Princess of Wales, Prince of Camelot by Ian Cooper

 

As the flowers piled up on North Moore St. in TriBeCa, an occasional motif of the past couple of weeks has been the casual comparison of Dianna, Princess of Wales, and John F. Kennedy Jr., both in their lives and the public reactions to their untimely deaths.

Indeed, there are striking parallels. But there are striking differences too, which give some insight into the contrast between the political cultures of Britain and the United States. For those readers who are weary of the already excessive coverage of JFK Jr.’s death (having reached a point of Grief Fatigue, “closure”, or both) I beg your indulgence while we engage in a bit of pop hagiography.

First, their lives. The similarities are obvious: they were both beautiful, enormously privileged, pursued by paparazzi, and from famous families (though Diana had married into hers). They both had an admirable devotion to charitable causes. They were both in their late thirties, and had seemed to arrive at a time in their lives where they had come into their own (for JFK Jr. this coincided with marriage; for Diana, it came after divorce).

Moreover, they were, and are, both “iconic” in that their images took on a life of their own, upon which their admirers could impose their own meaning and interpretation. And of course, their deaths inspired high public reactions, partly but not wholly media-generated, which were vastly disproportionate to their actual significance as historical figures. But despite these similarities, Diana’s appeal in Britain was very different from JFK Jr.’s appeal in the United States.

In life, Diana was a divisive figure. After her divorce, she came to represent the “modern” values of empathy, glamour, and female independence over the traditional values of self-discipline (the proverbial stiff upper lip), deference, and duty. She was loved by those in the broad middle of British opinion, including celebrity-worshippers, moderate feminists, and monarchy-reformers; but she was disliked by those on the extremes, both on the right (old-line monarchists) and the left (hard-core republicans and feminists).

JFK Jr., by contrast was Apple Pie – a universally liked, non-polarizing figure. This is because, despite all the talk about his “promise” or “potential”, his appeal was grounded in nostalgia – a yearning for the era of his father’s presidency, perceived by Americans (for reasons many non-Americans do not fully understand) to be something of a lost Golden Age. If JFK Jr. had lived to go into politics, he no doubt would have had supporters and detractors; but in his prepolitical state, still basking in the glow of his father, he was disliked by no one.

What made Diana contentious in life made her contentious in death. When Britons laid flowers en masse for Diana, it was in fact a political act; they were insisting not only that Diana was an important public figure, but that she should be mourned in the “modern” – that is, spontaneous and demonstrative – style she embodied. This spilled over into the question of whether she was worthy of official symbols of public mourning (flying the flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, the trappings of a state funeral) and – most bizarrely – the demand that the royal family mourn more conspicuously (one tabloid headline exhorted the reserved Queen, “Show Us You Care, Ma’am”).

During that hysterical week between the death and the funeral, most Britons participated in the public mood, while a minority fumed quietly about the “grief police” who had enforced that mood; in that charged atmosphere, apathy was not an option. There was a performative aspect to the public grief; people felt genuine sorrow, but they also seemed to need to prove themselves capable of an emotional outburst.

The reaction in America to JFK Jr.’s death was reserved by comparison, without the complex emotional turmoil of the Diana aftermath. The makeshift shrine on the TriBeCa sidewalk was positively tiny in comparison to the remarkable cellophane sea that had covered the grounds of Kensington Palace. Whereas hundreds turned out for JFK Jr.’s public and private memorial services, tens of thousands had crowded into Hyde Park and lined the funeral route for Diana. Depending on their temperament, Americans no doubt felt a range of personal feelings, varying from apathy to great sorrow, but they had nothing to prove through a collective expression of grief.

However, there was one disturbing aspect of the mourning for JFK Jr.: it was the tendency to refer to him as America’s version of a “crown prince” (which, to his credit, JFK Jr. Did not cultivate). The U.S., which most of the time is profoundly democratic country, for some reason turns to mush when it comes to the Kennedys, expressing a romantic longing for a dashing leader to sweep them off their feet. This notion, which would be offensive if it were not ridiculous, implies not only a hereditary regal entitlement – that the Presidency would have been his for the asking – but the even more pernicious idea that the nation does not govern itself but requires an anointed leader.

