Brainteaser. The worked solution to the Math Corner brainteaser in my March Diary is here.
Latrinalia. I like to think that my readers are of the better sort: thoughtful, well-read and well-spoken, of good manners and genteel sensibilities. My fancy is that I am writing for what Victorians called the Carriage Trade.
So imagine my chagrin on seeing that, to judge by the volume of email comments, easily the most popular segment in my March Diary was the one about coin-operated cubicles in public restrooms.
There was, I am sorry to say, a large component of latrinalia — the literary genre that finds expression on the cubicle walls of public restrooms. I guess this is my fault for having included a specimen in that segment.
One reader chid me for having quoted only the first stanza of that particular cubicle classic. He: "It’s like quoting only the first half of Hamlet’s soliloquy!" To be fair, Sir, the people penning these verses are practicing a form of soliloquy … or at any rate, I very much hope they are.
In all its fullness, this reader instructed me, the U.S. version goes:
Here I sit,
Broken-hearted,
Paid a dime,
And only farted.
Yesterday
I took a chance:
Saved a dime,
And s*** my pants!
A different reader has taught me that the lines can be rearranged to work even for cubicles that are not coin-operated. Thus:
Here I sit, broken-hearted,
Tried to s*** and only farted.
Then one day I took a chance,
Tried to fart and s*** my pants.
I have even received a sample of Russian latrinalia.
Писать на стенах туалета
Увы, друзья, не мудрено.
Среди говна мы все поэты,
Среди поэтов мы говно.
My reader’s translation:
Keep to yourself your clever comment
And spare the bathroom wall your wit.
Here, in a s***house, you're a poet --
But among poets, you're just s***.
Grateful as I truly am for all these contributions, I’m a little flushed from reading so much cubicle wit. I shall therefore turn the handle on this topic and urge readers to stand up, adjust their dress, and direct their thoughts to higher matters.
Carrickfergus. As signoff music for my March 18th Radio Derb I played Jom McCann and the Dubliners singing the haunting Irish folk classic Carrickfergus. Before doing so I mentioned the Clancy Brothers version but said I couldn’t find a good-quality clip of it on the internet.
A reader dug deeper than I had and turned up this Clancy Brothers version with a mood-setting 45-second spoken intro.
I also got a link to Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris singing Carrickfergus in their cups, although this is much more a novelty celebrity piece that a musical one.
QE2’s pronouns. A reader surmises that Her Britannic Majesty Elizabeth II, if asked to state her pronouns, would offer "one," "one," and "one’s." He asks me, a former subject of Her Majesty, if this is correct.
I don’t know, Sir, but I shall make a point of asking at my next audience.
Corruption. A lot of Radio Derb listeners have had things to say about corruption. One of them included an apt quote from Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal 21 years ago, to the effect that there is sometimes something to be said in favor of corruption.
The Italian public administration has traditionally had one saving grace by comparison with its British counterpart, however: its corruption.
Admittedly, corruption is a strange kind of virtue: but so is honesty in pursuit of useless or harmful ends. Corruption is generally held to be a vice, and viewed in the abstract, it is. But bad behavior can sometimes have good effects, and good behavior bad effects.
Where administration is light and bureaucracy small, bureaucratic honesty is an incomparable virtue; but where these are heavy and large, as in all modern European states, Britain and Italy not least among them, they burden and obstruct the inventive and energetic. Where bureaucrats are honest, no one can cut through their Laocoönian coils: their procedures, no matter how onerous, antiquated, or bloody-minded, must be endured patiently. Such bureaucrats can neither be hurried in their deliberations nor made to see common sense. Indeed, the very absurdity or pedantry of these deliberations is for them the guarantee of their own fair-mindedness, impartiality, and disinterest. To treat all people with equal contempt and indifference is the bureaucrat’s idea of equity.
In such circumstances, the use of personal influence or bribery by a petitioner at the bar of bureaucracy may actually represent an increase in efficiency.
That is all true; but I think we are using the word "corruption" in two slightly different senses here.
The corruption Dalrymple is describing could be called "street corruption." It’s corruption at a low, everyday level, very common in less-developed countries. You come to the attention of a beat cop or a traffic cop for some reason; you offer him a modest sum of money; he takes it and goes away.
When I entered Laos from Thailand fifty years ago, on the advice of friends I made sure that there were two 100-baht bills clearly poking out from my passport. (The Thai baht was trading at about 40 to the dollar. Laos was very poor.) The immigration officer took the bills without blinking, stamped my passport and waved me through. No questions, no forms to fill out.
You soon get used to street-level corruption of this kind, and even come to like it. Slipping a few bills to some underpaid low-level bureaucrat is way less trouble than spending all afternoon filling out a nine-page form and attending an interview.
Problems arise when, after living in countries like that for a while, you return home with those habits. Offering fifty bucks to an American cop in hopes he'll go away is not smart. The cop is looking forward to retirement at fifty and a gold-plated pension. He’s not going to risk blowing that for any sum you can afford.
That’s all street corruption. The other kind is what you might call "high corruption." Here the sums being exchanged have seven, eight, nine, or ten digits. The players are people of power, their families and old associates, donors and power-sniffing celebrities. That’s the kind of corruption that’s gotten Russia and Ukraine those dismal rankings on the world corruption stats … although I wouldn’t be very surprised to learn that Russian and Ukrainian street cops are just as flexible as 1972 Laotian immigration officers.
The Goggle Box. My tender, elegiac remarks about the passing of TV in the April 15th Radio Derb excited one listener to insensate fury, or at any rate the memory thereof.
Derb: Your waxing eloquent about the almighty box caused me to reflect on the enstupidating (I rather like that word) effect it has had on family and friends over the decades. I see the medium as a pernicious, brain-liquifying influence akin to fentanyl.
I went through a phase in the mid-eighties where I systematically gathered defunct sets and stockpiled them in a remote gravel pit on my grandmother’s farm where I later blew them into little pieces with mule-kicking buckshot fired in drunken, reefer-fogged anger. The sight of imploding screens and knobs spinning off in all directions is a most satisfying experience.
Should your own set one day incite your ire, I suggest you put that SMLE of yours to good use and "plug" it right good.
Apart from the immediate aftermath (cleaning up shattered glass and fragmented circuit board isn’t much fun, especially when your ears are ringing), life will improve markedly. Trust me.
Speaking as a reactionary myself by general temperament, I’m not unsympathetic. (Neither would the late John Updike have been, to judge from that short story — can’t remember its name — in which father, sick of seeing son sitting vacantly watching TV, hauls the family set out and smashes it on the driveway.)
Sure, ninety-five percent of TV is garbage. There is much harmless amusement in the other five percent, though, and even occasionally some instruction; and I’m pretty sure the proportion used to be higher.
And having been 13 years old when the Derbyshires acquired their first TV set, I missed the childhood TV experience, and I’m glad I did. That’s where the brain-liquifying influence is at its worst.
Further: If that listener owns a smartphone, as I do not, I hereby accuse him of choking on a gnat while having swallowed a camel.
