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7QT: Hidden Messages, Legal Ghosts, and Tenuous Alliances

7QT: Hidden Messages, Legal Ghosts, and Tenuous Alliances

Last updated on: August 22, 2014 at 2:18 pm by Leah Libresco

7QT: Hidden Messages, Legal Ghosts, and Tenuous Alliances 2014-08-22T14:18:36-04:00 Leah Libresco

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— 1 —

There’s no way, once I saw this part of Terry Pratchett’s interview with the New York Times Book Review, that it wasn’t going to take the first slot of this week’s links:

Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer.

G. K. Chesterton. These days recognized — that is if he is recognized at all — as the man who wrote the Father Brown stories. My grandmother actually knew him quite well and pointed out that she herself lived on Chesterton Green in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, here in the U.K. And the man was so well venerated that on one memorable occasion, he was late in sending a piece to The Strand Magazine and a railway train actually waited at the local station until Mr. Chesterton had finished writing his piece. When she told me that, I thought, Blimey, now that is celebrity.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? And the prime minister?

Well, it would have to be “The Man Who Was Thursday.” It’s a damn good read that I believe should be read by everyone in politics.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?

Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton and Neil Gaiman, because he’s a mate who knows how to order the most excellent sushi.

— 2 —

Terry Pratchett has been writing and sharing book recommendations despite struggling with Alzheimer’s over recent years. A story in This American Life this week proposed a better way to communicate with Alzheimer’s patients — derived from improv theatre:

Chana Joffe: Step into their world was a familiar phrase to Karen from the many nights she had spent doing improv comedy. She and her husband are actors. Step into their world is a mantra in improv. You walk on stage, another actor says something, and you step into their world, whatever world they’ve just created. You don’t ever say no. You don’t question their premise. You just say yes. And–

Karen: I didn’t even see it. I didn’t see the whole parallels of improv and Alzheimer’s. And when I did, it with just so obvious. It’s a whole “yes, and” world.

Chana Joffe: If all you’ve got is “yes, and,” you can’t say things like, but you don’t even like pickles, or, you don’t have a sister, Mom. You don’t tell someone they’re wrong, which Karen says is exactly what you always want to do. When her mom says she wants to go home, the most natural response is–

Karen: Oh, but this is your home now, Virginia. Come let me show you your room.

But this woman is looking at you saying, I want to go home. And you’re telling her she lives here. So now you’re telling her she’s a liar. You’re going to see her little veins start popping out in her neck and her little fists. But if you look at her and you say– she says, I want to go home. Yes, and tell me about your home.

Chana Joffe: Now she’s not a liar anymore. Karen felt like she’d discovered an instruction manual. Here was a way into a relationship with her mom if she just followed some basic rules of engagement, rules she conveniently already knew.

This story started encouraging, but there turns out to be an cost to this approach, and it got me a bit weepy.

— 3 —

Speaking of improv best practives, to be honest, I think Krebs on Security “yes, and-ed” a little too much in response to this communication. In a blog post, he describes a weird quirk in Google Translate, and wonders if there’s method in the madness:

It all started a few months back when I received a note from Lance James, head of cyber intelligence at Deloitte. James pinged me to share something discovered by FireEye researcher Michael Shoukry and another researcher who wished to be identified only as “Kraeh3n.” They noticed a bizarre pattern in Google Translate: When one typed “lorem ipsum” into Google Translate, the default results (with the system auto-detecting Latin as the language) returned a single word: “China.”

Capitalizing the first letter of each word changed the output to “NATO” — the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Reversing the words in both lower- and uppercase produced “The Internet” and “The Company” (the “Company” with a capital “C” has long been a code word for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency). Repeating and rearranging the word pair with a mix of capitalization generated even stranger results. For example, “lorem ipsum ipsum ipsum Lorem” generated the phrase “China is very very sexy.”

My guess is still that it’s just an artifact of the strange ways Lorem Ipsum is used, and Google’s poor learning algorithm struggled to make sense of what if found. But I like the hypotheses he develops as plots for a spy thriller.

— 4 —

Sometimes, it’s not necessary to decrypt hidden texts to be able to assert that they’re encoded. And sometimes, it’s not necessary to see ghosts to assert that somewhere is haunted. In a legal sense, at least. From Law and the Multiverse (naturally):

[T]here’s a famous New York case almost exactly on point: Stambovsky v. Ackley, 169 A.D.2d 254 (1991). The full text of the case is worth reading if only because it is full of terrible ghost puns.

In Stambovsky a resident of New York City bought a house in the village of Nyack, a small suburb of New York. Unfortunately for the buyer the house had a long and storied history in the community of being haunted, which the out-of-town buyer did not discover until after the purchase. Whether the buyer was superstitious or merely concerned with the diminished resale value of a haunted house, he sought to rescind the contract on the theory that the seller should have disclosed the house’s haunted status.

Ordinarily a court might balk at having to determine whether a house is haunted, but in this case the seller had previously made a point of claiming in both the national and local press that the house was indeed haunted. As a result the court held that the seller was legally prevented (“estopped”) from claiming otherwise and thus “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

— 5 —

Meanwhile, in Italy, some people are extremely intent on bringing their private writings to light, no matter what skeletons may lurk in their closets:

[F]rom the start, it took a prize of 1,000 euros, or $1,332, and — more important — the promise of publication to persuade so many diarists to entrust their musings to complete strangers.

It was a shrewd strategy.

“Say the word ‘prize,’ and Italians go crazy,” Mario Perrotta, an actor and author, wrote in a book about the archive. Italians, he said, “treasure thousands of prizes, and they all work.”

Anyone can compete for the prize, which is awarded each September to the most compelling read. The dozens of entries are vetted by reading groups that consist of townspeople here as well as residents of neighboring cities. The winner — selected from a shortlist of eight — is published. The others become part of the archive.

Of course, not all diarists are interested in putting their life struggles into the public domain, and in some cases the stories come with caveats. One woman from Foligno insisted that her diary be accessible to all, save for two despised relatives; another diarist requested that the submission be sealed until 2072.

— 6 —

Almost no words are needed for this beautiful, fan-made Hunger Games trailer:

— 7 —

Finally, as Katniss is soon to discover, once the revolution’s won, you may find you don’t like the allies who fought beside you. Peter Blair sees a similar future for the libertarian/trad anti-statist alliance:

As our former local communities of trust erode, society pushes back to maintain some cohesion, albeit in a somewhat nebulous form. Instead of your neighbor’s say-so on a restaurant, you have Yelp. Instead of local Yenta matchmakers, you have eHarmony. Instead of businesses knowing what you want because the owners know you personally, you have Google’s detailed profile of your buying and web-surfing habits. Instead of everyone knowing everyone else’s business, you have an impersonally administered surveillance society.

It’s important to note what’s true about all those paired transformations: both involve a kind of invasiveness and a limitation of strict anonymous autonomy. And more importantly, we don’t all necessarily always prefer the old-fashioned, traditional way of going about business to the new way. A neighbor watching our child while we are at work obviously seems preferable to a cop “protecting” a child by arresting her mother. But lots of people very much value the greater anonymity and freedom that come from a society where matchmaking, shopping, and surveillance are all more impersonal than they are in a dense, nosy community—where everyone knows everything about you and your personal affairs.

And this is where the inchoate civil libertarian-social conservative synthesis tends to break down.

Today is the ninth and final day of my novena to St. Maximilian Kolbe.

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