensures that I will transfer all my domains elsewhere.
I also have two UK domains. I have no idea who the good UK registrars are. Anyone any suggestions?
I had hoped to spend today writing a page about the catena of Nicetas, its date (1100-1105, according to Christophe Guignard; perhaps 20 years earlier according to J. Sickenberger, back in 1902), its manuscripts and so on. But I’m still too full of cold to do so. Maybe later in the week.
Instead I’ve written a review of a book about the Fathers on Amazon, and slated it thoroughly. Interestingly Amazon is sorting the reviews in a manner different from that which I remember. It used to be most recent review first. It is so no longer. Worth remembering, that.
I only picked the book up again because I need something to read. There must be something on my shelves I could look at…
I had to empty my loft a week ago in order to have some insulation fitted. I still have rather a lot of items lying in a heap. Last night I put some of the heavier stuff back up. But I noted that a lot of things were just in plastic carrier bags, and I wondered if I should repackage them.
This morning I found a Bleep and Booster annual (the one on the left). My parents must have given it to me as a small child, back in the 60’s. It was interesting to see it again, but I had to clean a thick layer of dust from it.
I also found some boxes for old PC networking kit. These have gone down to a pile for throwing out!
What I would like to do is to put everything into transparent plastic boxes. I bought one yesterday. But these seem quite expensive, and it doesn’t take much in the way of contents to make them too heavy to lift.
Oh bother … the cough I have been struggling with for the last week or so, and the sensitive stomach that I have lived with for nearly three weeks, have ganged up now with a streaming cold that came on last night. It must be holiday time! This business of living in an organic construct is not that great an idea, sometimes. Everyone in our office is starting to cough and choke, so I imagine we will all get it. It will stop me doing much this weekend, I suspect.
Last night was productive, tho. I realised that I had only 8Gb left of the 500Gb on my PC. Where had it gone, I wondered?
I always use WinDirStat to work out which directories are hogging the space. In this case, I found that one working directory for an OCR task had taken some vast area of disk, and I moved it out to my two external backup hard disks. Finereader 10 is really a disk hog!
Another 40Gb (!) was being occupied by two Internet Explorer temporary log files, named brndlog.txt and brndlog.bak. I also took the time to reorganise a bit, as I found multiple copies of some large PDF’s. After an hour or so I had 89Gb spare. I also backed everything up to the two backup drives.
It’s a mistake to think, since they thought the sun and planets revolved around the earth, therefore medieval men were egocentric fools. It’s not so much they thought the earth was at the center, but that they thought it was at the bottom.
I am no medievalist, but these few words really do make an important point.
I’ve had a rather exciting email today which I can’t discuss yet, thanks to some rather sniffy bureaucrats, but may mean that some interesting material is public domain, and that it will indeed be possible to get it online in English.
Rather busy with the chores of life this week. But last night I was able to acquire some books on ancient Persian religion, and the texts in which they are preserved.
I’ve been looking through some of them. The key fact, however, is that most of the literature is very late. The Avestan texts do not seem to have been written down until well into the Sassanid period, in the 5th century A.D., using a specially contrived alphabet, in order to create the now-lost “Great Avesta”, once present in every fire temple and destroyed by the Moslems. About a quarter of Avestan literature now survives, and the oldest manuscript is 12th century.
I was struck by how little they say about Mithra, or Mitra, and how little information they give us about this pre-Zoroastrian deity, incorporated as a servant god to Ahura Mazda. It ought to be possible, relatively easily, to compile a collection of all the literary and non-literary material relating to this sub-deity.
This evening I had another go at the web version of Brockelmann’s notes on the authors who give the history of Mohammed. It is a mark of how bad Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur is, as an organised source for information, that I have still not managed to get the stuff into some format that I can upload. The way in which the second edition refers to the supplement to the first, and the supplement to the first supercedes what is written in the second edition, is almost impossible to handle.
I’m making progress, tho, although I have spotted yet another area where a bit from the supplement needs to be translated and included. It is almost impossible to reproduce what the GAL contains, tho.
I’ve also been making an effort to work with Microsoft’s Expression Web4. It’s a lot like Dreamweaver; and, like Dreamweaver, the WYSIWYG editor is rather substandard; much less good than Microsoft FrontPage. Unfortunately FP2000 won’t handle unicode characters very well, and the Brockelmann is stuffed to the jawline with overscores and dots and funny characters!
