Bookshelves featuring this term’s reading for members of each of the four Hogwarts houses.

RAF officer Francis R.L. Mellersh (1922-1996) reads John Buchan’s thriller Greenmantle and smokes his pipe, while getting in a haircut between fighter sorties to intercept the Luftwaffe.

Boots loosened, pipe in mouth, reading his book, being attended to by a servant, the pilot resembles a medieval knight resting between the lists at a tournament.

David Frum got hold of the photo from the pilot’s daughter, who tells us:

We have the original of the photo, and the book (he was crazy about John Buchan) and that bloody pipe killed him in the end at 72. I’m afraid those who have been to war and daily diced with death are rather cavalier with their health. I’ll tweet you a pic of him in his 60s…the red hair’s faded to strawberry blonde but still recognisably the chap getting his hair cut.
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Instead of resuming his Oxford studies at the end of the war he remained in the RAF for another 30 plus years and flew right until the end (often with the Red Arrows – stress!). He reached Air Vice Marshal and was Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff. He was a very modest man, very laid-back (that photo says it all) and spoke little of the war.

You’ll like this bit. My grandfather, his father, was a WW1 ace and was on the sortie which downed the Red Baron. Forensic historians of course now say he was shot from the ground…my grandfather’s eye witness account is often quoted. We have a little box made from Richthofen’s propeller wood. He too made a career of the RAF, was in charge of operations in Burma etc in WW2 and, at one point, my father’s boss…somewhat disastrously! He died in a bizarre accident shortly after retiring…ironic given he survived the RB.

My grandfather was AVM Sir Francis (FJW) Mellersh, nickname “Tog” and my father AVM Francis (FRL) Mellersh, known always as Togs (nanny’s nickname ie. “of Tog”). Quite ridiculous. I have their obituaries and citations and some extracts from Aces High etc as well as my father’s log book filled in somewhat irreverently. He flew Beaufighters, Mosquitoes and Spitfires.

David Frum adds:

Francis Mellersh was twice awarded Britain’s Distinguished Flying Cross and was recommended for the Victoria Cross.

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RAF records state:

He was quite a successful night-fighter pilot, ending the war with a tally of eight destroyed and one probable, however, during 1944, he destroyed 39, possibly 42, V-1 flying bombs. …

Citation for the award of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

“Flying Officer Francis Richard Lee MELLERSH (105145), Royal Air Force Volunteer ‘Reserve, No.600 Squadron.

This officer is a tenacious and skilful fighter and has destroyed 5 enemy aircraft in combat. On 1 occasion in April,1943, during a patrol off Algiers at dusk, he encountered a large formation of enemy aircraft. In the ensuing engagement, Flying Officer Mellersh shot down 2 of them. Although his aircraft was badly damaged he flew it to base. More recently, in July, 1943, Flying Officer Mellersh destroyed 2 enemy aircraft during 1 sortie. This officer has set a praiseworthy example.”

(London Gazette – 20 August 1943)

Citation for the award of the Bar to the Distinguished Flying Cross

“Flight Lieutenant Francis Richard Lee MELLERSH, D.F.C. (1105145), R.A.F.V.R., 96 Sqn.

This officer has proved himself, to be a night fighter pilot of outstanding ability and determination and his skill and keenness have set an excellent example. Flight Lieutenant Mellersh has completed many sorties and has destroyed eight enemy aircraft; he has also destroyed a large number of flying bombs.”

(London Gazette – 3 October 1944)

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This is obviously the cover of the book he is reading.

Colleen from Chicago put up a post last year arguing that fox hunting is the best extreme sport, which has started making the rounds today in hunting circles.

Fox Hunting is the hottest extreme sport you’ve never seen, let alone tried.

Who doesn’t like the thrill of the chase? How about a sport that is hundreds of years old, involves a private club, speed, thrills, horses, hounds and the rugged outdoors? What if it involved lots of ladies in tight pants straddling horses, spurs, whips, alcohol and getting to say “bitch” as much as you like? Mounting regularly? Breeding? How about offering the lady of your choice the chance to wrap her lips around your flask in public? Thinking you will surely die, yet living to tell about it? Who wouldn’t like this sport?

Guess what? Our ancestors were on to something. They may not have had Xbox but they did have the hunt box. They practiced the extreme sport of foxhunting – formal, expensive, dangerous and an incredible amount of fun. Traditionally a very private and exclusive sport, fox hunting has been made rarer over time by urbanization. While it may be difficult to pursue country sport in the city, fox hunting continues today -even just outside most of our major cities. Today, fox hunting is also much more egalitarian and truly more about chasing rather than harming fox these days. If you enjoy risk, danger, adventure and nature, and have a desire to party like your ancestors, fox hunting might be the sport for you.

She’s perfectly right. As Mr. Jorrocks observed:

“‘Unting is the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent. of its danger!”

Read the whole thing.

Teo Soares ’13 did some recent navel-gazing in the Oldest College Daily on the perennial sterotype of the classic Yale man, against which Yale undergraduates have unsuccessfully compared themselves since roughly the time of Nathan Hale.