So if I had to draw a conclusion about the public reactions to these deaths, it would be this. The whole collective psychodrama after Diana’s death revealed that Britons could be, as a people, emotionally dysfunctional in mourning a beloved public figure. Americans, by contrast, reacted to JFK.

Jr.’s death with sorrow but not hysteria, showing themselves to be more well-adjusted emotionally. On the other hand, because Britain long ago had the sense to separate princes (and princesses) from politics, the effect of Diana’s death was played out solely on a mass emotional level, with nothing important – either politically or constitutionally – ultimately at stake. The American experience of the last two weeks was more politically revealing; it showed that even a nation which was rejected monarchy might still yearn for a prince.

In short, Britons are at times emotionally dysfunctional but have a well-adjusted relationship with their political leaders, whereas Americans are emotionally well-adjusted but at times have a dysfunctional relationship with their political leaders.

 

C

 

35 Fun Things to do When Driving

 

1. Have a friend ride in the back seat. Gagged.

2. Roll down your windows and blast talk radio. Headbang.

3. Wear snorkel gear and hang fish around from the ceiling.

4. Two words: Chicken suit.

5. Write the words “Help me” on your back window in red paint. The more it looks like blood, the better.

6. Pay the toll for the car behind you. Watch in rearview mirror as toll collector tries to explain to next driver.

7. Laugh. Laugh a lot. A whooooole lot.

8. Stop at the green lights.

9. Go at the red ones.

10. Occasionally wave a stuffed animal/troll doll/ Barbie out your window or sunroof. Feel free to make it dance.

11. Eat food that requires silverware.

12. Put your arms down the legs of an extra pair of trousers, put sneakers on your hands, and lean the seat back as you drive.

13. At stoplights, eye the person in the next car suspiciously. With a look of fear, suddenly lock your doors.

14. Honk frequently without motivation.

15. Wave at people often. If they wave back, offer an offended and angry look as if they gave you an obscene gesture.

16. At stoplights, ask people if they have any Grey Poupon.

17. Let pedestrians know who’s boss.

18. Look behind you frequently, with a very paranoid look.

19. Restart your car at every stoplight.

20. Hang numerous car-fresheners in the rear-view mirror. Talk to them, stroking them lovingly.

21. Lob burning things in the windows of smokers who throw their butts out the window.

22. Keep at least five cats in the car.

23. Squeegee your windshield at every stop.

24. If an firetruck comes up behind you, pull over, get on the roof of your car, and do a cheer for them as they pass!

25. Compliment other drivers on their skill and finesse.

26. Have conversations, looking periodically at the passenger seat, when driving alone.

27. Stop and collect roadkill.

28. Stop and pray for roadkill.

29. Stop and cook roadkill. (If in Tennessee.)

30. Throw Spam. Tape signs on windows protesting email abuse.

31. Get in the fast lane and gradually… slow… down… to… a stop. Then get out and watch the cars.

32. Vary your vehicle’s speed inversely with the speed limit.

33. Drive off an exit ramp, ask for directions to the town you’re in. When they tell you you’re there, look confused, glance at your map, laugh, and exclaim, “Oh! Wrong state!”

