New and Old #191
Friday roundup and commentary
Scrooge’s accusation, Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, December 21, 2018, Dana D. Kelley
The spirit exclaims incredulity: “I seek!”
Scrooge backtracks slightly: “Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family.”
To 21st century readers, it might seem like an archaic inside joke; but to Victorian England, the references were obvious.
In the years prior to the publication of A Christmas Carol, one member of Parliament had introduced strict Sabbatarian bills that foolishly, Dickens thought, sought to make “man truly moral through the ministry of constables, and sincerely religious under the influence of penalties.”
That quote is from a scathing essay Dickens wrote, directed at Sir Andrew Agnew, who repeatedly sponsored the legislation in the late 1830s….
Scrooge’s accusation of the ghost was actually a disguised dig at a local politician, and lost to obscurity over ensuing generations. The spirit’s answer, however, remains timely and applicable.
“There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they never lived.”
I remember reading an analysis of A Christmas Carol where the writer took this aside to mean that the story was fundamentally a Christian one, because Scrooge apparently understood the spirits to be sent from or representing the Christian God, in whose name those blue laws were passed. That seems like over-interpreting to me. But this scene is a funny little bit of inside knowledge that probably goes over the heads of most readers today. Myself included, before I found this article!
The most important invasive species for a few islands, especially Maui and Molokai, is the axis deer. On Molokai, an island of only around 7,000 people, there are somewhere around 70,000 axis deer. On Maui, there are around 50,000.
The axis deer are a fascinating and multi-dimensional inhabitant. They are simultaneously invasive and part of traditional culture; they destroy food supplies and are an extremely important source of food themselves; they are protected by law and despised by some parts of law enforcement; they are wildly destructive to Hawaii and also, during the worst of COVID-19, were a beacon of hope.
How it started:
“Introducing grazing animals here was considered a good thing,” says Jeff Bagshaw of the communications and outreach team for Hawaii’s Department of Forestry; he focuses on deer in Maui. Hawaii was a base to explore the Pacific and a halfway point to Asia, but some of the early sailors found it tough to restock their ships without land mammals to hunt. A few different peculiarities of the Hawaiian islands made it a great home for the axis deer. As grazers, they prefer to eat grass, but they will browse for just about anything. And Hawaiian plants, without any native mammals that might eat their leaves or shoots, never bothered to evolve thorns, spines or toxins to discourage herbivores. There’s even a variety of native Hawaiian raspberry, called the akala, that doesn’t have any thorns.
The deer found no predators in Hawaii, either; none of the wolves, big cats, terrestrial snakes or alligators that prey on them in Asia. But because they had so many predators in Asia, the deer evolved to give birth much more often than other deer species, in the hopes of outpacing the rate at which they get eaten. In Hawaii, they have no predators, but they still give birth year-round.
The dream of those early sailors was realized, but far too well….
It’s an interesting story of, as all these invasive species stories are, unintended consequences. There’s also a fascinating legal issue that resulted in an unintended consequence:
Not only is the Department of Forestry not allowed to completely eradicate axis deer from Hawaii, it is theoretically required to ensure that the population is stable and secure. Of course, that’s not a problem it’s really worrying about; the deer is so overpopulated that the idea of saving the deer is laughable. But it would have to, if it came to that.
And then this bit of regulatory standards having unintended consequences:
“The process of harvesting a wild animal has crazy amounts of overhead that go into it,” says Muise. It is legal to give hunted meat to anyone you want, in the United States, but to sell it, it has to be inspected. Unlike some states, Hawaii has no state meat inspection service, so Maui Nui has to go straight to the USDA. On every single hunt, a USDA inspector must accompany Maui Nui’s hunters and examine every single wild axis deer for health before giving a thumbs up to the hunter to take a shot. And that hunter can only take that one shot; the USDA regulations for humane commercial hunting strictly require that the animal be rendered unconscious immediately, with a single shot to the skull. This process is slow and liable to spook the deer, so it has to be done at night, when the deer are more calm, which requires all kinds of equipment. Maui Nui’s hunters use military-grade infrared binoculars and, as of recently, a drone, to locate deer in the dark.
Give this a read.
Our homes don’t need formal spaces, Curbed, Kate Wagner, July 11, 2018
It’s important for us as homebuyers, -builders, and renters to be able to discern a need versus a want (or as my mother says, an “I cannot” versus an “I don’t want to”) when looking for a potential home. “Entertaining space,” as it is marketed by builders, realtors, media, and popular culture, is, more often than not, a want that has been rationalized and internalized, and thus feels like a need. But now that science proves that nobody uses their formal living and dining spaces, it’s time for us to sit down and have a struggle session with “space for entertaining.”
Wagner is writing a tad tongue-in-cheek, but she means it. It’s an interesting phenomenon—those formal dining rooms with a nice table that gets stacked with stuff, that end up being ground-level giant open closets most of the time. “Oh, don’t go in there, we don’t use that room.” That was fairly normal for me growing up (though we did use our own dining room fairly often, and many regular nights for dinner too).
