08:03 – Names and dates. I was reading something the other night that was sneering at teaching history as “names and dates”. Over the last few decades, it’s become the prevailing opinion that such teaching of names and dates is useless. Perhaps that’s why few people who are younger than 50 or 60 years old know anything about history.
I learned history the old way, starting by memorizing hundreds and eventually thousands of, yes, names and dates. Even now, I remember most of those. Superficially, it may seem useless knowledge for me to remember, say, that Gaius Marius (157 to 86 BCE) served as consul seven times and reformed the legions or that Octavian (63 BCE to 14 CE) won the Battle of Actium in September 31 BCE or that Charles “The Hammer” Martel lived from 686 to 741 CE and won the Battle of Tours in the autumn of 732 CE or that Queen Victoria lived from 1819 to 1901. And, considered in isolation, those are indeed useless factoids.
But only when considered in isolation, and only when there are just a few of those factoids. When there are hundreds and thousands of them, they assume critical importance. They provide the framework for understanding history. Ironically, new-style history teachers condemn old-style history teachers for teaching “isolated names and dates” rather than teaching the relationships of people and events. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Ask a student who learned new-style history about a particular period. They may understand a famous event in some detail, but if you ask them what was going on elsewhere in the world at about the same time that influenced that event, they’ll have no clue. Conversely, ask someone who learned old-style history about the same event. They’ll be able to “connect the dots”. They’ll know what was happening elsewhere at about the same time, and who was involved. The new-style student sees history as a collection of unrelated events; the old-style student sees history as a tapestry.
I had very few teachers who put dates in context with a timeline, but the ones who did brought amazing insight. IIRC most of my European history came in Junior High (nowadays called Middle School), and by then, I could create my own timelines if teachers did not.
Rote learning of all kinds of material is absolutely necessary, as you point out. Thank goodness, because in the video work I do, doctors are occasionally asked to describe the effects of certain drugs. So far, all of them could lecture at length, on when they are to be used and in what quantity, what the expected results are, what the side-effects are, what other drugs they are not compatible with–and more. Occasionally, an emergency occurs, and when it does, they do not have to go to a book to read up on it.
It is the teachers who think that everything useful has been discovered, and nothing more remains to be done, that scare me. I recall a high school chemistry teacher who was absolutely positive that all elements of the Universe had been discovered and there were none left to be discovered. Fact is, that several elements have been added to the periodic table since I was in high school back in the ‘60’s.
Went to a function at my uni last night. There was a young woman there wearing a low cut top. Now normally, of course, I wouldn’t have looked, but her boobs were intriguing. I have never seen a woman with boobs that start so near her neck. They were a bit sagged and strangely shaped, like goat’s tits, but I couldn’t get over how high up her chest they started. Normally they start at about 6″ below the neck, hers started at about 3″ below. Very strange, and quite an odd shape for a young (20 or so) woman.
One of my favorite books is Asimov’s Chronology of the World, which breaks down historic events by region or country in various sized “chunks” of time. So you could find out what was going on in France between 1750-1800, then Italy, England, Germany and so on around the world. It isn’t a complete history, just a summary, but it does a great job of connecting the dots.
The only problem with the book is it ends in 1945. Isaac felt that there was so much history since then, that it required a second book. He died before completing it.
Might she have been wearing a push-up bra?
LOL no. It was the lowest of low cut bras. They were just strangely shaped. Think of long thin balloons with half the air let out. I’ve seen boobs that just jut straight out, like the owner is in zero gravity or the boobs are being held in place by an invisible bra. Hers were the opposite.
Actually, she was quite good looking, from south Asia I think.
Here’s a quote for you:
Immediately after the experiment confirming that radio waves exist, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, who conducted the experiment and for whom the frequency of various electronic waves are named, was asked what application the experiment had. His response: “It’s of no use whatsoever.”
Greg wrote: “Went to a function at my uni last night. There was a young woman there wearing a low cut top.”
Pics, or it didn’t happen! 😀
Greg wrote: “Went to a function at my uni last night. There was a young woman there wearing a low cut top.”
Did you check out the Adam’s Apple? Perhaps some surgery was involved.
The worst pair I’ve ever seen were on a NYC street “person”, that was only half way through their sex operation. S/He was wearing a sign that said “Will rap for $2”, a halter-top, and a mini skirt. We could tell s/he was saving up for the taycacophomy. operation. As I said, it was a mini-skirt.
