(Ref Mitch’s Prizes Galore.) Ladies and gentlemen, I present the List of 2006 Ig Nobel winners. The Peace Prize is particularly compelling.
Jay Manifold
Neolithic Boyz
There are lots of reasons why I’m not making a living blogging, and one of them is that I often insist on, and even enjoy, setting the expectations of my readers in brutally honest fashion. Therefore:
- This post is a lengthy (3,000 words; reading time 8-15 minutes, not including the links) review of three books.
- Two of them are obviously related and are the sort of thing that most ChicagoBoyz readers greatly enjoy, judging by what gets blogged and commented on here.
- The third book, however, may appear to have been dragged in from a not-so-parallel universe by The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
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- Anyone who finds another instance of these three being reviewed together gets the usual payment I offer for meeting a challenge (barbecue of your choice).
- If this entire post turns out to be value-added to a majority of its readership, I will have a miracle to my credit. Blessed Saint Leibowitz
- Just to discourage you further — as I have remarked elsewhere, when reviewing books, I pretty obviously don’t know what I’m doing, and as one authorial subject of an earlier effort remarked, my suggestions are of, shall we say, limited value in a market lacking a large segment of people with a mindset closely resembling mine.
- (Parlor game: if everyone shared your tastes, which sectors of the economy would collapse, and which would boom? Discuss.)
Well, then, to business: the first two books are Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn
Historical Irony of the Day
Apropos of nothing, I learn from Mexicans back home after months lost in Pacific, which is about several men who involuntarily undertook a harrowing journey of several thousand miles, that the Mexican AG is named Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, thereby sharing a surname with the early Spanish explorer of Mexico, who involuntarily undertook a harrowing journey of several thousand miles (the subject of a strange but intriguing movie fifteen years ago).
In Which I Repent
— of my delay in purchasing and reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which I am now devouring.
My apologies to 1) Lex; 2) anybody else on this blog; 3) anybody else in the blogosphere; and 4) anybody else anywhere over the past 17 years since its publication who has urged it upon me. Albion’s Seed is overwhelming. The pattern of cultural and linguistic influences in my own life — mostly Quaker/Delaware Valley, with a large (and thankfully benign) admixture of Border/Backcountry, and perhaps traces of the others (thanks to being born and mostly raised in Missouri, where worlds collide) — has shaped my political temperament, if not my specific beliefs; I’m a mild-mannered, moderate, quasi-anarchist.
But you don’t graze in here to read about me (if you do: for God’s sake, get a life*). The real lesson of the book, although I imagine many of its readers will enjoy developing a greater insight into their personal backgrounds at least as much as I did, is about how much of present-day American political culture is directly traceable to the four founding migrations from the UK in the 17th and 18th centuries. From the luridly ascetic authoritarianism of the Puritans, the luridly hedonistic authoritarianism of the Cavaliers, the relatively sane (but deeply sexually repressed) “reciprocal liberty” of the Quakers, and the fantastically violent impulsiveness of the Borderlands colonists came everything from the high taxes and gun control laws of Massachusetts to the 80 mph Texas speed limit and 40-per-100,000 murder rate in south Dallas.
Nor, I might mention, does Fischer stop at 1600. The four cultures themselves grew out of far earlier (first millennium) migrations to Britain itself, and from conflicts which had raged for several centuries before Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, et al. Antecedents may be seen in, among others, the kingdom of Alfred the Great — and the Nordic invaders he pacified; and if you try to guess which set of folkways would seem more congenial in early-21st-century America, you’ll probably guess wrong.
This one earns a place of honor on my bookshelf next to GENERATIONS and The Nine Nations of North America. By way of reparation, therefore: Lex, barbecue’s on me if you’re ever in KC. The rest of you are on your own.
KCStaralanche?
Shannon’s The Party for America Suckers is quoted in “Blog Bits,” a feature within “What Others Are Saying” in the editorial section of today’s Kansas City Star; it appears on page B 7 of the dead-tree edition. The only other Blog Bit this week is something from Richard Posner at becker-posner-blog.com.