Ogged has come up with a term for the phenomenon Dave Schuler (The Glittering Eye) noted in an earlier comment on the response of Londoners to this week's bombings. Dave points out:

A critical difference between the Brits and the Americans is that the British have the stubbornness and tenacity to bear up under incredible adversity. Americans, on the other hand, are more inclined to remove the adversity than to bear up under it.

Ogged notes that the distinction has wider applicabiilty than just Brits vs Americans, and he's looking for a term to describe it.

Some way to group together what a nation expects, accepts, tries to change, control, destroy, create. I think this will be the "That's How It Is Index." The U.S., has a low THIS Index, and you can see it in annoying things like frivolous lawsuits, but also in fantastic things like the moon mission, or the remarkable record of air safety. Near the other extreme, you have a place like Iran, where planes crash regularly, the roads are deathtraps, and people basically shrug. And the Europeans are somewhere in the middle. I've heard them described as "knowing what's important," but I wonder if they're just less motivated to keep making things "better" and so are able to do the things that people generally enjoy, like eating, drinking, and talking with friends (that is to say, no special knowledge of what's important required).

The stubborness of the Brits that Dave highlights suggests that the THIS Index may reflect one of those hallmarks of cultural identity that each group is rather attached to and, at least in both the British and American cases, embraces with a certain pride.

Recent Google search that brought a visitor to this site: Cairo female escorts.

Maybe it was prak's Egypt photo gallery from last September that did it. Though as far as I recall, there's not a female in sight among all the magnificent architecture and scenery. Google sometimes moves in mysterious ways!

I've long had a strange affection for underground transit, the London Tube in particular. This post was written a few months back as a distraction from depressing political debates and world events.

Today, to our collective horror, the Tube is anything but a distraction from reality. Today, the links in the post are to tragedy and mass murder, and "we are all Londoners now." But Londoners' famous resilience has already begun to kick in, and the Underground is gearing up to restart service. So perhaps it's not too early to celebrate the Tube's lively and somewhat endearing centrality to London's life, past and future.

---

originallly posted 2-12-05

About those things you find on the web that you didn't know you needed/wanted until you find them... OK, it's the weekend. And I'm not sure I can get all the way up for "good news Saturdays" or other kinder, gentler fare. Maybe I should call it "funky Fridays" but that would require an adherence to punctuality I've already violated.

Nonetheless, couldn't we all stand a bit of change of pace with no political angle after all the surreality coming out of the WH gaggle this week. And I need to replenish my batteries before I face the sturm und drang eminating from the "muscular democracy" theologians of the right hemisphere of PlanetBlog.

So here's a blog devoted to all things London Tube.

Underground mass transit, especially its aesthetics and technology, is not a new subject of inquiry at chez Nadezhda. Back in late October, when praktike was feeling especailly burned out on politics, he took a look at New York City's subterranean celebrations. [There's probably some sort of subtext about heading below-ground when we've had it with the blogsphere's insanity levels.]

The Going Underground blog has a bit edgier, urban attitude that's not exactly what you'd think of as a "trainspotters" sort of site. It's the companion blog to the website goingunderground devoted exclusively since 1999 to, you guessed it...

Check out the section of the website devoted to the drivers including some favorites from public announcements. You can even hear the audio of one of my favorites, as described by the webmaster as:

a really, really, TOP London Underground driver who was clearly either on drugs, or delirously happy, or both. It's a classic, he talks about people singing along with buskers, getting someone who's come on the train with an ironing board to do the ironing, and how every man on the carriage should stand up for any Mum as it's Mother's Day tomorrow.

The site also records the driver's response, which was to assure the riding public he wasn't high on anything, that's just his natural ebullience.

Then there's the section on "Ghosts, ghouls and other wierdos on the Tube." Reading on the Tube is a highly developed skill in the art of self-defense in public spaces, but you can also find plenty of reading about the Tube at this page on Tube lit. Or this amazon.com.uk page for One Stop Short of Barking, with its additional Tube-related reading selections, especially some of the photo books. If you have a taste for combining your ghosts with architecture, Abandoned Stations on London's Underground may whet your appetite. And you can add to your history lesson with What's In a Name, which explains the origins of station names on the system.

