User talk:TheoClarke/Archive 001

Back to Theo's Archive Contents and Index

Messages between February 5, 2005 and April 1, 2005

Welcome to the Wikipedia

Here are some links I thought useful:

Feel free to contact me personally with any questions you might have. Wikipedia:About, Wikipedia:Help desk, and Wikipedia:Village pump are also a place to go for answers to general questions. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, like this: ~~~~.

Be Bold!

Sam Spade (talk · contribs) 09:57, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Your signature

Hello! Your signature is broken, I'm afraid — in copying the code you've left in 'UserName' instead of replacing it with your own. Which College were you, by the way? (I see that you're a management consultant; don't worry, I'll not tell anyone.) Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 00:22, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

BAPA

By all means chagne the link, perhaps British Isles is a more accutate place to link to? The concept of "UK + Eire" isn't easily represented, but is significant in a lot of ways - perhaps there should be another article... Good luck choosing the link. Rich Farmbrough 10:21, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC) Having read your comment on BAPA discussion, perhaps you do mean United Kingdom (which excludes Ireland) after all. It does't seem salient that there were no Northern Irish in the originnal group. Rich Farmbrough 10:58, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The Cantos

Hi, Theo, thanks very much for your message, I'm sorry to say I only just caught sight of it. Giano posted at the bottom of my page a few minutes after you, so I looked no further for the "You have new messages". Compliments always sucked right up, whether deserved or not, so thank you! Bishonen | Talk 11:18, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your support on WP:FAC, which I greatly appreciate. Filiocht 11:52, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, readability is, of course, important. However, I too worry about a lowest comon denominator approach to language. After all, I suspect most people reading up such an arcane subject will be fairly literate. Still, I'll let it go to avoid the otherwise inevitable flood, as you rightly point out. Filiocht 12:13, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

I suspect the How to read The Cantos could be just one word: slowly. Keep piling uo the interludes and work may become redundant. Speaking of which, I'd better go do some! Filiocht 13:46, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

See my Joyce edit now; what do you think? Filiocht 16:03, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

A footnote!

A footnote! That was the thing that was missing! Bet it would have made FAC if it hadn't been missing footnotes! Thank you, Theo, you have put the cherry on the sundae. Bishonen | Talk 13:44, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Your domestic arrangements: practical, yes; opulent, no. Bishonen | Talk 15:05, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

re. Williamite war in Ireland

Thanks for your comments, this article was a spinoff from sorting out the convolutions of Jacobitism. The knowledgeable and neutral aspects are courtesy of the BBC source cited under External links. As for controversial, where I live occasionally has noisy football supporters going past singing such witty songs as "we are the Billy boys" so the historical facts are relatively mundane..dave souza 23:22, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Need Help

Two articles are up for deletion: one is specific for Classical studies, Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Vanavsos and the other is Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Family/State_paradigm. Can I ask for you help in these matters. Thanks.WHEELER 15:08, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Metal-bird He-fall-from-sky

That phrase has gone thru the following phases: plane crash > aeroplane crash > airplane crash > aviation accident. I just changed it to 'aviation accident' after some anon clearly struggled on the highly British-English marked 'aeroplane' and swapped it to 'airplane'. Hopefully 'aviation accident' is nice and neutral and it can stay like that. –Hajor 19:01, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Re:

See my reply @ User_talk:Sam_Spade#Obviously_.... Cheers, (Sam Spade | talk | contributions) 19:13, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Who doesn't need help?

"Unarticulated forms"? You bastard, you made me snort out coffee all over the keyboard! :-D Bishonen | Talk 19:32, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

london clubs

I agree with the name you chose, but it appears many don't as most links seem to point to the alternate title.

