Nige reminds us:

It was on this day in 1885 that the famous T.P. Barnum elephant Jumbo was killed, struck by a locomotive while crossing the tracks in a marshalling yard at St Thomas, Ontario. The collision derailed the train, and it took 150 people to haul Jumbo’s body up an embankment… Barnum of course couldn’t leave it at that. In what was then the largest taxidermy project ever undertaken, he had Jumbo stuffed so that he could carry on touring with the circus. After four years, Barnum let Jumbo go, donating him to Tufts University, where he became the university’s much-loved mascot – until he was destroyed in a fire in 1975. His ashes are now kept in a 14-oz Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter tin in the office of the Tufts athletics director, but his tail, which had been removed earlier, resides in the Tufts archives. That peanut butter tin troubles me – surely Jumbo deserves a more dignified resting place after all he’s been through…

Now the truth can be told, apparently. The wise men at the Times have decided to share some juicy inside information.

Partners get investment opportunities not offered to other employees, and are typically the highest paid at the firm. Goldman will even book tables for them at fashionable New York restaurants.

What Susanne Craig’s somewhat breathless account doesn’t tell you is that, having booked that fashionable table, Goldman will eat your dinner for you.

Tomorrow: “Traffic on Fifth Avenue is Southbound.”

David Hare on Mad Men. (Guardian)

It needs courage to withhold, and withholding is what this series is all about. Feature films in the English language seem to obsess more and more on only one thing at a time – they concentrate on their given subject with a kind of furious, exhausting dullness. But in Mad Men, nothing is dwelt on very long and, as in life, lots of things happen at once. It’s entirely typical of Matthew Weiner’s complicating techniques that when at the climax of three series, Don Draper drives home to find that his wife Betty has finally opened his desk drawer and come upon evidence of his previous self, he meanwhile has another woman waiting for him in the car outside. Even when facing the crisis of his life, our hero’s mind can’t help, partly at least, being on something else.

Khadije Sharife. at the LRB blog, on the bogus headquarters of Hollywood studios (and hundreds of thousands of other American corporations).

Delaware, the first state to ratify the US Constitution, is also the world’s leading tax haven, thanks to its generous provision of such perks as corporate opacity, banking secrecy, company redomiciliation and protected cell companies. Last year, 200,000 companies, including Fox, Universal and Warner Bros, as well as Coca-Cola, Ford, Kentucky Fried Chicken and two-thirds of the Fortune 500, were registered at the same single-storey address: 1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington.

Just as being based in Delaware helps Chevron, for example, minimise the taxes it pays in Algeria, Angola, Brazil, Argentina and Alaska, so it helps Fox avoid sharing the profit from films like Avatar with the state of California. This shouldn’t go down well with California’s state employees who are being forced to take three days unpaid holiday every month. Yet even as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ’state of emergency’ shifts the multi-billion-dollar budget deficit burden to citizens, Hollywood’s reaping the benefits of tax-code changes last year that hand hundreds of millions in tax credits to movie studios. Don’t expect to see ‘Last Exit to Wilmington’ coming to a screen near you any time soon.

¶ At Jonathan Harris’s site, an uncredited bit of wisdom that we’re going to attribute to the keeper — who is now half our age. Which means that he has had only half our experience at getting back “what we had to give up.” At a certain startling point, life lurches into Reverse, and it takes a while to figure out that Reverse is the new Drive.

There comes a time in your life
when you stop trying to escape
from your childhood

and you try to get back
what you had to give up
to make your escape.

¶ Gotham Diary: Rising.

From Joe Moran’s Blog, a seasonal evocation of the pleasures of the freshly stocked school kit, and the dreams that it inspired of using esoteric contraptions such as the slide rule.

My affection for stationery even extends to those mathematical instruments, like set squares and protractors, whose purposes remained obscure throughout my school career but whose uniformity and symmetry I enjoyed. So I was puzzled recently when Melvyn Bragg, in the middle of complaining that his former employee, ITV, was obsessed with audience ratings, said that it had been “taken over by slide rules and suits” – in other words, overrun by sharply dressed, number-crunching managers going on about focus groups and audience share. I associate the slide rule, by contrast, with gentle, tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking engineers, calculating formulae for jet engines in sheds.

