Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, 2013

I really enjoyed myself.

What was most remarkable was the number of sessions based on re-enactment or experimental archaeology.

Activities  on site included:

Smelting

Drinking ale and mead brewed with historic methods

Dressing a person in armor starting with the underwear

A late medieval armor  fashion show

This doesn't include discussions of activities off site.

Peak moment: watching a re-enacted trial by combat while in the next room a pick-up choir learned plainchant -- and sang it very well indeed.

Italy!

What's wrong with Niall Ferguson

I have had a low opinion of Niall Ferguson ever since 2003, when he was academic hitman for the pro-Iraqi invasion interests. Following his most recent creepy outburst, Juan Cole has explained just what's wrong with the man better than I could:

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson apologized Saturday for having said that economist John Maynard Keyes did not care about future generations because he was gay and had no children.
The question I want to raise here is the over-all logic of Ferguson’s underlying reasoning. What makes him continually make embarrassing and simple errors of fact, as with his attack on Obama last summer, which Newsweek did not bother to fact-check before publication.
I would argue that the reason that conservatives like Ferguson hate Keynes is that Keynes demonstrated conclusively that when the economy goes into a deep recession or depression, the only way to get back out of it is for the government to increase spending. ... Paul Krugman once wondered, after the 2008 meltdown, why so many academic and professional economists are so anti-Keynesian, given the impressive record of correct prediction attendant on the Keynsian enterprise. I am more cynical. I don’t have to guess. I think some, or many, are corrupted by the big money that flows from upholding the independent role of capital and from belittling government efforts.
Ferguson’s outrageous polemic is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. Instead of demonstrating that Keynes’s theory is faulty (which no one has yet done), Ferguson attempted to smear Keynes and deprive him of standing in intellectual debate by calling him a deviant...
Why does conservatism even have the implicit category of the deviant lurking in the back of its collective mind?
Contemporary Conservatism erects a social hierarchy, with wealthy heterosexual Westerners (and their compradors) at the top, and other groups queuing behind them from below. The wealthy Western heterosexuals are autonomous wealth-creators, constantly dragged down by the foolish impulse to regulate inherent in the government, which in any case represents the unwashed hoi polloi.
Ferguson’s remarks come on top of another conservative Harvard scandal, as a 2010 paper by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff , which argued that deficit spending by governments hurt growth. ...
Ferguson is so tied to the demonstrably false Reinhart-Rogoff paper that he continues to defend it even after its own authors are backpedaling furiously, and continues to attack Paul Krugman, whose papers won him a Nobel prize; they noticeably lack glaring excel spreadsheet errors. (Excel? Seriously?)
The hierarchies are not only economic or rooted in style of life. Ferguson’s Western triumphalism is well-known. I was at a conference where his comments about the (perfectly nice) Oxford Islamic Center was brought up, and he shouted, “They’re in Oxford!” Ferguson thinks it was a good thing for Oxford graduates to run, and loot, Muslim countries at gunpoint during the past two centuries, but is appalled that Muslim intellectuals might turn up for peaceful academic discussions in the old college town. [emphasis SM] He was all for the Iraq War and only carped that it couldn’t be successful unless the US committed to run Iraq for decades. Presumably this is because Iraqis (Muslims after all) are juveniles that need the firm adult Western hand. The Conservative fascination with reviving a long dead and impracticable Empire is just one more manifestation of a desire for social hierarchy. The imperial masters are on top.
The creation of social hierarchies, with people with ‘good’ attributes on top and others seen as somehow incomplete or deformed, is central to contemporary conservative social thought. Christians (or, in some versions, Christians and/or secularists)? Good. Heterosexuals? Good. Muslims and gays? distinctly inferior. Moreover, the government is the mechanism whereby the second-class citizens can engineer changes in regulations that rein in the alleged money-makers, and so it is intrinsically problematic and should be crippled as much as possible.

Ferguson is a smart guy and may have done some good work along the line. But he can't be trusted.

Shiraz Timelapse

Over at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, this portrait of Shiraz in Iran. What gorgeous gardens and monumental buildings!

This was segregation, 2

One of the great racist lies that has distorted North American politics since 1865 is that African-Americans, once they got there formal freedom from exploitation by the masters, suddenly turned into welfare bums, exploiting in their turn the story of past injustices to get handouts from the government. But it would be a brave person who could honestly say that the injustices have even stopped yet. Who got talked into subprime mortgages and then got punished for the crimes of the people who lent them the money? (Before you object read story of contract buying below.) Ta-Nehisi Coates spells out the systematic economic exploitation of the black population by both official and unofficial white actors, in areas where segregation was the law of the land, and areas where it was not on the books. It's one more part of a continuous story reaching back to the first slave sales in Jamestown Virginia.
Coates:

