History

History is a fickle thing. We of Britain know all about Germany's war atrocities in the second World War, but what do we know of the events across on the other side of the world. From what little I've gleaned from the scandalous sources of scurrilous bestsellers and movies, the Japanese empire were even worse, but we're none the wise. History is taught geographically and not morally, alas. With a whole world to choose from, and thousands of years of British history, what do we choose? Hitler's Germany and Henry VIII.

What could we teach in history, if we but had the courage? What about the discovery of the Americas? What about the Crusades, or the changing status of Parliament and the Crown? What about the short-lived samurai era of Japan, or the pressures that caused that brief bubble that was the Old West. There is so much to think about that you wonder how it could even be taught at all. What about the Moon Landings, or the Cuban Missile Crisis? What about the Korean War and the cold war between the USA and China? What about our Cold War in the early 1900s?

Looking back, the only things I remember from History class are Hitler's Germany, one variety of castle, and maybe something to with the aforementioned portly monarch with dubious marital protocols. It's pretty telling that almost all I know about the late Queen Mother is from the movie 'The King's Speech'! What will be the things that are taught from this era of history, if anything. Will Trump be a talking point in fifty years time - hopefully not, as that would imply some kind of impending disaster - or the EU exit? Since history curricula are always written from either a trivially obsessed neutral point of view or in a highly biased political frame, who will be deciding it anyway?

Sometime in the future, someone will be sifting through current events, and most of the things happening now will have led to nothing of any particular import. The EU Exit will have become inconsequential, President Trump will have been the nail in the coffin of the old corrupt system but will have done very little in office (we hope), and things will have continued much as before. It might all be about climate change, the vacuousness of society in the early twenty-first century, or the Reign of the Artificial Intelligences. Humanity will have to wait to find out.

Who does decide what received history should be? Almost always the people you wouldn't choose?

O.

Television: 'Quantum Leap: M.I.A.' (Episode 2x22) (1990)

This was always a series that was about it's secondary character, the irredeemably scurrilous Al, or Admiral Albert Calavicci in full, as played by Dean Stockwell. Yes, it's supposed to be the story of Scott Bakula's Sam Beckett, but we know the truth. Every time Dean Stockwell stepped up to the plate, the show became that much more fleshed out and nuanced, and this is arguably the best example of that.

'M.I.A.' is the definitely the episode of QL that you know will tear you up before the end. It's the one that explains just why Al is as irrepressible as he seems to be throughout the series, and it also exemplifies just how decent Sam is at his core. He couldn't do a wrong thing even if he wanted to (see also, episode 2x10, 'Catch A Falling Star'). If you didn't love these two guys before, especially Al, then you would after. It's a very rough watch, as will become clear, but it explains so much while setting up character growth in the future.

Donald P Bellisario, creator and showrunner, deployed military characters in all his series, as he was a Marine himself and famously wanted to have positive portrayals of the military and veterans in his series, and presumably liked to use his own experiences to make his characters and shows stronger. This is one of the classiest examples, as Al - the exemplar wisecracker - attempts to trick Sam into changing the past so his wife doesn't take him for dead during his long time missing as an MIA in Vietnam, trapped in a tiny cage in an eternal torture, and so that he won't spend the rest of his life heartbroken. Sadly, it can't be done, as Sam's real mission is elsewhere, and we get one of the most heartrending leaps out in the whole series. Never again will 'Georgia On Your Mind' go by without a moment's thought.

This is why 'Quantum Leap' is excellent: Dean Stockwell is in almost every other appearance a journeyman actor and a solid guy, but in'Quantum Leap' he meets every expectation and doubles it. He is the ideal casting, the only casting, and goes from comical, to touching, to dramatic in seamless fashion. He is the ultimate human counterpart to Scott Bakula's too perfect Sam, and I still wish the series had had a better finale, to bid him adieu in better fashion. Stockwell's humanity added the special ingredient.

'M.I.A.' is one of the best of 'Quantum Leap', and definitely up there on my list of things that will make me cry. That's a sign of purity and excellence indeed.

O.

Brown Paper Of The Soul

The 'Doctor Who' DVDs have been sold, and I don't mind at all. 'Doctor Who' has always been such a marginally acceptable series here in Quirky Muffin world that it's amazing that so many discs accrued over time. However, reclaiming a massive amount of space is not the primary topic here so much as the horrors of wrapping up the parcels. Good grief. How on Earth has parcel wrapping never somehow been made easier? It's almost an exercise in endurance hyperdimensional geometry!

