Q: Can one kitten, weighing well under 10 pounds, open a full-sized refrigerator door all by himself?
A: Yes, with sufficient motivation.

Q: Even a relatively new refrigerator with reasonably tight vacuum-sealed doors?
A: Yes.

Q: What kind of motivation would something like that take?
A: A salmon steak defrosting inside. Especially if he saw Mom putting it there.

Q: What will he do once he gets inside and the door closes?
A: Eat the salmon, of course. Every bit of it. Plus a nearly-full packet of kitty treats.

Q: Can he get out again?
A: No.

Q: Won’t he be cold?
A: No doubt.

Q: And with a tummy-ache from scarfing down all that rich food on top of his normal dinner plus a little wet chicken-in-a-can?
A: Likewise.

Q: And short on air?
A: After a while.

Q: Will his best friend and lifelong companion alert anyone about this situation?
A: No. His BF/LC will be delighted to have the bed and its Warm Body all to himself and will happily purr himself to sleep.

Q: Don’t cats have a ‘Timmy fell in the well’ instinct?
A: Not a glimmer. They do not possess the Lassie gene. In fact, they really do not give a shit about Timmy unless the whole well thing prevents prompt attention to dinner (theirs, not Timmy’s).

Q: Will he die, stuck there in the refrigerator?
A: Eventually. But first he will start meowing loudly enough to wake BF/LC and Warm Body, who will get up and start looking for him at 4:30 in the morning.

Q: Will he seem the least bit remorseful or lethargic or show any other signs at all that this whole escapade was A Bad Idea?
A: No.

Q: Will he be eager for his usual brekkies by 7?
A: Absolutely.

Q: Can it happen again?
A: Got any more salmon?

Jane

Anyway, this weekend, it was the turn of Saturday Night Live (hosted by Russell “I’m more famous in England” Brand)  to make me laugh out loud, with this segment posing as a trailer for a  gritty and “extremely British” crime flick. The critics are raving! USA Today says: ”I thought they were speaking a foreign language. … I don’t think I heard a single consonant.” Time magazine chimes in: “Is there a way to turn on subtitles for a movie in English? If so, which button is it?”

Which pretty much sums up my efforts to understand the good people of Lancashire …

Jane

Warning to my British friends (aka ‘mist-based life forms’): You’re going to really hate Stephen’s parting shot …

Jane

I’m teaching one of my favorite classes this semester, on journalism ethics — and as always, there is lots to talk about! In addition to some class-related cases and issues, the course website includes a broader ‘Of Interest‘ category. These are posts about media coverage and choices that potentially raise ethical questions, as least for me.

Students will be posting their thoughts, and yours are welcome, too. So when I write something there about an ethical issue in the media, I’ll flag it here, as well.

Please join the conversation — the more, the merrier!

Jane

P.S. At the moment, few of the students have posted to the individual blogs that you’ll see listed on the side of the page. Check back in a few weeks for more interesting reading from these young ethicists.

This weekend, I went to see The King’s Speech, a wonderful movie about how a young prince named Bertie unexpectedly became King George VI (the current queen’s father) and overcame his debilitating stammer with the help of a speech therapist, going on to unite and rally the nation during and after World War II. He did it through willpower — and the power of radio. ‘I have a voice!’ the future king cries in anguished frustration in one scene. Indeed he did, and millions soon would huddle anxiously around their radio sets to hear it.

British media continue to have enormous power. Although newspaper readership is in decline in Britain as elsewhere, it remains among the highest in the world. The BBC is ubiquitous but has gained dozens of competitors over the past few decades; all now are going digital. More than 80 percent of the population has Internet access, as well.

In the coming months, I will be blogging about the British media and media coverage of their nation and our world. Look for lots of links and a bit of commentary to go with them.

After the coronation of King George in Westminster Abbey in 1937, his royal procession was televised — the first time that the BBC ever set up a camera outdoors. This spring, his great-grandson will be married in the same magnificent cathedral so rich in British history.

It’s a safe bet there will be just a few more cameras.

Jane

Along with 200,000 other shivering revelers on both sides of (and above) the Thames, I tried to stay warm by jumping up and down to the bouncy Black Eyed Peas tune, repeatedly piped from giant loudspeakers by BBC Radio One. Over and over, we all shouted in unison that ‘tonight’s gonna be a good night’ as we waited for Big Ben to solemnly chime in 2010.

There aren’t many places outside the UK on Greenwich Mean Time, and we were proud to be the planet’s biggest and best party — for our time zone, anyway. Occasionally, a TV helicopter would hover overhead, and the BBC announcer would urge us to ‘wave to the world, London!’ We all tilted our heads back and grinned, lifted our hands palms up, and gave the world an uncharacteristically friendly ‘hullo.’ Then we went back to hopping and singing and clapping and trying not to think about how bleeding cold we were.

Fireworks over the Thames (Photo, J.B. Singer)

Finally, finally, Ben Ben’s giant hands both pointed skyward, and all 200,000 of us drew in our breaths as the iconically deep chimes began and the fireworks burst gloriously from the London Eye, dancing and sparkling, lighting up the famous riverfront and all our upturned faces.

Then the light faded, and it was time to go home. A week later, I was more than 4,000 miles away, back in Iowa.

Readers of this blog will know that during my three years in the UK, I frequently found the English exasperating, their customs confusing and their bureaucracy baffling. Their crowded island is small and wet and chilly, their food is infamously unappetizing, and their trains don’t run on time as regularly as one might hope.