34. Sing without having the radio on.

35. At stoplights, run out of your car, place pylons around you, then gather them back up as the light changes and drive off…

 

Неологизмы

 

Переведите следующие предложения, определив самостоятельно значение выделенных слов и выражений:

 

1. The German High Command planned a lightning war against the Soviet Union with view to crush the Red army within few weeks after the beginning of hostilities, but this proved to be a fatal blunder of the German strategy. 2. US land and naval forces operated under strong air umbrella, which accounts for much lighter losses as compared with Iraqis. 3. Prefabs are generally used instead of conventional building material when rapid erection of houses is required. 4. In the atomic burst, it is the fall-out that is no less harmful for both people and material than the blast and flash burn hazards. 5. A big four-decked merchantman was shored by a heavy storm a few days ago off the Cape Horn. 6. Both A-bomb and H-bomb are the weapons of mass destruction and therefore we insist on stopping all A-tests and H-tests. 7. It was a handsome man; he clerked at some forwarding department and roomed a very small lodging not far from his office. 8. Nadya Pryakhina, a well-known chute jumper, is particularly keen on delayed jumps; today she has made her second delay-drop of 15 seconds. 9. London busmen went on strike demanding the 15 shillings-a-week increase of pay. 10. Several leaders of the strike were clubbed and then questionized at the police station. 11. Scientists developed new weapons for aircraft, particularly air-to-air and air-to - surface atomic missiles. 12. Before World War II distinct signs of westernization were clearly visible in the educational system of India.

 

Практикум

А

А TWO-DIMENSIONAL ATOM GAS (2DAG) has been optically trapped for the first time. Two-dimensional arrays of particles are rare: 2-dimensional electron gases (2DEG) are at the heart of the quantum Hall effect, and planar sprinklings of atoms at the surface of a superfluid have been studied. But only now have physicists been able to trap atoms in a quasi-2-dimensional pancake only 200 nm thick about 800 nm above a gold substrate. Harald Gauck and his colleagues at the University of Konstanz use a battery of lasers to cool and confine argon atoms in what is essentially a planar resonant cavity for atom waves. By shaping the local light fields, the researchers hope to fashion planar structures such as miniaturized atom interferometers and even one-dimensional atom waveguides. The planar gas of argon atoms is not dense enough to fall into a Bose-Einstein condensate, but the Konstanz optics setup might lend itself to achieving eventually a 2D condensate.

 

THE NEOLITHIC TRANSITION IN EUROPE. Human behavior is much more complicated than the behavior of atoms, liquids, or planets. Nevertheless, physicists and mathematicians have attempted to apply their equations in the social sphere; recent examples recounted in Physics News Update include such topics as the arms race, economics, bird flocking, and the making of group decisions. Now two Spanish physicists, have applied diffusion/reaction equations – governing, say, the diffusion of one fluid through another with due allowance for chemical reactions along the way – to the diffusion of agricultural technology into Europe in the early centuries of the Neolithic epoch roughly 10,000 years ago. Such an effort had been tried before, but the model predictions poorly matched the observed anthropological, linguistic, and genetic data. According to Joaquim Fort of the University of Girona, a much better match can be achieved by using equations with additional “time-delay” terms of the type used successfully to model the spread of forest fires and epidemics. In the case of human migration a time delay factor would reflect the fact that generally the offspring of migrating farmers must grow to adulthood before they themselves “diffuse” outwards. Fort believes that mathematical modeling will become even more important to anthropology and history, but only in concert with high-quality data from fieldwork.

 

RELATIVISTIC SLEIGH RIDE. The December 11 issue of Fermi News seeks to answer the perennial question of how Santa Claus can, in the course of a single night, deliver gifts to each of the world’s 2 billion children. Even if a full-scale quantum computer were to work out the optimum course plan St.Nick must still cover a flight path of some 160 million km and stop at 800 million homes along the way. How does he do it? By traveling at close to the speed of light, of course, which, incidentally, also explains why (thanks to time dilation) Santa never seems to age. The Fermi News article helpfully addresses such questions as to how it is that the fat fellow can fit into Lorentz-contracted chimneys in the first place and how one can determine the color of the Doppler-shifted light emitted by Rudolph-the-rednosed-reindeer at sleigh velocities approaching the speed of light.

