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You can hear me on BBC Radio 4's "Any Questions?" this week ask my question to the panel.

Hear me ask my question to the panel of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions? this week. It will be broadcast online and on UK radio at 3:00 p.m. EDT (New York), 20:00 in the UK and available as a free podcast for download.* (Also available for free via iTunes.)

This week's panelists:

Sir Harold Evans of The Sunday Times, US News and World Report, The Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Daily News. In 1986 he founded Conde Nast Traveler. His book The American Century (1998) receiving particular acclaim. He is editor-at-large of The Week Magazine.

Former U.S. Rep. Nan Hayworth (NY 19th Congressional district) who may be considering a re-entry into politics. She was defeated in 2012 by Sean Patrick Maloney (who I've met several times over the course of years, as well as his partner Randy who is a fellow Hawkeye).

Former NY Attorney General and NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a contributor for Slate.com as well as a guest on cable news programs such as, recently, Up With Steve Kornacki; (a clip).

U.S. Rep. Donna Edwards (MD 4th Congressional district) who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2008 and sits on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology  and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

I attended a recording on the evening of April 18th, 2013, of one of my favorite radio shows, BBC Radio 4's Any Questions?, the world's longest-running radio panel discussion program, begun in 1948.** The show traveled across the pond to NYC this week to Columbia University's School of Journalism. Usually the show is broadcast live in the UK, and broadcast from a different location each week.

Attendees' questions are submitted ahead of time and selected by BBC staff. Panelists don't know ahead of time what the questions will be. For this taping, my question was one selected. I got to read my question aloud to the panel. For me this was very exciting.

The show has 3 million listeners a week, and it is part of my BBC Radio 4 triumvirate podcast I listen to each weekend--the other two programs being Friday Night Comedy (The News Quiz hosted by Sandi Toksvig and The Now Show with Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt) and In Our Time with host Melvyn Lord Bragg of Wigton.

*It's rebroadcast at 8:10 a.m. EDT on Saturday, 13:10 in the UK, too. Once archieved, it will be here.

**Technically, Gardeners' Question Time was founded a year earlier, in 1947, but it's a niche program really. ;)

PHOTOS, top to bottom: The panel (in the Pulitzer Building's lecture Hall on campus); me with Congresswoman Donna Edwards; me with Jonathan Dimbleby after the recording.

The 10 Most Underpaid Jobs - Yahoo! Finance

To identify the most underpaid jobs, U.S. News analyzed data provided by the compensation experts at PayScale to highlight occupations in which people earn far less than median pay. We further sorted those jobs to isolate those in which workers say the stress is high (a proxy for how demanding the work is) and their work makes an important difference in the world. (See a full methodology note at the bottom of the story.)

Read the article at finance.yahoo.com

(Image via Tumblr posts tagged "assisted living")

Assisted living coordinator (median mid-career salary: $36,900).

Daycare director ($32,100).

Police, fire or ambulance dispatcher ($39,300) -- "one of the most stressful jobs you can have while sitting at a desk".

Office nurse ($42,700).

Medical insurance coordinator ($34,600) -- "When there's a problem, they're the first to hear about it. But when everything goes smoothly, nobody knows they're there".

Lead pharmacy technician ($34,900) -- "pharmacies...are under constant pressure to cut costs".

Veterinary technician ($32,800).

Social worker ($42,300).

Emergency medical technician (EMT) / paramedic ($39,600).

Artistic director [of a theatre, concert hall, performing arts company] ($48,200) -- "grueling lifestyle sacrifices.... Cutbacks in public funding".

Why is Gangnam Style such a hit? And should it be performed at the DMZ?

The music video "Gangnam Style" is a global phenomenon and the most popular upload in the history of YouTube--449,015,599 views at the time of this writing.

BBC Radio 4 asks in a 3-minute segment of "Profile": why is "Gangnam Style" such a hit? 