In the aftermath, it seems as if most of the sellotape in the Western Hemisphere has been used, along with a kilometer or two of brown paper and bubble wrap, and now we're just left with some very weighty packages. It's unsatisfying. More fussing can not be imagined, after so much one-handed fumbling of tape, springy cardboard and five dozen flaps all coming loose at the most inopportune times. Thankfully, it is now done. Thankfully. Except for Parcel Force.

Oh, for goodness sake, Parcel Force's website is still to come. The most miserable rigged website in the world, perhaps, that requires you be using all three of Windows, Firefox and Adobe PDF reader in order to allow you to do anything. Why not force us to write on the screen in chalk as part of the procedure too? It's incredibly frustrating, especially as there are cashback options for paying online, and cashback is to be hoarded, or completely ignored.

Selling things really is difficult. How on Earth do businesses keep with all these things? How does it happen? At least in this case, a whole crate has been cleared for games and DVDs, which will be nice. Now, the temptation is to fill up the box with yet more marginal things, and it must be resisted! It must! Actually, it's very likely that 'JAG' will up the space, as will the remainders of 'Quincy, ME' and 'The Rockford Files'. That seems nice, and of course there is still a little 'Doctor Who' left, with Smith, McCoy and a smidgen of Hartnell still in the mix. Oh, and 'The Flintstones' or 'Night Court'. These decisions remain for the days to come.

That's a wrap!

O.

Story: The Frozen Valley

Twelve years and sixty-two days ago, something happened in the Valley of the Antelope. To put it simply, everything stopped. Birds that had been flying across the sky hung motionless, caught in a split second of motion. Bees, reindeer, mice, even the plants and the river itself, all were frozen in place completely. Only clouds seemed immune to the effect, passing over the the valley with the new nickname of the Frozen Valley.

Scientists were completely confused by this phenomenon, sending in probe after probe which were completely unaffected by whatever might have happened. The sensor measurements were unexplainable, revealing nothing new and nothing to support any theories. Frozen Valley resisted all explanation.

The next step was to send in devices that could interact with the environment. The first one carefully bumped into a static badger, and couldn't budge it. Then, a blade of glass was selected as a sample, and a snipper-bot sent in to cut it and bag it. The scissors didn't even make a mild scratch. The limits of automated devices were rapidly becoming apparent. Progress could only be slow and miserable if they couldn't send in people to investigate. However, what would happen if living matter went into the valley? Would it freeze into a static frame of reference inevitable?

The quandary was clear, and no clear way presented itself, all volunteers being asked to think again due to the danger involved. How could it be resolved?

Go Get 'Em, TS Eliot!

It's difficult, very difficult, to balance a horde of students, an Open University course, a proofreading job, an eccentric blog of miscellaneous nonsense, and a thousand other smaller things. In fact, it is almost impossible! However... there are ways and means... it will all get easier in time...

As an English tutor, part of the time anyway, you start looking for articles to throw at your students for comprehension exercises, and find all kinds of things. For example, the Silfra Fissure, in which divers can actually touch two continental plates at once, of the Zimmerman telegram, which pushed the USA into the First World War against Woodrow Wilson's wishes. There's a much nicer world of Internet content out there, if you can but find it. The Smithsonian online magazine pages seem particularly nice for this purpose, as do some sections of The Atlantic. Yes, magazines are still alive and well in some parts of the world!

Wow. Magazines. A substantial magazine hasn't been spotted in these parts for more than ten years, and then it was promptly cancelled! I think it was BBC MindGames, actually, and even that was more of a puzzle book. We don't seem to have the likes of 'The New Yorker', 'National Geographic', 'The Atlantic' or even 'The Smithsonian' here in the United Kingdom. Are we just a population of illiterate goons, believing everything pushed out in pulpy newspapers of utmost bias? Some magazines would be nice. And some people actually reading books. At the moment my most well read acquaintance is a GCSE student, which is lovely, but worrying at the same time.

It's odd to think that we've slid so far from the pinnacles of education, that great enabler. We are supposed to be taught to teach ourselves and become fully independent people, but somehow we've ended up being forced into systems that don't work any more, and enslaved to screens of information we don't actually need. As TS Eliot wrote - in 'The Rock' - and was repeated in 'Oliver's Travels':

"Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

We have masses of information, but is it useful or is it part of a much larger dungeon of which we only ever spot the edges from the corners of our eyes.

O.

Television: 'The Mentalist' (2008-2015)

It's tantamount to a confession, and one that has been made previously, but I really like 'The Mentalist'. It was one of the most likeable shows on television and very high up there on my list of most watched series. It's simply a great show in my mind, but one which was almost never talked about except in the negative sense. It did have the bad fortune to be made at the same time as the similar show 'Psyche', and get labelled as 'the copy' and unimaginative, but it went beyond that by tapping into some things that were generally out of fashion and by doing everything it tried with ease.