You never see anyone using a slide rule in a film. Matinee idol scientists always work out algorithms unaided in their brilliant minds, or scrawl them manically in chalk on giant blackboards. By the same token that unfairly condemns people with colour-coded ring binders as the owners of overly tidy minds, slide rules are supposed to belong only to the pedantic foot soldiers of science, the plodders who have to show us their workings out. But slide rules are lovely things: pleasingly solid, elegantly mysterious in their markings, the perfect marriage of form and function. Since scientific calculators rendered them obsolete in about 1980, some people (not me) even collect them.

HRH Prince Charles recycles.

“Someone has been imaginative enough to make cuff links out of the previous engine from my 40-year-old Aston Martin and to sell them in aid of my trust for young people. “I even have shoes made from leather salvaged from an 18th century wreck. They are totally indestructible and will see me out,” the Prince wrote. The shoes were made in 1987 from leather recovered from a Danish brigantine, which sank off Plymouth in 1786. Its cargo of hides was discovered by divers in 1973. Charles , who as Duke of Cornwall was the owner of the wreck and its contents, allowed the divers to sell the hides to finance the salvage operation. In return, he was given the first pair of leather shoes.

(via Good)

Eric endeavors to take a scientific view of jealousy (not a current affliction, thank goodness), but does not quite succeed.

I thought of my own experiences with jealousy. I had been extremely jealous in my first relationship. I was constantly suspecting my boyfriend of infidelity and constructing heartbreaking scenarios in my mind. In later relationships, the level of jealousy declined dramatically and precipitously.

Could this be because my body senses that, by now, a sufficient amount of genetic material must have found its way into the creation of some new entities that will be able to carry on my genetic legacy?

I had assumed that it could be explained by how, in my first relationship, I felt like I had found something that I had been waiting for for my entire life. It was so special and so wonderful, I was terrified to lose it. So the idea of anything threatening to take my boyfriend away from me sent me into a hysterical state. Since our relationship had begun with a kiss, a kiss with another seemed like it might be the beginning of my end.

Now, many years later and with plenty of experience with heartache, I know that I will probably be able to rebuild myself after being brutally demolished, and I am also a better judge of what constitutes a true threat to the relationship. So, consequently, I am less jealous.

I guess these thoughts were wrong, I thought.

At Big Questions Online, Alan Jacobs writes about an experience that thousands of thoughtful people have had on the Internet in these early days: becoming too angry to type. There is always only one immediate cure.

The author and commenters bristled at my critique. I bristled right back. The argument escalated. At one point, I said to myself, “All right, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball” — and I would have cut loose and said exactly what I wanted to say, except that at that moment my hands were shaking too violently for me to type accurately. I looked at my trembling fingers for a moment. Then I closed that browser tab and spent a few minutes removing all Anglican-related blogs from my bookmarks and my RSS reader. I stopped reading those blogs and have never looked at them again to this day. I don’t think I’ve ever made a better decision.

A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.

(via MetaFilter)

Double Dangler: “Days from death, Fla. wildlife officials free plastic jar that was stuck on bear cub’s head.” At Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum pretends to scratch his head:

Who was just days from death? Well, this is a headline, so we have no prior context, so we don’t initially know. But we see that someone is days from death, and the comma tells us that this is an adjunct introducing a clause that is almost certainly going to tell us, so we read on, and we hit the main clause subject: Florida wildlife officials. We are all mortal, and some day every Florida wildlife official must prepare to meet the Creator of all wildlife, so it is the most natural thing in the world to take them as the target of predication that we need, and we fill it in: we understand (for a split second) that some Florida wildlife officials were just days from death. So now, what did they do?

And at that point we learn that they freed a plastic jar. Even though they were dying. The story is getting stranger and stranger. Next we learn that the jar was freed from the embarrassing predicament of being stuck on a young bear’s head. Still not a lot of sense to any of it. But we read on, and finally we encounter the explanatory sentence: “Biologists say the cub was days away from death because the jar made it impossible to eat or drink.” OK, puzzlement over. The cub was just days from death, the jar was on the cub’s head, the wildlife officials are fine, they freed the cub from its jar-imprisonment by freeing the jar from its bear-attachment, everything is now clear.

