The Russian Revolution in 400 words

Something I had to write for work the other day. Pretty much all of this was news to me, so I found it interesting.

In early 1917 failures on the battlefields of World War I, coupled with frustration at the slow pace of political reform in Russia, triggered an armed uprising in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed in 1914). In what became known as the ‘February Revolution’, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and a reformist provisional government was formed.
Regardless of its intentions, the situation this new government inherited was completely unworkable. The Russian Army was locked in a stalemate with the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire) and losing thousands of men every day to desertion. The state was effectively bankrupt and many wanted to sue for peace. The government knew, however, that a peace settlement under these conditions would mean devastating reparations and territorial concessions. Furthermore, the old regime’s allies, Great Britain and France – who had invested heavily in the Russian war effort – would not allow such a move. It was decided, therefore, that the fighting had to continue, much to the dismay of the Russian population.
While the war raged on, the radical groups that had backed the February Revolution began working to undermine the provisional government, which they now saw as a continuation of the old regime. The Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, was particularly active in this regard, establishing a parallel system of local government controlled by workers’ committees, known as ‘soviets,’ all over the country.
With the integrity of the state deteriorating rapidly, the Provisional Government pinned their hopes on a final, massive offensive against the Central Powers in the summer of 1917. Aware that the Central Powers were also near collapse, they hoped this final push could pave the way for a acceptable peace settlement. The offensive proved to be a catastrophic failure, however, and led to the near-collapse of the Russian Army. As the crisis deepened, the internal divisions within the provisional government flared up, leaving it deadlocked and incapable of responding effectively. In the absence of a functioning government, the authority and influence of the soviets grew.
As early as March 1917, the Bolshevik Party had been establishing units of Red Guards, an armed militia. By October this had grown into a force some 200,000 strong, with brigades all over Russia. On 25 October, Lenin used the 30,000 Red Guards within Petrograd to seize power. The Red Guards arrested the Provisional Government and declared that they had taken power in the name of the soviets of Russia.

Wikifights

I use wikipedia quite a lot when I'm at work. The project I'm currently working on often requires me to read up on a broad swathe of history so that I have a reasonable idea of the context of the events I'm writing about. I don't need to know anything in great detail, just the broad shape of things. For that purpose wikipedia is great. I also frequently need to write things about weapons systems, past and present, and wikipedia -- with its huge cast of gun nuts, teenage boys, and war-obsessives -- gives me all the detail I could possibly ever want to know (and a fair bit more... I now have an opinion on the relative merits of 7.62mm vs 5.56mm ammunition, for example -- an opinion no one is ever going to ask me for, nor do I ever want to volunteer).

Unfortunately, if you spent a lot of time using wikipedia it's hard to resist the urge to glance under the hood, so to speak, to hit that little tab on the top of the page that says 'talk'. At first I'd look to see if anyone had put any useful links there in the course of their discussions, now I tend to look out of a sort of morbid fascination.

In case you're unfamiliar with the format, a wikpedia talk page is where the people involved in the creation of the page -- and interested readers -- can post queries or messages, suggest changes, or debate what should go in the article. Every now and then you find one like this, usually on some innocuous subject like botany or basket-weaving, but generally they're either empty (because the article was written by one person, and no-one else cares) or they're filled with a wonderful cross between committee minutes and a full-on forum flame-war. The rules of wikipedia -- which discourage personal attacks and urge contributors to always assume good faith -- ensure that most disputes are, at least at first, couched in wonderfully passive-agressive language. People make extraordinarily bitchy comments about each others' contributions without ever technically breaching any of these rules. I often find myself scrolling down, reading the gradual descent of a sensible, grown up discussion into childish name calling and threats. Often it's possible to follow these arguments as they jump from one article's talk page to the next, to various users' personal pages, to the annals of the administrators.

The talk pages on well known contentious and divisive subjects don't really interest me -- if I wanted to see pages and pages of people arguing religion or politics I'd look at, well, anywhere on the internet. What I like are the pages where you get two socially maladjusted nerds flinging abuse at each other over, say, the divisional organization of an army that was disbanded 200 years ago. It's like what the big bang theory would be if the characters weren't secretly just mouthpieces for witty, articulate people.