The reason i moved it is that it's up for COTW, under that title. However, I'll happily see it at your title, and I'm sure it won't take too long to revert most links. My club also uses the title, perhaps the other useage is an American thing? Grunners 18:16, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I see you've already done so! good job! I'll get down to expanding it then. Grunners 18:20, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

How to read a poem

Thanks for letting me know, Theo. I have updated my user page. Tim Ivorson 10:14, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The Quarrymen

QUOTE: "Hi: Thanks for your addition to The Quarrymen. Are you sure that the demo was recorded on a 78 rpm disc? I have a note the recording engineer "later wiped the tape", which suggests that it was tape recorded"

Yes, it was demo songs recorded on tape, that was an acetate recording. I reckon it is the Beatles' first 78 while they were in The Quarrymen. By the time of the recording, the band consisted of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Colin Hanton, and John Duff Lowe at the time of this recording. The tape was wiped out, but John Lowe of the band, kept a copy of the two songs that were produced on 78rpm before it got wiped out.

Below is the double sided labels of the acetate 78rpm that was preserved. You can now hear these recordings on the album "Beatles Anthology Vol. 1". I think the acetate recording was recorded at Liverpool 7.

Taken by John Lowe in 1981

Ensoniq EPS

Your welcome, but don't be hesitant to remove the tag yourself, otherwise a perfectly good article could end up sitting with a cleanup tag for months. - SimonP 22:19, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

Alfred/A.L. Rowse

The reason I changed the category links is that the pipe text in a category link doesn't change how the name appears in the list; it only changes where the title files alphabetically. No matter what you pipe into the category links, the name will still appear in the category pages as "Alfred Leslie Rowse" unless you change the actual page title. All that would happen if you put A. L. in the category links is that the name would move out of sort order -- the name would still appear as Alfred Leslie, but it would file ahead of, say, "Addington Rowse" if there were one in the same list.

This isn't really the best example of what I'm talking about, since its place in the list won't really change either way, so let me use a clearer example: there's a Canadian play called Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, which was made into a movie called Love and Human Remains. A single article was originally created at the Unidentified Human Remains... title, with the category link [[Category:1993 films|Love and Human Remains]]. But when you looked at the 1993 films category page, the title still appeared as Unidentified Human Remains...; it simply appeared under L instead of U. (I've since corrected this.)

If you want the page to appear as A. L. Rowse, that's fine by me -- but because of the way the category links work, you'll need to move the page title to A. L. Just changing the categorised name won't change how the name appears if the page title is left as Alfred Leslie. Bearcat 16:16, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Cool...unfortunately I think the category sorting can be a very tricky thing to understand since it's kind of counterintuitive to the way piped text works in the article body. And yeah, I agree totally that an article title should be at a person's best-known name whenever possible, even if that's just initials. Glad it worked out okay. Bearcat 22:16, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you, Theo, for your support and your kind words on my adminship nomination. I appreciate the confidence you have in me. Kind regards, — mark ✎ 22:39, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Poetry

Theo, thank you very much for your compliment. It is kind and encouraging. Maurreen 16:27, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Obsequiousness

Well, at weekends my online intellect is way more enormous than Filiocht's, I'll have you to know, since he's always away. But that's the only times. :-(. Anyway, I took a look at Talk:Poetry analysis, and it looks like Fil already has a structural concept mapped out. It really is his subject, not so much mine. I wrote a comment on the talk page, just to remind everybody of the added complication of the Poetic diction page. Way to drain all initiative out of people and bring them to a standstill, I realize, sorry. :-( Bishonen | Talk 16:14, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That was quick!

Glad you liked it! Bishonen | Talk 22:05, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Poetry analysis draft

Thanks again, Theo. I found the /Draft page. I plan to use that space today and tomorrow to get the new structure set up. BradGad (Talk) 22:16, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Poetry analysis: LONG

Hi Theo. When you have a chance, would you take a look at Talk:Poetry_analysis/Draft? I put the page structure we discussed in place, then plugged in just about all material from the old page, and then expanded each section into a discussion. I've now hit the 32k mark, and there are still sections with scant coverage. I can cut flab from my writing and maybe reduce the total by 20%, but even then the article will still go over 32k when it's complete.

What do you think is the best course at this point? Split sections off into different articles? Dispense with the examples? Think about a different page structure? Consciously decide to go over 32k?

