The End Is Nigh

You’ll have heard that there is a “Mayan Prophecy” that the end of the world is imminent, but I bet you haven’t heard any circumstantial details. Where was this prophecy written? Some stone inscription? An ancient partchment? Who discovered it? Can you see it in a museum?

I was trained to do job interviews, and there was always the possibility that someone might not be entirely honest, so there was a simple technique to expose deceit: you asked for more and more details. It’s very easy to remember minor details if you’re telling the truth, but difficult to invent them spontaneously but consistently when lying. I’m sure the police use the same sort of thing when questioning suspects.

The absence of detail about the “Mayan Prophecy” idea is a pretty good guide to its being fake, simply an internet fiction. In fact, it’s one of those rolling stories which mutates as it spreads, because, originally, it was a “Sumerian Prophecy” that the world was to end in 2003. It didn’t.

The Sumerian notion originated outside the internet in the books of Zecharia Sitchin, who made his own “translations” of real Mesopotamian inscriptions, readings which, to put it politely, were not consistent with what all other scholars get from them.

Mayan digits

Once the world didn’t end (again) in 2003, some of the elements of the story were added to a new concept, that the world would end when the Mayan calendar ran out of digits. You know how children, newly introduced to numbers, sometimes go through a phase of thinking that there must be a “biggest number”? But they soon learn that you can always add one to any number. The Mayan calendar has no “biggest number” either.

The Mayans and related cultures used a “Long Count” system, which was simply the number of days since the beginning of time, a day which we call the 11th of August, 3114 BC. The earliest actual date using this system (found so far) is inscribed on a stone in Chiapas, Mexico, and denotes 1,124,333 days after the Creation. That’s 6th December 36 BC.

It’s striking that these ancient peoples were quite able to calculate numbers in the millions. They had their own notation, different to our modern one (which originated in India) and they counted in 20s, not 10s. A Mayan “digit” is a simple glyph which uses a dot to signify 1 and a bar to signify 5. Three bars and two dots is therefore 3*5 + 2*1 or 17. Today, a Mayan number is usually represented with the digits in decimal and periods between them, such as 12.17.3.2, which would be 12*20*20*20 + 17*20*20 + 3*20 + 2.

(Long Count numbers are actually slightly different to ordinary numbers. The third digit from the right rolls over at 18, not 20; probably because 17.19.19 plus one is 360 days, or close to a year.)

The next “round number” in Long Count dates is 13.0.0.0.0 or 21st December 2012. And the day after that is 13.0.0.0.1 and the day after is 13.0.0.0.2, and so on and so on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Mayans didn’t think that time was going to end at any particular string of digits, although they did have the general concept of cycles of time and history, and they probably had a bit of a party when a lot of digits flipped over.

Me, I’m most excitedly waiting for the instant when the date changes from 19.19.17.19.19 to 1.0.0.0.0.0 which will be midnight on Thursday, 12th October 4772. Let’s party like it’s 1999.

In The Book

Last week, my BT Phone Book was delivered. Well, I say “delivered”. In fact, it was left leaning against a tree at the end of the lane, two hundred metres from the house. I assume that BT subcontracts the deliveries to local agents or casual workers. That was pretty casual.

Anyway, as usual, I ripped off the plastic bag before dumping the directory straight into the green recycling bin. That’s how useful it is. That is to say, not useful at all.

I worked for BT for twenty-four years, and in that time I saw a lot of business fads and fashions come and go. Big businesses are run almost entirely on the basis of the prevailing fashion. That’s not necessarily because the directors and CEOs can’t think for themselves, although I’m sure that’s a factor. It’s because not following the current ideas of the market can adversely affect the share price. Now, that effect definitely exists because investors can’t think for themselves. They’re herd animals.

So, at one time there was “diversification”, but at another, it was divesting “non-core” activities. It was during a phase of the latter that BT spun off Yellow Pages as a subsidiary, and then sold it. As “Yell” (yes, I know) the new owners floated it on the stock exchange in 2003. You might have missed this, but the company has just changed its name to Hibü, pronounced “high-boo” (yes, I know).

