Cannabis or alcohol? The listening prime-minister.

New Labour has shown again that it only has one response to things it doesn’t like: that is, criminalise them.

And if it wants to show it dislikes something more than it used to, it puts the criminal penalty up a notch, pour encourager les voters.

Many of us don’t like hunting, even if  -- in my case – we flirted with it in our rural pasts. But I can't help thinking that it would have been a good deal better to kill off this nasty nineteenth-century tradition (which is what it surely must be) with the drip, drip of ridicule than with unenforceable legislation. After all, those men in red (pink, I mean) jackets do look very silly, don’t you think?

As for cannabis, it is extremely enjoyable  (more enjoyable than hunting, as -- inter alia - it doesn’t require staying on the back of a horse). There is also no doubt at all that for some users it is dangerous, even life ruining. Surely there is a way of getting that message across without upping the potential prison sentence, which is what the government’s reclassification of the substance from Class C to B means. In fact young people's cannabis use had actually been falling since it was down-graded to C, which makes one wonder whether the risk of punishment might have been part of the allure.

But isn’t it odd that Gordon Brown’s first, turn-over-a-new-leaf, style of listening, actually means not listening to the very committee he got to advise him on this ? For they advocated precisely the reverse. I guess ‘listening’ is a good sound-bite, but it still means a choice about who you are going to listen to.

Almost 50% of young people between 25 and 29 in the UK have used cannabis, just like their parents – ie my generation – did. We might want to encourage them not to, but what on earth is the point of criminalising half the population? OK, 5 years inside is the maximum sentence. But can we really countenance a government regulation that could in principle put half the nation behind bars for half a decade (with remission)?

The police wont enforce this, of course; they haven’t got the time, for one thing. But that ends us up in a worse position… with the idiocy of an un-enforced law.

There is also the complete illogicality that rules most of our “rule-making” on drugs. We all know – and any sensible teen-age sees this clearer than any of us  – that if either alcohol or tobacco were subject to the same scrutiny as cannabis it would be found a much more dangerous substance indeed. But in the case of alcohol we decide to allow its sale at all hours, in the case of tobacco we just ban it from public spaces.

It is the weird accidents of history that have decided which dangerous things we tolerate and which we don’t.

Of course the big bogey of the moment is skunk. Apparently this is much stronger than what Mums and Dads used to smoke in the 1970s, and so much more dangerous. But as the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs observes, that may well mean that kids use less of it.

Come to think of it when I have a whisky, I don’t put it in a pint glass.

Comments

[Simri Idoine]

Yes, Prof Beard, those men in ruddy pink jackets do look silly - almost as silly as middle-aged TV dons who sport sagging t-shirts and unkempt locks in a studied attempt to appear unworldly and populist. The same goes for Goldhill's shorts. Perhaps you would like all whose jobs or pastimes demand traditional attire - presumably including lawyers, clerics, policemen and almsmen - to succumb to the homogeneity of the jeans and t-shirt uniform imposed by western culture as the sartorial norm. Darn these dated modernists and their totalising liberal rationalist agenda!

[PL]

Tony-- Remarkable facts about all that drug addiction in the 19th c! That version at least sounds more believable than the theory that cannabis got outlawed because the liquor industry found they were losing sales; especially since their sales would soon be cut off totally by fiat.
Correction and augmentation to my last post: Baudelaire wrote:
"Le vin exalte la volonté, le haschisch l'annihile. Le vin est un support physique, le haschisch est une arme pour le suicide. Le vin rend bon et sociable. Le haschisch est insolant. L'un est laborieux pour ainsi dire, l'autre essentiellement paresseux."
And of course the passage occurs in "Les paradis artificiels", not "Les paradises…"
I was much impressed by the Wiki article you referred us to (under another topic) on Marine Corps (note spelling) lawyer Col Matthew Bogdanos. A remarkable man I'd never heard of before.

