You Can't Say That

If censors had a motto it might be "What you can't see won't hurt you." Countries such as Iran and China might have censors--in practice if not in name--but surely enlightened democracies such as Britain and the United States don't. Not so fast, says Henry Laurence, a Bowdoin College professor who lectured yesterday here in Oxford. Henry compared episodes involving public broadcasting in the U.K., Japan and the U.S. The bottom line: Uncomfortable subjects make people uncomfortable.

In 1965 a British filmmaker named Peter Watkins made a film for the BBC about the devastating effects that a nuclear attack might have on England. Called "The War Game," it featured harrowing scenes of death and destruction. We see those sorts of things everywhere now--I'm disappointed if my evening's television viewing doesn't include at least one mushroom cloud, fireball or slow pan over a post-apocalyptic landscape--but it was scary stuff back then. And since the film seemed to question the very notion of mutual assured destruction--aka, "Nuke! You're it!"--executives at the BBC started to get nervous. In the end, they were so nervous that they didn't show "The War Game." It was finally aired in 1985.

Japan's public broadcasting service, NHK, was explicitly modeled on the BBC, though critics say it is so deep in the government's pocket that it's covered with lint and fuzz. Nothing is more controversial in Japan than that country's World War II atrocities. When a conference was held in 2000 to discuss the issue of "comfort women"--Chinese, Korean and other women forced into prostitution to service the Japanese Army--it was big news. Or it would have been big news, had the Japanese media bothered to cover what was being billed as a "People's Tribunal." Still, NHK commissioned a documentary on the conference and the reparations movement. But after alleged pressure from top government officials, including future prime minister Abe Shinzo, NHK watered down the program to the point where it was as useless as a dose of homeopathic medicine.

If issues of defense and national guilt are controversial touchstones in England and Japan, what excites Americans? Sex! Gay sex! Girl on girl action! Animated rabbits! PBS's Buster the rabbit really stepped in it in 2005 when he took his camcorder to Vermont and showed families involved in producing maple sugar and cheese. The problem: The two families happened to be headed by lesbian couples. This worried the Bush education department, which had provided some funds for the children's show, and it pressured PBS not to distribute that episode of "Postcards From Buster," though stations could request it from WGBH, its maker. PBS honcho Wayne Godwin said: "In fairness I would have to say a gay character is not one we would not include. The fact that a character may or may not be gay is not a reason why they should or should not be part of this series." Apparently he was getting paid by the "not."

It's hard being a public broadcaster, taking the public's--or the government's--money but striving to remain independent. I wonder if things would have been any different if those three networks had been private. Maybe not. I remember the foofaraw over "The Day After," a 1983 ABC docudrama that, like "The War Game," showed the effects of nuclear war, in this case by incinerating Lawrence, Kansas. (Well, pretending to incinerate Lawrence, Kansas.) The Reagan White House was nervous about the film's anti-nuclear message. ABC went ahead with it. (And in Langley Park, Maryland, a college student and his roommate were inspired by the program to write a pop song called "Tomorrow Might Be the Day After." It was sort of an updating of Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," in which the singer urges a girl to sleep with him tonight, since tomorrow the Soviets might drop the big one. Yeah, it didn't really work as a song or a pickup line.)

Then there's the decision in 2004 by the Sinclair broadcasting group not to show an episode of "Nightline" in which the names and photographs of 500 U.S. servicepeople killed in Iraq were to be aired. "We find it to be contrary to public interest," said Barry Faber, general counsel to Sinclair, which owned eight ABC affiliates and dozens of other stations.

"Contrary to public interest." Hey, here's an idea: Let the public decide.

The Great Escape, Plus: Mind the Gap

Oxford is an ancient university and so certain workarounds are required to bring it into compliance with the 21st century. For example, in the good old days, if you were in the basement of a building and a fire broke out, you were content just to die of burns or smoke inhalation while silently chanting in Latin. Or, if you were lucky, you scrambled up a fire escape only to find your exit blocked by a chair against the door. Not any more. Now, courtesy of signs like that one above in Nuffield College, your escape route is clear: You simply climb to safety, emerging from the wainscoting like a rat.

I spent much of the lecture I attended in that room yesterday distractedly wondering if the panel would pop open and a ragtag line of dirty-faced survivors would crawl out. Finally, when I could take it no longer, I got up and moved a heavy table against the wall, ensuring that the proceedings wouldn't be interrupted. Now let me see, did I push the table away when the lecture was over?

Just kidding! Of course I didn't do that. I concentrated on the lecture, a talk by Paul Kellstedt, a political science professor from Texas A&M University, on sabbatical with his family here at Oxford. The lecture was entitled "The Macro Politics of a Gender Gap" and while much of it was lost on me (I start to sweat when I hear words like "variable" and "coefficient"), it was interesting.

