bad week...

[simonineaston]

Sad that we've lost Bernard Cribbins and Prof. Lovelock.

[audaxjk]

Cribbins always reminded me of Perks in The Railway Children. 93 is not a bad age to go though I suppose.

[thirdcrank]

Cribbins always reminded me of Perks in The Railway Children. 93 is not a bad age to go though I suppose.

There's probably a reason for that

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066279/
====================================================
Earlier in July I was interested to read the obituary of Hugh Brown who had died at the age of 95

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/ ... -improved/

I was only in his presence once on a police war duties course around 1990, held at Northumbria Police Training School near Billingham. He was both a distinguished medic and member of the TA. He opened with something like "I am to speak to you about the effects of exposure to nuclear weapons but I will talk about something to cheer you up." He then gave us some insight into the advances made in dealing with childhood leukaemia and it still cheers me up

[Mistik-ka]

I was only in his presence once on a police war duties course around 1990, held at Northumbria Police Training School near Billingham. He was both a distinguished medic and member of the TA. He opened with something like "I am to speak to you about the effects of exposure to nuclear weapons but I will talk about something to cheer you up." He then gave us some insight into the advances made in dealing with childhood leukaemia and it still cheers me up

Thanks tc, that little story cheers me up.

[Paulatic]

That’ll be Bellingham TC. A great place and area.

[thirdcrank]

That’ll be Bellingham TC. A great place and area.

Not Bellingham - I stayed at the old YH there in 1960

Inspectors had to do the regional war duties course every four years. After Ronald Gregory retired in 1983, the Regional Police Commander (Designate) was Stanley Bailey of Northumbria and the courses were arranged under his aegis. In the days when public money was more plentiful for big projects, that force took over a former training college (previously used by some women's organisation) and set about converting it. I thought it was in Billingham but on reflection it may have been in Ponteland, although it doesn't affect my memory of Hugh Brown

[Cugel]

Sad that we've lost Bernard Cribbins and Prof. Lovelock.

We haven't "lost" these fellows as they left a large tranche of popular and perhaps valuable media stuff in the public domain, unlike most of us will do. (Unless you count CUK forum posts of course).

Also, they aren't "lost" or "passed away", they're dead. This is the fate of every human, you know, so no point being sad about every stranger-death case, even if we did enjoy their books and filums.

I have half a bookshelf of Lovelock writings although no recordings of Cribbins' oeuvre. I'll continue to reread the Lovelock and might even watch The Railway Children again, being a sucker for girlie-films, me, especially those with a bit of sad in the middle that gets swept away by a happy ending. (What a softlad, eh)?

Cugel, already sad enough about too much current degradation about the place!

[simonineaston]

Also, they aren't "lost" or "passed away", they're dead.

I'm sorry my euphamism doesn't suit you, Cugel - I was just trying to be tactful. It's an open forum with a wide range of readership and plain speaking - which I agree has its uses - may be a touch jaring for some readers - who knows?

[pwa]

"Passed over" is the phrase that makes me laugh, as if we are like the ancient Egyptians, imagining the crossing into some afterlife. I generally say "died" or "dead", not to offend with bluntness, but to avoid any misunderstanding about what I think happens when a life comes to an end.

Cribbins is intertwined with my childhood, so I'll remember him, and his voice in particular, with some fondness.

Lovelock backtracked on some of his musings over the years and I don't think he ever helped me to crystalize my own view of the Earth and our dealings with it. His hippy-dippy Gaia stuff was borderline religion and therefore nothing more than a mildly entertaining distraction from the serious business of working out how to live without messing up the planet we depend on

[Cugel]

Also, they aren't "lost" or "passed away", they're dead.

I'm sorry my euphamism doesn't suit you, Cugel - I was just trying to be tactful. It's an open forum with a wide range of readership and plain speaking - which I agree has its uses - may be a touch jaring for some readers - who knows?

I know you mean well but those euphemisms are dangerous things, often used to sanitise far worse doings, attitudes and events than someone's death. One becomes oversensitive to their use perhaps. But is it tactful to avoid reality or help others to do so?

A euphemism easily slips into a lie; or makes something horrible seem innocuous or even nice. In some sense, all those euphemisms seem dishonest in one way or another. I pounce on the rascals, pulling away their gadroons, garlands and ribbons to see what's underneath!

Cugel, hunting reality but finding only discarded old words.

[Cugel]

"Passed over" is the phrase that makes me laugh, as if we are like the ancient Egyptians, imagining the crossing into some afterlife. I generally say "died" or "dead", not to offend with bluntness, but to avoid any misunderstanding about what I think happens when a life comes to an end.

Cribbins is intertwined with my childhood, so I'll remember him, and his voice in particular, with some fondness.