[Tony Francis]

Dear PL: The legalization of marijuana has been on the front burner of groups like NORML since at least the 1950s. So far, they have failed to get their agenda legislated. So we can assume if there was a ground swell of support for their position, people would vote for it. Drug regulation has not occurred in a vacuum. Probably at least half the surviving veterans of the US Civil War were dilaudid or moprhine addicts. In the late 1800s, probably 25-35% of the country was addicted to codeine or hashish. That was what led to restrictive regulation. It is always possible to mock seemingly unenforceable laws. There are 20,000 homicides in the US every year. Only 50% of murder cases ever have an arrest. We could say that homicide laws are uneforceable. Yet no one is suggesting they be repealed. Repealing marijuana laws would give a tacit approval for their use. The general feeling in the country now is that less intoxication, and not more should be the goal. Whether laws criminalizing marijuana are effective is debateable. Their repeal would probably increase usage.

[PL]

Tony-- You mention "the moral authority of law";
but law loses its moral authority when, because in contradiction to what people actually believe and practice, it becomes unenforceable. This happened notoriously with alcohol consumption during Prohibition. It is now happening with cannabis? I certainly hope not. As you point out, the latter stays in the body a lot longer. A drunk will be sober the next day-- crapulous maybe, but sober; a pothead stays more or less spaced-out-- and subject to recurrences of the full effect--for weeks. Baudelaire, who knew both forms of intocxication well, gave another reason for preferring alcohol: "Le vin exalte la volonté; le hachiche l'annulle" ("Les paradises artificiels", I quote from memory). Indeed the decline of Islamic civilization vis-à-vis the West has been explained by the ban on wine resulting in widespread use of the dreamier, more passive-making stuff.

[Tony Francis]

We know that a certain percentage of people will use intoxicants of all kinds. Many will do it for years, without any apparent consequences. But the question becomes: Are we going to use the moral authority of law to encourage or discourage certain behaviors? If a certain percentage of the population is chronically intoxicated (I would guess it is between 5 -10%), the society as a whole ceases to function for a variety of reasons. Whether criminalization of substances or behaviors is effective is another question. But every law makes a moral statement because it carries the implied use of the policing power of the state to enforce it. On the other hand, lack of law does the same.

[PL]

There are other dangers too. A biochemist friend tells me his dissertation advisor in Oregon in the 60s refused to smoke marijuana on the grounds that it "might lead to the hard stuff", by which he meant cigarettes.

[Tony Francis]

Despite this rosy, Polyanna picture given by NORML, if you are in an accident or involved in a crime, and you piss hot for marijuana, you are going to be presumed to be under the influence. That goes for the law, and for any judge or jury your case is presented to.
http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=4934

[Tony Francis]

Dear PL: Ok, drinking is legal, driving drunk isn't. It used to be that if a drunk driver killed you, that was just too bad. Then they cracked down on drunk driving with stiff criminal penalties and enforcement. You can check a blood alcohol level. A person can "piss hot" for 30 days after smoking marijuana. So a pot head kills someone with a car, and claims he hasn't smoked for 2 weeks. All his buddies sign affidavits swearing it to be true. Then what?

[PL]

Tony: Liquor is legal but driving drunk isn't.

[Tony Francis]

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug_prohibition

Here is a hypothetical: Marijuana is legal. Some guy stoned out of his mind runs you down while driving his car. You are permanently disabled, and can never work again. He doesn't have any money. Now what do you do?

[Tony Francis]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060919070043AAZ4lio

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamekeeper's_thumb

[Oliver NIcholson]

' Ware Riot.

[SW Foska]

The best work on hunting is the Pseudokynegetikos published in 1874 by the archaelogist (so therefore relevant person) Alexandru Odobescu. Odobescu actually disliked hunting and his manual uses hunting as a metaphor for the true subject which is digression.

[Oliver NIcholson]

May I return to the point, please ? Or at least one of them - you provide a rich mixture of points. If we are going to be nasty about hunting, we might perhaps get the facts right. Foxhunting is not a 19th century tradition. The Quorn (I seem to remember) can trace its history continuously back into the 17th century and Sir W.W. Wynn's certainly to the 18th century. It is said that the preoccupations of 18th century MFHs like Squire Osbaldeston who pioneered Fox Hound breeding went hand in hand with the contemporary interest in improving the breeds of farm animals.

The history is reflected in leterature. The first classic hunting poem, The Chase, by William Somerville of New College, a fine piece heavily dependent on Nemesianus and the Georgics ("The Chase I sing, Hounds and their various breed, and no less various use..."). was published under George II. The greatest prose work on hunting, Thoughts on Hunting in a Series of Familiar Letters to a Friend, by William Beckford, a remarkable man who was inter alia responsible for the musical education of Clementi, was published in the 1780s.

