...though only G*d in her infinite wisdom knows why....
Consider the following from ICTS this morning:
"We are pleased to announce that solutions to a number of identified problems have been implemented. After Novell identified a number of bugs in their code, they wrote and tested fixes, which they then provided to us. This has improved the stability of the GroupWise system significantly. We have included more technical details below, should this interest you."
....
Thank you for your continued support while we address these problems.
Regards,
ICTS Communications"
So what happened VERY soon after I read this?? Why, I noticed that GroupStupid! seemed reluctant to take notice of keystrokes...then crashed. I opened it up again, it considerately offered me my half-composed-and-very-important-message-to-patent-lawyers back again, so I continued - right up to the point when it crashed AGAIN. This time, losing all the attachments I had so carefully added....
I said bad words. I crashed around the office. I kicked things. I reopened GroupSTUPID!!!! AGAIN, redid all the attachments - saving it twice while doing so - and sent the message off. I could have DRIVEN it down to Research Office quicker!!!
I reiterate: Group STUPID!!!!!! is a clunky frakkin' piece of sh1t, and we must GET RID OF IT!!!!!
You know, the Retroid Kollectiv has long held the view that nine-tenths of literature - in terms of the requirements of Sturgeon's Law - is crud. The corollary to this is, of course, that nine-tenths of all literary criticism is crud, except that this is not true: it is more like 99%.... And of course, a further corollary is that nine-tenths of all literary critics are crud - except that this is also not true, as they are in fact all crud.
And a glowing exception to the literature rule is the fiction of one Terry Pratchett. Yes, despite his having single-handedly having invented a genre (science fantasy satire), and having written some 30+ books in said genre, it may be said that all his offerings are gems beyond compare.
This member of the RK speaks with the authority inherent in his having read all of said oeuvre over more than twenty years, and nearly all of them more than once (many recently, in search of Escape), and having read his non-science fantasy satire books before he was famous.
These are of course few in number - if two can said to be "few", rather than just a couple. However, I can safely claim to have read "Dark Side of the Sun" WAAAAY before TP achieved serious fame, and to have read "Good Omens" before Diskworld became the famous structure it is today.
To read his works is to submerge yourself in a world where the whimsical and the side-splittingly funny share a stage with the learned, the knowledgeable, the erudite and the sensitive, and yes, their cousin the sad. For TP is nothing if not well informed, well educated, accurate - and an astonishingly good observer of human behaviour. And also of the behaviour of dwarfs, trolls, vampires, werewolves, witches, policemen, wizards, and of Death Himself. And his horse, Binky. In a world which is a disk, borne on the back of four elephants standing on the back of the great turtle A'Tuin, who bears this load uncomplainingly across the universe, through billenia. With the odd diversion down the wrong trouser leg of Time.
With humour. And pathos. And acute sensitivity.
Catch me any pre-post-demi-modernist who could do any of that, and I'll show you your derrida....
I'm off to re-read "Thud!". Wherein Commander of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, Samuel Vimes, battles ancient demons, dwarfs, trolls, vampires, himself and the Patriarch - and still finds time to read a bedtime story to his son. Every night. I can identify with that....
I see The Man Who Would Have Been DVC at UCT - only he went north, and became a VC - not only didn't give up his plog (=paper blog, aka The Times column), but now calls for...nuns?!...yes, actual penguins!, to rescue South Africa's ailing school system.
All across the land, I hear the despairing cry, of "Oh, please, for pity's sake, nooooooo...!"
You see, while J Jansen esq - for it is he who plogs thus - thinks a good dose of nunning would stiffen the moral fibres and backbones of the sullen mob of under-educated and under-achieving children that are our learner cohort, because such treatment worked wonders for all of the well-educated Zimbabweans who flock south and make bead ornaments instead of being allowed to teach our children, he gets the wrong end of the stick to some extent.
As did many, many of us who WERE nunned, in the lands to the north.
You see, the reason that many of us-who-were-trained-by-religious-and-especially-by-penguins over-achieve and do well, is because the nuns are behind us.
ALL THE TIME.
With a thick 30 cm ruler. Waiting, waiting for the infraction - real or imagined; these are one to the nun - so that she can leap into view, ruler upraised, ready to strike at the trembling fingers.
Oh, I exaggerate - well, a little, anyway - but as anyone who survived went through the Dominican Convent Schools of Salisbury/Harare or Lusaka can attest, the German Dominicans should more properly have been called The Little Sisters of Perpetual Torment, and it takes many, many years to forget some of the petty cruelties and arbitrary punishments. And then you get early arthritis in the fingers. I only suffered nuns by proxy, as it were - my sister and my wife were at the Lusaka Convent - but I was welcomed to kindergarten in Lusaka by a Sister Mary Pia, who kept popping up throughout my schooling, and has haunted my dreams since I was five.
For the nuns stay with you...always over the shoulder out of sight; always about to berate you for your stupidity - and the ruler, always the ruler, always there....
So we may achieve, we the nun-schooled ones; we may do well - but we do it out of neurosis and guilt, more for fear of the Wrath of a Small Nun and The Ruler, than for ourselves.
I give to you,then, as learned in religious schools, the principle of Pre-Emptive Guilt Installation as a teaching tool: make the learning recipient guilty right up front, and they are yours for life. And they'll always double-check the centrifuge door; always check AGAIN before throwing the switch that sets amps coursing through gels; always check the lights are off and the doors are locked...because YOU are standing behind them. Forever....
So, Professor Jansen: do you want neurotic, over-achieving well-educated-but-damaged school graduates that nuns would give us? Or at the other end of the spectrum, do you want the happy, well-adjusted, low-achieving products of the Waldorf and Steiner schools of the leafy suburbs? I have chosen the safe middle way for my children: gentle Anglicans for one, and a good government school for the other (no, not SACS or Rondebosch or Westerford). No overt religion, no guilt, no jockism, and no single-sex dysfunction incubators for the Retroid children!
Because I still dream of what happens when you stumble over the conjugation of "pouvoir", or what happened at the Council of Trent - and my back doesn't work properly because of rugby. And I am an atheist because (partly, anyway) I went to schools called St Augustine's Abbey School (Benedictine monks), St Francis College (Franciscan friars), and St George's College (Jesuits).
So no, Professor Jansen, no nuns: what we need instead is what the mission and other schools gave Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe - which was a cohort of well-trained, literate, motivated teachers, who educated people well, even in rural mission-school contexts. At UCT we have gone seamlessly in the last thirty+ years from well-educated white Rhodesians coming first in everything, to well-educated Zimbabweans coming first in everything - who come from schools that didn't even exist in the 1980s, which gives the lie to Jansen's comments that the Smith regime killed the schools. And consider: these are the kids who didn't get into the University of Zimbabwe, whose entrance requirements are still FAR stiffer than any SA University.
More Zimbabweans, Professor Jansen - not nuns. Please, no nuns....
