steepholm

Oh, and by the way, my daughter is featured both in this BBC article about the new Aardman website on mental health, and in the website itself, where she voices Tai, an overcompetitive treadmill runner.

I'm proud, of course - but not in a competitive way, oh no!

I'm putting these links here for my own reference, but they may be of wider interest. As you can imagine, I've been following the whole Rowling situation fairly closely, and I've seen many responses to it, some good, some not so much. I thought it might be useful to curate some of the more helpful and informative ones and put them in one handy place. This list may be expanded in future (indeed, feel free to recommend additions).

Rowling's essay.

We the Mudbloods: long, heavily referenced, point-by-point refutation of Rowling's essay. NB. It's in three parts, with a link to part 2 at the end of part 1.


Video essay by a cis woman and a trans man (who are also partners). Quite user-friendly for people who aren't particularly familiar with the issues.


Video reviewing the Rowling's essay, and also discussing the ways it may or may not affect the reading experience of Harry Potter fans uncomfortable with the author's views.

I can't say I exactly recommend watching the opening episode of Survivors, which I just watched for the first time since it was broadcast, forty-five years ago, but it is very good:

Well, it's now April in Japan, which means that today is the day they will announce the name of the new era that's due to begin with the current (Heisei) Emperor's abdication in a month's time. The name has been kept under wraps, which must have been a real headache to everyone who needs to prepare for the change: e.g. by updating computer programs, printing stationery, etc. (It's not an abstruse matter: in Japan, in case you don't know, the regnal/imperial number is commonly used as a way of writing the year, rather than the Christocentric Western system.)

Anyway, word is that this time, in a break with protocol, the era name will for the first time be sponsored. McDonalds and Starbucks are both said to be interested, with ハッピーセット and スターバックスラテ among the bookies' favourites、but all eyes are on the Imperial Palace.

In totally unrelated news, it appears that, although the term "April Fools Day" is known in Japan, the practice of planting false news stories, etc., is not at all widespread. This gave me the opportunity the other day to tell my friend about the 1957 spaghetti harvest. Let's all relive it, shall we?

The trolley problem is not just a thought experiment - it's a practical issue, at least for the AI programmers charged with teaching self-driving cars whom to spare and whom to kill in ticklish traffic conditions. That, at least, is the premise of MIT's Moral Machine project.

The programmers are of course aware that there is more than one conception of what constitutes a moral decision, so they're crowd-sourcing their morality in the hope of creating different driving strategies according to the cultural priorities of different countries. If you click on the link above, you can add to their database.

Anyway, I was very interested to read this article, which crunches some of their data to show how priorities differ in different countries. For example, should the self-driving car choose to run over young people or old people?


Far-eastern countries, perhaps under Confucian influence, are much more careful of the lives of the elderly, whereas the West is in general keener to preserve the lives of the young - perhaps on the individualistic principle that older people have already "had their turn". The data doesn't give us explanations, but such graphs are of course an open invitation to draw on national stereotypes.

What about the importance of sparing more lives rather than fewer?



Again, there's largely an East-West split, with Westerners perhaps performing a kind of utilitarian calculus whereby three lives are worth three times as much as one. This doesn't mean of course that Japanese drivers will recklessly swerve into crowds, merely that they place less emphasis on numbers.

The one that interested me most was this one, concerned with whether one should spare pedestrians or passengers:



Here, suddenly, China and Japan are at opposite extremes, and how! Chinese drivers see random pedestrians as far more expendable than the friends, family or colleagues who are presumably their passengers. (Note to self: look both ways on the streets of Shanghai.) Japan, by contrast, sacrifices passengers to pedestrians to a very marked extent.

The obvious explanation, it seems to me, lies in the uchi-soto (inside-outside) principle, which demands that outsiders be treated with preferential politeness and consideration. The nature of the in-group depends on context: it could be one's family, one's school, one's company. When referring to members of one's in-group to an outsider, you always use humble language; when referring to outsiders, you always use polite language. For example, if I want to mention my son, I say "musuko", but your son would be "musuko-san". If I'm the humblest employee at Sony, then I will refer to my CEO as Yoshida, without any honorific, when speaking to people outside the company. (Inside the company, it would be a very different matter.)

Perhaps, for the purpose of the MIT experiment, passengers are regarded as "uchi", and pedestrians as "soto"? That's just a top-of-the-head theory, but I find it plausible.

I always keep a recorder handy when I'm working. When I'm stuck for ideas, I often find that a bit of jamming on a descant really helps me think (while robbing anyone nearby of that capacity, sadly, but what are you going to do?). It's been that way for a long time - roughly since I gave up recorder lessons at primary school. My favourite instrument is a pear-wood one that I bought when my father died, but the plastic Aulos range gets a workout, too.