 

WIRE-GUIDED ATOMS. The development of “atom optics” is part of the effort to store, guide, focus, reflect, and perform calculations with atoms in analogy with the ways electrons are used in electronics and photons in photonics. In a new innovation cold lithium atoms from a magneto-optic trap (MOT) were nudged in the direction of a thin current-carrying wire. Although the atoms are neutral, they still feel the magnetic force field, which can be used to send the atoms in two types of trajectory. In one case the atoms spiral in “Kepler” like orbits around and along the wire. In the second case the use of an extra field helps to create a “potential tube” parallel to the wire in which the atoms are guided along the side of the wire. This second guide is especially interesting since the wires can be mounted on a surface, allowing for easy miniaturization of these guides and traps. Physicists at the University of Innsbruck expect that this will allow them to design guides and traps for cold atoms with a variety of different geometries. These can be used to manipulate atoms from Bose-Einstein condensates, or serve as beam splitters or interferometers for guided atoms. Even more complicated integrated atom optics devices and networks, similar to integrated circuits for electrons, can be devised. Some mesoscopic experiments, which now use electrons in solids, might, with this new atom optics tool, be able to use guided atoms moving above a surface.

 

HOLOGRAMS OF TRANSISTOR INTERIORS can provide maps of electrostatic potentials in that crucial zone beneath the transistor’s gate, where the passage of electrons from emitter to drain can be made difficult or easy, just as a water tap can switch a faucet on and off. Why are such maps necessary? “Within a decade, integrated circuits will consist of transistors 150 atoms long and 50 atoms deep,” according to researchers at the Institute for Semiconductor Physics in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and knowledge of the precise whereabouts of dopant atoms will be vital. To this end, the Frankfurt scientists can now produce a subsurface sectional map of the transistor. Electron waves from a transmission electron microscope (in which the quantum wavelike properties of electrons are more important than their particle properties) pass through the thin transistor, where they scatter slightly. These waves are recombined with some unscattered electron waves to form a holographic signal, which encodes in formation about local conditions throughout the section. The electron data can be processed into 2-dimensional images with 10-nm resolution and high sensitivity.

 

A SINGLE-PHOTON TURNSTILE, a device in which photons are emitted one at a time under controlled circumstances, has been created by a team of scientists form Stanford (US), Hamamatsu Photonics (Japan), and NTT (Japan). Essentially the researchers use the quantization of electrical conductance to produce a quantization of photon emission. They put together a quantum well (the frontier between two thin semiconductor layers) containing a single electron (other electrons are dissuaded from entering because of a “Coulomb blockade” effect) with a quantum well containing a lone (comparably Coulomb blockaded) hole, and then cycle the voltage across the whole stack of layers in such a way that the lone electron and lone hole meet, mate, and make a lone photon. The resulting device, which operates at mK temperatures, is typically a tiny post some 700 nm tall and with a diameter of 200-1000 nm.

 

B

‘We did not hang around to see if the gun worked’

 

John Aglionby in Dili

Saturday September 4, 1999

 

The sound of the smack across my friend’s face echoed like a gunshot. I whipped round to see her clutching her left ear and a fiery man shouting at her: “Get out you foreign dog.”

This appeared to be a signal to the six man with him to attack us, five journalists investigating an attack by pro-Jakarta militias yesterday morning on the pro-independence suburb of Becora in the East Timor capital, Dili. Another man pulled out a pistol. It was only a homemade gun but we did not hang around to see if it would work. Should I have left with the journalists who at that moment were packing their bags to evacuate on a BBC charter flight?

Several of the militiamen followed us briefly but, thankfully, made no serious attempt to prevent our escape. Even more passive were the dozen members of the police’s crack mobile brigade, all armed with automatic rifles and bayonets. The officers made no attempt to intervene at any time: they did nothing when the militiamen barged though their ranks, heading for us, or when the assault began.

The words of UN spokesman David Wimhurst ran through my mind. “The performance of the Indonesian police has been totally inadequate since polling day.”

That was Monday, when 98.6% of East Timorese adults voted, mostly peacefully, on whether to remain part of Indonesia or choose independence.