I spent the last week interviewing men and women, and the children of men and women, who bought their homes on contract in Chicago during the 1950s. Contract buying sprang up in Chicago after the federal government effectively refused to insure mortgages for the vast majority of black homeowners, even as it was insuring the mortgages of white homeowners, and encouraged banks to redline black and integrated neighborhoods. The import of mid-20th century housing policy -- along with private actions (riots, block-busting, contract lending, covenants) -- has been devastating for African Americans. 
Buying on contract meant that you made a down-payment to a speculator. The speculator kept the deed and only turned it over to you after you'd paid the full value of the house -- a value determined by the speculator. In the meantime, you were responsible for monthly payments, keeping the house up, and taking care of any problems springing from inspection. If you missed one payment, the speculator could move to evict you and keep all the payments you'd made. Building up equity was impossible, unless -- through some Herculean effort -- you managed to pay off the entire contract. Very few people did this. The system was set up to keep them from doing it, and allow speculators to get rich through a cycle of evicting and flipping.
I spent some time talking to a 90-year-old man who'd come up from Mississippi. His family had been reduced to sharecropping after the county government took their land. "In Mississippi, there was no law," he told me. There was no law in Chicago either. The gentleman purchased his home for $26,000. He later found out that the deed-holder had purchased the same home -- only weeks before -- for $9,000.
...
Jim Crow -- Northern or Southern -- is usually rendered to us as an archaic system in which people irrationally decide to separate from each other just based on skin color. There's a reason that so many of us remember Martin Luther King's line about little white boys and little black boys holding hands. It's comforting to us. Less comforting is that fact that Jim Crow amounted to the legal pilfering of resources from the black communities to advantage white people across generations. In Mississippi, it meant the right to reduce someone to sharecropping, or to benefit politically from their census numbers while not giving them any representation, or to tax them for services they did not enjoy equal access to. In Chicago, it meant the legalized theft of black wealth by white agents.
It is very hard to accept this -- the wealth gap is not a mistake. It is the logical outcome of policy and democratic will. From the streets of Cicero on up, the point was to imprison black people in the black belt and then exploit them. The goal was pursued through public policy, private action, and open terrorism. The goal was accomplished.
If you want to know more, see the reading list here, specifically Beryl Satter's Family Properties.

In Canada, we have a similar situation in regard to native peoples, who are treated as outsiders (sovereign nations) only insofar as it benefits everybody else. The vast benefits that we immigrants have gotten in our dealings with native communities are undeniable; benefits for the natives are generally inadequate and hedged around with exceptions and limitations that leave northern communities swimming in sewage. I can American treatment of African-Americans, the impoverishment of native communities is no accident.

The mysterious slash

Anne Curzan in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. It isn’t that often that slang creates a new conjunction.”
Let me explain. Lots of us use the slash (/) in writing to capture two or more descriptions of the same thing, with a meaning something like “or,” “and,” or “and/or”—e.g., “my sister/best friend” or “request/require.” The slash typically separates two things that are the same part of speech or parallel grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”
Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way, with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they now often do. A student kindly sent me some real examples from her Facebook chat (shared with her permission):
1. Does anyone care if my cousin comes and visits slash stays with us Friday night?
2. I have been asking everyone I know in the Chicago area if they’re going slash if they’d willing [sic] to let me tag along slash show me around because frankly I’d have no idea how to get around Chicago on my own....
If the story of slash ended there, with a perfectly logical semantic extension of slash from its more conventional use, I wouldn’t be writing about it here on Lingua Franca. But for at least a good number of students, the conjunctive use of slash has extended to link a second related thought or clause to the first with a meaning that is often not quite “and” or “and/or” or “as well as.” It means something more like “following up.” Here are some real examples from students:
7. I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?
8. Has anyone seen my moccasins anywhere? Slash were they given to someone to wear home ever?
9. I’ll let you know though. Slash I don’t know when I’m going to be home tonight
10. so what’ve you been up to? slash should we be skyping?
11. finishing them right now. slash if i don’t finish them now they’ll be done in first hour tomorrow
The student who searched her Facebook chat records found instances of this use of slash as far back as 2010....

 The innovative uses of slash don’t stop there either: some students are also using slash to introduce an afterthought that is also a topic shift, captured in this sample text from a student:

12. JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you
This innovative conjunction (or conjunctive adverb, depending on how you want to interpret it) occurs, students tell me, even more commonly in speech than in writing. And in writing, it is often getting written out as slash, even in electronically mediated communication, where one might expect the quicker punctuation mark (/) rather than the five-letter word slash.
Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do mean word, not punctuation mark. The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language. This use of slash is so commonplace for students in my class that they almost forgot to mention it as a new slang word this term. That young people have integrated innovative slash into their language while barely noticing its presence is all the more reason that conjunctive slash might have staying power.

Green paint and other good things

Here in the Near North April and even early May can be pretty dry.The huge overlay of winter snow melts off, but that is not enough to start things growing. For that you need rain, and we often don't get rain for weeks at a time. April showers, forsooth! "April showers bring May flowers" is like a cruel joke imported from a different climactic zone.

Eventually, the rain does come, and in dramatic fashion the first really good rain turns things green *immediately.*   It is like green paint is falling from the sky.

Today, May 1, the green paint has fallen.

Yesterday, I had another pleasant experience, a surprise. You should know that North Bay does not have a Starbucks. The coffee market is absolutely dominated by Tim Horton's, a coffee/donut/sandwich chain that makes reasonable but hardly inspiring coffee. We do, however, have a good coffee shop called Twiggs. I discovered yesterday that I had missed the opening of the second Twiggs near the University. My wife and I sat around there and it was very pleasant. For one thing, there were young people, maybe even university students, not just old-timers like us. (North Bay has a rather elderly population these days.) And they were not dressed like they were just back from hockey practice. In other words, it looked like we were in a university town. Which in fact North Bay is.

I should be fair and mentioned that the wearing of hockey arena clothing that is so common in North Bay is not just a matter of a deficient fashion sense. Given what the weather is like here during most of the school year, hockey arena clothing is a sensible choice. But it's nice to see something else when the good weather finally rolls in. See my remarks on green paint.