Sometimes the people involved are clearly completely insane. For example, I recently found this userpage, having encountered his signature on a few particularly bizarre messages left on talk pages. It reads like the sort of thing that gets mailed to the New York Times shortly before the author goes on a spree killing.

By far my favourite recent discovery, however, is this wonderful page -- the talk page relating to an article on a not particularly well known chess player, writer, and aspiring libertarian politician who seems to have puffed his own page out beyond all proportion to his notability. It's good partly for the arm-flapping fury of the participants, but also for the personalities of the two main combatants. If you follow their various disputes from page to page, it soon becomes clear that this bloke is this bloke's nemesis, and vice versa. They've managed to generate an animosity for each other, purely through chess and arguments on the internet, that in day of yore would have required one of them to murder at least two of the others' immediate family. The whole thing provides a fascinating insight into the slightly surreal and unintentionally hilarious world of professional chess players.

Robot Music

The above picture is taken from a Musicians Union campaign from the 1930s against the use of recorded music in movie theaters (cinemas). This particular dispute is covered in detail in this interesting post from the Smithsonian's stable of bloggers.

I'm always fascinated by conflicts like this, by incidents of people being made redundant by new technology. On the one hand, it's never good to see people put out of work, to see skills that have been honed over many years rendered useless, but on the other hand it seems absurd to 'uninvent' or ignore something to protect the income of a particular group.

When it comes to cases like this, people tend to come down strongly in favour of the group being pushed aside, but there are plenty of others where people would be fine with it. I think very few people realise just how labour intensive pretty everything was until the last few hundred years or so.There are thousands of jobs -- occupations that people once devoted their lives to -- that have faded completely into obscurity, in many cases the idea that you could have a job doing one of these things strikes people as weird, even funny.

The first time I was really struck by this was while studying Herman Melville at university. One of his short stories (which are generally much better than any of his novels), the wonderfully titled Bartleby, the Scrivener, describes in intimate detail, the daily life and work of a once common class of clerk -- the Scrivener. These men were essentially human photocopiers -- they spent hours, sometimes days, painstakingly copying legal documents or writing them out in a professionally presentable form. The work required perfect penmanship and a proofreader's eye for detail (mistakes could end with someone getting sued). It sounded, to me, like a close approximation of hell. There are no scriveners anymore (at least, not as far as I know) but that doesn't seem like a loss that anyone should mourn.

I suppose the reason why I'm so interested in stuff like that is that I work in an industry that has recently experienced a similar technological shock. Back in the 1970s my job (I'm an editor for a reference publisher, in case you didn't know) would have been done by several different people and would have taken a lot more of everyone's time. Computers changed all that. I now do the job of both an editor and a typesetter, and frequently do the work of a designer or a proofreader. In a few seconds I can make changes to a layout that would, just 25 years ago, have required a lengthy discussion with a designer, a few minutes fiddling with a pasteboard and scissors, a trip to the typesetter and a time-consuming period of re-fitting. There are still some in the publishing business who miss the old days, but to me, having not lived through them, it seems like an absurdly convoluted and frustrating way of making a book. 

Walking

I've been a London commuter for about four years now. Every day I get on a train from Ladywell or Honor Oak. I get off at London Bridge and walk down the long passageway from the platforms. I then weave my way through the milling crowd in the connecting passageways and go down the short escalator to the ticket barriers. I beep through, (usually on the right-hand-side barriers, as they're less crowded) and duck through the tourists in the underground station concourse. I beep through another set of ticket barriers and go down the long escalators to the northern line. I then cut right and walk down the tunnel that leads to the far end of the platforms (the exits at Angel are at the end of the platform). I get off at Angel and go up the short escalator, then round the corner to the long escalator (longest in Europe, fact fans) though the barriers and up the street to my office. In the evening I do the same thing backwards (backwards as in reverse order, not literally backwards, that'd be unsafe). I estimate I've made this journey (there and back) about a thousand times now.

