Dyson Handheld Vacuums: C+

Okay, it is still better than any other handheld vacuum. But:

1. Gryroscopic force twists your hand clockwise slowly, and the lightweight nozzle turns too; then, one corrects for this, and the lightweight nozzle does not twist back with a turn of the wrist: the sensation is like trying to pick up an olive with a toothpick attached to an andiron.

2. The trigger pinches the trigger finger. Until one learns to adjust, and hold the trigger in a funny way, one has a sharp red line and discomfort each and every time one uses the thing.

3. The Dyson Handheld can run with the latch open: watch out, dust and debris gets accelerated all over the room.

4. Originally the Dyson Car Vac, now, it is not. Where's the lighter-plug gone to? Did it short out someone's Mercedes?

Mr. Dyson, did you actually design this thing? What does "design" mean? Or, as I suspect, did you make the innards and farm out the handheld to others to "design"?

Fox an' the Fliies

An Afrikaner University which staffs a South African history journal made the mistake of asking me to review C. v. O.'s Fox an' the Fliies (I want to avoid searches), in a review essay. ("Or, a group review --" Me: "No, I'll do it.")

Anyway here is the last comment from the referee, who looked at my revisions:

> But more importantly,
> the author must still discuss the substantive,
> wide-ranging historiographical issues raised by the
> book: these, as my initial response indicated, would
> include the Atlantic World, late 19th century
> globalisation, gender and race, criminality, and
> identity, amongst others.

This is supposed to be in the conclusion of the essay.

[Addendum: I hear now it is going forward as is . . .]

Future Projects

Clownface.

Mukoma Ngugi

Said something very smart in an interview. That Africa got democracy as an abstraction, without the material in it. They didn't get the civic institutions and cross-regional alliances that underpin it. It's like a map of roads and towns which do not yet exist.

Decline and Fall

Implicit in some of the anti-declension narratives I read from people I enjoy, is an unwillingness to see a major trend of up or down in any terms, anytime. Maybe this is temperment, because I seem to have drawn different conclusions. I think studying Africa has shown me that sometimes suffering can increase, for long periods of time, maybe forever.

Ending only with cataclysm or redefinition as normal.

If we were to say, "decline from here, would look like this," would we be able to agree on here or this? One person can have answers, an aristocracy, a group of intellectuals, maybe a community, sometimes (horribly random but there you are) a race, a class, a gender, overall; rarely a nation; never a continent, nor the world.

My view of academics in the e-age is: wait and see. Teachers may learn what decline means. It is not hard to win bets as a pessimist.

Applied Science

A process of winnowing and sorting into bins. Sometimes the ease of argument is the giveaway.

Complex sorting mechanisms tailored to individuals: graduate school.

Eschaton

There is an early modern European literature connected to Biblical scholars and ancient near east scholars. The consensus there is to accept Ernst Troelsch's modified "relative deprivation" hypothesis: in both ancient Jewish millenarians, and industrial-revolution-era proletarianizing millenarians, the community's "relative deprivation" spurred them into the hope fulled fantasies of salvation-on-this-earth that subsequently reentered Christian practice.

These were people who, relatively quickly, became relatively worse off than those around them.

Like all over the world, right now.