Yeah, I know. Pics or it didn’t happen. There are some things that just shouldn’t be immortalized in pictures. The memory serves.
And burns. Oh! How it burns!
*Taycacocophomy. Jeeze, fuck up the punch line much, Bill?
In college, I knew a girl who really didn’t grok the idea of funny. If she heard a joke, like:
A priest, a doctor, and a lawyer were in a dinghy that capsized in shark-infested waters. The water churned as the sharks ripped the priest and doctor to shreds. A bystander on shore, horrified by the carnage, was stunned to see a shark with the lawyer riding on its back toward shore. When the shark delivered the lawyer to shore, complete with his briefcase, the bystander asked it, “Why didn’t you rip the lawyer to shreds?” “Professional courtesy,” replied the shark.
If this girl had told that joke, pathetic as it is, she’d have told it something like, “A priest, a doctor, and a lawyer fell out of their boat and the sharks ate everyone except the lawyer.” Then she’d wonder why no one laughed.
Bill wrote:
“Taycacocophomy’
Since I didn’t know that word I Googled it:
Your search – Taycacocophomy – did not match any documents.
Did you mean “cut and tuck job”?
I’ve stopped telling lawyer jokes to my nephew’s wife, a lawyer. She says she’s heard them all.
Speaking of sense of humour, a blonde goddess I knew around 1990 had a great liking for blonde jokes, she’d even tell them herself. One of my favourites was:
Q: What’s the difference between a blonde and a shopping trolley?
A: A shopping trolley has a mind of it’s own.
She did NOT appreciate the following, though:
Q: How do you know when a blonde’s having a bad day?
A: She’s got a tampon behind her ear and she can’t remember what she did with her pencil.
I don’t think she was REALLY trying to put me in hospital, but I was concerned for a while.
Bill wrote:
“Pics, or it didn’t happen! :D”
She wanted to come home with me for “coffee” and so I could take some pics for my perv friends in North America, but I told her I was too tired for what she had in mind.
Greg wrote: “Since I didn’t know that word I Googled it:
Your search – Taycacocophomy – did not match any documents.
Did you mean “cut and tuck job”?”
I should hope Google couldn’t find it. I just made it up, but you get the idea. The usual term is “nip and tuck”.
Break it down phonetically:
Tayc-a-coc-oph-o-my
Take a cock off of me
The obverse is Adacoctomy.
BGrigg: haha. But too verbose. You should have just said “YHBT. YHL. HAND.”
“Dedick” would have been shorter and more to the point.
Bunch of jokesters and comics around here lately.
I am with our host on the learning and study of history, as might be imagined of a derelict fossil like myself. I probably already told my miserable little story here of how I came to love history so I won’t bore anyone with it again. In any case, I got a compliment one time during my sentence in English grad school from a more traditional (and rare) younger guy, whose specialty was the 18th-C Brits and Celts. He said he’d noticed that I seemed to be comfortable with any and all periods and places of history and thought it rather remarkable in this day and age. I took it as a compliment but also felt a bit sad that it has come to this.
As with much else, the mandarins, nabobs and potentates of the humanities departments in our mental institutions of ‘higher learning’ have decreed that the study of history is to be one mostly involving neo-Marxist theory and the various collisions, ramifications and juxtapositions of such mind-boggling-boring characteristics as race, gender, ethnicity and power. Through that Marxist lens, of course. So rather than memorizing stuff like Bob mentions above:
Gaius Marius engendered the Roman archetype of patriarchal repression, etc. blah, blah. And his critics and biographers until very recently are guilty of the same evil. (you can accuse dead white penis people of anything at all and it always sticks)
Octavian was really gay and probably of mostly African descent. (you can just make up shit as you go along and not get called on it, ever.)
Charles Martel, another patriarchal jingoistic tyrant who was transgendering and in denial of his love for the world of Islam.
Queen Victoria was the obverse Protestant/Puritan side of the Catholic Church’s coin of Mariolotry and was, in fact, the younger brother, transgendering-in-progress, of King George III.
To things like that, much study is devoted, and though I may exaggerate a bit here, much worse can be found with a fairly easy search into the current syllabi. And it IS much worse, in the English and Comparative Lit departments.
But soon all these fuckers will be dead and we can start again.
SteveF wrote: “BGrigg: haha. But too verbose. You should have just said “YHBT. YHL. HAND.””