The short answer, provided in part by Dr. Hae-kyung Um of Liverpool University, is that the video and its creator South Korean rapper Psy are both perfect for the online era. They both have cross-over appeal to various groups and do not resist parody; in fact, they seem to invite it. Several parody videos of "Gangnam Style" appear on YouTube daily. This trend in turn heightens awareness of the original. "Gangnam Style" is a participatory artistic and pop culture phenomenon for an age of transparency, collaboration, and global connectivity through technology.

YouTube can be a delivery vehicle for global success but it doesn't guarantee it. Less remarked upon in the BBC segment is that by reflecting the Western, specifically American, influence that for years has strongly influenced South Korea (1 in 5 Koreans are Christian, one Korean Pentecostal mega-church famously has 1 million members), Psy and "Gangnam Style" are familiar enough to Western viewers to be non-threatening while still being distinctly South Korean enough to be safely and entertainingly exotic.

So, questions remain. Why is this Psy video a breakout when earlier ones are extremely similar? Do American viewers in particular perceive a tip of the cowboy hat from Psy in his rodeo-evoking moves? Is "Gangnam Style" more popular than his previous videos in non-Western countries, too? If yes, then would non-Western popularity be as strong if the video had not also caught on in the US? Who is influencing whom and how much? I presume it's not particularly popular in Sana'a and Mexico City...or is it?

I suspect that to younger Westerners the video raises curiosity about South Korea in general and perhaps K-pop music in particular, as the Summer Olympics in Seoul might have done if they had been in 2012, not 1988. The 2012 Summer Olympic games had unprecedented Internet presence--much to the benefit of Britain's brand and London tourism--including through social media engagement by spectators and athletes, whose average age was 26. Psy is a bit like a one-man South Korean Olympics, a second one for 2012: flashy, pop-oriented, and if not athletic or very young, at least slightly baby-faced and surprisingly agile and fun to watch. BBC Radio 4 even gives some understandably tempered play to optimistic speculation about Psy's ability to thaw North and South Korean tensions. What would be more Olympic than that? Global goodwill through dance. I would not, however, expect a performance at the DMZ anytime soon.

 

Photo: U.S. Army, Installation Management Command, Korea Region, Public Affairs Office (2008) via Wikipedia

The Death of Achilles, ep 02 of Troy - "A single night has bound my heart in ice."

From the second episode of the three-part 1998 BBC Radio 3 drama, Troy (Jeremy Mortimer, prod./dir., Andrew Rissik, writer) now available for a limited time on BBC Radio 4 Extra, the words of Helen of Troy (portrayed by Geraldine Somerville, later cast as Harry Potter's mother, Lily, in the Harry Potter films),

I dressed for the first time in memory, alone, with no servants. I wore rough sailor's cloth. I remember, when I kissed Paris in the dark his body would not stay still. It moved under my hands. He took me ashore in a boat which let the water in. He sat in a puddle as he rowed, and when I laughed at him, he lept up like a baboon and stopped my mouth with his kisses. I think I grazed an elbow shouting, "Slower! Slower!" And as he came the thunder came, too. God-light arched across the bay. The cliffs shook. The clouds split open. They pelted arrows of water upon our delighted bodies....

We passed three days and nights on the isle of Cranae, sleeping and making love, eating cheese and black bread, drinking only goats' milk and rough local wine.

As the bird flies home to its nest, as the soul returns at last to god, so the spirit in love finds and receives the beloved.

The cast also includes the late Academy-award winner* Paul Scofield CH CBE, Julian Glover, Michael Sheen OBE, Lindsay Duncan CBE, and as Achilles, Toby Stephens, the son of Dame Maggie Smith and Sir Robert Stephens.

Achilles: 

We are wretched creatures, ignorant, selfish, and cruel. My life has gone by and the time has been wretchedly used. I have been ungentle and unloving, and serving myself above all others, I have wasted my best days. 

In wine there is some oblivion, yet it does not last. In sleep there is some rest, yet it is not perfect. In memory there is some peace, yet it is fleeting. In love there is some ecstasy, yet it is changeable and shifting. Forgetfulness is ever denied us, for the imagination does not forget except briefly, but possesses its own inequities until the end of consciousness, which if the gods are kind is death, a sleep secure and senseless--inanimate as the earth. 

