Have I lost my bet?
Regular readers of this page - (pause: cue sound effect of distant crickets chirruping) - might recall an earlier post about the strange case of Mr. Graeme Angus, who had a letter published in the Melbourne Age, about a friend of his who innocently took some sunset happy snaps of a major oil refinery, in the bayside town of Geelong, and who had police on his doorstep within hours, warning him off any such photography.
In that post, I offered to bet my favourite Christmas present that the Age, for all its tub-thumping about Howard's fascist anti-terror laws, would not follow up this frankly implausible story.
In response to an enquiry, I received a very courteous and cordial reply from one of the Age's editors, advising me that they have indeed been looking further into this story, and plan to publish a follow-up report early next week. Have I lost my bet? It looks like it. As I didn't make the bet with anyone in particular, and as I doubt the editor of the Age would have much use for my present, the best course seems to make a donation - equivalent in monetary value - to an impeccable charity, such as the Red Cross.
Still, it'll be cheap at the price to have my curiosity satisfied, which is sharper than ever, given the editor's comment that there are:
In the meantime, I'll offer some wise words on wagers as a dialectical circuit-breaker, from one of my favourite books, The Age of Scandal (1950), T. H. White's riveting anecdotal history of Eighteenth Century England:
'Our ancestors were men of their hands' said G. M. Trevelyan, 'who regarded a duel as the natural issue of a quarrel, and a bet as the most authoritative solution of an argument.' They did not find it convenient 'to spend twenty minutes in confuting a man who had so little faith in his own view that he would not back it with twenty guineas'. The wager was, according to this historian, a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or a cutting of the Gordian knot in controversy.
Regular readers of this page - (pause: cue sound effect of distant crickets chirruping) - might recall an earlier post about the strange case of Mr. Graeme Angus, who had a letter published in the Melbourne Age, about a friend of his who innocently took some sunset happy snaps of a major oil refinery, in the bayside town of Geelong, and who had police on his doorstep within hours, warning him off any such photography.
In that post, I offered to bet my favourite Christmas present that the Age, for all its tub-thumping about Howard's fascist anti-terror laws, would not follow up this frankly implausible story.
In response to an enquiry, I received a very courteous and cordial reply from one of the Age's editors, advising me that they have indeed been looking further into this story, and plan to publish a follow-up report early next week. Have I lost my bet? It looks like it. As I didn't make the bet with anyone in particular, and as I doubt the editor of the Age would have much use for my present, the best course seems to make a donation - equivalent in monetary value - to an impeccable charity, such as the Red Cross.
Still, it'll be cheap at the price to have my curiosity satisfied, which is sharper than ever, given the editor's comment that there are:
"initial difficulties of substantiating the story and some contradictoryI'll bet there are.
information which we need to iron out"
In the meantime, I'll offer some wise words on wagers as a dialectical circuit-breaker, from one of my favourite books, The Age of Scandal (1950), T. H. White's riveting anecdotal history of Eighteenth Century England:
'Our ancestors were men of their hands' said G. M. Trevelyan, 'who regarded a duel as the natural issue of a quarrel, and a bet as the most authoritative solution of an argument.' They did not find it convenient 'to spend twenty minutes in confuting a man who had so little faith in his own view that he would not back it with twenty guineas'. The wager was, according to this historian, a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or a cutting of the Gordian knot in controversy.
posted by cuckoo at
9:07 PM
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