Is it true that something that gets used once or twice a year isn’t needed? Maybe. Maybe spare capacity is kind of needed, though. On the other hand, of course, two generations ago lots of us did without it, and lots of us still do without it. Not only do you survive, but some of the friction and inconvenience can turn out to be a kind of social glue.
Here’s more of her primary point, which is classic anti-consumerism, anti-keeping-up-with-the-Joneses stuff:
The irregular massing and enormous windows of two-story foyers and great rooms, as well as formal dining rooms (often nested in a separate mass or articulated with wall-to-wall windows) facing the street, are such common McMansion features that yours truly has, over the past three years, immortalized them with a series of pejorative terms (Lawyer Foyer! Dining Turret!). If these rooms were designed for their actual practical purposes (entertaining) instead of being architectural megaphones for their owners’ money, they wouldn’t be cavernous spaces where it takes 50 steps to walk from the refrigerator to the oven, where the windows are so large that the heating/cooling bill is hundreds of dollars with an added bonus of being able to get a sunburn inside, and where the mere clinking of plates (much less a conversation) mercilessly reverberates through 3,000 square feet of pure echo.
The ironic inefficiency of hyper-exaggerated high-end entertaining spaces belies a truth: These spaces aren’t really designed for entertaining. They’re designed for impressing others. And not just impressing others: After all, it’s general politeness to compliment a host on their home no matter how impressive it is. The real goal, deeply embedded in these oversized, over-elaborate houses, is not for guests to say, “Oh wow, this is nice,” but to make them think, “Oh wow, this is nicer than what I have and now I feel jealous and insecure.”
I used to very much take this view of what I would have considered conspicuous consumption. Now that I’m a little older and have my own home and my own responsibilities, I understand that pinning down precisely what counts as overconsumption or wasteful consumerism is tricky.
Back when I first started taking stuff home from the dump in high school, my dad said, “nobody throws something out without a reason.” When a lot of the stuff I brought home was worth money or worked great, we rethought that. But the opposite may be true: nobody buys something without a reason. If a fancy house makes you envious, that’s your moral problem, not the owners’ consumption problem. Etc., etc.
What do you think?
The Pirate Preservationists, Reason, Jesse Walker, September 10, 2023
The fearful mood intensifies whenever politics enters the picture. When books by Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and other long-dead authors were reedited to reflect what are said to be “contemporary sensitivities,” many e-books were automatically updated even for readers who had bought them long before. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, several streaming services, unable to stop the abusive policing that set off the unrest, decided instead to edit or eliminate TV episodes where characters appeared in blackface. (This wasn’t an anti-racist gesture so much as a cargo-cult copy of an anti-racist gesture—an elaborate imitation built without figuring out the functions of the component parts—and so it mostly affected shows that had presented blackface with obvious disapproval.) Several songs with words that might offend listeners have gone missing from Spotify or (as with Lizzo’s “Grrrls,” which originally included the term spaz) were replaced with new versions.
This is not actually the main point of the piece. It’s really this: “There’s something to be said for the bootleggers and pirates. Whether or not they mean to do it, they're salvaging pieces of our heritage.”
More:
As a profit-generating enterprise, they are either dead or, at best, in suspended animation. But they’re still there. When HBO pruned its library, the pirates became accidental preservationists.
This wasn’t the first time that happened, and it will not be the last. Cultural artifacts have long been preserved by people acting either outside the law entirely or in a legal gray zone:
• F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu is a critically acclaimed horror classic. It is also an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. After Stoker’s widow sued to stop it from being distributed, the German courts ordered that every print of the picture be destroyed. It survived only because a collector illegally kept a copy, which eventually made its way to the archives of the Cinémathèque Française.
This is also true of stuff like video games on legacy platforms, where the actual software and hardware are effectively impossible for a regular person to use. The only way to preserve them meaningfully is for the ROMs to be emulated. There’s a little bit about video games here, and also this, with some hope:
One unexpected effect of this migration to the internet was to blur the boundary between a blog and a music label.
Countless companies specialize in finding forgotten music, often released by regional or local labels that went out of business long ago, and repackaging it for modern listeners. Countless crate-diggers do essentially the same thing, but they post their finds on blogs, on YouTube channels, in Internet Archive collections, or as SoundCloud mixes. As streaming gradually displaced CDs, some reissue labels started posting playlists as well as publishing physical releases. This is not just true in the sense that, say, the Chicago-based Numero Group posts albums on Spotify. The same record label posts playlists on Spotify, the way any user can, which gives it a legal way to include songs it doesn’t have the right to reissue itself.
This is a really interesting article. Read the whole thing.
Related Reading:
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With regards to entertaining space, my view is that people feel that they need this since there is no third space for them to take visiting friends and family etc. You can essentially can meet someone outside the home for either a coffee for a full meal. Finding something in between is quite hard where you can hangout for a while.
Re: the formal spaces piece. It certainly matters what kind of family and lifestyle the home needs to accommodate. For instance, people with larger families that are home and TOGETHER much of the day need a lot of shared spaces, as Lane Scott explains: https://substack.com/@lanescott/note/c-78222870 This could in part be a declining family/ multiple children phenomenon. But homeschooling and larger families would probably be shaking their heads at that piece, as their "entertaining spaces" are actually..... needed for living.