Lovelock backtracked on some of his musings over the years and I don't think he ever helped me to crystalize my own view of the Earth and our dealings with it. His hippy-dippy Gaia stuff was borderline religion and therefore nothing more than a mildly entertaining distraction from the serious business of working out how to live without messing up the planet we depend on

Was it Lovelock himself who promulgated the "hippy-dippy Gaia stuff"? As I recall, he was dismayed that his mere use of the name to denote the planet-wide mechanisms he felt were operating in some sort of systematic fashion was taken anthropomorphically by various of the dippily-inclined. He himself was always bedded in a rationalist/scientific outlook, was he not?

We humans love to make the not-us seem like a bigger-better version of us. Gods all tend to be humans writ large & powerful. What an arrogant bunch of creatures we can be, eh?

****
My own worry about Lovelock-thought was his ongoing promotion of the notion of nuclear power as "the answer" to various difficulties. Personally it seems just another difficulty itself, of a rather looming and dangerous kind. Consider Sellafield, even now generating more ten thousand year environmental problems in The Irish Sea.

Cugel

[Nearholmer]

Personally it seems just another difficulty itself, of a rather looming and dangerous kind.

Glad you said that, because I share your reservations. As an engineer, I probably ought to have complete faith in science and engineering, but as a person, I don’t have anything like complete faith in people, and since we are the ones who do science and engineering, I can’t have complete faith in them either.

[Cugel]

Personally it seems just another difficulty itself, of a rather looming and dangerous kind.

Glad you said that, because I share your reservations. As an engineer, I probably ought to have complete faith in science and engineering, but as a person, I don’t have anything like complete faith in people, and since we are the ones who do science and engineering, I can’t have complete faith in them either.

Many do science as a faith rather than as a sceptical frame of mind allied to a robust method of discovery. Some scientists are the worst culprits, treating various theories as irrefutable dogmas rather than as the best understanding we can currently muster until there's a better one.

Personally I feel that the observations of Thomas Kuhn (Structure of Scientific Revolutions) still stand as a fair description of the sciences which, like all other human endeavors and institutions, are bound up with various human habits of mind and socio-cultural behaviours that tend to give precedence to status and the status quo over the more vigorous scientific explorations that challenge the dogmas.

Still, science is the best methodology we humans have discovered so far for enabling some degree of accuracy in prediction and control attempts. Not infallible by any means but a very productive and resilient methodology for discovering not just what is but what isn't. The tradition does contain some possible traps, though. For example, does there really have to be a single all-encompassing theory of everything that seamlessly connects all aspects of reality and their scientific understandings? Perhaps that's just the human cultural habit of wanting certainty about everything, in that ole religious fashion?

Another faith is that hard & fast belief many humans have in technology, as though it was a magic horn of cornucopia from which only ever-better good things spill. It's a Pandora's Box, stuffed with every Trouble imaginable! Of course, Troubles are often good at disguising themselves as wonderful opportunities and glittering prizes. Or "needful things".

The techno-science faith is generally expressed in the notion of Progress (capital "P") that assumes there's an ever-upward arc of human betterment, driven by science and technology along with the "training" it provides in making adherents "rational". If only! We humans are as irrational and unreasonable as we've ever been. See current world events for details, in which science & technology are at the bottom of some very bad human doings indeed.

On the other hand, the alternative seems to be a state of nature in which life for humans may be "nasty, brutal and short". Sadly, it might be techno-scientific progress that casts us back there, if it doesn't just extinguish us outright.

Cugel, waiting for my own lucky bubble to be popped by Gaia.

[briansnail]

Lovelock did early research on cryo-preservation in rodents.Hopefully they both passed away peacefully.

[Cugel]

Lovelock did early research on cryo-preservation in rodents.Hopefully they both passed away peacefully.

Hi hi! Not only have you employed a-one o' them saccharine euphemisms, you've also implied that there's something of a rat to "pass away". This is dangerously close to proposing that rats have souls, which many of the humans will take offense at, since they claim a certain "special nature" for peoples (well, some of them, if they're the "right" sort) which is in fact outside of nature and a true resident of the crystal sphere that supposedly surrounds us all, in which there is a hierarchy of beings, with humans between the angels and the worms.

Myself, I feel that humans only have soles (if they can afford shoes, in this ever-impoverished economy) and that souls ought to join phlogiston in the ether.

So there.

************
Can you imagine the hell on Earth should some silicon valley type derive a successful method of not only freezing rich corpses for later revival but also a successful means of actually reviving the things!? Perhaps there'd have to be a change in the euphemisms for "dead" to others meaning essentially "undead"? Nothing would "pass away" .... although what if the soul searchers couldn't bear to give up the notion? The corpsicles would have to first "pass away" their unnatural essence and then somehow have it "return" to the dripping former corpse. Gaw!

Cugel