The only works of literature I can think of generated by smoking (of any sort) are James I's Counterblaste to Tobacco and C.S. Calverley's Ode to Tobacco (a rare example of successful English Sapphics - which might amuse Richard). But I would not wish to ridicule your amusements.

Go hunting - 50 million foxes can’t be wrong.
OPN
(a former Master of Beagles, but I did not inhale)

P.S. Does Jock Anderson cover the hunting of foxes in his splenddi Hunting in the Ancient World ? Lots of hares and deer, I know

[Jane]

SW Foska
To bore is human, to divert, condign.

[SW Foska]

Fair point Jane, although the extent of your tedium was not exactly clear from your earlier intimations. No Jane, no gain.
xjy is right - a beamer is more than a full toss. Why beamer? for the horizontal trajectory? Because it's aimed at the eye?
When I was a PhD student I was asked to polish up a non-native speaker's translation into English of a folklore monograph. How much do you want they said? I said 50p a page. The author was a big shot in his country and got me a pound a page from the (outraged) state publishing house. By the time i'd finished I decided not to do that again for less than £5 a page. It's harder than starting the translation from the beginning. An then the outraged state publishing house 'corrects' your revisions because they think they know better.
I'd say something on-topic but i've run out of tokens. 'Somebody's boring me. I think it's me' (Dylan Thomas).

[Xjy]

Re: beamer as a full-toss. I thought it was more a very fast ball aimed straight at the batsman's head. A bumper without the bump.

Re: non-native gibberdeglish. Not many people give a toss (full or not). I have a very good friend who is able to communicate with about 150 words of English. It's fantastic to see her in action. I call it Grubelichki internatsional. Talk about Communication Before Correctness! If more people had her zeal for getting something across, we'd be way better off. It is to unbelieve!

I feel quite quaint with my Virgo obsessive-pedantic nitpicking crossword mind. In fact apart from the translation work (and sometimes even there) I'm trying very hard to deobsess and unpedantize.

There's always (or at least always used to be) some poor sod of a secretary condemned to shoehorn the boss's gibberish into English and then put a shine on the uppers. It's more fun to be the master than the slave. I'm getting fed up with shoehorning some dickhead's foreign gibberish into acceptable (to some) English gobbledegook. I'd much rather spout like a gargoyle and watch others sweating to catch and distill the precious drops so they don't just turn the place into a smelly bog.

It's enough to drive one to drink - or to the drug of one's society's choice... ;-)

[PL]

Given that a lot of this stuff goes off-topic (for better and worse), why not say under RECENT COMMENTS what the comments were really on?

[Tony Francis]

When in my residency, I spent a rotation with a general surgeon from Holland. He was really a good surgeon. There was a woman who was dying of ovarian cancer. She was always cheerful and exceptionally pleasant. The Dutch surgeon said, "That is such a glorious woman. She is experiencing a blessed and wonderful Catholic death. She is an inspiration to us all. But you know, in Holland, we would give her a couple shots of morphine IV, and this would all be over."

[Jane]

Me, lecture?
Merely, I found the off-topic topics boring. It is a greater sin to bore than to deviate, as Oscar Wilde may have said.

[anthony alcock]

English. I usually tell all my classes that when they speak to non-native speakers, they will find it almost impossible to "make a mistake", because the others probably won't spot mistakes and even if they do, probably won't feel confident enough to say so. If, however, there are any comments from non-native speakers about "mistakes", I advise people to discontinue the conversation as quickly as possible.

[PL]

I heard a lecture on English as a Foreign Language recently in Stockholm, in which I was told Chinese corporations actually prefer to have their employees learn English from Germans, Belgians, and such. It seems speaking it too much like a native Brit or American is considered unbusinesslike and connotes insincerity.

[SW Foska]

anthony, I have an opposite problem, I read so many scholarly articles written by non-native speakers that I just skip over idiomatic aberrations cos you'd be pausing every sentence. I then set them to students who really baulk at them. My other problem is going to conferences where i'm the only native English speaker and nobody can understand me cos everyone else transacts in internationalglish. so i'm glad you're taking the trouble to teach the Germans 'the tonguework and the vocabular' as it is called in the 1936 satirical work 'How to do and say in England: A Trim Kompaktikum for Students of Englisch Talk'.
I also think it's a bit rich of Jane of all people to be lecturing us about going off-topic & am tempted to ask her about certain aspects of microwave ovens that are currently bothering me. Maybe soon.