After each episode's initial Saturday broadcast it will be available for seven days to listen to on demand using BBC iPlayer.

*Best Actor, won for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, for which he also was awarded a BAFTA Award and a Tony Award.

Image: promotional photo of Whatanui Flavell and Roimata Fox as Paris and Helen in the Ngakau Toa Company's Maori production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressdia (Toroihi raua ko Kahira), which represented New Zealand at The Globe to Globe Festival as part of the Cultural Olympiad in London, April 2012.

Britishisms in American English? Brilliant! | DD Guttenplan | Comment is free

in a recent report by the magnificently monikered Cordelia Hebblethwaite. It seems that more and more British words are entering the American language. Now of course some Americans have always favoured a bit of British to try and raise the tone of their discourse. We call such people "stuffed shirts", though "toffs" is close enough. Indeed the shame of being seen as a linguistic striver is strong enough that despite 17 years in London, I still cringe at the memory of being caught offering to "hold the lift" for my sister last year.

via www.guardian.co.uk

As the Churchill insurance dog would say, "Oooooh, yes!" This may be the only trend I was ever ahead of. Thanks to Iowa PTV's broadcasts of Doctor Who in the 1970s and 1980s, living in London 1993-4, several visits back, Brit friends both Over There and stateside, a Radio 4 habit, and VPN access to a UK/domestic BBC iPlayer, I was "sat" instead of "sitting", whinge instead of complain, "agree" instead of "agreeing to", gingers instead of red-heads, trousers instead of pants, and crikey instead of....instead of I'm-not-sure-what for nearly the last twenty years, albeit not consistently, and mostly in the last nine or ten years.

No, not affectation, just weird imprinting on someone weirdly impressionable. Okay, I confess "trousers" is a bit of an affectation, or at least it's an Isebrand Britishism born not entirely of repeated exposure but helped a bit by me along the way. I think it's in part because "pants" in the UK was also slang for unfashionable, undesirable, and sometimes I'd hear fellow countrymen say pants or I see it in print and for an instant feel like giggling. I admit that this may be a treasonous reaction. But there it is. For me, pants has become a funny word, and I frequently have to actually stop myself from saying trousers when I mean...pants. (Tee-hee.)

The absences are just as odd, I suppose. I don't think I have uttered "blimey" once, though a Brit friend of mine says it often. I've been known to say the occasional "washing-up" though. And once--once--I actually said "ta-ra" instead of goodbye, not only a Britishism but a somewhat regional one. You'll rarely if ever hear a native Londoner say "ta-ra"!

Guttenplan's correct. Especially since the Second World War especially, American English influences British English more than the other way around--though the influence really began with the talkies, I assume. America's greatest weapon: Hollywood. You don't have to look too long online to find Brits complaining about instances of Americanisms creeping into British news broadcast or anachronistic ones in UK television programs set in Britain before the middle of the 20th century.... And disproportionate number of British television programs seem to be set before the middle of the 20th century!

My own early-ish anecdotal evidence that Ben Yagoda of Not One-Off Britishisms might be right was noted in this 2010 Isebrand.com post on "bespoke" and "agreed," though I'm not sure if "bespoke" is purely a Britishism or is also found regionally in American English; I certainly never heard the word while growing up in the Midwest.

A couple of weeks ago, I was with friends in NYC from the UK when one got a "Cheers!"--in an American accent--from someone he'd held the door open for at a Chelsea restaurant. My friend asked, "How'd he know I was British?" My answer: "He didn't." Since then, I've heard a "Cheers!" exit an American mouth instead of "Thank you!" at least once more. And so it goes . . . . linguistic trans-Pond cross-pollination.

Friends You Can Count On. Maybe especially those like Lois Weisberg?