You can get going-underground.net goodies from cafepress.com with T-shirts motto-ed, what else, "mind the gap". [I wonder how many national security-types who click on the portion of the chez Nadezhda sidebar blogroll under the category "minding the gap" recognize the Tube reference, not just the Thomas Barnett one.] Since we didn't win the Satin Pajamas award, I'm going to have to spring for my own sleepwear -- and the boxer shorts look just the thing!

Cafepress offers more than just merchandise -- it takes you to an article at Suite University (online learing site) that gives a brief history of the famous phrase. And for those of you who can't get enough of reading about "mind the gap," you can hear it as well -- Richard's sound effects recordings (apparently an "audio" trainspotter) has captured the "mind the gap" announcement, sandwiched within a nice assortment of train arrival, brakes, doors and other Tube-sounds from a stop on the Bakerloo line. He's also got a recording of a "Sonia" public announcment -- a digitized "posh" voice the staff declared so annoying "it getS ON YA nerves."

The Tube's not just an underground space. It offers its own "map of the world," a way of conceptualizing above-ground geography, a kind of virtual space that links the totally different topographies of the subterranean and surface. Look at the difference between this pocketmap of the Tube from 1927:


with the first diagrammatic map of the Underground from 1933.


I learned London as a "temporary audio typist" (don't ask!) for a summer in the early 70s. I spent the first week combing the near-in downmarket residential areas for a coldwater flat to rent, and each week I would get a new assignment that would take me to a company in another area of London. All of that was done by Tube, and all with a diagrammatic map based on the original classic. Needless to say, my mental picture of London is dominated by the Tube diagram, even though I know full well the actual surface streets and parks and landmarks don't in fact resemble the diagram closely at all.

Today, if you want to explore the London segment of the blogosphere, there's London Bloggers, the London weblog directory -- 1632 registered blogs and counting -- organized by, what else, the Tube map.

But back to the Tube itself. Not everything about the London Tube is sui generis -- it shares a number of features with other underground mass transit systems. For example, subway riders around the globe could benefit from some of the "etiquette rules" Although, certain techniques for addressing violations of etiquette might work better in some cultures than others.

I once heard a tube story of a woman who was being groped by a man in a crowded tube. She picked up his hand from her rear end, held it in the air and loudly said "Does this belong to anyone, as it seems to be attached to my bottom?" The man went purple with embarrassment and slunk off the tube at the next stop.

Apparently this comes in handy when someone takes a bit too enthusiastically a driver announcement encouraging a crowd on a northbound Victoria line train:

"Move right down inside please - it's a Friday afternoon, the weekend has just started, and we all would like to get home. Please move inside the carriages so everyone can board the train. I know it is a bit squashy, but you never know, you might make a new friend to spend the weekend with. Mind the closing doors, please".

And don't forget to mind the gap!
-------------------
Art posters -- Underground Art: London Transport Posters 1908 to the Present by Oliver Green

Maps from London's Transport Museum

Pocket Underground Map, 1927, designed by FH Stingemore

Henry Beck's first diagrammatic Underground map , 1933

London Underground map download for desktops

Haggai accepted my offer to play the movie DVD game. Some similarities between his list and mine -- we both have a Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, 81/2. Looks like I've more of a taste for comedy. Of course, he's now got me rethinking my selections -- The Godfather, how could I leave it off a list, even if it is the number one film on IMDB!

I think we need to invent a "best in genre" game to deal with categories I didn't even think about, like animation. This is even harder than "what's your favorite dish" without being able to say "favorite Indian," "favorite Italian," "favorite Lebanese," etc. In the meantime, he-e-e-ere's Haggai...!