His Grace is now forced to devote more time each day trying to stem the tide of offensive and irrelevant comment than he is able to dedicate to each morning’s missive. When one is forced to spend the first hour of one’s day not in the crucial contemplation of religio-political issues but in the cleansing of the temple, it is evident that something must change. …
His Grace has attempted to make his blog a bastion of free speech, but there are those who are intent on hijacking every thread for their own malignant and malicious purposes. When he has directly emailed the perpetrators and politely asked them to desist, he receives insult, invective, and condemantion that he is not prepared to tell ‘the truth’. …
His Grace has therefore decided to ban all ‘anonymous’ comments, thereby forcing all communicants to register a Google account (pseudonymous, if preferred) before they may contribute to a discussion thread. Should individual accounts thereafter prove irritating or offensive, it is easier to identify the individuals (who sometimes post under a plurality of ad hoc identities) and ban them. …
His Grace will hereafter monitor any progress and prays that it will ameliorate his happiness and general well being. Should there be no improvement, he will not hesitate to take more drastic action, however terminal: he is not averse to silence or cessation.
This is a sad day, but evidently a necessary one, and “His Grace” has acted with moderation and restraint.
We have all been used to presuming that everyone on the internet is basically a decent human being. In the past, being smaller in number, this was largely true. Even the hackers really meant no harm.
But the internet has grown to include all sections of society. And in every society known to man, there are criminals.
A pedant might say that a criminal is someone who breaks a law which a powerful man has chosen to impose on a society. But this is to get things backward.
A criminal is a man who preys on his fellow men. He is the kind of man who will do whatever he likes, regardless of the injury caused to others, simply because he wishes, or it gives him advantage of some kind, or for any other reason. Such human beasts have always existed, and any society tries to protect its members from them, by various means. They are destroyers, creating nothing and wrecking for any purpose and none.
Perhaps the time has come to recognise that the criminals are now well-established on the web. We have all tolerated the troll; although trolling is clearly a moral wrong in most circumstances, as it violates the principle of “do not do to others what you would not like done to you”, in that it causes upset at the very least.
But this tolerance of wrong-doing is now being used by much worse people. There have been vulnerable teenagers driven to suicide by campaigns of bullying and harassment online. I myself experienced a vicious assault of the same nature, designed to seize control of the Mithras article in Wikipedia, evidently without the slightest concern for right or wrong or anything but the culprits’ own base wishes. Fortunately I’ve been online a long time, and maintain emotional detachment; but that these people meant to do me injury, to hand out a beating in order to steal the fruits of my labour, is not remotely in doubt.
Perhaps we need to stop thinking about “harassment”, about “trolling”, about “bullying”, and start thinking of this as what it is — assault. It is a form of battery, exploiting the most powerful and engaging form of communication known to man to inflict pain and misery. It is a criminal act.
One obvious cure for it is to require everyone using the internet to register, and to write and post under their own name. Few of the criminals above would care to have their conduct under their own name.
At present the effect of allowing the criminals to rampage unchecked is that using your own name online is becoming rarer and rarer. In Wikipedia fewer and fewer people do so, because it disadvantages them so, when faced with trolls who frequently change their identities or post under different names. The same is true in nearly all the fora known to me.
Yet which of us would trust a politician with the power to control who has access to the internet? To control what may, or may not be said?
These are difficult times. I hope that some middle path may be found. But that the criminals need to be dealt with … that is becoming ever more urgent.
UPDATE: A couple of hours later, I see a news report on Sky. An academic study reports that 35% of teachers have suffered some form of online abuse; and in a quarter of the cases, parents are responsible.
One of the most prevalent types of abuse was through the creation of a Facebook group to be abusive about a particular teacher.
The report said there was evidence of pupils trying to establish fake Facebook pages in a teacher’s name, posting videos of teachers in class on YouTube, and setting up whole websites to be abusive about a single or group of staff.
The BBC version is here, and offers some horrifying details:
“Some parents view teachers as fair game for abuse,” Prof Phippen said.
“They use online technologies to hide behind while posting lies and abuse about their chosen victim.”
Intimidation, harassment … enough. We’re talking about violence, and those doing it are criminals.
I forgot to mention that at breakfast I found myself in the queue, and talking to a chap who, like myself, wasn’t wearing his name badge (the name badges this year were excellently readable). It turned out to be Mark DelCogliano, who has translated a number of the prefaces to books of the Vulgate and also done an academic translation of Eusebius, De Pascha for a volume of papers which has just appeared and which I need to get and read. Currently he is doing a translation of some of the homilies of Gregory the Great Basil of Caesarea for the St. Vladimir Press, and most of those homilies have never been translated before. It was great to meet him.
The system of having meals together is a very important part of the conference, and was the main reason why I endured the discomfort of Queen’s College Annex.
