Free the children!

Here's something to chew on, via Mirabilis:

Ute Navidi, who heads a British children's charity called London Play, was walking along a Berlin street, on a break from an international conference, when she stopped to watch a group of primary schoolchildren in the schoolyard. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. "If this was London they would have called in search- and-rescue," says Navidi. "Or the health inspector would have come in and shut the place down." Young German kids were chopping wood with axes and mixing soups in a cauldron over an open flame. Children who looked like kindergarteners were manoeuvring kayaks on their own in a large pond while the adults chatted on the sidelines. The scene got Navidi worried -- and not for those kids. The risks the German children were learning to manage far surpassed anything schoolchildren in her city were doing.

In Britain, as in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere, an overwhelming concern for safety -- along with a desire to safeguard against child-injury litigation -- has completely altered the landscape of kids' activities over the past 20 years. . .

But recently, a growing number of people have reached an epiphany similar to Navidi's: despite our best intentions to protect children, our actions have produced the opposite effect. Studies are showing that kids have become less capable, less self-reliant -- essentially, more vulnerable to harm. . .

And kids spend more time with parents -- eight hours more with their mothers and four more with fathers -- compared with 1981. The radius of play of the average nine-year-old has shrunk to one-ninth of what it was in 1970.

Read the rest in Macleans.

ADDENDUM: I wish we all had urban spaces like that described in Berlin. We do a pretty good job during summertime in taking our kids where they can run wildish, and in our Providence neighborhood the kids are allowed to play outdoors with an independence unusual for American children nowadays. Nonetheless, our playgrounds are pretty much like playgrounds everywhere, with not a cauldron or an axe to be seen. This article did provoke a flashback, however, to the scene c. 1963 in Seven Up (repeated in part in all the subsequent "Up" films) where the then-seven-year-olds are taken together to a London play park which by modern standards takes your breath away: not just the conventional playground hardware, but the piles of scrap wood with which some of the boys busily set to building a playhouse.

Pompidou apology

The Pompidou Centre yesterday admitted responsibility for the destruction of two works of art that fell off its walls and smashed to pieces. The pieces on loan from America were part of a four-month exhibition of Californian artists called Los Angeles 1955-1985. . .

An investigation was launched after Untitled, a 1971 resin work worth £22,000 resembling a black bar measuring 8ft high by 5ins wide, by Santa-Monica-based artist Peter Alexander, fell off the wall during the night, a few hours after it was hung just before the show opened in March. The second work was Untitled Wall Relief by fellow US artist Craig Kauffman, created in 1967 of acrylic lacquer on a Plexiglass mould more than 4ft by 6ft, and worth £48,000. It dropped and shattered before the show closed in July.

Both pieces were damaged beyond repair. Full article in the Guardian.

Saliera postscript

And a strange one it is:

THE thief who made off with one of Benvenuto Cellini’s most valuable artworks got a trifle arrogant. He sent his police pursuers a text message: “Thank you for your efforts. We will get back to you shortly.”

It was enough to trace Robert Mang’s telephone, and yesterday the man known as a “gentleman thief” received four years in jail for stealing the 16th-century golden salt cellar sculpted by the Italian master. . .

Tears flowed from Mang’s eyes as sentence was pronounced by Judge Walter Stockhammer. But that did not stop almost a hundred women from surging towards the convicted art thief from the public gallery of the Vienna court.

Mang, 51, the owner of a security company, has become a celebrity in Austria. More than a thousand women have sent him letters in prison, many enclosing photographs of themselves in bikinis, and fan websites have been set up.

From the Times of London.

Pyramids in Ukraine?

We shall see; read about it in the BBC and the Guardian:

Archaeologists in Ukraine have unearthed the remains of an ancient pyramidal structure that pre-dates those in Egypt by at least 300 years. The stone foundations of the structure, which probably resembled Aztec and Mayan ziggurats in South America, were discovered near the eastern city of Lugansk.

It is thought they were laid about five millennia ago during the early Bronze Age by animists who worshipped a sun god. The "pyramid" is in fact a complex of temples and sacrificial altars topping a sculpted hillside with steps on its sides.

"The Man Who Fed the World"

Who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970? You may be forgiven for not remembering, given some of the prize's dubious recipients over the years (e.g., Yasser Arafat). Well, then: Who has saved perhaps more lives than anyone else in history? The answer to both questions is, of course, Norman Borlaug.

Who? Norman Borlaug, 92, is the father of the "Green Revolution," the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. He is now the subject of an admiring biography by Leon Hesser, a former State Department official who first met Mr. Borlaug 40 years ago in Pakistan, where they worked together to boost that country's grain production. "The Man Who Fed the World" describes, in a workmanlike way, how a poor Iowa farm boy trained in forestry and plant pathology came to be one of humanity's greatest benefactors.

From the Wall Street Journal. Order the biography here. Why aren't they teaching about Norman Borlaug in our schools? When we can't celebrate real heroes, what does that say about us?

Manuscript scrap found

Despite the breathless writeup, this sounds like nothing of great import. I wasn't going to post on it until a reader asked me about it:

Historians working in the library of a Benedictine monastery in Rajhrad near the city of Brno have made an extraordinary discovery. By accident they found a fragment of a manuscript most likely dating as far back as the 8th century. If its age and origin are indeed confirmed, the fragment will be treasured as one of two oldest documents owned by cultural institutions in Moravia.

While this may be a welcome discovery for Moravians, calling the fragment "priceless" is way off the mark. Though the possible early date is a plus, tiny scraps of medieval manuscripts are far from rare.

Octagonal Roman bathhouse found in Kent

An archaeological dig in Kent has turned up a Roman bathhouse described as "totally unique" for the county.

The remains of the 5th Century building were uncovered in a field in Faversham by students working with the Kent Archaeological Field School. . .

Dr Wilkinson said: "There's unique shapes in it, there's a hexagon plunge bath in the centre, there would have been two storeys, there's a fountain in the centre of it.

"This really is very exotic and sophisticated architecture."

From the BBC. Sounds reminiscent of early Christian baptistery planning -- though I would expect the identification as a bath could be quite firmly established by the presence of underfloor heating.

Farewell, my pharaoh

Downtown Cairo did not sleep last Friday night. Its streets were enlivened with the scene of a huge carnival, with hundred of thousands of Cairenes leaving their homes to line the pavements and bridges as they bade farewell to the red granite colossus of the 19th-dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II. The colossus, the central point of Bab Al-Hadid Square since 1954, was now making the overnight journey to its new home at the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) overlooking the Giza Plateau.

As the 'royal' cavalcade rolled through the streets, where thousands of policemen were deployed in a bid to form a cordon allowing for the safe passage of the convoy, people stood at their windows and balconies waving, clapping, whistling and ululating to greet the pharaoh, while others climbed buses, cars and buildings trying to catch the last glimpse of this familiar downtown landmark. As he passed the Qasr Al-Dubara Church in Qasr Al-Aini Street, the church bell rang to salute the great king. "Ramses, Ramses, we are going to miss you!" "Grandfather, where are you going when you leave us?" "Love you, love you Ramses!" the people cried at every stage of Ramses's final journey to the GEM, where, it is hoped, he will spend the rest of his days.

From Al-Ahram. Pre-move post here.

Goudstikker Jordaens at Ulster Museum?

The Ulster Museum was last night at the centre of a probe into a famous painting that's suspected of being plundered by Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering.

Leading art detective Clemens 'Fifty Per Cent' Toussaint is set to travel to Belfast in a bid to establish if the museum's most prized Flemish painting - St Christopher Carrying The Christ Child - was stolen by Hitler's right-hand man during the Second World War.

Full story here.