Thanks for your input. BradGad (Talk) 07:06, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My instinct at this point is to tighten mercilessly, but keep the current structure and the examples, in the end going over the 32k guideline (by as little as possible). BradGad (Talk) 07:39, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Poetry analysis: MLA Citation

As X. J. Kennedy has said, "Should the poet succeed, then the discovered arrangement will seem exactly right for what the poem is saying" (582). This is standard MLA citation. The author's name appears in the sentence, and a single work by this author appears in the list of references, so all that should be needed is the page number. See, for example, http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html. I looked at Wikipedia:Cite_sources before doing this, and it didn't seem to come down declaritively in favor of any single format, so I used this well established one. Would you suggest an alternative? BradGad (Talk) 23:53, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That convention is new to me—or, at least, that part of it—and it has the disadvantage of being arcane. Just the addition of the word 'page' would be enough to clue in the uninitiated. I used a variation of the Harvard Referencing System at my first university, standard Harvard for the first degree at my second university, BS 5605 for my second degree there, and numbered footnotes at my third university! I still have APA, MLA and Vancouver to explore! --Theo (Talk) 00:23, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry for being of no help, but looks like you did not need any. Filiocht 09:48, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

Deletion done now. Filiocht 10:56, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

For whatever it's worth (and don't even ask what I'm doing reading your talk page), what BradGad did was instantly recognizable to university escapees in the US, as the MLA has kind of a corner on all parts of the U. except the hard sciences. However, if the continent of Europe has been spared its money-making schemes, then all the better (MLA is in the business of issuing a new and different book every year, thereby ensuring many, many, many books sold and great funding for their big party, The MLA, which is a convention where bright stars of the future, like Eve Sedgwick can be heard reading their papers on profound subjects like "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" just before joining the faculty of Duke). Geogre 01:12, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikimeet transport arrangments

Hi Theo! I noticed you're planning to travel on the train from Ipswich down to the Wikimeet on saturday. I live in Lowestoft and am really commited to attending this meet, but have reached a financial brick-wall on the transport front. Would you be insterted in joining a car/van/mini-bus pool if one can be arranged? Yours, nsh 01:47, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)

Update: Do you hold a (current) UK driving licence? I believe I can secure a [fully-comped? openly-insured?] car for saturday if someone can do the driving. The price of petrol and parking in one car will be lower than individual public-transport costs for three or more people (sadly). nsh 14:04, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

About the spelling

I saw your question on Vamp's page. The spelling comment is intended to serve as a guide for copy-editors. It states what kind of spelling is used in the article. Of course, that doesn't mean that edits have to be made using that spelling, but copy-editors may edit the page to achieve spelling consistency. SpNeo 16:45, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. Another candle lit and one fewer curse against the darkness! --Theo (Talk) 19:00, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sic semper tyrannis

Yeah, yeah. I was just buffing it up a little, in case the rebellion breaking out in the April Fool's vote brings some new readers over. Would be a bit embarrassing if they found us failing to wikilink the Divine Right of Kings! "Via" isn't ideal, I guess...neither is what was there before ...you figure something. --Bischånen|Tåk 14:06, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

European toilet paper holder

When I was making the changes, I was just cleaning up some sloppy editing. Shortly thereafter, I realized that this article was nominated for April Fool's Day Featured Article, for which I gave my support.

But, on the other hand, if you want to make a hoax work and fool everyone, it must look real and not overemphasize the mistakes. The translation of sans-culottes was somewhat ridiculous for anyone knowing French. This would be too conspicuous, whereas the explanation for the Holy Grail will fool more than one. As to rejigging the image of Elisabeth I, I don't understand the reason you give. But if you insist, you can rearrange it back to its previous state. JoJan 18:03, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Oh, very sure. This from the Peredur ap Evrawc (Lady Guest's translation): And thereupon they saw a black curly-headed maiden enter, riding upon a yellow mule, with jagged thongs in her hand to urge it on; and having a rough and hideous aspect. Blacker were her face and her two hands than the blackest iron covered with pitch; and her hue was not more frightful than her form. High cheeks had she, and a face lengthened downwards, and a short nose with distended nostrils. And one eye was of a piercing mottled grey, and the other was as black as jet, deep-sunk in her head. And her teeth were long and yellow, more yellow were they than the flower of the broom. And her stomach rose from the breast-bone, higher than her chin. And her back was in the shape of a crook, and her legs were large and bony. And her figure was very thin and spare, except her feet and her legs, which were of huge size. And she greeted Arthur and all his household except Peredur. And to Peredur she spoke harsh and angry words. "Peredur, I greet thee not, seeing that thou dost not merit it. Blind was fate in giving thee fame and favour. When thou wast in the Court of the Lame King, and didst see there the youth bearing the streaming spear, from the points of which the drops of blood flowing in streams, even to the hand of the youth, and many other wonders likewise, thou didst not inquire their meaning nor their cause. Hadst thou done so, the King would have been restored to health, and his dominions to peace. Whereas from henceforth, he will have to endure battles and conflicts, and his knights will perish, and wives will be widowed, and maidens will be left portionless, and all this is because of thee." I used the last few sentences as the epigraph to my first book. The maiden was clearly far gone in constipation. Filiocht | Talk 10:03, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