In Steven Strogatz's "Friends You Can Count On," in The New York Times's online column Opinionator, it's noted that a study of "all of Facebook’s active users, which at the time [of the study] included 721 million people — about 10 percent of the world’s population — with 69 billion friendships among them" found that

a user’s friend count was less than the average friend count of his or her friends, 93 percent of the time. [Researchers] found that users had an average of 190 friends, while their friends averaged 635 friends of their own.

Studies of offline social networks show the same trend. It has nothing to do with personalities; it follows from basic arithmetic. For any network where some people have more friends than others, it’s a theorem that the average number of friends of friends is always greater than the average number of friends of individuals.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

It's a fun article to read, and it put me in mind of a 1999 New Yorker article I loved and kept for years, misplaced at some point, but searched for online after reading "Friends You Can Count On" and discovered it had been written by Malcolm Gladwell: "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg." (If Gladwell was famous in 1999, he wasn't to me.) If I remember the article correctly, it concerns connectors--the concept that some people are connected to many people and most of the rest of us aren't. The  idea of everyone on Earth being only six degrees of separation from each other isn't strictly true (again, assuming I remember the article correctly), but something like it is true if we have among the six people we reach out to someone who is a connector, like Lois Weisberg was.

Photo: Lois Weisberg

BBC Radio's Troy - "Have you ever seen a hawk hang motionless in the air?"

Have you ever seen a hawk hang motionless in the air? So is fate above mortal men and women.

Jeremy Mortimer's (prod./dir) and Andrew Rissik's (writer) phenomenal three-part radio drama, Troy, originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1998 and broadcast on BBC Radio 7 every year from 2004 to 2009, has returned as of Saturday, September 29th, on BBC Radio 4 Extra, with the first episode, "Priam and His Sons."

Of those few BBC radio plays that I have heard, it is second dearest to me after The Lord of the Rings (1981).

After each episode's initial Saturday broadcast it will be available for seven days' time to listen to on demand using BBC iPlayer.

Science brings people together in sometimes unexpected ways

Please click "Like" under Ashley's and Lee's photo on Blue Bridal Boutique's Facebook page to help Ashley win a wedding gown. Ashley and Lee are both paleontologists.

Also, check out Philip and Susan's great story on NPR's Storycorps.

Ashley Fragomeni ->  Blue Bridal Boutique of Austin A DINO-MITE Love--Ashley and Lee

via www.blogfordarwin.com

Please click "Like" under Ashley's and Lee's photo on Blue Bridal Boutique's Facebook page to help Ashley win a wedding gown. Ashley and Lee are both paleontologists.

Also, check out Philip and Susan's great story on NPR's Storycorps.

Ashley Fragomeni ->  Blue Bridal Boutique of Austin A DINO-MITE Love--Ashley and Lee

One million people at London's Team GB parade

One million people turned out in London today for the 3-mile long parade celebrating Team GB's 800-some 2012 Olympic and Paralympic athletes.

(Photo: the crowd in front of the Bank of England.)

Microsoft asleep for the Assumption

My Outlook calendar says that August 21, 2012, is the "Assumption Day - Eastern." Well, Microsoft's wrong. The Roman Catholic Church's Feast of the Assumption and the Eastern Church's The Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God (Theotokos, "God-bearer," officially since the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431), are both celebrated on August 15.

The day of the death of the Mother of God is called the Dormition (or falling asleep) in the Orthodox church, for her body did not know corruption after death, but together with her soul was taken up into heaven; hence, another name for the feast is “the Assumption”. We have no historical data to indicate how long the Mother of God remained on earth after the ascension of Christ into heaven, nor when, where, or how she died, for the Gospels say nothing of this. The foundation for the feast of the Dormition is to be found in a sacred tradition of the Church dating from apostolic times, apocryphal writings, the constant faith of the People of God, and the unanimous opinion of the holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church of the first thousand years of Christianity.

via www.newsfinder.org

(The Anglican tradition does not have a doctrine of the Assumption and is more circumspect about Marian theology in general. Most Anglican prayer books have August 15 as a feast day in honor of Saint Mary the Virgin.)