[Tony Francis]

The apartment building I lived in in medical school was so permeated with maijuana smoke (from the medical students), I imagined I could get high just from walking in the halls. In my residency, about half the residents were chronic marijuana and alcohol users. I never went in for this scene, because when I wasn't on call, I was moonlighting in an ER --3-4 nights a week. Working ERs is a great place to learn medicine. The Children's Hospital in Denver was the same. It would close down Thrusday afternoon and not re-open 'til Monday afternoon. All the residents and nurses would go to the ski-lodges for a giant marijauna-alcohol screwfest. I used to take call on the weekends because I wasn't into that. Presumably, these are the same doctors who are now giving out high blood pressure pills, and doing spinal surgery and total hips.

At some point the responsible people in society have to sober up. You can't have drunks flying the airplanes and doing surgery. The US federal courts have a 2-3 year wait for hearings of disabled people trying to get Social Security, Federal Disability, Workers Comp, Federal Tort Claims, etc. It starts from about age 35 on. Some of them are taking up to 180 mg of morphine a day, prescribed by a doctor. (5 mg would knock a normal person out for 6 hours.) They are dysfunctional from narcotics addiction, and hence unemployable.

[Paul Potts]

Hunting is not a 19th century tradition - though the get-up may be. The Regulations of Charlemagne on the behaviour of the Clergy (="servi dei") are very concerned to ban clerical hunting with dogs or horses. Of course the poor would and could hunt maybe as far as the 12th Century in Britain, when it came known as "poaching", since the aristocrats owned the land. Robin Hood was guilty of poaching the King's Deer, and there are plenty of hunting clergymen in Anthony Trollope, the TV series "A Touch of Frost" and in Dorset. Perhaps the right to hunt can be restored the the poor - even foxes make tolerable eating, so I'm told.

Paulo

[Michael Bulley]

To Anthony Alcock: I've come across co-worker in British English and it's sometimes even written without the hyphen. The first time I met it like that, I thought it referred to someone who orked cows.

[Tony Francis]

In the US, "Beamer" or "Beemer" means a "BMW", as in Bavarian Motor Works car. 'He drives a Beamer" translated: "He is an up and coming Yuppie", "They are Beamers": "They want to belong to the jeunesse doree (and probably do coke and marijuana on the weekends)."
My latest Wiki article:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuance
Someone corrected spelling errors - and put it in British spelling: "favor" became "favour", "defense" became "defence" - what's up with that? He/She missed one: "color" was still "color". Egad!

I have had a mini-war over linking my articles to other articles (the "See Also" category at the bottom of the articles). I decided not to get angry. It has been amusing. On the Bracton article, "Devon" was proud to have the link, "Somerset" didn't want it, "Henry III" liked the link, but re-wrote part of the Bracton article (it was better because of it). The Bracton link to "Cnut" was discarded because there was "no relation between Cnut and Bracton", even though Bracton modified the laws of Cnut. Whatever! There was a 3 week long battle over linking to the subpoena articles. It boiled down to an argument: "Is a link to the Fourth Lateran Council article proper, even if this led to jury trials which led to subpoena?" No one seemed to know this fact. It took three weeks of multiple daily e-mails to resolve it. Good Grief! Some guy even started quoting long lists of California case law to me. I am somewhat familiar with California case law, since I went to law school in Nevada and California. What this has to do with the Fourth Lateran Council remains to be seen. Don't these Wiki editors have anything better to do?

[anthony alcock]

Dear SWF: thanks. It's happened to me so often that I've said confidently "We don't use that" only to find out later on that we do. One example is "co-worker" (Mitarbeiter), which I later discovered is common in the US. Incidentally, do you know if anyone in the UK or USA uses the expression "barkeeper": it seems to me a German hybrid formation from "barkeep" and "bartender". All information gratefully received.

[Jane]

Lucy
On Woman's Hour. (Very retro, I know). You can Listen Again on the Radio 4 website, it's right at the end of the programme so fast forward about 40 minutes.
The discussion started off with the information that the University frowns on such trivia. Intriguingly, the ladies selected to take part in the discussion mainly thought it was a good thing, and that if you've got it you should flaunt it. Make money from anything legal, was the gist, and Lily Cole (model) was also mentioned.