Part of the agreement when BT sold YP was that BT should not compete in providing business directories for one year, but as soon as that expired, BT launched a classified section in the BT Phone Book, where all but the basic line entries are charged for. You might question the logic of selling off a business that was already doing that quite successfully, before starting off from scratch again, but as I said, fashions come and fashions go.

In Northern Ireland, BT faced the problem that there was one old, unclassified directory covering the entire country, and it was already quite fat. It would be impractical to separate out and include a second, classified section, which would be much larger by reason of the advertising content. (In fact, because of my privileged position, I happen to know that an unusually high proportion of Northern Ireland phones were ex-directory — more than 40% — which means that, potentially, the directory could have been even thicker.)

There was no option then, but to split the directory into volumes, and BT chose to do it regionally. This was instantly unpopular with customers, and for good reason: it ignored geography and actual demographics. In fact, you might say that it ignored reality, never a good business strategy. Neither is pissing off your customers (although it seems to work for Ryanair) but in spite of many complaints, BT has stuck with the multiple-book solution. Each customer is (more or less) delivered one volume, but can buy any of the other three at ten pounds each.

My own case is a perfect example of the uselessness of the directories, particularly the classified, businesses part. There are three small towns which are conveniently near to me (all about seven miles away) and where I might shop or do business. Only one of them is included in BT’s idea of my local area. At the next-larger level of commercial centre, there are two roughly equidistant. Both are roughly 15 miles away, but neither is in my BT Phone Book. In fact, Belfast is the only city large enough in Northern Ireland to host many types of business and services. I don’t get Belfast numbers in my BT Phone Book.

Actually, when companies pay BT for an entry in the classified directory, they can choose to pay more and have their listing in multiple books; and I’m sure that the larger businesses in Northern Ireland do exactly that. But from the customer’s point of view, looking for a particular type of service or shop, you simply can’t know if the ones in your BT Phone Book are the best for your needs.

For us, as customer, there are two solutions. You either use the (High-Boo, remember?) Yellow Pages directory, one volume covering all of Northern Ireland; or you use the internet, like a normal person. Either way, the BT Phone Book goes in the bin.

Mother Tongue

If you aren’t interested in the Olympics, the choice of British television to watch has become even more restricted. Fortunately, last weekend, BBC Alba was showing live sets from the Belladrum music festival. There was one point where one of the organisers explained something along the lines of Belladrum hosting all kinds of music: rock, indie, folk and soul. That reminded me of “both kinds of music: country and western”, but actually, it was OK with me. Rock, indie, folk and soul is fine.

BBC Alba is the Scottish Gaelic service, but parts of the programme were in English (such as interviews with English artists or other foreigners), and most of the rest was subtitled in English. The Gaelic sounds very like Irish to me, and I’m curious how intelligible it would be to a fluent Irish speaker who didn’t otherwise know the language. I only have a little Irish (Cad é mar a tá tú? Póg mo thóin!) but I’m sure I picked up the occasional word.

It’s no accident if Scottish Gaelic is like Irish, or rather, it is: historic accidents. The language originated with settlers and colonists from Ireland in the early Medieval period, when the kingdom of Dál Riata held territories on both sides of the sea. Over the next few hundred years, the colloqial language developed separately from Irish, but at the same time, “classical” Irish was the literary language, and therefore the guide of how to talk proper. Modern Gaelic supposedly still shows this later Irish flavouring.

It’s a wry twist that the other language in Scotland in the early modern period, Scots, also suffered damage from its southern cousin, English in that case. Scots had developed independently from English, from an Anglo-Saxon dialect, Anglian (rather than the West Saxon that forms the core of English), but its use in high society was eroded by English influence in the royal court and nobility.

Scots, unfortunately, is dead, although it has been nailed to its perch in Northern Ireland, where both Irish and Ulster Scots have official support. (It seems that some fans of Irish are in favour of public funding for Ulster Scots so that their own hobby gets a quid pro quo.) There certainly is still a rich heritage of Scots words in use (in fact, a quare wheen of them) but little trace of a distinct grammar.