---

• Total number of films I own: About 165 DVDs
• Last movie I bought: Make that the last six movies I bought, five in one boxset. They were in an Amazon order that came in a few days ago: Steve McQueen Collection, and Jules and Jim.
• Last movie I saw: Jules and Jim. This category changes pretty much every day for me.
• Five favorites: My top five movies are fairly solid, but not the order they come in. With no particular order:
  • Casablanca
  • Lawrence of Arabia
  • The Godfather
  • The Empire Strikes Back
  • Rear Window
  Another five favorites:
  • 2001
  • Chinatown
  • The Searchers
  • 8 1/2
  • The Rules of the Game*
  * [ed. -- A surprisingly common title, so I'm assuming this is Jean Renoir's "La Regle du jeu"]

In terms of frequently watching things, I fall into odd patterns these days. I think the DVD in my collection that I've watched the most often has ended up being Kind Hearts and Coronets. I've been keeping a log of everything I watch since the beginning of this year, and there are two movies I've seen more than once since Jan. 1st: Bambi, and Days of Being Wild (first viewing of that one was in a theater).

Stygius passes me the DVD library movie meme. Just one small problem -- I don't own any movies on DVD (or on any other medium, for that matter). Culturally deprived luddite, and all that. And a few years back, when I had three back surgeries in a 10-month period, I sort of got out of the habit of sitting in movie theaters.

So I guess I'll just have to improvise, with apologies to Stygius and the meme originator.

• Total number of films I own: zero
• Last movie I bought: uh, never
• Last movie I saw: Pirates of the Caribbean (hey, my nieces were in town and brought it with them -- they couldn't bear to be parted from Johnny and Orlando for a week!)
• Five favorites: I suppose this should be translated as -- "what are the five DVDs you would own if you owned any." This sort of open-end exercise -- infinite possibilities and such a tiny number of answers -- is quite a challenge. I can't even do "what's your favorite in each genre," because there are certainly more than five genres. So here's a first crack at a list.

  • Bringing Up Baby -- the perfect ensemble "domestic" farce
  • The Producers -- on my "favorite" list a few decades before the stage show
  • Blade Runner -- "seminal" is too often used used with gay abandon, but Scott defined an aesthetic for an entire generation
  • Notorious -- my favorite Hitchcock, and yes, Cary Grant can show up twice on my top five any day of the week
  • 8 1/2 -- Fellini's masterpiece is either an overwhelming experience or it simply doesn't speak to you

  And I still haven't done any Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot) or an action-adventure (French Connection) or spy thriller (The Third Man) or stage musical (Cabaret) or social comedy (Alfie the original, puh-leez!) or historical (Gladiator -- yeah, I'm a Ridley Scott fan bigtime), or stage-to-screen (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) or political thriller (Z) or... yeah, I know, I'm cheating. I'm well into my third "top five" list, and there are more genres to go. Sigh.

  So to pass the virus along. First, to Haggai, who I know first-hand is the compleat film freak. I'm quite curious what his choices would be. Haggai's not been blogging much recently, but he's welcome to post his response here if he wants to play. And then:

  • Brad Plumer, who clearly needs a diversion from his current addiction.
  • Needlenose's Swopa -- maybe fubar will let Swopa feature a DVD list in the next installment of the SRIPOTW.
  • Eric Martin (Total Information Awareness -- I'm still hanging on to another baton he passed me earlier and Eric, I promise, I will get to it later this weekend).
  • My list is woefully light on foreign films, so let's go across the pond to Emmanuel of Ceteris Paribus, who can provide his list in the language of his choice. After the events of the past week, maybe Emmanuel also needs a diversion to maintain his Europtimisme.
  • And for a bit more geographic diversity, from down-under Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion.

About the death of Pope John Paul II, I have no personal thoughts to share, other than to extend sympathy to the millions around the world who are experiencing his death as a source of considerable sorrow. The wall-to-wall media coverage about the significance of John Paul II or the religious reactions of members of the Catholic faith are mostly over-the-top hagiography, good TV visuals, or simply remote to those of us who don't share that faith. Most of the non-religious commentary on the life of the Pope or the future of the Church has been just another excuse for the commentariat and puditocracy to trot out their favorite over-exercised hobby-horse.

Enlightenment of either the spiritual or intellectual variety has been equally rare in the blogosphere. I've come across two notable exceptions, that weren't simply stale rehashes of ancient debates seen through one predictable worldview or another. Taken together I found they implicitly challenge most of the narratives being imposed on the story of the Pope's death, and thereby challenge a number of assumptions, casually shared by many American and European commentators, about the political valence of religion in the culture of the "West" and in the rest of the world.