[PL]

Dear Anthony Alcock: Sorry about "beamer". You're perfectly right. I took it on trust, figuring it must be the technical term for that particular kind of projector. In fact, my expert informant is, like you, an ex-pat living in Germany. When I told her about the confusion, she replied:

"Oh, maybe beamer is German/Deutschlisch? It is!! I just looked it up. It is called a projector, or a video projector in English. I didn't know that either (being away from my home for rather longer than two and a half decades). Beamer is German pseudo English, like Handy for mobile phone. My apologies!"

[compassion]

Has anyone stopped to think that education, alcoholism, drug usage, language communication, voting patterns, and words like admiration and achievement become utter bullshit when people fail to care?

[SW Foska]

dear anthony,
i work and teach in your native town, although I have the bad taste to live in the Catholic diocese of Shrewsbury, which nevertheless stretches to the left bank of the Mersey even if they keep trying to close down all the churches. Here, 'beamer' means a full toss in cricket but has no place in the IT lexicon. In schools they have all kinds of gear but at the University I doubt anybody would know what a 'beamer' is,
yrs, SWF

[Lucy]

Jane - please can you point me to where you found that story?! I'm really curious - why on earth should she be in trouble? Or is this a typical media storm in a teacup about unruly Oxbridge students?

PL - Yep, got that, but the point is, sans serif might be used for dyslexics when they do have to read a text. It's recommended as easier - which I guess goes to show that we're not all as uniform as Bill Gates and the ubiquitous Times New Roman (bleugh) would like to make out ...

[Paul Potts]

And, by the way, if you really want to get high without bothering the government, I suggest you go back to Sophocles, starting with his "Antigone". Read it aloud if circumstances allow, and if you don't understand every word, keep going. Research has not revealed the malign effects on the mental health involved, but it might be better if there some.

Paulo

[Paul Potts]

Yes, Mary, quite right. But perhaps even you have to be a little cautious, where I do not. They ban beggars, they ban children on the streets, they ban hunting, they ban smoking, they ban cannabis, they ban Gay jokes. And if this and more is not enough, they seem to think that banning something solves the problem, or achieves anything other than making the job of the police even more cumbersome and their relationship with the people even more impossible. We don't want a "listening" government, whoever they think they are listening to. We need a government that can hear - "they have eyes but they cannot see, they have ears but they cannot hear" - one of the Psalms, don't know which one. If they could hear the beggars, the children, the hunters (though it's them I am concerned for, not the foxes), the people who find tobacco or cannabis useful in otherwise difficult social situations, the police, other than those they have appointed to talk to them, the homosexuals, gay or otherwise, they might take seriously their own "Human Rights" chatter - but neither Labour or New Labour had any real interest in that. It's almost enough to make me want to vote Tory next time, but that's another can of worms. Even the LibDems, of whom by the way I am a founder member, mute their voices and incline to the same register of discourse. That kind of sincerity is the first refuge of the hypocrite, especially when it betrays obvious backside-covering. Someone should have changed Blair's nappies long ago, but his spin-nurses were paid not to do so. As for Brown's underpants, I prefer not to think about them - impacted and congealed as they must be.

I have a label for the New Cromwellite Brown Party. It comes from the film "Carry on Spying", one of the best of the series. It is STENCH: Society for the Total Eradication of Non-Conforming Human Beings.

Paulo

[anthony alcock]

Dear PL: is the word "beamer" used in the UK ? I haven't lived there for about two and a half decades, so I'm a bit out of touch. I've been telling all my students here (Kassel University) that the standard English word for this piece of equipment is "projector". I'd be grateful for any information.

[Nicholas Wibberley]

These regulations precurse revolution.

[PL]

Lucy,-- The books for dyslexics were audio books. Only the reader (me) had to cope with the dense masses of sans-serif type.

With Powerpoint, however, it seems sans-serif is a must. My expert informs me:

"Powerpoint shows are normally displayed by means of a beamer. Technically that is like a monitor, except it greatly enlarges and projects the image onto a screen. The resulting poor resolution makes serifed fonts difficult to read as it swallows fine detail. . . . Computer monitors [on the other hand] don't suffer from the same coarse resolution, so serifed fonts are fine."