Irish is definitely still a living language, and a historic and culturally important one. But in no sense is it the aboriginal language of our ancestors. Like English, it arrived from over the sea as the property of an economic elite, and gradually displaced the language previously spoken. Archaeology shows that the first Celtic culture arrived in Ireland by the fourth century BC, presumably bringing the language with it.

But the process of replacement took hundreds of years, and doesn’t seem to have been complete even by early Christian times, when the Érainn, Laigin and Cruthin were considered to be “non-Irish” peoples. Though nobody knows what language or languages were spoken prior to Irish. I imagine that Basque might give a hint: an old, unique language with no historical link to anything else.

On the genetic front though, things are much clearer, and quite different. Rather than a diverse matrix as in languages, the genetic makeup of Europe is surprisingly uniform. You might have heard that genetic traces can be detected, of, say, the Anglo-Saxons arriving in Britain, or Viking settlement along the Atlantic coasts. But that is misleading.

Those are only slight statistical differences on top of a broad level of similarity. In fact, the prevailing scientific theory is that our ancestry was mainly laid down in a single historical process: the repopulation of Europe after the end of the last Ice Age. A single group gradually spread west and north, beginning to populate Ireland by about 8000 BC.

So it seems that cultural evolution is much, much faster than biological evolution. Even though Europeans are genetically uniform, a wide diversity of language and cultural practices has emerged over a few thousand years, although maybe the internet and modern communications will put a stop to that.

Genetic Legacy

That’s Annie and Jeannie Jamison, my maternal Grandmother and Great Aunt in about 1915. I think Annie looks very pretty — that’s obviously where I get my good looks from — but her big sister is a little plain. They also had very different personalities; with Annie being constantly active and, in her later years when I knew her, fiercely independent. Jeannie, in comparison, was easy-going and laid back all her life, and was happy for people to do things for her. Annie died at 70; Jeannie made it to 94. There’s a moral to that story.

My Father’s side of the family tend to Celtic dark hair and pale skin, with brown eyes, but I have the Nordic colouring from my Mother’s side. And eyes. Blue eyes are a genetically “dominant” characteristic, and if one parent has them, it’s very likely that the children will as well. I remember a striking moment from my Grannie Annie’s final days in hospital: my Grandmother, Mother and Sister happened to all turn to look at me at once… and they all had the same eyes. And I do too. Bluey-grey with a greeny-brown ring round the pupil. Quite distinctive.

But if the bodywork and paint job are from that side of the family, the internal mechanics are from my Father’s side. We all have an inherited flaw in the way our digestive system is plumbed-in, the effect of which is to allow corrosive stomach acid to “reflux” up the esophagus where it’s not meant to be. Nothing serious, but the burning can be a bit painful. Medicine today has a number of drugs which can safely turn off acid production all together (a doctor told me that our modern diet doesn’t need acid to digest it anyway), but my paternal Grandmother Sarah is said to have kept a paper bag of bicarbonate of soda with her at all times, and licked the dry powder from the palm of her hand.

Gold, Silver and Yawns

I’ve tried to be gracious about the Olympics. Or at least, tried not to bitch too much. After all, the event has been giving excitement and entertainment to millions. About the only times I’ve cracked have been when people assume that their own enthusiasm is replicated universally. It’s happened often on BBC news.

Because not only do I have no enthusiasm for the Olympics, I have almost zero interest as well. I say “almost” because even I can’t help noticing what is going on, and, say, having heard about badminton players attempting tactical failure, my brain registers that for a while.

But the main thing is that I don’t get it; and the main thing I don’t get is “we“. People I had not previously heard of win medals and stand on their places on the podium. Well, that’s very nice for them. I can appreciate the achievement — after all, it’s the absolute worldwide peak of their sport. What I don’t feel at all is that I should care more if one of them happens to have the same brand of passport as me.