Since then peace has been hard to find anywhere in the former Portuguese colony, invaded by Indonesia in 1975.

I last left Dili on Wednesday afternoon, to go to the village of Hera 10 miles away, where four people were reportedly killed by militiamen.

The local people described how the militiamen pulled four graduates of the local polytechnic from their car the previous day and took them away. Ten hours later they were dead. The one man who saw the assault is now in hiding, nursing a smashed head and broken arm.

 

Hate campaign

 

Far right sets sights on Brandenburg

 

Ian Traynor in Berlin

Saturday September 4, 1999

“No more money for foreigners”; “Don’t let the bigshots make a pig of you”; “German money for German workers.”

In hundreds of thousands of posters, these neo-Nazi messages of hate and rage are plastered everywhere in the small, depressed east German state of Brandenburg ahead of tomorrow’s election – a vote that threatens to inflict a humiliating defeat on Chancellor Gerhard Schruder’s governing Social Democrats.

The vote could also see the neo-fascists entering the state parliament in Potsdam for the first time since Germany’s unification almost a decade ago.

The mass poster and mailshot campaign is the work of a reclusive millionaire Munich publisher and neo-Nazi leader, Gerhard Frey, who has spent almost J1m in Brandenburg in hopes of repeating last year’s stunning success in taking 13% of the vote in neighboring Saxony-Anhalt.

Mr Frey’s political vehicle is the DVU, or German People’s Union, a phantom political outfit that exists purely by his grace and favor. Its campaign features no public rallies, no debating, no manifestos, and few public faces. Just posters and letters. Yet, pollsters say that the DVU is hovering near the 5% threshold needed to enter the state legislature.

The neo-Nazi vote is notoriously hard to gauage, but Brandenbur is fertile ground for the extreme right – at least 20% of its 2.6 m people are unemployed, there is widespread hostility to foreigners, and the state has the worst record in Germany for racist violence.

Its interior minister, Alwin Ziel, reported this week that so far this year there have been 33 acts of serious violence, many of them against immigrants. When councilors in the town of Farstenwalde stood in silence to mark the death of an Algerian asylum-seeker who was hounded to his death by skinheads, the neo-Nazi councilor, Danilo Wilke, remained seated, nonchalantly reading the extremist German Voice. Most of the state’s 56,000 foreigners stay in after dark and avoid public transport.

“Unfortunately, xenophobia here has become routine,” said Brandenburg’s prime minister, Manfred Stolpe, the regional baron for Mr Shruder’s SPD.

Mr Stolpe has abandoned hope of retaining the 54% majority he seized in 1994, and if the neo-Nazis surmount the 5% hurdle he will, at best, have to seek a coalition partner.

The neo-Nazis” electoral chances are usually hurt by bickering and splintering of their constituency between the three main vehicles – the DVU, the Republicans, and the National Democratic Party, which marshals the skinheads and street bullies.

But this time n Brandenburg, the DVU and the Republicans have a pact that the Republicans will stand down.

“We will succeed in defeating the far-right extremists if all the democratic parties pool their efforts,” said Mr Ziel, a Social Democrat.

But there is little chance of that. The Christian Democrat opposition leader, Jurg Schunbohm, has even been fishing for the neo-Nazi vote himself.

 

ВЫБОР ЛЕКСИЧЕСКОГО ВАРИАНТА

УПРАЖНЕНИЯ

I. Руководствуясь контекстом, найдите в словаре нужные значения выделенных слов и переведите предложения:

А

 

Electric power can easily be transferred over long-distance from the power -plant.

The important task of preserving peace lies mainly with the Great Powers.

As long as the Conservative Party remains in power in England no betterment of living conditions for the working class there can be expected since this Party is not in power to solve the most pressing economic problems of the day.

5 to the second power is equal to 25.

 

B

 

An electromotive force is produced when a conductor cuts magnetic lines of force.

The peace proposals of our delegation were in line with the peaceful policy of the Russian Government.