But I knew up there on Waterloo Bridge that I was going to miss it, and them, terribly. And I do.

Jane

Another thing that made me roll my eyes every year was local restaurateurs’ practice of raising their prices during the ‘festive season.’ I don’t mean the prices on holiday ‘specials,’ nor the (exorbitant) cost of meals for large groups. (Office holiday lunch parties are all the rage, an excuse to get at least tipsy if not roaring drunk and to take essentially the whole afternoon off. These occasions also are, as far as I could tell,  the only time all year that Brits who work together actually eat together in a sit-down restaurant.)

No, I mean they raised the cost of a regular meal. Should you happen to be hungry at any time in December, you could expect to pay roughly double what you would pay for the same food in, say, November or January.

I once got so annoyed when the waitress at a restaurant where I ate at least three or four times a month handed me a menu with doubled prices that I remarked to my companion — no doubt a little too loudly, American that I am — ‘well, that’s certainly un-Christian of them!’ As a shocked hush fell over the dining room, she hustled back to lean over and whisper, ‘You’re a regular, so you can have the usual price. But don’t tell anyone!’

She was good for her word: I paid the un-festive tab for my plate of pasta. My friend, however, was charged the doubled fare for his virtually identical lunch.

And a happy Christmas to you, too.

Jane

I tried doing this in Preston, too, setting out candies or biscuit (cookie) tins in the morning on collection day. But I quickly realized that it was a no-go. Why? Because the nasty little yob-wannabes on my resolutely middle-class street would steal whatever I left out as they walked past my house on the way to school.

Yes, that’s right: The neighborhood children (‘arseholes’ being the appropriate British vernacular term, one needing no translation) nicked the sweets intended as a Christmas gift for the men whose thankless and thoroughly unpleasant job it is to pick up other people’s rubbish.  Really, how low can you go?

Jane

Iowa City has gotten its first real taste of winter over the past week and a bit: bitterly cold temperatures (something like 20 below 0 — that’s Fahrenheit, of course — with the wind chill), ice and several inches of snow.

University of Iowa Old Capitol and Pentacrest, December 2010 (Photo, J.B. Singer)

The effect on daily life around town? Pretty much nil. The snowplows and gritters take care of the roads overnight, so the buses can run their normal routes starting well before dawn. Homeowners dust off their cars and shovel their sidewalks (it’s the law), and business owners clear and sand the area around their door. The university thoroughly sands all pedestrian areas, so even the steep walkways leading away from the river are safe to trudge along. It’s sloppy and sloshy and not especially pleasant — although the Pentacrest covered in snow is lovely — but the disruption is minimal.

Meanwhile, in England, it’s also winter. And once again, for the third year in a row, the country has essentially come to a skidding halt. “Is the UK uniquely bad at coping with snow“? the BBC asks. Reassuringly, the story points out that the Germans and the Belgians also are struggling (though a close read suggests not nearly as much).

The article details a variety of excuses for another season of impassable roads, cancelled trains and planes, burst water pipes and all manner of other weather-related headaches. Most of them boil down to a lack of money — or, more accurately, unwillingness to spend it on something as unpredictable as the weather. That might be reasonable logic were it not for the fact that weather woes in an average winter reportedly set the nation back a stunning 1 billion pounds in economic and social costs, which seems pretty much like a working definition of “penny wise, pound foolish.”

But no worries! In true British fashion, they have hit upon a solution: form a committee, give it an impressive title and put a guy with some letters after his name in charge! Hence the Winter Resilience Review, led by one David Quarmby, CBE (for Commander of the Order of the British Empire), which released its final report (on last winter’s nightmares) in October. The main recommendation: Buy More Salt. Or in official Brit-speak:

“Whilst acknowledging the difficult financial position highway authorities now find themselves in, the Review concludes that modest re-allocation of expenditure on winter resilience in some areas, clearly targeted, is likely to be highly beneficial to local economies.”

So that’s sorted, then. Good luck with the slipping and the sliding and the sitting in transit waiting lounges while you hope for it to happen, mates.

Jane

I also procrastinated in buying the cards. But no problem — even here in Iowa, every card shop and grocery store carries Hanukkah cards. Unlike in, say, Lancashire.

I was not terribly surprised that it was impossible to find Hanukkah cards in Preston, a city of about 135,000 with a virtually nonexistent Jewish population and no surviving synagogue (but, according to the Islamic Society of the University of Central Lancashire, no fewer than 13 mosques).

I was, however, surprised that it was nearly impossible to find a holiday card that did not specifically refer to Christmas.

A large percentage of the boxed cards available for sale here in Iowa City have pleasant non-denominational images (winter scenes, animals, something artsy) and carry generic messages, such as “Season’s Greetings” or “Happy Holidays.”

In England, virtually every card I ever saw — and I looked high and low all over town each year — referred specifically to the Christian holiday in words (“Happy Christmas”) or images or, usually, both. Outside of the London museums — where the boxed cards were likely as not of foreign origin, notably from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — it was incredibly difficult to find a card that I felt comfortable sending.

Just one more reminder that lip service to ‘multicultural Britain‘  notwithstanding (not to mention all those mosques!), it remains a fundamentally Christian nation. “God bless us every one,” exclaims Tiny Tim, but his tale is, after all, “A Christmas Carol.”

Jane