It's Always More Complicated

Hampstead’s retro cafés fight back against a revamp:

“London is a muddle” as EM Forster once observed — but one whose complexity is enjoyed by inhabitants. This bitter row over cafés, with small operators objecting to a tendering process that rewards a chain, has pitted the Corporation’s efforts to modernise facilities against those who feel protective towards their homeliness.
....
But as the campaigner Jane Jacobs, who championed haphazard urban environments, pointed out, city life is inherently messy. Imposing more rigid schemes can destroy its vitality, what she called “the intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities”.

Shop windows tell the story of London’s revolutionary illustrated newspapers:

Printing on the Strand in the 18th century was a major hub of London’s popular print culture, characterised by vibrant publishing activity that wasn’t constrained by rules affecting printers within the City of London.
Key sites included Bear Yard, near present-day King’s College London, which hosted significant printing and publishing operations, and a King’s College exhibition, which is free to view through the shop windows, tells their story.
The printers moved away when the area was redeveloped, hence the exhibition title, the Lost Landscapes of Print, which is a mix of objects and stories from the printers’ trade.
Although Fleet Street is synonymous with the newspapers, two of the most popular newspapers of the 19th century were printed on the Strand, not Fleet Street. They were the Illustrated London News and rival The Graphic, both trading on their revolutionary ability to print pictures in their pages.

More and “Better” Babies: The Dark Side of the Pronatalist Movement - we feel this is the darker side of an already dark movement, really.

***

Apparently this was found to be missing recently from Le Guin's website but has now been restored: A Rant About “Technology”:

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

And talking about people getting all excited about 'technology' me and a load of other archivists and people in related areas were going 'you go, girl', over the notes of cynicism sounded in this article about the latest Thrilling New Way Of Preserving The Record (it is to larf at): Stone, parchment or laser-written glass? Scientists find new way to preserve data.
Admittedly, I can vaguely recollect an sf novel - ?by John Brunner - in which an expedition to an alien planet found the inhabitants extinct but had left records in some similar form.

That if you once start exhuming persons of note so that their (alleged) descendants can get a DNA test done, there will be no end to it, I think we can be pretty sure, no?

Anyway, I recently came across this, where somebody who is, it appears, already actually acknowledged to be the descendant of Warren G Harding's adulterous rumpy-pumpy* in the White House, is still asking for this: Warren Harding: Grandson of former US president asks to exhume his remains.

James Blaesing told a court he wants to establish his ancestry with "scientific certainty". But other members of Harding's family have opposed the request, filed in May. They say they have accepted DNA evidence that Mr Blaesing's mother, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was the daughter of Harding and Nan Britton.

Harding, the 29th president of the US, had an extramarital affair with Britton before and during his presidency, between 1921 and 1923. The affair only came to light after Harding died of a heart attack while still in office in 1923. Britton revealed their relationship in a 1927 book, The President's Daughter, but never sought DNA evidence confirming Harding's paternity of the child. Harding had no other children.

Apparently the Harding Memorial is intending including a section on Britton and her daughter (and perhaps a reconstruction of the notorious coat-closet?) and say they accept the existing DNA evidence concerning Mrs Blaesing, so we don't quite see why her son wishes to disturb Harding's corpse. Case seems already proven (matrilineal descent being after all, uncontentious).

*Is this, like 'bonk', a word no longer known among the youngs?

I don't know whether there was one precipating event or a coincidental confluence of things, but people have been posting hither and yon about the assumption that anything that helps you deal with a physical or mental condition is a 'crutch', which the Truly Strong and Determined person will endeavour to do without.

As people have already commented, wow, what a really bad metaphor that is anyway once you start thinking about the literal uses of a crutch as assistive technology.

And I remember a comment to a post of mine at some point about the sheer well-meaning authorially-approved cruelty of the parents who persuaded Ethel May (in Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and sequels) that even though she was severely myopic (and surely that had a lot to do with the clumsiness for which she got criticised?) she should endeavour to refrain from wearing glasses. Yes, on reflection this is even worse than the reproofs for trying to keep up with her brother's academic achievements instead of concentrating on her domestic duties.

When did the idea that it was okay to wear spectacles (rather than a sign of moral weakness) finally gain widespread acceptance? Because by the 1920s one of the arguments that was being put forward by advocates of birth control against claims that 'tes flyin' in the face of nature was that did their opponents not wear glasses? How was that natural? it was the beneficient development of science, etc, etc.

(Not that people thought being myopic was entirely okay - eny fule seem to no these days about M Stopes dissing on her prospective daughter in law for her 'hideous specs', but a number of interwar eugenists, including the Communist Dr Eden Paul, were all about short sight as one of the genetic evils of modern society.)

People have also been posting about migraine. What has massively improved my life (besides, you know, glasses to correct my extreme short sight) has been a) effective migraine prophylaxis and b) effective (providing I take it early enough) treatment for attacks that do happen.

There was once a point when I was encountering the claim that Migraines were sending A Message that one needed to hearken to.

On reflection, the ratio of noise to signal on that was so enormous that any message except 'Can it please be over?' got effectively drowned out. I'm not denying that there was an emotional component affecting frequency, which halved once I quit the Slow Motion Train-Wreck Relationship, but they did not, in fact, cease entirely.

I will concede that possibly my slump into depression c. 1980 was sending me a message, but the message was not 'Tough it out', but 'get some anti-depressants to get yourself together and get into therapy'.

There may be times when suffering is inevitable, occasions when it is even necessary. It is, however, not in and of itself a good thing. Things that reduce it are good things.

(Small earthquake in Brno.)

Mendel family and Augustinian Order duke it out over manuscript of Mendel's paper on his pea-breeding experiments.

I'm puzzled as to why it should be a German cultural treasure. (Okay, have checked and the Mendel family were ethnic Germans living in what, at that time, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

And even if it is, should be buried in a bank safe deposit box rather than being in an archive (do bank deposit boxes even conform to British Standard 5454 for storage of archives, or EC equivalent?) where it could be consulted by scholars?

Given that the then Abbot of the monastery burnt all of Mendel's papers after his death (the paper itself survived via the Brunn Natural History Society), I'm not at all persuaded that the institution has any particular moral right.

And am totally not sure that monk's possessions fall to their relatives after death (because they don't actually have possessions to leave...)

The whole thing is rather horrifying to the historian and archivist, though o dear, not exactly surprising.