Kelltstedt's central finding is that there is a gender gap between American men and women when it comes to political policy. Women are, on average, 2 to 5 points more "liberal" than men. What's interesting is that this relatively small number pales in comparison to other gender gaps: There are much bigger gender differences when it comes to party identification, political participation, presidential approval and presidential candidate selection. These gender gaps are growing while the macropolitical gender gap is staying the same. In other words, what you would expect to be the bedrock foundation for decisions about politics--a person's stance towards various policies (on the environment, welfare, etc.)--does not correlate directly to which candidates people support or how they vote.

I'm sure I'm mangling this completely.

Paul didn't mention it yesterday, but here's another bit of research that resulted in counterintuitive findings: The more you know about global warming, the less motivated you are to do something about it. Kellstedt and colleagues surveyed 1,093 American and asked them about global warming. "More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming," they wrote in the journal Risk Analysis.

Said Kellstedt: "The findings that the more informed respondents were less concerned about global warming, and that they felt less personally responsible for it, did surprise us. We expected just the opposite."

Too bad there's no fire escape to help the planet escape from global warming.

Hey There Delilah: Shirt Happens

Cable news giant CNN appears to be testing a new feature that will allow you to order a T-shirt emblazoned with a headline from its web site. The beta site is already attracting the derision of bloggers. I was prepared to heap abuse on poor CNN myself, but then I paused. Why shouldn't people be able to order a T-shirt that has a CNN headline on it?

The gleeful scorn with which some bloggers met the CNN T-shirt news is unseemly for a few reasons. The first is that most of these bloggers who are calling the CNN shirts lame already wear lame T-shirts. They probably have drawers-full of 100 percent cotton Hanes Beefy Ts with lolcatz, "Zero Wing" and other ironic sayings on them. Second, the underlying premise of the Internet--the one most vigorously embraced by most bloggers--is that you can do anything. You can find anything, post anything, download anything. The web is ancient Rome, baby, and we're all Caligula. You want to pirate "Silver Surfer," upload a video clip of your roommate barfing, sleep with your sister and make your horse a consul, go ahead! But let poor CNN dabble with a T-shirt and suddenly it's "the death of broadcast journalism."

If CNN goes through with this--and it appears that some of its beta T-shirt web site has already been taken down--I can guarantee you that first in line to buy the shirts will be spittle-spewing bloggers who will defend their purchases by arguing that they wish to wear their chemises in an ironic, post-modern way.

Pest in Show
Some of the bloggers say the shirts will be lame because CNN.com's headlines are lame. Okay, there's something to that. But all news web site headlines are lame. They're designed to be read by machines, not humans, an attempt to achieve maximum Googlage and linkage. I was told that to increase traffic to my blog I should use straightforward headlines. But simple, boring headlines leave me so cold that I opt instead for inscrutable ones like today's, which will guarantee no one but adolescent girls and dyslexic "Forrest Gump" fans find me.

Anyway, everyone knows the best news headlines are on tabloids. The New York Post's "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and the Sun's "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" are classics of the genre.

The British are also good at writing "news bills," those advertising signs outside of news agents and tobacconists. Here's one I snapped this morning:



The problem arises when you don't put the sign in its holder correctly:


An "ex pest?" Well what's the problem then?

Sky Prince: Something in the Air

First off, a very sincere welcome to anyone who has arrived here courtesy of my essay in today's Guardian. It's about how some people find my blog, usually people who aren't looking for it, but for something a bit more, um, interesting. Like most people with web pages I have a little bit of software that shows me how many people are visiting. (I use one called StatCounter but there are others. [Any recommendations on a better one?]) Rest assured that it doesn't tell me who you are. Your identity is safe.

Now to Britain's royal family. I confess that I have trouble keeping England's princes separate. Which one is the heir to the throne? William? Henry? Wait, there isn't a Henry. It's Harry. Harry?

Both brothers have something to do with the Army, in a stage-managed, Potemkin-village sort of way. But one turns out to also be in the Air Force, or at least to have gotten his wings from the RAF.

That would be William, who recently earned his pilot's wings after some sort of crash course in flying ("crash course"; that's probably not the best choice of words). And now Prince William has been criticized for using his newfound ability to fly a helicopter to his cousin's bachelor party. Training, said the RAF. A waste of 15,000 pounds, said critics.

The episode made me think of my own dodgy flights courtesy of the Air Force. Well, not totally dodgy. My dad was in the U.S. Air Force and as a dependent I was able to fly "space A": space available. Sometimes when I went from one divorced parent to the other it was on an Air Force passenger plane. (The best flight was when Dad did an exchange tour with the Royal Air Force and I jetted from England to the U.S. on an RAF VC-10.)