My daughter sometimes expresses wry exasperation that my one superpower is apparently the ability to play any tune by ear on the recorder, just the format in which no one would want to hear it, and I admit that the situation does seem to bear the fingerprints of a vindictive fate. People are sometimes intrigued by my party trick, but they don't stay intrigued for long: a distinct air of "You have delighted us long enough" typically settles in by the second minute. That's okay, I only play for myself, really, and, as I say, to help jiggle my neurons into more cooperative constellations.

I've had a bad cold for the last few days, which is very frustrating as this is a rare non-teaching week and I'd had it earmarked for all kinds of useful tasks, which are now proceeding only at a snail's pace. In these circumstances, after writing about Lolly Willowes and Madoka yesterday, it seemed a fun idea to play Kyubey's invitation to the world of magic, Salve, Terrae Magicae, with a black cat on my lap. So I did. (Breathing was a problem, of course.)

Today was my last ABBA blog. I've been doing it once a month since it began in 2008, so it's a bit of a wrench. I think I've missed my monthly slot on maybe three occasions: once because I plain forgot, once for illness (that was last summer), and once because of pressure of work. Not bad, over a decade.

Sometimes I've had a bit of a panic about what write in the days up to the 11th of the month, but something's always bubbled to the top. All the same, it takes time to write it, and from the beginning of this month I've taken on Chief Editorship of Children's Literature in Education, so I felt that one of my commitments had to go.

There's also the fact that it's a blog written by children's writers, and I've not had anything published for children in five years.

Anyway, here for my convenience and your possible pleasure are some of my favouriter entries:

Neat, Pray, Shove
Two is the Beginning of the End.
"T" is for Tiger
Introducing the Amazing, Patented Title Generator
Sir Gradgrind and the Great Amphibium; or, a Peripatetic Defence of Fantasy
Ridiculously Bestselling
Recommending Books for Grown-ups
From The Children's Writers' Songbook

Tomorrow is The Changeover day!



I can't tell you how important Mahy's book was to me when I first came across it in 1991 (seven years after it was published) - but suffice it to say that without what I learned from The Changeover I doubt I'd ever have managed to produce a publishable book of my own. It helped me triangulate my Garner and Cooper obsessions, and find an angle of approach that wasn't just a feeble echo of theirs. Where Garner wrote with fierce spareness, Mahy was linguistically munificent; where Cooper was writing about ancient places, Mahy wrote about shopping malls. And no children's writer before her had brought Wicca-style magic into a modern setting. (If you know of a counter-instance, I'd like to hear about it.) When this book was published, Buffy was only a twinkle in Joss Whedon's teenage eye...

So, I hope the movie does it justice. The trailer seems promising, and having watched some other clips on the same Youtube channel I feel confident that this is, at least, no The Seeker. I only hope it will be released in the UK, as I don't want to have to wait for the DVD.

On the other hand, for James Corden's Peter Rabbit I will happily wait until the second law of thermodynamics has rendered the universe a thin atom gruel.

The other day I listened to The Film Programme's discussion of Alice Guy's 1906 film, "Les Résultats du féminisme", in which we are shown a world where "feminism" has triumphed and men and women have effectively exchanged roles. You can see it here (it's only 7 minutes):



Apparently Guy (by then Alice Blaché) made another film with a similar theme but a future setting, In the Year 2000 (1912). Alas, that one is now lost.

The studio discussion assumed that Guy was making a feminist point herself, highlighting the treatment that women receive in the real world by showing it happening to men. That may well be right - but more than anything I was reminded of the anti-suffrage postcards produced around the same time, with very similar images of a world in which feminism has triumphed and men are reduced to domestic servitude while their wives carouse and put their feet up. Nothing very feminist about those - nor indeed about the Two Ronnies sketch series The Worm that Turned (1980), which is actually cited as a parallel by one of the studio guests. (This compilation I've linked here is 90 minutes long, but watch the first four minutes and you'll find you've had quite enough. I remember it all too well from 37 years ago.)

It's not that I don't believe Guy's film is feminist: without knowing something of her political opinions, I really couldn't say. But it's a striking instance of how the very same (or very similar) images can have opposite meanings, depending on the assumptions with which one approaches them.

The old mobile phone advertising slogan, "The Future's Bright, the Future's Orange" has been going through my head for the last day or so - can't think why...

Anyway, idly searching the phrase on Youtube I came across this 1999 advert, imagining a dystopian future world in which Orange has become a vast, all-controlling panopticon, micromanaging the lives of everyone and interposing itself in human relationships at every level.

Although at one point (0.51) we read that Hillary Clinton is running for the US presidency, the news is greeted with scornful, uncomprehending laughter by the complacent white family at the film's centre, who are unaware of how their autonomy has been usurped by the all-powerful Orange Corporation.

It's nightmarish stuff - complete with creepy clowns (4.05). Watch it (and then live it) if you dare...