The Angry Exile: Too much time on someone's hands

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Thursday, 16 June 2011

Too much time on someone's hands

It's the only reason I can think of for this:

Academics have carried out a detailed analysis of the 700 head injuries suffered by characters in the Asterix comic books, in a paper published by a respected medical journal.

FFS.

The German scientists ...

We'll take the unkind jokes about the German sense of humour as read, shall we?

The German scientists calculated that the “plucky little Gaul” and his sidekick Obelix were responsible for causing more than half of the wounds, “under the influence of a doping agent called ‘the magic potion’”, with Roman soldiers their most common victims.

Oh noes, violence and performance enhancing drugs. Oh, the humanity! These are going to be a bunch of head doctors wringing their hands about desensitisation of violence, right?

Wrong.

[The] paper, published in the official journal of the European Association of Neurosurgical Socities, known as Acta Neurochirurgica, sets out with no apparent irony their aim to “analyse the epidemiology and specific risk factors of traumatic brain injury in the Asterix illustrated comic books”.

I really thought it was going to be trick cyclicts but it turns out to be a different sort of head doctor. And that raises a question: for a bunch of neuro-surgeons what the fuck is the point of this?

By “screening” all 34 books, the authors found 704 cases of head or brain injury, all but six suffered by men.
[...]
In 696 cases “blunt force” was used but eight people were strangled and six suffered a fall.

What did they expect to learn?

They found that many of those who were knocked out in the 34 books, more commonly enjoyed by schoolboys than neurosurgeons, were often left with an outstretched tongue or amnesia but none appeared to die.
The researchers, led by Marcel Kamp at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, conclude: “The favourable outcome is astonishing, since outcome of traumatic brain injury in the ancient world is believed to have been worse than today and also since no diagnostic or therapeutic procedures were performed.”

Okay, you got me there. They learned that cartoon France of 2,000 years ago did not perform many CAT scans. Some might think it's a bit short on applicability to the real world in 2011, not to mention being a fucking a priori conclusion in the first place, but I'll give 'em credit for this astonishing discovery.

However the paper notes: “No case of death or a permanent neurological deficit following traumatic brain injury has been found.”
Most of those attacked were wearing helmets at the time but the “vast majority” lost this protective barrier “during the traumatic event”.

Okay, so we can also conclude that wearing a funny little tin hat with horns or wings on can protect you from being smashed on the head with a large rock by enormously fat or extremely short Frenchmen providing that you are also a fucking cartoon character. My my, these useful insights just fucking pile up, don't they?

In a comment piece, Karl Schaller, a neurosurgeon at the University of Geneva, describes the Asterix comics as “very important” in European history and adds: “Fighting against pretension of hegemony by the bad guys – be it on land or on water – has never been illustrated in a more decent, ironical [sic] and sometimes hilarious manner.
“Most interestingly, according to the analysis provided by this paper, it was not that dangerous either, given the low rate of serious injuries.”

Okay, we all get that this is not serious and nobody expects to get any useful new information about diagnosing or treating head injuries, but is it really that interesting that analysing the Asterix books finds that hardly anybody gets badly hurt by things that would be lethal in real life? How exactly is it interesting, and for that matter how is it research as opposed to the kind of amusing list-making exercises that you find on the interwebs? As far as I can see the only difference is that this got published in a medical journal. That it got published, not to mention the fact that it got started, makes me wonder if a few people there have suffered a crack on the head. What's next week, an analysis of the mechanism of magical spells in the Harry Potter books conducted by the physics department of Imperial College and published in the journals of the Royal Society?

'Kinell.