(via Felix Salmon)

From Research Digest Blog:

As the dirt and germs are wiped away, we’re left feeling not just bodily but also morally cleansed – a kind of metaphorical virtuosity that leads us to judge others more harshly. That’s according to Chen-Bo Zhong‘s team, who invited 58 undergrads to a lab filled with spotless new equipment. Half the students were asked to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe so as not to soil the shiny surfaces. Afterwards all the students rated the morality of six societal issues including pornography and littering. Those who’d wiped their hands made far harsher judgments than those who didn’t.

Nige gets wet, and aren’t we jealous..

Getting off the homeward train last night, I stepped straight into torrential, monsoon-style rain, coming down in sheets. As I strode away from the station, I found I’d been joined under my large umbrella by a cheery young lady of Chinese origin who happened to be going my way. She was visiting from Oxford, where she was studying for a PhD in mathematics. She already had a Masters, and her employers (in the City) were subsidising her PhD. Clearly a bright spark then – and she was a violinist, on her way to see a musician friend. The time passed agreeably enough under my umbrella (cue Hollies song). At the high street, our ways parted and she skipped off into the rain. By the time I got home I was soaked to the skin, the wake from a passing car having thoroughly finished the job. This morning there was a large garden snail asleep on the front door. On the inside.

From “Goodbye, Children,” the latest entry at Dominique Browning’s Slow Love Life:

My younger son Theo, returns to California for one more year of college. He has spent much of the summer with me, so once again, as I wrote about in my book, Slow Love, I’ve been able to be a Stay at Home Mom with an actual child at home. It took some adjustment. Granola disappeared as if locusts had visited. “You’ve forgotten the way 21 year olds eat, Mom.” The photograph here–which I did not set up, but instead, came home to one afternoon–shows what passed for putting up clothes. In the living room. “But they’re up off the floor, Mom.” My five-year-old friend Sophia came to visit, clapped her hand over her mouth in mock horror and burst into giggles at the sight of his room. She dubbed him Messy Theo. I tried explaining the virtues of an ordered environment. He tried explaining the irrelevance of chores that were done only to be undone within the same day. And we had great talks, walks, swims, meals, and enjoyed one another’s company. We watched rainbows dissolve, and I got to wish him goodnight for weeks, the same way I did every night through his and his brother’s childhoods, the way my mother did in mine: “Fais de beaux reves.”

By the time you are reading this, I’ll be driving him to Providence. And I can promise you, the moment he and his backpack hit the lobby of the train station, I’ll be sobbing.

There was never any way that this feature wasn’t going to feature Choire Sicha during its first week. If we had our lives to live over again, we would come back as him. Why? Because Choire Sicha has perfected the illusion of appearing to say not just anything but everything that crosses his very critical mind. We suspect that he is actually a person of vast discretion. To appear to be shockingly candid, but without actually hurting the feelings of any truly nice people — that’s a trick that we’d like to know.

Here he is, on the thrills of reading Young Adult fiction (Mockingjay) — which right there makes you want to call the police, no?

This is also way more interesting than Harry Potter’s tiresome obsession with avenging his parents or whatever! I mean, that’s the kind of value system I want to inculcate in the young!

But similarly, the “Hunger Games” series is also very clean in that soothing YA way. Everything is clear—including our heroine’s romantic choices (there are two boys! Et cetera!)—and all is spelled out in fairly big block letters.

Is it making me stupider? Maybe! But only for a couple of hours. I mean, this kind of book goes down fast.

Though I can’t tell you for sure yet. It turns out that Amazon is a west coast company at heart. And their idea of a “midnight” release is what people over here on the real coast of America call “3 a.m.”? Only the kids can stay up that late to get their books. (Also? Check it out! Young people, staying up late at night for books again!) But from the first page, all I had time to scarf down over breakfast, I would say that the book is like totally awesome, you know?

Housekeeping Note: The Daily Office will appear at 6 PM.

From the de profundis of reddit:

Last night, my adult kids and I were sitting in the living room and I said to them, “I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug.”

They got up, unplugged the computer, and threw out my wine.

They are such assholes.

Housekeeping Note: The Daily Office will appear at 6 PM.