Utinam!

[Jane]

As this blog has gone so completely off-message, I throw in the following for consideration: no doubt the government felt it was doing the right thing. Since the only people I know who have used cannabis have mental health problems, (cause or effect, pass) or, in the younger generation, severe under-achievement problems, I think that the matter is serious enough to warrant further thought by experts (not bloggers necessarily.) This edict will ensure that the matter continues to be looked at, and can that be a bad thing?
Now, back to off-message: I heard on Radio 4 this morning that a first Year student at Mary's esteemed ivory tower is in trouble for entering the Miss Universe competition. Mary, would you care to give us an essay topic on that one?

[Tony Francis]

Why dost thou seek to confuse,
throwing out this new word, "Clerihews"?
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerihews
Maybe they are only double dactyls, this pair: Wooley Bulley and Foska is Tosca, hiding behind a pseudonym?
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl

[abc]

Yes, people who drink their drinks in pint glasses should never really go to university or indeed to school. They should stay at home with their mummies.

[Lucy]

Pl, it's interesting you mention books for the dyslexic - I always thought sans serif was meant to help dyslexics with tracking words in large chunks of text?

[Susanne]

Why not adjust the type size if you find some web pages difficult to read? It helps a lot if you are reading a screen all day. My browser automatically does this now. With Internet Explorer go to View and Text Size.

[Michael Bulley]

SW Foska
Could get an Oscar,
But a prize for clerihews
Would be quite surprising news.

[SW Foska]

I feel seriously sorry for the people reading this,
When they discover that versification is the new cannabis,
And if that doesn't rot their head,
Causing them to go brain dead,
They have to deal with some guy Bulley-ing you,
Who, without having given any consideration to the (legitimately flexible) prosody of the clerhiew,
Thinks it's cool
To stick to metres that are taught in school,
Thereby confusing difference with imperfection;
Don't imagine you've escaped detection!

[PL]

Dear SW Foska and Tony Francis--
First of all, Powerpoint slides and overheads (and picture captions) are not the question. For small blocks of text sans-serif is fine. Its clean look may even make it more attractive and more suitable for certain jobs. That's just a matter of taste.
What I'm speaking of is large blocks of dense letterpress, what printers call "body text", as in books but also in long texts for the a computer screen. Here serifs aid the reader's eye in three ways:
(1) They make it easier to distinguish characters that look almost alike: e.g. I, l, i, and 1.
(2) They provide a running horizontal moves the eye along; and, relatedly:
(3) They check the eye's tendency to go on past the ends of lines, as with the principal strokes of b, h, i, k, l, I (capital I), J, T, etc.
Of course the eye makes these adjustments automatically and one is not normally aware of them. With short blocks of farly large text no strain is normally felt. But after several minutes of reading a large block of small sans-serif type, I submit, one will feel a definite strain. I can't quote studies that confirm this-- though I'm told there have been such; I can only relate my own experience and, as I did before, invite those who doubt me to try the experiment themselves.
In my job recording talking books for the blind and dyslexic I was once given a Botany textbook printed entirely in sans-serif, The text was well organized, well written, intelligent, clear, informative-- altogether a pleasure to read, as far as content goes. After a few pages the strain of paying close attention to the sans-serif characters (our oral versions had to be word perfect) became downright painful. It was then I understood why so few books that are meant to be read seriously and with attention are printed in sans-serif. Of the several hundred I have recorded, this was, I believe, the only one set up entirely that way (it was badly produced in other respects too: leaves of cheap paper glued, not stitched, together, etc).
But don't take my word. Try reading a page or so of this blog and then a page or so of something on www.newyorker.com.

[Xjy]

I shot the sans-sheriff... - all you gotta do is override the font chosen by the webpage in question with one of your own choice (in the browser preferences). Say Georgia. And if you use Windows, god help us all, go to the display preferences and select Effects and then choose Clear Type as your preferred method of anti-aliasing display fonts. That might help.

Who'd hoist our Bulley
Up high on a pulley -
The pie-eyed painted pothead
Poetess in the agora,
Or the glutgut goatfoot godhead Gung-ho on Viagra?
No - it's fierce and fiery Foska
In his dazzling Dacian droska!

[Michael Bulley]

I liked the lines by Classicsgirl.
The feet were okey-dokey.
But Foska clearly cannot tell
An iamb from a trochee.