As well as the lance, Peredur saw a large salver containing a severed head, borne between two regulation maidens. This story is one of the clearest Celtic sources for the Grail legend, along with certain Irish tales. Spears always feature strongly in the Celtic sources,as it happens. Filiocht | Talk 11:53, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

Acronym

Oh, acronym! Sorry! --Bischånen|Tåk 11:30, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Revert, by all means: afraid I just did not spot the acronym. So sorry. Filiocht | Talk 13:36, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

Coffee

While simultaneously chewing out CWI on IRC. Life is good! --Bishonen|Talk 17:07, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

User talk:Bishonen/European toilet paper holder/Anti 'T' bias poll

Vote early, vote often. Filiocht | Talk 08:45, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

I just want this awful, awful dispute to be over with, so all people whose usernames start with T can edit free of the Damoclean dystopia of the dysfunctional dispute-doomguard diaspora casting their every edit naked and screaming into the merciless flames of antagonistic contempt, searing the sufferer's countenance with the withering glares of supercilious floccinaucinihilipilification. So yeah, I like it when things are clear so we can talk better. JRM 22:10, 2005 Mar 30 (UTC)

It's the DAP

Thanks for the further explanation of MLA referencing. It is always warming to have a stalker. I was not surprised to see your allegiance to Chapel Hill on your user page (a truly impressive creation, incidentally), given the snipe at Duke. I spent a while in Cary NC in the mid-nineties; The big event was the change of Bulls ballpark. --Theo (Talk) 11:38, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I did get out to the old DAP before they made it shiny and new, before the Bulls became a Pirates farm team, and I was there at the park made famous by Bull Durham. I have often wondered, but I'm pretty sure that, no matter where I went, I'd have found Stanley Fish personally off-putting, Jane Thomkins and Sedgwick-Kosofsky and the herd of other "moi-critics" there villainous. That I was at a rival school with a rival philosophy (the philosophy that makes one a decent encyclopedist, since the emphasis is on facts, facts, facts, and facts) just made it easier. Geogre 15:26, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I liked both ball parks. I particularly enjoyed the smoking nostrils of the bull. Don't you mean Jane Tompkins? Reader Response seemed like an appropriate reaction to New Criticism although both are grotesque over-simplifications. Facts are merely consensual opinions if Bertrand Russell is to be believed! --Theo (Talk) 16:56, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I love Reader Response, and my own "theory," if I have one, is a branch of that called Reception Aesthetics. Tomkins, though, didn't stop when she was writing sane stuff, IMO. After her early work, she went on to things like the "curriculumless classroom" and came over to our lounge to give us a lecture on how brilliant it was to have no curriculum in freshman English. She said that she'd ask students what they wanted to do, and that's what they'd do. So, for example, they had a class field trip to Toys 'R Us, where they talked about cultural assumptions in the toys, etc. A bull session is neat, and it's really neat to have one with one's professor, but these are supposed to be extra-curricular things, and not things that parents pay $15,000 for. To Fish's hypothetical "Is there a text in this class," Tomkins was beginning to answer, "Class? What class?" The insane becomes the inane terribly quickly. (Reception aesthetics is quasi-Marxist: how any given work is received by the public demonstrates the ideological fissures operative in a culture. Longfellow was so praised in his own lifetime as to be the only American poet buried in Westminster Abbey, and yet now he's a joke. His poetry hasn't gotten any better or worse, of course, but the cultural questions asked by his work were resonant in the society of 1900 and are now offensive in 2005. How can we see in the reception the particular fault-lines of ideology?) Geogre 18:29, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Reception Aesthetics (how sad that it is a redlink) is most appealling from my limited research. I enjoyed your characterization of Tompkins' stance and I can see why such extremism is annoying. --Theo (Talk) 20:58, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