The first is a highly personal and entertaining tale by Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber on his family's excursion to see the Pope when he came to Ireland in 1979, and an extraordinary portion of the entire population of the country went to see him. Kieran follows with the unhappy story of what has happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland since the Pope's famous visit.

The Irish story contrasts sharply with Ed Kilgore's thoughtful assessment of John Paul II's significance for the Church in the Southern hemisphere, where the tensions perceived in the Northern hemisphere -- between the "liberal" and "conservative" Pope -- have certainly played out differently.

Yet nearly everything about the powerful and perhaps irreversible trajectory he set for the Church points South, to the Third World, and away from Europe and the United States. Many obituarists of this Pope have struggled to categorize him ideologically as "conservative" on faith and morals yet "liberal" or even "radical" on issues of globalization, poverty and war, even as they acknowledge the unity of his own thinking.

But these are Eurocentric ways of looking at his teachings, which may confuse and distress American Catholics and what's left of the faith in Europe, but make perfect sense to most Catholics in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

A deeply illiberal approach to issues involving sexuality and gender; a rejection of capitalism as a necessary counterpart to democracy; and an abiding hostility to U.S.-European political, military, economic and cultural hegemony: this is a consistent point of view with strong support in the global South, among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Indeed, in many respects what John Paul II represented was a living link between the pre-modern traditions of European Catholicism and the post-modern realities of much of the rest of the world.
[...]
Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and irreligious, who are outdoing each other this week in viewing this pope's legacy through the lens of their own cultural and political obsessions. This pope's opposition to "American exceptionalism" invariably embraced opposition to the death penalty, to capitalist triumphalism, and to George W. Bush's unilateralist foreign policies, as well as to abortion or birth control or the removal of feeding tubes from the hopelessly dying.

Many conservatives accuse John Paul II's American flock of practicing a "Cafeteria Catholicism" of selective obedience to Rome. But the American Right, I would argue, is practicing "Cafeteria Conservatism"--an equally selective interpretation of this pope's teachings and legacy, which lead not Right or Left but South. [em. added]

To relate these observations to my most recent blog entry -- when those of us from developed liberal democracies embrace the prospect of promoting greater political freedoms and development across continents where genuine freedom is scarce and poverty is endemic, Kilgore's observations should remind us that that large portions of people in those worlds share the "mentality" of a Pope whose attitudes and core beliefs are often hard for us to integrate, reconcile or fully understand. That recognition should be reflected both in the actions we choose and in our expectations about the probable results of our actions.

I've made it through another April Fools Day without too much personal damage, so to celebrate here's a rather charming April Fools tale I hadn't heard before, courtesy of Spiegel's online international service. Rather remarkable to think less than fifty years ago there was such a pre-Europeanized, pre-globalized world of early electronic media.

One of the most famous media spoofs of all time is the BBC "spaghetti harvest" documentary, which was broadcast on April 1 1957. The program showed Swiss women in traditional costume harvesting strands of spaghetti from trees. In pre-Jamie Oliver days many British people had only ever eaten spaghetti from tins and had no idea where it actually came from. The documentary, which was watched by 8 million viewers, fooled whole sections of the nation, partly due to the weightiness of presenter Richard Dimbleby's commentary. "He had enough gravitas to float an aircraft carrier," the program's producer David Wheeler told BBC Online. Wheeler and his team were heavily criticized at the time, but he says that he has no regrets. "I think it was a good idea for people to be aware they couldn't believe everything they saw on the television and that they ought to adopt a slightly critical attitude to it."

Probably an always-timely reminder.

Does Todd Zywicki believe in the efficient markets hypothesis?

In this picture, I'm trying to think of a good way to convey the words "flux capacitator" through charades. We got it in a little over nine minutes. I had a great spring break.

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. President James Madison

If I were a betting woman, I'd say it's pretty good odds that most bloggers aren't aware that today marks opening day of the first national Sunshine Week. What, you may ask, is Sunshine Week? The NYT sums it up as " a weeklong campaign for government openness spearheaded by the AP and more than 50 news outlets, journalism groups, universities and the American Library Association."