The Iraqi Government took a strong line in its negotiations with the Western Powers.

I know by heart many lines of Pushkin’s works, especially his lyric poems.

 

C

 

Under the influence of heat the substance passed from a solid into a liquid state.

The artificial satellite appeared over Moscow at 6.50 a.m. and then quickly passed out of sight.

Our ship passed the Suez Canal at noon.

The Conference passed a resolution calling for the immediate banning of nuclear tests.

The student successfully passed all his examinations.

 

II. Руководствуясь контекстом, установите значение глагола to get в каждом отдельном случае и переведите текст:

HOW I GOT THE TICKET

 

(В данном тексте подобраны выражения с использованием глагола to get.)

 

As soon as I had got your letter in which you were asking me to get a ticket for “Hamlet,” I got on horseback and went to town. Before I got there, I had to get across the river. I got wet through and I have got such a cold that I shall not be able to get rid of it in a week or so. Having got to the town I first of all got shaved and dressed and then got into the booking office to get a ticket for the play.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get the ticket that very evening; however I got to know there that I should most likely get one the next morning.

I got out and went home. As soon as I got there, I got my supper and then got to bed.

I got up at 7 o’clock in the morning, got my breakfast and then got myself dressed that I might get out in time to get the ticket.

After I have got it into the tram and about 10 o’clock I got home.

So I got through with your errand; I have got the desired ticket, which you may get at any time you like.

 

Практикум

А

 

ZERO-POINT MOTION IN A BOSE-EINSTEIN CONDENSATE has been quantitatively measured for the first time, allowing researchers, in effect, to study matter at a temperature of absolute zero. According to quantum mechanics, objects cooled to absolute zero do not freeze to a complete standstill; instead, they jiggle around by some minimum amount. MIT researchers measured such “zero-point motion” in sodium BEC, a collection of gas atoms that are collectively in the lowest possible energy state. According to Ketterle, “the condensate has no entropy and behaves like matter at absolute zero.”

The MIT physicists measured the motion (or lack thereof) by taking advantage of the fact that atoms absorb light at slightly lower (higher) frequencies if they are moving away from (towards) the light. To determine these Doppler shifts (100 billion times smaller than those of moving galaxies), the researchers used a technique known as Bragg scattering. In this technique, atoms absorb photons at one energy from a laser beam and are stimulated by a second laser to emit a photon at another energy, which can be shifted upward, or downward depending on the atoms’ motion towards or away form the lasers. Measuring the range in energies of the emitted photons allowed the researchers to determine the range of momentum values in the condensate. Multiplying this measured momentum spread (delta p) by the size of the condensate (delta x) gave an answer of approximately h-bar (Planck’s constant divided by 2 pi) – the minimum value allowed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation and quantum physics. While earlier BECs surely harvested this zero-pint motion, previous measurements of BEC momentum spreads were done with exploding condensates having energies hundreds of times larger than the zero-point energy.

 

ACCOUSTIC-DEPENDENT FRICTION. Studies of friction are often carried out at modest relative speeds: the two moving surfaces in question typically slide past each other at 1 cm/s.

However, researchers at UCLA wondered if new mechanisms might appear when surfaces slide against each other at higher velocities, such as those associated with friction between tectonic plates during earthquakes.

Observing the jerky “stick-slip” motion of a steel block riding on a rotating steel table, the researchers carefully measured the friction forces for relative velocities up to 0.35 m/s, by monitoring the expansion and compression in a spring attached to the steel block. At these high velocities, they noted that the significantly increased production of sound waves (largely neglected in past analyses) dissipates a large amount of energy, stealing away some of the energy of motion required for two surfaces to slide past each other and thereby amounting to an increase in friction. This suggests that the generation of sound waves between two sliding fault surfaces during an earthquake may provide a significant feedback mechanism that mitigates a quake’s effects, by converting energy of motion (friction which might otherwise have caused fracturing in the Earth) into sound energy.

 

B