Yes, but as you can see, I’ve already had to explain it to the resident Aussie. 🙂
I think I mentioned a while back about someone who was addressing a university history class asking the class how many of them knew who George C. Marshall was. None of them knew anything about him. This, incidentally, was a graduate class of Ph.D. candidates.
How can anyone, let alone a university student, let alone a history major, let alone a history Ph.D. candidate *not* know anything about George C. Marshall? That’s like not knowing anything about Confucius or Aristotle or Sulla or Suleiman or Gustavus Adolphus or Thomas Paine or Robert E. Lee.
That actually explains a lot.
See, you feel that way simply because you’re old. Marshall was probably your younger brother or something. A PhD candidate would be — let’s see, start college at 18, transfer out of engineering or pre-med at 19, five years to get a History BA, three years to get the MA, a year or three in the PhD program — would be not quite 30. To someone with his life ahead of him, there are better things to do than memorize facts that are easily found on Wikipedia. And besides, History as a discipline is all about analyzing trends and relationships to reach the correct conclusion, with “correct” being determined by the preferences of either the tenure board or the people who are signing the check.
Can’t live in Germany without knowing Marshall. Marshall got a Nobel prize for instituting the European Recovery Program while he was Secretary of State–money given by the US to Europe to rebuild after the war. Of those countries receiving funds, all spent it–except for Germany. Germany took it and loaned it out to those rebuilding. So while other European countries have nothing to show for the Marshall Plan, Germany still has all the money given to it–plus interest.
I managed to get somebody a job at the German Marshall Plan. A German friend was looking for a change in her HR job. I saw a job ad for head of HR at the Marshall Plan, and we told her about it. She had not seen it, but applied, got the job, and worked there for most of the time we lived there. That was when we first arrived in Germany, and I was reading job ads for practice and to find a job for myself.
FireWire connections are disappearing. Personally, I don’t understand this. Not only are they fast, and there is lots of video/audio equipment out there with FireWire interfaces, but they do not have to be ‘ejected’ to disconnect them, like USB connections do.
I am looking at a new video camera, and it has no FireWire output, only USB. Requires hitting an ‘eject’ button on the camera before unplugging the USB or turning off the camera. The pro forums are saying that FireWire is being replaced with Thunderbolt (apparently an Apple creation) and PCIe connections. Meanwhile, USB is the transition mode with FireWire no longer an option. This is yet another case where big business is deciding what we will have, and damned the consumer problems it causes. We have equipment we need to interface, which has ONLY FireWire and no USB, so not having FireWire is a major problem.
I love his amps…
Kidding! He was the guy in Patton.
KIDDING! I am a child of WWII, and the Marshall Plan is well known to me. Dear old dad spent the 50s in Germany, helping to defend the West from the Wicked Nasty People to the immediate East. He and his very pregnant wife moved back to Canada and denied me a birth in a country with good beer.
Oh yeah, we all know there is no good beer in Canada. Labatt’s? Molson? Flavored water, barely. Germany, on the other hand, master of so much already, clearly has the crown for best beers. As with so much else that they do and have done. I worship them, I give them thanks, I praise them for their glory…whoops, just drank some of Herr Waggoner’s Kool-Aid…got carried away…
What a country!
Wasn’t George Marshall a gay black guy who beat the Confederates at Bull Run after making out with Gustavus Adolphus, who invented the printing press and Wikipedia after helping Sulla design the first IPad?
Gee–how many days can you get off for Passover?
B&H is closed online until 20 April, and the store is closed until 27 April.
Have you got Aldi in Canada? They import some pilsner beers that are respectable. Funny, the North of Germany drinks nothing but Pilsner, and the South does not even know what Pilsner is.
Four day weekend in Europe. I sure miss that.
The northern German pilnsers must have come over to England with the Angles from what is now Schleswig-Holstein and southern Denmark or something, but I could not abide them when I got older. Thankfully somebody developed porters and stouts. Americans seemed to go for the lagers and pilsners, largely, possibly due to the very large German population here, that has mostly been expunged from the history books since the wonderful Great War. Funny, too, that German just barely missed becoming the national language here, LOL. But no one knows, apparently.
Bill the wordsmith wrote:
“Break it down phonetically:
Tayc-a-coc-oph-o-my
Take a cock off of me
The obverse is Adacoctomy.”
Ahh, very clever.
