How NOT to win friends and influence people

Yesterday morning when I opened up my email, I got this message from someone whose name I did not recognize.

Mano,

I thought you might enjoy:

Link #1

Link #2

Link #3,

Best,

(Name redacted by me)

That is not unusual. I get emails from time to time from people who think I may be interested in something. I did not click on the links (I am wary about links being used to propagate viruses) but the wording of URLs seemed to indicate that they had something to do with Shakespeare’s (or the Bard’s) sonnets, which seemed reasonable since the email arrived the day after I had two posts about the controversy over the Bard’s authorship.
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Documentary of the Shakespeare authorship question

In my earlier post on the question of the debate over whether William Shakespeare was the Bard, I forget to mention a 2012 documentary that I saw on this question called Last Will. and Testament.

It was pretty interesting. While presenting all sides of this debate in the context of the personal and political conflicts of those times, the documentary tends to take a skeptical attitude to the question of Shakespeare being the Bard and spends some time on Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and a group of authors as the most viable alternative.

Here’s the trailer.

Shakespeare controversy keeps going

If you want to ignite a firestorm among scholars of English literature, just bring up the possibility that the author of the works that now constitute the Shakespeare canon were not written by the historical figure William Shakespeare but by another author who, for whatever reason, chose to be anonymous and had him act as a front. To keep the issue under discussion clear, some people refer to the author of the canon as the Bard and to the historical figure as William Shakespeare, so that the question can be formulated as to whether the Bard was William Shakespeare or someone else.

One would think that the issue would have been resolved by now but part of the problem is that although many doubts can be raised as to Shakespeare being the Bard, the alternatives also have problems. Furthermore, one could analyze the question from different disciplines such as literature, history, and linguistics, each with their own methodologies, and arrive at different conclusions.
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Why do some people litter?

It annoys me when I see people throw things out of their car windows or when I see things like plastic bottles and containers strewn on sidewalks. Litter makes the environment ugly. It does not take much effort to not litter. You just keep the waste item until you reach a trash can. So why do people casually toss things away in public places, even sometimes when there is a trash can nearby? Some researchers are studying why people litter as part of an effort to reduce the practice, and find that there are multiple reasons why people do it.

In 2011, a study in Environment and Behavior observed people littering in public places. The researchers went to 130 outdoor, public locations in 10 U.S. states and watched almost 10,000 people as they went about their business.

When the researchers first arrived at a site, they were tasked with evaluating the area’s cleanliness and the availability of garbage bins. Of the 130 sites, 91 percent had at least one trash can. Only two sites didn’t have any visible litter.
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Ulysses and the nature of difficult novels

Fans of author James Joyce and his novel Ulysses celebrate today (June 16th) because it is the day in which all the events of the book take place and it has come to be known as ‘Bloomsday’, named ofter one of the key characters in the book Leopold Bloom.

Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement.”According to Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.”
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Surviving a plane crash

More details have emerged about what happened to the four children (aged 13, nine, four, and 11 months) who were rescued 40 days after the plane they were in crashed on May 1 in the Colombian Amazon jungle, killing their mother and two other people.

The mother of the four young Colombian siblings who managed to survive for almost six weeks in the Amazon jungle clung to life for four days after their plane crashed before telling her children to leave her in the hope of improving their chances of being rescued.
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A search team found the plane on 16 May in a thick patch of the rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board but the children were nowhere to be found.

I was reminded about something I used to do with faculty to make them aware of the benefits of using cooperative learning techniques with their students. It consisted of an exercise called Survival in the Desert and involved giving everyone the following scenario. (This exercise was developed by the US military and there were several different scenarios for crashes, the desert being just one.)
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What’s with all the naked Greek men?

Sarah Murray, an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto in Canada who is a cultural historian and archaeologist specializing in the material culture and institutions of early Greece, ponders an intriguing question: Why are so many of the Greek men found in depictions of ancient Greek art not wearing any clothes, even when they are engaged in everyday activities such as working in a foundry where basic safety should suggest that clothing was essential?

Scholars struggle to answer these questions with certainty. The truth is that male nudity, as both an aesthetic and a real practice in the ancient Greek context, was many-faceted. Men in Greek art seem to do pretty much everything without their pants on, ranging from the obvious (having sex), to the sensible (bathing and swimming), to the painful (riding horses), to the seemingly suicidal (fighting battles). The convention of nudity in Greek art cuts across apparent class differences as well as a wide range of activities: ‘working-class’ nude men harvest olives and dig clay for pottery production, while heroes and gods from Greek myths and legends fight battles, pursue paramours and mourn lost friends, all while clad in armour that curiously leaves their most sensitive bits exposed.
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Extraordinary survival and rescue of four children in the Amazon

This has to be one of the most incredible stories in recent times.

Four children have been found alive after surviving a plane crash and spending weeks fending for themselves in Colombia’s Amazon jungle.

Colombia’s president said the rescue of the siblings, aged 13, nine, four and one, was “a joy for the whole country”.

The children’s mother and two pilots were killed when their light aircraft crashed in the jungle on 1 May.

The missing children became the focus of a huge rescue operation involving dozens of soldiers and local people.
…

The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group.
…

A massive search began and in May, rescuers recovered items left behind by the children, including a child’s drinking bottle, a pair of scissors, a hair tie and a makeshift shelter.

Small footprints were also discovered, which led search teams to believe the children were still alive in the rainforest, which is home to jaguars, snakes and other predators.

Members of the children’s community hoped that their knowledge of fruits and jungle survival skills would give them a better chance of remaining alive.

That hope turned out to be justified.

The children’s grandmother, Fatima Valencia, said after their rescue: “I am very grateful, and to mother earth as well, that they were set free.”
…

She said the eldest of the four siblings was used to looking after the other three when their mother was at work, and that this helped them survive in the jungle.

“She gave them flour and cassava bread, any fruit in the bush, they know what they must consume,” Ms Valencia said in footage obtained by EVN.

For the 13-year old to be able to keep the others, especially the one-year old, alive for more than a month in a dangerous jungle shows remarkable presence of mind. I do not think I would have lasted for more than a few days in that situation, even if I did not have to care for anyone else.

I just hope that they are not too traumatized by the loss of their mother and the whole experience.

Annoying film titles

They say that you should never judge a book by its cover but I admit there are some film titles that are so annoying to me that I resist watching them. The ones that are most annoying are the ones with deliberately misspelled words that strike me as too cute by half. Three examples that come to mind are Inglourious Basterds, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Biutiful.

This article looks at those and other titles and explains which have some justification in the plot and which are just directorial vanities.

The paparazzi problem

The seemingly never-ending soap opera that surrounds the British Windsor family continues in the US with Harry and Meghan and their story of how paparazzi reportedly chased their vehicle through the streets of New York City, risking accidents, in order to take photographs of them. The photo agency is denying that their photographers acted in a dangerous manner and is refusing their demand to hand over any photographs that were taken during the alleged car chase.

For some reason, there seems to be a large audience that likes to see photographs of famous people taken without their consent. As a result, there is a market for such photos in tabloid media and for paparazzi who go to great lengths to get such photographs, such as surrounding celebrities in public places, even when they are engaged in mundane tasks like grocery shopping or taking a walk or eating in a restaurant.
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