If you're interested in a stepped back view of what Russell (and others) might mean (as events, not within their discourses), a wonderful essay is Burdened and Disemburdened 18th Century Man and the Flight into Unindictability, by Odo Marquard (trans. 1990, Yale UP book whose title I have forgotten). Basically, Marquard starts off by saying that in everything he is about to say, he's not an expert. He's just a stunt man, a guy who will say some things and take the fall, but he must not be understood to be an expert. He then goes on to examine the question of theodicy and its attempted answers in the 18th c. Although he simplifies, he says that there are only a few answers. One makes God culpable for evil, and another makes man culpable for it. Yet another removes God altogether, creating a de facto atheistic moral scheme. If man is responsible for evil, then it should be possible to study evil. It is no longer an irrational and diabolical thing, but rather a product of humanity, and that means that Experts should be able to solve it. Instead of God, man will now fix things. Hence, the birth of Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology. However, he says, once we have Experts, we have the terrible burden that Leibniz had tried to take away from God: the responsibility for evil. Therefore, he says, there is a move that culminates in our own day to back away, to try to raise fogs, to explain the unknowability of man himself, questions over media, over thought itself, over the observer, over signification, etc. All of these allow the expert to try to say that he's not Expert. This nervousness in the face of plain failure at containing evil makes the experts into chaos theorists in a hurry. It's a highly provocative and interesting essay. Geogre 01:23, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

ETOH > ETPH

Well, I'm frustrated by the continuing mobbing up of youth on Wikipedia. I understand the intellectual retreat to FAC that some have made: they can have their Digimon Ranger articles, so long as there is a place for well developed and esoteric articles. We've all felt that pull, I guess, and I finally found the gibbering of VfD too strong to endure. However, there is a fundamental truth that the project needs to face, sooner or later.

Many of the policies that have framed the site were developed in reaction to the failure of the first Wikipedia, where few contributed and nothing got done.
Many of the policies were intended to attract contributors and retain them.
Democracy is ill-defined in the best of situations, and here it is very poorly defined.

All of this is merely to say that the project was designed to grow. However, the reality today does not match the reality of its founding.

Much is getting done. In fact, so much is getting done that quality control breaks down. There are only so many people who can watch for libel pages, scams, etc.
We have grown exponentially, and now our needs perhaps are to concentrate on strength rather than volume.
Mobs overrun all policies, and dictators are needed (literally) to stem the tide of votes. This is because voting blocks form not out of mutual interest, but to cover mutual weakness. This was illustrated most clearly by the "VfD must die" campaign of a few months ago (maybe ongoing for all I know), where people who'd had their favorite fetishes VfD'd had banded together to say that there must be no more deleting.

So, on the one hand, the rise of a clay dictator over the FA is necessary, just as a rise of an authority over peer-review was. We invent experts and authorities and willingly submit to them because, frankly, nothing can go forward within the constraints otherwise. It's just that I had thought that FA was a retreat, an island apart from the mob of kids. When the grown-ups table is run in a way that doesn't fit with the grown-ups, one can feel the sting more keenly. I suppose that's why I'm disgusted that, of all things, Nintendo Entertainment System is the April 1 FA. Geogre 03:46, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the note. I did really want to agree with your point that ETPH was a place wrer friends were made, and you underscored that with your expression of concern. I'll be off on my weekly retreat soon, am planting a tree in the garden and preparing for some readings I'm doing soon. Plus going to the library with the kids tomorrow. Real life, even. Filiocht | Talk 10:54, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

Eucalyptus gunnii. Mailed you as best way of giving you mine. Filiocht | Serious fun 11:02, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism reverted

Thank you very much for reverting that rather nasty vandalism at ETPH. Good job that somebody's watching our treasure, our precccccioussss! Gollum