The Virtual Stoa

Over here.

[thanks! DC]

Our beloved cat Enkidu is dead. He was last seen alive on Monday 16 November, and was found dead at the Jericho boatyard the following day, cause of death unknown. He was four and a half years old. Full tribute over the fold.

(more…)

When I begin to think at all I get into states of disgust and fury at the way the mob is going on (meaning by mob, chiefly Dukes, crown princes, and such like persons) that I choke ; and have to go to the British Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.

– Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 4 November 1860 [thanks, GC]

This week has been a fantastic week for Gordon Brown’s “Britishness” agenda, as two events have united the people of Britain as almost never before.

First, the people of Britain came together to support Barcelona in the final of the Champions League (with the exception of a small handful in the Northwest of England). Second, we are (almost) all of us delighted to welcome a dozen Norwegian beavers into the wild (with the exception of a small handful within fifty miles or so of the beaver-reintroduction zone in Scotland).

I’m feeling fairly patriotic this week, at any rate, certainly much more than usual.

The annual intercollegiate tortoise race was held yesterday here at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Blue Peter showed up to cover the race, bringing the official Blue Peter tortoise. And, after being placed in the middle of the race circle, one of the tortoises successfully mounted one of the other tortoises.

I learn from here and here that Brian Barry has died. Glancing at the various Barry books I’ve got scattered around the place, I see that he he was one to pay tribute to his cat Gertie in the Prefaces of his later works.

Justice as Impartiality (1995 – I only have the Spanish version to hand, oddly enough, since I don’t really read Spanish): “… y puedo decir sin faltar a la verdad que apenas hay una página de manuscrito que no muestre signos de haber sido completamente hollada por una pata felina.”

Culture and Equality (2001)  “Like the cat on Shackleton’s Endurance, Gertie oversaw the entire operation, and made much the same kind of contribution as Mrs. Chippy, her speciality being to hide the scissors and stapler (essential tools of the trade if you write the way I do) by settling down on top of them and yielding them up only under protest.”

Why Social Justice Matters (Polity, 2005): “Those who have persevered through my previous books (or at least their prefaces [a pre-emptive reference to the Virtual Stoa - ed.]) will not be surprised by my acknowledging the role played in writing this one by Gertie. Cats have been shown to lower blood pressure, and I am sure that she succeeded in doing this every time – and there were a lot of them – that I felt I had bitten off more than I could chew. Perhaps I had, but at least I finished the book, with Gertie keeping me company almost to the last iteration of the optimistically titled ‘final draft’. However, she died at the age of 18 just before that, and this showed that I had if anything underestimated the difference she had made.”

His early books, by contrast, are free of references to cats. Political Argument (1965) thanks his two D.Phil examiners, for example (Strawson and Plamenatz), and chaps like Hart and Rawls, but no cats, and my copy of the Midway Reprint edition of Sociologists, Economists and Democracy doesn’t seem to thank anyone for anything at all (quadruped or otherwise).

(On reflection, if there is a Stoa-reader out there who would like a copy of the Spanish editions of Theories of Justice and Justice as Impartiality, do get in touch, and we can work out how to get them to you.)

I’ve often wanted to attach some kind of GPS device to Enkidu, in order to work out where – and how far – he goes at night. It’s good to learn that Reading University scientists want to do something similar, and that even they have “virtually no idea of what they [the cats, not the scientists] get up to outdoors, particularly at night.”

The article also suggests that Enkidu may be wiping out far more wildlife than he brings in to show us, given that the rabbits, weasels (apparently) and water-buffalo that he brings down won’t fit through the catflap, and so they are eaten where they fall. (I may have garbled that last bit.)

Thinking of wildlife, I liked the final image in this gallery. Much better than that stupid white horse (and the duck isn’t bad, either).

UPDATE [Wednesday am]: Socialist Unity weighs in.

The nuclear option is still on the table, over here [via].

Here, and here.

Enkidu was on the local news today, filmed trotting across the boatyard site, and looking magnificent.

You can see him, for a bit at least, over at the BBC South Today page: click to watch the “BBC Oxford News”, and he appears one minute and seven seconds into the report. Philip Pullman is on immediately after Enkidu, but it’s a bit of a let down as he lacks the natural screen presence of the black-and-white cat.

Full story, over here [thanks, RCP]

Elephants can count, over here.

The Third Earl of Shaftesbury on the Elephant (again):

But had Nature assign’d such an OEconomy as this to so puissant an Animal, for instance, as the ELEPHANT, and made him withal as prolifick as those smaller Creatures commonly are; it might have gone hard perhaps with Mankind: And a single Animal, who by his proper Might and Prowess has often decided the Fate of the greatest Battels which have been fought by Human Race, shou’d he have grown up into a Society, with a Genius for Architecture and Mechanicks proportionable to what we observe in those smaller Creatures; we shou’d, with all our invented Machines, have found it hard to dispute with him the Dominion of the Continent.

Over here.

I clearly haven’t been following politics closely enough recently, as the news that Labour attacked the Tory candidate in Crewe & Nantwich for living near llamas has only just caught up with me, thanks to popbitch.

This is just weird. It’s not violently grotesque, the way the “make foreigners carry ID cards” leaflet was violently grotesque, but it is very, very strange. Everyone I know is strongly pro-llama. (I think that everyone I don’t know is strongly pro-llama.) And the slow take-over of the English countryside by camelids is very much to be welcomed.

In a genuinely socialist Britain, we would probably all live close to llamas, what with the disappearance of the distinction between the town and the country; and we wouldn’t need lawn-mowers any more. (Charles Fourier probably said something about this.)

Over here. I am proud to share my county with a beaver. It is apparently not the first beaver in Oxfordshire in five hundred years: last summer another beaver escaped from Cirencester and lived in the Cherwell before being recaptured and shipped back across the county line into Gloucestershire.

[It's also good to see that someone mentions Gerald of Wales in the comments below the article, before it all begins to degenerate.]

Over here [via].