[SW Foska]

A course I was sent on last week recommended sans-serif fonts for Powerpoint slides, overheads and web postings. I must say I agree.

[Tony Francis]

Dear PL: Is there any evidence that sans serif is more difficult on the eyes? It seems to be more of a personal choice to me. I used type exclusively in New Times Roman, because that was the default on Word Perfect. Then, a few years ago, I switched to Arial. Now New TImes Roman looks archaic (to me). I don't have an opinion about Georgia.
http://blog.extensis.com/?
http://blog.extensis.com/?p=982

[PL]

Dear Mary: I put your plea of helplessness in the matter of fonts to my expert advisor, who replied:

"The font is defined in a stylesheet and that may (or may not) reside on the server. If it does she probably isn't able to get at it. But the Internet Person at TLS surely can. If it isn't on the server she can change it - but of course she'd have to know how."

I suspect it is the Internet Person who is responsible. Please try to persuade him or her that an ordinary body-text font (e.g. Times or, even better, Georgia) will be just as handsome and fashionable, and many times easier on the eyes, than the sans-serif font you presently use. There is abundant evidence, confirmed by anyone's experience, that serifs make for easier reading of dense bodies of text.

[SW Foska]

Someone should haul Michael Bulley
To a great height with a pulley;
It's the least he deserves -
His pedantry gets on my nerves.

[classicsgirl]

Let's all encourage Michael B
To recognise a pun.
'Autres' - 'voters'; can't you see
It's just a bit of fun.

[Tony Francis]

People using marijuana are denied a liver tranplant because marijuana use is indicative of an addictive personality disorder. Substance abusers are uniformly denied organ transplants. All drug abusers are liars. You can take it to the bank.

[Michael Bulley]

Let's all encourage Mary Beard
To write her French correcter.
The verb is ‘voter' - hardly weird,
But the folk are called électeurs.

[Jackie]

I am always a bit wary of an argument that starts 'A is not as dangerous as B therefore A is okay. It's a bit like saying 'An ordinary bomb is not as dangerous as an atom bomb, therefore it's okay to drop one.I don't have any first hand experience of cannabis (I was at a very staid all girl boarding school in the 50's so it was not available!) but I do like my glass of wine. This does not mean I approve of 24 hour licencing, or disapprove of the upgrading of the drug. What I do think, however, is that the government decisions on alcohol and cannabis owe more to government panic than any logical thinking. And that really does worry me.

[Mary]

PL. I like a seriff or two, too. But I dont think I CAN change the font!!

[sunil jain]

Drug abuse in older times was far worse!

[Patrick]

I like the comment regarding 'whiskey in a pint glass.' I tend to shake my head at these things, as I find the belligerent drunken guy starting fights with the general population to be a tad more threatening than a guy sitting at home with a spliff giggling at reruns of The Rockford Files, then probably falling asleep.

I wonder where they're going to send all of these new 'criminals' as all of the prisons seem to be filled. Reintroduce penal colonies for these foul villains, perhaps?

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing they're going to do is ban couples from holding hands in public...

Enjoyed your article. Look forward to reading more.

Patrick

[Errol Dunkley]

It reminds me rather of Tiberius' view of the criminalisation of luxury as portrayed in Tacitus. If you criminalise something that everyone does then criminalisation loses its force. can we make this comparison?

What about drug use in the ancient world?

[PL]

Three instances of the criminal craziness of the War on Drugs in the U.S. are reported in Hendrik Hertzberg's penultimate posting:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2008/05/drug-war-bullet.html

After reading it, please note how easy on the eyes the body-text (seriffed) font is.

[Lucy]

'Of course the big bogey of the moment is skunk. Apparently this is much stronger than what Mums and Dads used to smoke in the 1970s, and so much more dangerous. But as the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs observes, that may well mean that kids use less of it.

Come to think of it when I have a whisky, I don’t put it in a pint glass.'

Yes ... but sadly it's well known that us evil young things do put whiskey in pint glasses, so why would we suddenly decide to smoke skunk in elegant inch-long doobies?

[Mary]

country girls, richard..

[Richard]

It's a case of the politician's syllogism:

We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.

I'm not in the least dismayed by Prof. Beard's pothead past. But hunting?!

ATB,
Richard