After that, I checked out of my room and took my luggage to the lodge. Curiously their locked room for heavy luggage is down two flights of narrow stairs! Someone at Queens needs to think about that, just a bit.
Merton Street, Oxford
Then I wandered off into Oxford. Today it was damp and hot, but overcast, and there were few people around. It was around 9am. I walked down to the Eastgate Hotel and verified the presence of a usable-size car park there, for future reference. The rack rates were extortionate, but the staff as good as told me that they were all negotiable. Doubtless in reality you book through some agent and pay 50% of it.
Then I walked along Merton Street — such a contrast to the noisy High Street. I walked through my old college, Merton, to the gardens, out to the turret on the wall where Tolkien used to sit, and where I remember that we once held a bible study on a sunny day. Then down to the Rose Lane Annex, looking unchanged, and then to Grove and out again. The college grounds were immaculate, and I reflected again on how lucky I was to have spent four happy years there.
Alas! The ranks of the Grecians of my time may stand still, yet we are not what we were. Some have been shaken or defeated by the shock of the years, or unexpected illness, and all of us, I fear, have had to give up the ambitions of youth in the daily effort to make a living. Few were wealthy or well-connected, and most had no real idea of what to do next. Many have ended up in dead-end jobs such as computer programming, wondering what happened, and even unable to marry for lack of suitable people whom men of intelligence and humour could sensibly marry. “Is this all there is?” some ask, wondering what meaning their life has. Alas, for such is the lot of men.
I have been very fortunate to be able to return to Oxford at a conference such as this, where everyone is friendly, a smile will be returned, and everyone you meet will be doing something interesting, and be able to tell you about it and to hear about your own work. It is always the people that make the place. Indeed, once the conference was over, I was just a solitary man again wandering around a strange town.
The Parian Marble – a Greek Chronology
I walked down to the river, and then back up St Aldates, along Cornmarket, to the Ashmolean Museum. I had heard good things of this last night. Blessedly, admission is free. Even more blessedly, they allow photography, so long as you don’t use flash. My mobile phone has a 5mp camera in it.
Most interesting of the exhibits was a block of stone labelled the “Parian Marble”. As you can see from the photograph, the script on it is barely visible. Yet it is, in fact, a Greek chronology, and the oldest known, according to the note on display. The earliest entries are mythical, but it would be interesting to compare this with Eusebius’ Chronicle.
A very dramatic bust of Trajan was present, in the form of a cast.
A cast of a bust of the Emperor Trajan at the Ashmolean
Another couple of items, also casts, caught my eye. The first was a tauroctony — quite a small one, cast from an item in the Museum of London, and dated to the third century AD.
Tauroctony of Mithras, London, 3rd century, in Ashmolean
Mithras is surrounded by the zodiac. Top left is the sun, top right is the moon, while two of the winds fill the lower corners. The writing indicates that it was dedicated in fulfilment of a vow by a veteran named Ulpius Silvanus, who became an initiate at Arausio (modern Orange).
Another item is probably from a tomb, and depicts a butcher at work, while his wife keeps the accounts in a little codex. It dates from about 125-150 AD. Here it is:
Butcher and wife, 125-150 AD, with codex. Ashmolean cast.
I’ll include a close-up of the book. I had read that businessmen in the early Principate used notebooks made of papyrus leaves, but this is the first example I had seen. But this might also be an example of a wooden codex with wax pages, that could be reused.
Butcher's wife with codex, AD 125-150
You can click on any of these images to get a full size image.
After that, I quickly tired of walking around alone, and made my way back to the college. I retrieved it, and got them to call a taxi (A1 Taxis, 01865-248-000), which turned out to be a real taxi rather than a minicab and which whisked me quite cheaply back to where I had left my car. And then, dear reader, I drove home.
What a week it has been! It was with great trepidation and stomach cramps that I set out on Wednesday. The cramps, I suspect, were really caused by the stress of getting ill when I wanted to be in Oxford. Then the difficulties on arrival and with the accomodation, and the stress of setting up the stall and so forth.
But it has been tremendous. I have enjoyed being here, and would not have missed it for the world. The papers were, if anything, rather better than last time. The presence of graduate students with a need to impress — to find posts — meant that even these had made a considerable effort.
I’ve grumbled quite a bit about some of the admin things, not least because they are hard on a man who is not that well, and not that young any more. But these must be taken in perspective, and much of the organisation was actually rather better than in previous conferences. The conference itself is the thing, and it is a great joy to attend. To leave is like leaving home.
I’m looking forward to Exeter next year.
UPDATE: Fixed description of what Mark DelCogliano is working on.