Then there was the time after college when my dad was the commander of a U.S. base in Germany. I had just graduated from college and was kicking around Europe, planning on being the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald. (I must look into why that never happened.) I went from Germany to France and then to England, where I pitched up at the Camberwell flat of my friend Adrian. It was there that I ran out of money and decided I had to go back home and start my adult life. The problem was, half my luggage was back in Germany. How would we be reunited?

As there was a USAF jet flying from Germany to RAF Alconbury, Dad had my suitcase put aboard. He said it was an F-4. Can that really have been true? My Samsonite in a Phantom, the workhorse of the Vietnam War? I like to think of it nestled in the nose or strapped to a wing. In any event, Adrian and I went to pick it up. We think of tight security as a post-9/11 artifact, but bases were guarded just as strictly then. I had my Air Force dependent ID card with me and pulled it out as we drove up to the gate. Oddly, the guards were in combat uniforms, with machine guns slung over their shoulders. A yellow flag hung from a stanchion on the gate house. There was some sort of war game exercise going on, explaining the extreme readiness.

The guard ordered us to stop and I handed over my ID. Just then, a phone rang. The guard answered it. "Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. Okay," he said. He took the yellow flag out of its holder and replaced it with a red flag. "Did we just die?" Adrian asked as the guard returned my ID and waved us through. Perhaps on some war planner's graph paper a Soviet bomb had just obliterated Alconbury.

We drove to a little office attached to a hanger and there was my suitcase, specially delivered by the U.S. Air Force, faster even than Fed Ex could have brought it. I think because of that, I don't begrudge William his little helicopter trip.

Pesky Tesco: Tough 'Love' in Thailand

We won't be shopping at Tesco anytime soon. It's not really a hardship. There isn't one nearby. We're in Co-Op/Somerfield/M&S Simply Food/Sainsbury's territory. Still, it makes me feel better to think I'm boycotting the supermarket giant.

And why? Because its Thai subsidiary, Tesco Lotus, is suing two journalists for allegedly printing anti-Tesco statements. The dispute centers on Tesco's expansion in Thailand and the fear that it is harming homegrown stores. The latest libel case involves a business columnist named Nongnart Harnvilai, who in a tongue-in-cheek piece wrote that Tesco Lotus "doesn't love Thais." The supermarket chain is asking for 1.6 million pounds in damages.

Will Tesco Lotus have to prove in court that it does "love" Thais, and if so, how? Does it buy them chocolates? Take them dancing? Bear their children? Care for them on their deathbeds? It's a crazy allegation, designed to stifle a free press in a country that has a shaky enough grasp on these kinds of things without the local subsidiary of a British corporate giant entering the fray.

So I won't be shopping there. Hasn't Tesco been testing the waters in the U.S. too? If so, where's the love?

BritNews RoundUp
This may be the single most important article printed in any newspaper this week: Research has shown that "drummers are natural intellectuals." I knew it all along and will be packing a copy of the Daily Telegraph story in my drumstick bag to show to all those snooty guitarists and pampered lead singers in the future. Okay, maybe the "intellectual" tag is a bit of a stretch. I think of an intellectual as a nearsighted, leather elbow-patched professor droning on about Habermas and Derrida, not a drummer in a black sleeveless Motley Crue T-shirt. Still, researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet had subjects tap a drumstick while answering 60 psychometric questions. Those who could keep better time were better at answering them. Take that, Bono.

The British love getting drunk. And when they get drunk, they like doing interesting things. Some of them involve sex with inanimate objects--regular readers of this blog will remember fences, bicycles, lamp posts, Members of Parliament. And some of them involve reaching out in unusual ways to our mammalian brethren. Or sistren, for "Dave," a wild bottlenose dolphin often spotted off Folkestone coast, is actually a female. And it was Dave with whom two British men were convicted of "interfering" after an all-night drinking party. (The men were drinking; Dave, we assume, was sober.)

Michael Jukes, a 27-year-old pipefitter, told Dover Magistrates' Court: "It was approaching us. We were touching it, but not in an aggressive way. I was not hurting it." The court thought otherwise, fining Jukes and Daniel Buck 750 pounds. Dave did not testify and she hasn't been spotted since the incident.

While we're in the water, a British sailor who got into a spot of trouble while 700 miles off the coast of New Zealand knew exactly whom to call: His wife. When Tony Curphey's sailboat starting taking on water, he radioed his wife Susanne, who was in another sailboat about 150 miles away. He said he didn't want to trouble rescue services. I don't know what's odder, the fact that Curphey called his wife, or that the two of them are sailing around the world in separate boats. Perhaps that's the secret of a long marriage.

A 93-year-old former Pentecostal minister from Glamorgan has decided to give up driving after flipping his Ford Fiesta while driving through an auto dealer's parking lot. Jack Higgs was uninjured but the same can't be said of the two Porsches his car landed on top of.