Yalies own MacBooks, smartphones, blazers; they wear boat shoes in October and North Face jackets in November; they eat in restaurants that serve neither endless pasta bowls nor specials with names like “Lobsterfest” and “Admiral’s Feast”; they know how to handle chopsticks; they shell out $1.75 for coffee at Starbucks while Atticus, less than 30 yards away, charges a flat buck.

And also: Yalies vacation abroad; they call New York “the city”; they have access to their parents’ credit card; they hold true a geography that includes places like Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard; in short, they show signs of what might be broadly labeled “privilege.”

I mention these stereotypes because I share them. In my head, I conceive a group of students to whom they apply. These are the real Yalies, the people who truly belong — and this is of course a fallacy.

That I weigh my own Yalie-ness against that standard is a defense mechanism, a way of coping with the fact that, even as a second-semester senior, I sometimes feel I don’t belong.

Read the whole thing.

Back in my day, everyone knew that, properly speaking, the genuine Yale man ought to have spent his secondary school years at one of perhaps a dozen elite preparatory schools, starting with Andover and ending somewhere around Lawrenceville or the Hill. The authentic Yale man was tall, elegant, handsome, and athletic, and had won his letter playing football against Harvard or (possibly better yet) rowing crew.

His true defining feature, however, was effortless competence, succeeding at everything and rising naturally to the top leadership positions on campus and joining the most exclusive clubs, all without ever being seen by anyone actually to be trying. True Yalieness in the old days was indistinguishable from the Yale cult of coolness, of nonchalance at any cost.

The material emblems of membership in the real Yale were the aged, but recognizably expensive, tweed sport coat, khaki pants, and a pair of deliberately unmaintained white bucks.

Sporting an aged pair of buckskin oxfords simultaneously proved that you habitually moved in the kind of circles who dressed all in white and played croquet between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and that you had owned the esoteric footwear appropriate for such occasions so long that you had an aged pair, unmaintained and demoted for use in daily walking around. The kind of person seen wearing aged and soiled white bucks on weekdays in Winter would be thought to represent the very height of Yale cool, and would be referred to as “shoe.”

Needless to say, in my day as well, the actual majority of Yale undergraduates had attended public high schools, failed to resemble closely the Paul Stuart man, and had yet to acquire their first pair of white bucks. But we, too, just like Teo Soares today, thought deeply about these things.

Hat tip to James Harberson.

Rob lives on a carefully-constructed drink, containing all essential nutrients, which he calls “Soylent.”

Rob Rhinehart tells us:

Food is the fossil fuel of human energy. It is an enormous market full of waste, regulation, and biased allocation with serious geo-political implications. And we’re deeply dependent on it. In some countries people are dying of obesity, others starvation. In my own life I resented the time, money, and effort the purchase, preparation, consumption, and clean-up of food was consuming. I am pretty young, generally in good health, and remain physically and mentally active. I don’t want to lose weight. I want to maintain it and spend less energy getting energy.

I hypothesized that the body doesn’t need food itself, merely the chemicals and elements it contains. So, I resolved to embark on an experiment. What if I consumed only the raw ingredients the body uses for energy? Would I be healthier or do we need all the other stuff that’s in traditional food? If it does work, what would it feel like to have a perfectly balanced diet? I just want to be in good health and spend as little time and money on food as possible.

I haven’t eaten a bite of food in 30 days, and it’s changed my life.

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And what exactly is in Soylent? Rob isn’t telling. He’s afraid it might not suit your metabolism. You might croak on a diet of the stuff, and your survivors might sue him. But, he is offering to send you a free supply, if you get medically tested before and after trying his diet and then inform him of your results. link

It seems to me that a clever fellow could synthesize the same sort of thing just as well or, dare I say it? even better than good old Rob. For instance, I bet a little vodka would help a lot…. (sound of loud, echoing manaical laughter coming from the laboratory)

What would it be like to ride, just like the late Dick Francis, on one of the famous Steeplechase race courses? Jodie Skelton’s helmet camera gives the viewer something close to the rider’s point of view. This race course looked to me like a tough version of an American Eventing course. The comments refer to “a bit of a slap off the ground,” meaning the footage even includes a fall. Ouch!

Via Siobhan English.

Sampson Strong, Cardinal Wolsey, 1610, Christ Church College, Oxford.

The Telegraph reports that the successful search for Richard III’s remains is prompting the city fathers of Leicester to promote a search for another lost burial, that of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.

Wolsey, a great builder, had arranged for himself a magnificent black sarcophagus in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but his failure to procure Henry VIII the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon led to Wolsey’s downfall, the confiscation of his properties, and finally to his arrest for treason. He was lucky enough to expire in Leicester of natural causes en route to London for his trial and inevitable execution. Wolsey was consequently buried in the same Leicester Abbey as Richard III, without a monument. The grand sarcophagus eventually went to a more worthy occupant: naval hero Lord Nelson.