The whole thing got started in 2002 with Sunshine Sunday in Florida, an initiative to heighten public awareness of the importance of access to information and government accountability in the wake of 9/11, which had opened the floodgates for some "particularly egregious open government exemptions" considered by the Florida state legislature. As Barbara Patterson, who helped organize the first Sunshine Sunday, explains in American Editor (pdf p. 10), the newsletter of the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

Any opposition to the proposed bills was summarily dismissed by sponsors and lobbyists as a “press problem,” even though most of the proposals raised serious constitutional issues and would have curtailed the public’s ability to hold its government accountable. A “press” problem?

Since the first Sunshine Sunday -- selected as the Sunday before James Madison's birthday, which is National Freedom of Information Day -- several other states have joined in. The impact in Florida has been considerable, if measured by the new-found sensitivity of both state legislators and the public, which voted overwhelmingly in the 2002 general election for a measure limiting the ability of the legislature to restrict open access. Probably most important, according to Patterson:

Legislators and other key government officials have begun to realize that being tagged as a supporter of open government is a good thing.

The recognition that being seen as an open government advocate is good for your political health seems to be slowly catching on in Washington as well -- on both sides of the aisle. Here's Sen John Cornyn (R-Texas) in an op-ed he penned for Sunshine Week about the new FOIA legislation he and Sen Leahy are introducing.

Just last month, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a longtime champion of open government at the federal level, and I joined forces to introduce the OPEN Government Act of 2005, to strengthen and enhance our federal open government laws. It has been nearly a decade since Congress has approved major reforms to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And the Senate Judiciary Committee has not convened an oversight hearing to monitor compliance with FOIA since 1992. So this week, I will chair a Senate hearing to examine needed improvements to our open government laws.

The legislation we introduced contains important Congressional findings to reiterate and reinforce our belief that the Freedom of Information Act establishes a presumption of openness, and that our government is based not on the need to know, but upon the fundamental right to know.
[...]
Moreover, our legislation is not just pro-openness, pro-accountability, and pro-accessibility—it is also pro-Internet. It requires government agencies to establish a hotline to enable citizens to track their FOIA requests, including Internet tracking, and grants the same privileged FOIA fee status currently enjoyed by traditional media outlets to bloggers and others who publish reports on the Internet. [ed. emph added]

There are actually two pieces of proposed legislation being sponsored by Cornyn and Leahy: the OPEN Government Act of 2005, announced Feb 16, and the Faster FOIA Act introduced March 10. The latter bill would establish a 16-member advisory Commission on Freedom of Information Act Processing Delays, which would report back within a year to Congress and the President on ways to reduce delays (including fee issues) in the processing of FOIA requests.

Now the last bit -- that bloggers may get reduced FOIA fees -- seems to have permeated the blogosphere's collective consciousness. However, the big brouhaha about blogging-press-government relations has been over the Apple litigation, covered here by Donna Wentwoth at CopyFight. Most of the other blogging-press-government flap-a-doodle has been devoted to the FEC-related firestorms (so far more smoke than fire). But a quick Googling didn't find much attention by the blogosphere to the FOIA initiatives, beyond an effort launched last week by the student activist IP-oriented site FreeCulture.org to promote a blogshine Sunday. And CopyFight is one of the few spots I've found with a blogshine.org button and blogging about the Cornyn-Leahy legislation.

The public's access to information and -- equally important -- how information intermediaries and consumers choose to use that information, ought to be a major focus of the blogosphere of "ideas," whether politics or science and technology, medicine, environment, social services, law and law enforcement, labor relations, financial services, education, you name it. For the great majority of blogs that aren't engaged directly in electoral politics or who don't see themselves competing with "journalists," the ability to access the vast amount of information that federal, state and local governments have collected, analyzed and archived is far more important than the debates over "who is a journalist" and whether/how blogs will be regulated if they support partisan activities.

The first reason why open access is important is the "business model" issue. If blogs are to be something more than partisan voices or provide more than entertaining critiques of stories developed in the mainstream commercial media, one major type of blogging will be digging into substantive topics requiring some background knowledge, pulling disparate pieces together, and bringing stories and analysis to a broader audience of interested readers. These are the sorts of activities that few news organizations can afford these days, or at least not on the range of subjects that the blogosphere is capable of covering.