It’s that human tribalism thing. I don’t think I have it. I suppose I have a certain fellow feeling for certain types of people: musicians, music fans, scientists, engineers, freethinkers. But to me that doesn’t seem the same. We have no flag. And I still wouldn’t care who got a medal. (Or a Mercury Prize.)

Patriotism has always been a tool of the politicians, and not just as a method for getting young men to line up and kill each other. You can see it happening now in Britain with the current Olympics, as Prime Minister David Cameron basks in the borrowed glow of other people’s success. It’s his chance to reinforce a sense of national unity, his claim that “we’re all in this together”. Are we fuck.

Sense of Direction

When I was doing flight training in California, I was based at Long Beach Airport. It’s a sizeable field, with five paved runways, the longest a full 10,000 feet, but there isn’t too much commercial traffic, partly because of noise restrictions (it’s totally embedded in the greater LA conurbation) and partly because Los Angeles International is only 18 miles away.

The site was originally named Daugherty Field after Earl S. Daugherty established a very early flying school (possibly the world’s first) on the property in 1919. The famous aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart took her first ever flight there in 1920.

Daugherty’s obviously an Irish name, but I’m even more proud to be a spiritual descendant of the star of “The Flying Irishman”, an RKO picture of 1939. Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan played himself in the autobiographical movie, with the other parts filled by Hollywood regulars.

Corrigan earned fame and his nickname by making an unauthorised solo transatlantic flight in 1938, claiming that he had “accidentally” flown East instead of West because bad light made it impossible to read his compass. Departing Bennett Field in Brooklyn in the early dawn, he landed at Casement Aerodrome outside Dublin 28 hours later, instead of his home base at Daugherty Field, Long Beach.

The fact was that Corrigan had been applying for official permission to fly the Atlantic for more than a year, but his aircraft had never been approved as airworthy for the role. Even the incoming non-stop flight from California to New York had only been given provisional approval. This was not merely bureaucracy. Corrigan’s plane was a heavily-patched 1929 Curtiss Robin which he had extensively modified in an idiosyncratic way, with a new engine assembled from the components of two non-functional ones, and extra fuel tanks attached in various places. The Bureau of Air Commerce (forerunner of the FAA) grounded the plane as un-airworthy (for any flying at all) in 1937 when he made his first flight to New York. Corrigan had probably planned an unofficial Atlantic crossing at that time, but had to ship the plane back to Long Beach for further modifications to make it legal, so that he would at least be allowed to take off again at New York.

In 1938, when he departed Brooklyn, it was in a plane that had no visibility to the front because of the placement of one of the additional fuel tanks. After flying the “wrong way” for ten hours, he felt his feet cold, and noticed that a leak in one of the tanks had filled the bottom of the cockpit with gasoline. He stabbed a hole in the floor with a screwdriver to let it drain out, taking care to make the hole on the opposite side to the red-hot exhaust pipe. It’s not recorded how much fuel actually remained when he landed in Ireland.

Corrigan insisted, straight-faced, for the rest of his life that his transatlantic flight had been an accident. His license was suspended for 14 days as a very mild punishment. In fact, coming back by ship, the suspension expired the same day as he arrived in New York. The New York Post printed its headline in reverse in his honour, and the city gave him a bigger tickertape welcome than had been received by Lindbergh. As well as fees for the movie, he made money by endorsing products, such as a watch that ran backward.

I admire such bloody-minded determination, but I’m not like that myself. Too reasonable — that’s why I’m not famous.

Packing Heat

When I returned to the public stage as a musician in about 2005, I had to bring some of my old sound equipment, because the other members of the band were new to live rock and didn’t have performance gear. For a venue which didn’t have its own PA, that amounted to my own small PA, with tops and bass bins, mixer, wedge monitors, two EQs and two amps; along with two guitar amps; my bass amp; and all the required stands, microphones and leads. Fortunately, the drummer was responsible for her own kit.