OFD wrote:
blah blah blah “Gaius Marius” blah blah blah.
None of you have mentioned the most worth names in Roman history, Cincinnatus and Cicero. Tsk Tsk Tsk.
Chuck wrote:
“Four day weekend in Europe. I sure miss that.”
Come to Australia.
They used to have a five day Easter weekend in Victoria. Think they still do.
Well, those may be the most worth names in Roman history to youse down in Oz but some of us really dig Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida and Virna Lisi. Consult your dictionary under “cougar.” And Google images.
Long weekends? Yah, our boss told us to beat it today at 1:00 PM, I about fell off my chair; this is not the usual deal at gigantic American corporations. I still felt guilty and didn’t leave until almost an hour later. Such are the joys of Puritan DNA over four centuries, I reckon.
Thunderbolt is mostly Intel with a little Apple help.
Firewire is mostly Apple with help from a bunch of others.
No Aldi in Canada, at least not in the bush, where most retailers think I live.
I can get good beer, and Canada does make some, but Labatt’s and Molsons aren’t them. They’re better than Budweiser and Coors, but that’s faint praise. I tend to buy different beers, just to try different beers. I have Go-to beers, depending on the weather. I like stouts and bitters in the winter, and lagers, especially Pilseners, in the summer. Budweiser Czechvar or Pilsener Urquell being my favorite favorites. Beck’s, Grolsch or Freydenlund are also popular. Mostly I look for micro breweries. I have rarely disliked a microbrewery beer.
Bloody Hell! Those females OFD mention must be even older that the lovely Hillary. I’d understand Clint Eastwood saying they’re nice, but they’re 50 years too old for *us*.
I’m not a beer connoisseur, so I just buy VB where I can get it. A couple of my favourite eateries have substituted Carlton Draught, which is okay. Heineken, Carlsberg and Grolesch are all okay too, mainly when I’m overseas and can’t get VB.
Howdy from Texas! I’m here visiting family for a couple of weeks. The trip was uneventful, aside from laughing at the newest acts in security theater. Example: once we were on the final, international leg of the flight, the German flight crew announced rarher apologetically that US regulations required then to enforce a rule that groups of passengers are not allowed to stand together (like, waiting for the toilets).
Good, if shocking, news. Even my very conservative, ultra-patriotic family has turned, and finds itself embarrassed and angry at the US government. Of course, much is directed at Obama, but they even say that the Republican candidates are a loss. Here I half figured they might like Santorum. Pleasant surprise, even as we agree that things are likely beyond saving…
And here I thought we were all agreed that the best beers are made in the US. Not by the big names, of course.
I’ve heard enough people say that the major US beers are cats piss that I believe them. That leaves the problem of finding the good microbreweries. Or taking the path of least resistance, as I did in 2003, and just get Heineken, Carlsberg and Grolesch.
Bob wrote: “And here I thought we were all agreed that the best beers are made in the US. Not by the big names, of course.”
I thought only you agreed on that? I recall backing you up on the microbrewery angle. I find all the big NA names makes so-so beer for the masses, while some of the smaller “big” names, like Sam Adams and Yuengling make much better beer for the more discerning consumer.
I guess it all comes down to what value you want from a beer. I like bitter or “skunky” beers more so than smooth sweet beers. My neighbor just buys the cheapest piss he can get by the 24 pack. I buy beer by the 4 or 6 pack.
I have yet to come across a bad microbrewery, and can’t understand Greg’s issue with finding a “good” one. There must be one somewhere that is trying to emulate Foster’s, but I haven’t found one yet.
Bill, you realise, of course, that the formula for Fosters is licensed from a Canadian brewery… 🙂
Formula? I thought they just used row upon row of well-watered cats.
Really? Must be one of those big name brands I mentioned earlier. I think it’s Labatt that is aligned with Foster’s. I haven’t drank a Labatt Blue beer since I was a teenager.
I do find it interesting that Foster’s also brews VB. Perhaps they get the cats to drink the VB first?
RBT wrote:
“Formula? I thought they just used row upon row of well-watered cats.”
Now there’s a good idea. We can put those noxious animals to a good use, making “beer” for the British market. The Poms’ll never know the difference.
VB is far far too good to allow cats to drink.
Meh. Britain, like America, has bad beer from big breweries and great beer from microbreweries. We have particularly good (microbrewery) ales and ciders.