Niche blogs offer the prospect of important stories being identified, fleshed out and debated with attention to detail by people who are knowledgeable about the subject area even if their "business" isn't blogging. Bloggers, unlike most news organizations, also have the ability to stay with a story that interests them for a long time, even after it's moved off the "hot" list.

But the success of this model of blogging depends on widespread, low cost access to raw material -- information. Collecting information isn't the blogosphere's competitive advantage -- that remains and will remain, even with the advent of citizens media, the competitive advantage of commercial media in many instances (though whether they will exploit that advantage is a different matter). But the public sector is also a major source of that raw material. Open access to information in the hands of governments is a critical element of this emerging role of the blogosphere going forward.

The second reason why open access is important is the "functioning democracy" issue, where the blogosphere has an important potential role to play in the coming years. I count myself among those concerned about info-tainment increasingly dominating much of what passes for news and analysis, as well as the trend for government and corporate communication machinery to find congenial forums to pass off counterfeit "objective" information to suit their persuasion agendas.

I also believe, however, that the impulse to counter these trends with ownership or content rules is often a misguided one. Rules are easily gamed by those they are supposed to control or, when the rules are binding, turn out to have some unfortunate unintended consequences. More often than not, the benefits of new rules inure to those with vested interests, unless the changes are truly revolutionary, and then the outcomes are likely to be highly unpredictable.

Technology and the changing economics of media are, in fact, offering the beginnings of a revolution. I was intrigued by a recent analogy attributed to Joe Trippi, that blogging and e-media today are about where we were with television in 1955 when it comes to politics. That suggests lots and lots of changes ahead, not just in content and technology of communication itself, but in all sorts of social structures and patterns about how we use different forms of media and what we expect from them.

I for one would prefer to focus on enabling that revolution. Opening more space for ideas, and ensuring open access to and flow of information, seems to me preferable to trying to make the existing large commercial information gatekeepers perform "better." This is especially the case as the very gatekeeping role for large corporate media is being redefined with technology and competition, and the cost of producing and distributing ideas and information is declining so dramatically.

So with that lecture on why sunshine is important to all of us -- as both citizens and bloggers -- here's some info on what's on tap for Sunshine Week. Of course, check out the extensive website that the sponsors of Sunshine Week have assembled, including calendars of goings on all over the country. They've got lots of great background material on the First Amendment and FOIA as well as "toolkits" (articles, op-eds and even editorial cartoons) for their participating newspapers to run. AND you can order your very own bright yellow "sunshine in government" wristbands. Knew you wouldn't want to pass that one up.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings are on Tuesday, March 15 at 10:00AM. Editor & Publisher has a summary of some of the events scheduled for Sunshine Week in various locations. Here in DC, in addition to the hearings that are being held by Cornyn et al on Tuesday, the big events are:

The National FOI Day Conference will be held March 16 at the Freedom Forum's center in Arlington, Virginia. Speakers include Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), Cox Washington bureau chief Andy Alexander, and First Amendment attorney Lee Levine. The event is free and open to the public.

A symposium titled "Confronting the Seduction of Secrecy: Toward Improved Government Access on the Record" will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on March 17. The event will begin at 8:30 a.m. with a continental breakfast and conclude at 10:45 a.m. This is the 5th Annual Curtis Hurley Symposium and is co-sponsored by the Missouri School of Journalism. The event will be moderated by Geneva Overholser and will feature as panelists Bill Kovach, Tom Curley, Mike McCurry, Jack Shafer, and others. For more information or to register, e-mail Billie Dukes at dukesb@missouri.edu.

Coming up next on chez Nadezhda for Sunshine Week -- "how to get Congress to walk the walk" -- or how to save poor Steven Aftergood from the totally unnecessary chore of being our sole online source of Congressional Research Service reports, which are controlled by our elected representatives to dole out when it makes them look good or makes a constituent happy.

{March 14 12:56AM EST -- updated to correct graphics & links; added several links & trackbacks}