With the back seats of my Honda CR-V lowered, there was adequate room to pack everything, but I developed an optimum packing plan which kept stacking to a minimum. (Meaning less scope for bits tumbling around. You should see how I drive.)

Anyway, being a true nerd, I made sure that I got it right every time by drawing out a plan on paper. I found it the other day, and since I don’t have that car any more, I may as well trash it. Although not before scanning it for posterity.

Easter Bunny

You’ll often see the explanation of Easter as the Christian replacement for a previous pagan festival devoted to a fertility goddess, Eostre. While the general idea is plausible enough, given that other festivals certainly were taken over, the name of the actual goddess was not remembered in any folklore, and is mentioned only once in surviving written material.

That one mention was by the chronicler and monk Bede, in his Latin document “On the Reckoning of Time”, published in 725. After explaining the origin of the Anglo-Saxon month name “Hreth-monath” by reference to pagan worship of the goddess Hretha, he goes on to say that “Eostur-monath”, Easter month, was similarly derived from the name of the goddess Eostre.

The 19th century linguist and folklorist Jacob Grimm decided that Bede, as a clergyman, would not have invented material (a rather weak argument, if you ask me) but admitted that neither goddess was known from tradition or other sources. He tried to use etymological methods to guess what the original names would have been, and suggested *Hrouda and *Austro (linguists put an asterisk at the beginning of hypothetical constructions).

Only English and German use this name for Easter (Ostern in German). All the related Germanic languages — Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and so on — plus Romance languages, Celtic languages, and most of the rest of Europe, have a name that derives from the Latin “Pascha”, which itself comes from the Hebrew “Pesach”, the Passover. (Slavic languages are the exception. Apart from Russian, which uses “Paskha”, their term usually translates as “Great Night”, for example, “Wielkanoc” in Polish.)

There must be some historical reason for the deviant terminology in German and English, but I’m not totally convinced by Bede’s account. It sounds rather like “folk etymology” to me, where the origin of a word is given a plausible, but unsupported derivation. A counter-argument to his theory is that none of the other ten months have a name in Anglo-Saxon which refers to a god or goddess, but their names do have obvious meanings in Bede’s own Anglo-Saxon (such as “Hærfest-monath”, Harvest Month). Perhaps he felt he had to suggest meanings for the two which he didn’t understand.

On the other hand, there are obvious pagan aspects to the traditional Easter celebrations. Something to do with the Spring, fertility, bunnies and eggs. To my mind, one of the funniest traditions is the practice in parts of Eastern Europe of spanking young women to ensure beauty and fertility. No, really. Czech out the Czech Easter card featuring a happy girl in traditional dress and a whipped bottom. I suspect I’ll have to make do with a chocolate egg though.

A Modest Proposal

If you have children, then you’re condemning them, and their descendants, to consume the Earth’s resources. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that the world’s population is currently over-consuming. The total load on the planet is now about 1.5 times what it can sustain indefinitely. Technological improvements may close the gap somewhat, but it’s a big challenge even to run fast enough to stay in one place.

Because it’s everyone’s ambition to live a life like the people in Western-type countries. If everyone lived like Europeans, the consumption of the planet’s resources would not be 1.5 times over, it would be 3. The American lifestyle is even worse. It rates over 5.

Less developed countries are using up less than their share, at the cost of widespread miserable poverty. One country falls on the 1.0 point — whose citizens, on average, have a sustainable level of consumption. That’s Cuba; so if everyone in the world lived like a Cuban, there would currently be enough to go round. And we’d have an excellent, free medical service and a fine education system. It wouldn’t be so bad. And rum. And great cigars. And the music.

On the other hand, everybody could have the American life if there weren’t so many of us. Current predictions show the global population topping out during the next century, but without active measures it will take many hundreds of years to fall to a sustainable level, if it ever does.

There are some organizations which advocate population reduction. For example, the Church of Euthanasia recommends suicide and cannibalism (although not necessarily in that order), while the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement settles for a universal abstention from reproduction until humans become extinct.