City councillor Ross Willmott said: “The discovery of Richard III is wonderful news, yet there remains something of a mystery about what happened to Wolsey, who rivaled Henry VIII in wealth and power and was one of the most significant political figures of the era.

“Arguably, he is far more influential than Richard III. To discover his remains would help tell the story of another historic figure linked to the city.”

“There have been digs over the years to try to find him but they have not succeeded. I would like another go.

“It would bring more tourists to the city and further excite the interest in history and archeology that we are now seeing.”

The churchman, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, died at the town’s abbey, the ruins of which can be seen from the city centre, while travelling to London after being accused of treason when he failed to secure the annulment of the king’s marriage to his first wife Catherine of Aragon.

He served as royal chaplain to Henry VII, who seized the throne after Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

It is likely he was buried with great ceremony at the abbey but historians think his tomb was destroyed later in Henry VIII’s reign, when abbeys were dissolved in the late 1530s after England’s split with the Catholic Church.

Attempt to locate Wolsey’s remains during digs in 1820 and again in the 1930s drew blanks.

However, Leicester Civic Society chairman Stuart Bailey said: “His bones may have been scattered and any remnants destroyed, but for years they said that about Richard III.

“I think it would be marvellous to have another look. It was a great fluke that Richard was found but we know Wolsey was buried in the Lady Chapel of the abbey church, which is not all that big.”

Just in time for yesterday’s St. Paddy’s Day celebration, Jeffrey P. Kahn, in the New York Times, cites recent theories that agriculture (and therefore civilization) developed earliest for the production of beer rather than food.

Human beings are social animals. But just as important, we are socially constrained as well.

We can probably thank the latter trait for keeping our fledgling species alive at the dawn of man. Five core social instincts, I have argued, gave structure and strength to our primeval herds. They kept us safely codependent with our fellow clan members, assigned us a rank in the pecking order, made sure we all did our chores, discouraged us from offending others, and removed us from this social coil when we became a drag on shared resources.

Thus could our ancient forebears cooperate, prosper, multiply — and pass along their DNA to later generations.

But then, these same lifesaving social instincts didn’t readily lend themselves to exploration, artistic expression, romance, inventiveness and experimentation — the other human drives that make for a vibrant civilization.

To free up those, we needed something that would suppress the rigid social codes that kept our clans safe and alive. We needed something that, on occasion, would let us break free from our biological herd imperative — or at least let us suppress our angst when we did.

We needed beer.

The headlines were filled recently with gleeful liberal accounts of spaghetti-spined members of the GOP, Charles Murray and Rob Portman, advocating surrender to the left on culture issues like Same Sex Marriage.

What we are obviously seeing is the herd mentality of the community of fashion in operation.

The Left controls most engines of opinion-formation in this country. First, revolutionary proposals originate in the left’s radical fringe, then little by little, they are “bravely” embraced by one pillar of the establishment after another. When it becomes apparent that the looney tunes running American education have successfully brainwashed the lumpenstudenten mob of impressionable, emotionally volatile, and fashion-conscious young, what we experience next is the unbecoming spectacle of older non-rugged-individualists scurrying to catch up with the departing bus of fashionable opinion which they perceive as about to motor through the endpoint of success, leaving behind History’s losers.

The truth of the matter is that you do not win culture war contests with the revolutionary Left by surrendering on point after point as soon as the Left appears to be gaining the upper hand. Even when they are going to win this particular battle today, it behooves Republicans and conservatives to recognize that revolutionary victories do not necessarily last forever. People living in France are not counting how many days of Ventôse remain before the arrival of Germinal.

Absurd leftist overreach may temporarily gain ascendancy and make entire societies dance to its tune, but the worst and the silliest of the Left’s ideas will always be doomed to fall in the end of their own weight of stupidity and falsehood.

In the meantime, we ought not to be like the French Army, offering the future surplus sale of MAS rifles described as “never fired, and only dropped once.” We ought to face the Left on every culture wars issue the way the doomed Spartans faced the Persians at Thermopylae. We should not cut and run, like Godric at the Battle of Maldon, but should, like Brythold, resist every time on every point to the bitter end.

“Hige sceal þe heardra,
heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare,
þe ure mægen lytlað.

“Mind must be the harder,
heart the keener
Spirit shall be greater –
as our strength lessens.”

Young people grow up. The Left’s domination of the Dummer Junger student and recent graduate crowd does not in most cases last forever.

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Molly Hemingway, at Ricochet, pointed out just how worthwhile Rob Portman’s analysis really is.

Leaving apart the question of whether marriage law should be changed, this strikes me as a problematic approach. I mean, marriage law should be changed or it shouldn’t be changed — but it shouldn’t hinge on the sexual attractions of one senator’s son, should it?

What if a conservative senator said, “I’m reversing my views on whether abortion should be legal because my daughter got pregnant and wished she weren’t.”

One of the fascinating things about society today is that personal experience trumps everything else in argumentation. Very few people seem to care about fundamental truths and principles while everyone seems to care about personal experience and emotion. It’s the Oprahfication of political philosophy.

Should a conservative determine good policy this way?