Gargoyle Roman Appendages of the Week
The Italians just don't do gargoyles. I thought I'd collect a bunch but I didn't see a single one. Of course, the Romans have plenty of old statues. Many of the statues have seen better days, though. Like this one, from the Vatican Museum:


And this one:



I think this was my favorite, though:


A big big toe. There's probably more beauty in that big toe than in a hundred lesser sculptures. If it hadn't been about the size of a medicine ball, and just as unwieldy, I would have snuck it under my coat and back to my hotel room. It's just toe-riffic.

Have a great weekend. There's rain in the forecast here, but I hope it's sunny wherever you are.

Pillow Talk

I get the basic rationale behind this tag, which is on the pillows in our Oxford rental home:



Don't smoke near the pillow. Yes, it's made of flame-retardant material, but absentmindedly putting out your cigarette on it is a bad idea.

What I don't get is what's printed on the other side of the label:


Shake and refluff daily? What happens if I don't? Will the pillow burst into flames? And how much work should a pillow be anyway?

I love England, but normal domestic life is filled with this sort of maintenance. Our dishwasher has a filter that must be cleaned regularly and a salt reservoir. We have to add special dishwasher rock salt every now and then. (And when I say "we," I mean My Lovely Wife.) Our washing machine stopped working a few weeks ago. It just wouldn't rotate and the lights blinked mutely. The rental agency was called, a workman was summoned, and he gave his diagnosis. We hadn't cleaned the washing machine filter. It was behind a bit of wainscoting at the bottom of the machine. It didn't say anything in the instruction manual but the guy said we should occasionally be prying off the paneling, unscrewing the filter, and rinsing it out. Riiiight.
It's like owning an old Bentley.

We Americans like to push a button, walk away and return 20 minutes later to find our clothes washed, our plates clean, our pillow pre-fluffed. I'm not saying that's a good thing. That kind of mindset is what got us in trouble in Iraq. "You mean we have to add salt? And clean the filter? I thought I'd just push the 'shock and awe' button.

Seen in London
I jotted down the wording on a sign in a Pret a Manger the other day: Over a photo of a "hot wrap" was the legend "Fresh from the oven. Naturally."

Naturally? Is there an unnatural way to take something from the oven? Do other restaurants remove their toasty sandwiches in a perverse manner?

Confessions of a Travel Writer

There's a bit of a to-do over a new book from a travel writer named Thomas Kohnstamm. In "Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?" Kohnstamm admits to various bits of trickery and corner-cutting while working on guidebooks for Lonely Planet. Among the allegations are that he gave a good review to a Brazilian restaurant after having sex with a waitress on a table ("the table service is friendly," he wrote) and that he wrote a Colombia guidebook without ever visiting the country. The former seems to be true, the latter not.

I haven't read his book, but Kohnstamm seems like kind of a smarmy guy, willing to take Lonely Planet's nickel and then diss himself, and by extension them. I was in the guidebook game for a while, rewriting most of the Fodor's travel guide to Washington when I was a freelancer in 1989 and then updating it for the next few years. I never got to have sex with a waitress on a table, though I did French kiss Ling-Ling, the giant panda, behind the National Zoo's snack bar. ("The pandas, a gift from China, are not to be missed," I wrote later.)

I think guidebooks are better now than they used to be. Fodor's, part of Random House, encouraged me to be quirky and conversational in my tone, to divide the city into walking tours instead of alphabetical lists of attractions. Other, narrower guidebooks are on the market now too, with Rough Guide, Access, DK and Lonely Planet earning fans. But there is a bit of sameness to any travel guide, as opposed to a travel memoir.

That's because the first thing you do when assigned a travel guide is read all the other travel guides, just to make sure you don't miss anything. If you think something's a waste of time--Hillwood in D.C. springs to mind--you can't just leave it out. Your travel guide would be lacking. Also, you're not paid that much--or at least I wasn't. I was a lowly freelancer, happy to get the job. I think I was paid $3,000 to write eight walking tours, update the entire front of the book, pull together a history of the city and compile a list of nightlife. My friend Jeanne did restaurants and hotels. I probably earned something like $5 an hour.

And I made some rookie mistakes. I wrote the book on a tight deadline in the autumn and it was published the following spring. I remember visiting some part of the Mall the summer after the book came out and noticing that a view had changed. I had said something like, "Note the uninterrupted vista from the memorial to the building off in the distance." Well when I wrote it was uninterrupted, but that was because there were no leaves on the trees. By summer you couldn't see a thing. I fixed it in the next edition.

There was one cool thing, though: I saw a family using my book, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I wanted to walk up to them and introduce myself, but thought that would be weird. At least they didn't look lost.