Although I personally have decided not to breed, I think extinction is excessive. The planet could comfortably support half a billion humans comfortably I’m sure. (A seventeenth-century number.) You could say I’m comfortable about that idea.

If you do have children and you now feel guilty about the ongoing burden you have placed on the planet, you have a few options. First, and probably the best solution, is to send them to Cuba. Excellent education system, although there may be political issues to do with free expression and so on. However, they will be educated to accept that, and soon they will be calling you a “capitalist lackey”, that is, if they speak to you at all.

If you don’t like the idea of Cuba, you could always take the hit on the current generation, but ensure that it stops there. It’s a simple medical procedure — my cat can explain. They will thank you for it in the long run, honestly. Or, finally, there’s the Jonathan Swift proposal. Swift suggests “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled”.

In The Name Of The Father

Today, 19th March, is Saint Joseph’s Day — Joseph, husband of Mary: that one. There is a body of information which Christians “know” about Joseph, but almost none of it comes from the Bible. Joseph is mentioned in two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, in the account of the Nativity, although the story given in each is substantially different.

In the Greek of the original gospels, Joseph is described only as a “tekton”, or craftsman, although there is a long tradition of his being specifically a carpenter, and many translations of the bible use “carpenter”.

In Matthew, Joseph is a citizen of Bethlehem who marries the pregnant Mary and takes her and the newborn child to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre. When it is safe, the come back to Palestine and settle in Nazareth. In Luke, the couple originate in Nazareth, but travel to Bethlehem before the birth to register for a census. No massacre or visit to Egypt is mentioned. They just go home to Nazareth.

Both gospels say that Joseph was descended from David (because the Messiah had to be) but they give different information. Luke names Joseph’s father as Eli, but Matthew says he was Jacob.

The last mention of Joseph in the Bible is when Jesus is 12 years old and goes missing in Jerusalem, to be discovered discussing theology with the rabbis in the Temple. After that, Joseph is conspicuously missing when Mary is referred to, leading to the supposition that he must have died.

The gospels left Christians with some problems. Jesus is referred to explicitly as “Joseph’s son” and “the carpenter’s son” in the Bible, and Joseph’s descent from David is stated to show that Jesus was of the house of David, as was required of the Messiah. But that contradicts the idea of the Virgin Birth.

It was left to later Christians to suggest that Joseph was merely the “legal” father of Jesus whose descent from David covered the house of David requirement for the purposes of Jewish law (as if that was important); while his “real” descent from David must have been through his mother.

Some time during the first centuries of Christianity, the belief arose in the movement that sex was evil. Mary’s virgin birth was no longer enough. It was decided that she could not possibly have had a physical relationship with her husband. This meant that the awkward issue of the brothers and sisters of Jesus, as mentioned in the gospels, had to be explained away.

One early attempt to resolve the puzzle was a Christian text called the Protoevangelium of James. This purported to be a history written by James, called in the gospels “the brother of Jesus”, although in reality it’s a much later document. This “James” says that Joseph was an elderly widower when he married Mary, and that he mimself, “James”, and the other brothers and sisters were the children from Joseph’s first marriage.

The ideas of Joseph being an old man with an existing family have been absorbed into Christianity, even though no church takes the Protoevangelium to be scriptural. Eating your cake and having it, I’d say.

Joseph’s feast day was celebrated on the 19th of March from medieval times. In the mid 20th century, there was an attempt by the Catholic church to impose a new saint’s day of “Saint Joseph the worker” on Mayday to compete with, or perhaps confuse, the secular celebrations of the nasty communists and socialists, but it didn’t catch on.

In fact, the actual Saint Joseph’s Day is only a significant festival in a few places, most importantly Sicily (and where there is a significant Sicilian diaspora, such as New York and New Orleans). In Sicily, they eat the sugar-frosted doughnuts called zeppoli, and less enticingly, fava beans. In Italy and several other traditionally Catholic countries, Saint Joseph’s Day is also when Fathers’ Day is celebrated (most other countries have it as the third Sunday of June).