'The Mentalist' falls into the sweet gap between episodic and serialised television, with runs of 'cases of the week' that served to space out and add time between events in the overarching narrative of the eponymous Mentalist, the curiously named Patrick Jane and his friends. Serialisation is not something I like, but this mixed approach has always worked nicely. The key to the early success of the show is that rogueish central character, as played by Simon Baker, who is really a leading man of the old school, someone who could have stood up to the company of the Shatner, Robert Vaughn from 'The Man From UNCLE', or James Garner in anything. Such a charismatic throwback could only come from Australia! He takes the sometimes tortured central character, and his vengeful quest, and makes it palatable. In second place was Robin Tunney as his liaison at the California Bureau of Investigation, Teresa Lisbon, a grand infatuation fueller, and then her team.

It really shouldn't work. It should fall into the 'too many beautiful people' trap and stink, but that was averted. Somehow, they managed to cast a bunch of people who really did grow into their roles until you stopped noticing how glamorous they were, especially Tim Kang as Agent Kimball Cho. Cho was such a great and wonderful breakout as the incredible stoic that he was carried over into the epilogue of the series. In some ways it's the reverse of Star Trek spinoff syndrome, where they put together the too large extended cast, which never matures and becomes a millstone about the neck. Why does it work? After all that gushing above, which neglected the occasionally great writing, it probably does all have to come down to Simon Baker, who manages to pull off the double trick of being an old school charming lead and bringing out the best in his ensemble cast. He makes it work.

The central arc, the story of ex-fraud Patrick Jane attempting to catch the serial killer who murdered his wife and daughter by working with the police, goes up and down, and for probably a little too long. For five and a bit seasons, the killer Red John was set up as a semi-mystical entity, who might be the real psychic that Jane always claimed to not exist, but then turned out to be an utterly normal person person with connections. It didn't work at all, after so long setting up a thematic mystery that ran as a counterpoint to Jane himself, but the epilogue was some compensation. Again, the epilogue should really have been a mess, an unwelcome tying up of loose ends and putting together of Jane and Lisbon, and tying up of loose strings. It shouldn't work, but does. It was lovely to see the two happy.

I'll never really understand why 'The Mentalist' is so high on my favourites list, but it is. It never seems to fail, has a solid cast which struggled a little at the beginning, but succeeds with a charm all its own, as if it had emerged from a much earlier time in television history. It might even be the last television series I will have collected, chronologically, but this will remain to be seen.

O.

It Doesn't Have To Be Dull, Surely?

While writing numeracy questions for my GCSE students, which is often an onerous chore, I sometimes get to thinking about how to make things more interesting. Or funny. Or both. It shouldn't be impossible to make practice questions interesting, should it? For that matter, why do exams and examples have to be so humourless in general? Students might do a little better if they weren't locked into quite so grim an examination mindset. Ah, for the good old days which never happened! I don't remember that time when the whole exam wasn't themed on raising dragons in Hyborea...

How can numeracy questions be made more interesting? It's a tough question. The standard and most substantial numeracy question is often about a business and its dry income and outflow, and how it all adds up to a net result. How on Earth could that not be dull as ditchwater? (Note: Must find out why ditchwater is the epitome of dullness. With that much life in it, the results of consumption would be anything but dull!) Well, what if we changed from a business to a person, some kind of unusual person? Or a spacegoing cruise line? Or the president of the United States? What if we looked at the bizarre budget of Count Dracula, Baron Frankenstein, or Sherlock Holmes? What if we had to go through the oddities of conversions in barter cultures, or societies that trade via pigments, odd rocks or the sculptures they make in the backs of their caves?

We can literally do anything while making up practice questions. They don't have to be super-conventional and super-dull, they only need to cover the material that will be presented in the exams. It's early days, but progress is being made, and the beginnings of a portfolio are being put together. It's amazing how even the brightest of students have been stunned by new numeracy papers, and presumably were similarly stunned by their previous analogues. We'll get there in the end, with some examples that lead and some that challenge.

In other affairs, if anyone runs into a camel marked 'Abu Dhabi Or Bust', please contact the Quirky Muffin. The story is long, involved, and connected to the mysterious disappearance of said camel from the audience during a recent performance of 'Ooh, That's Not My Fish', a satirical comedy on the connections between frozen strawberries, maniacs moving into the White House, idiots running Downing Street, and the reasons why triangles are under-represented in nature. The camel is a material witness.

O.