On the days when one of the escalators in this sequence was out of action (which is quite often on the London Underground) I'd be faced with a choice between a crowded escalator that I would have to stand still on, and sometimes queue to get onto, or the broken one.

After a few years I noticed something really strange was happening to my body when I got on one of these stationary escalators. I found that as a result of this constant repetition, my inner ear  has developed an automatic reaction to escalators. It compensates for the slight acceleration and deceleration experienced when getting on an off, keeping my sense of balance perfectly even at all times. I only notice this when I get on an escalator that isn't moving: my inner ear does its usual thing, but there's no acceleration to compensate for, so instead I just feel my sense of what is 'up' tilt slightly forwards. On a few occasions this has nearly sent my crashing face first into the steps in front of me. The reverse happens when I get off.

I've learned to expect this now, so I don't topple over, but I can't seem to stop it. It means that if I get on a stationary escalator (something that I now avoid doing if I can possibly do so) then I get off feeling dizzy and slightly sick.

I was interested, therefore, to read in this fascinating article that this is not an unusual or undocumented condition. It's known as the Broken Escalator Phenomenon and has been studied by people at Imperial College (train to Charing Cross, walk down to Embankment, get the District over to South Kensington).

I've just found another person for my 'Nerds at War' series (a general interest book that I'll get round to writing one day).

Abraham Wald
Abaham Wald was born in 1902 in what was then Austria-Hungary. His hometown is now part of Romania, but he belonged to an earlier map of Europe, in which you could be German or Jewish (he was Jewish) but hail from just about anywhere in eastern Europe.
He studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, which even before the Nazis arrived wasn't the most Jew-friendly of institutions. One of his supervisors, however, managed to get him a position teaching in the school of economics, where he remained until 1938. When the anschluss came, Wald was already putting the finishing touches on his escape plan, and he was gone long before the knock on the door came.
He ended up in the United States, working at Columbia university, where he was was finally able to work on research for publication (something that he had been previously barred from doing). He specialised in the more complex and abstract branches of statistics, though he also undertook some economic analysis work for the government when the war began.
His most notable contribution to the war came in 1944, when the US Air Force asked him to look over their damage statistics. The strategic bombing campaigns of the European theater were exacting a heavy toll on aircraft and airmen, with the airforce losing hundreds of bombers to anti-aicraft fire every week. They were always looking for ways to improve their aircraft, and to this end they collected vast reams of information from the mechanics who fixed the planes when they got back to base. They had diagrams showing where planes got hit most often, and had resolved to add extra armour plating to those vulnerable spots. To make sure they were not making any mistakes they showed their statistics to Wald.
Wald got back to them a few days later with some surprising news. They were, he explained, looking at the statistics the wrong way round. The data set they had was corrupted by what statisticians call 'selection bias' -- it did not show the damage sustained by all their planes, but  rather the damage sustained by those planes that made it back to base to be repaired. In other words, what the diagrams and statistics showed were not the aircraft's most vulnerable points, but its least vulnerable points, places that could be hit again and again without bringing the plane down.
Wald produced a report that was a mirror image of the previous one, the spots he highlighted as being in need of extra armour were those where the air force had few, if any records of aircraft being hit. Wald saw that these were not places where no plane ever got hit, they were places where no plane ever got hit and survived. 
History does not record what came of his insight, but even if his work only marginally improved the survivability of a US bomber crew, then it would have saved hundreds of crewmen's lives.

Canterbury West, 2004.

When you're a student, and you have no particular reason to get up in the morning, December is a month made entirely of evenings. The evening seems to start at around lunchtime, as the light begins to fade and keeps going until you go to sleep. If the stars come out at 4pm, it's easy to lose track of where evening ends and night begins, and if it doesn't get light until 8am, the shift from night into morning is similarly hard to spot.
On this particular evening me and Kristen had woken up at around noon, showered, and then gone our separate ways. We'd spent the previous evening shopping for presents that she could take back to her family and making our goodbyes to those who were getting on evening flights -- I think we finally went to sleep at about 4am.
In the half light of the early evening, I walked the eight metres back to my house, and settled down to finish writing my paper. It'd been a week or two since I'd last slept in my room, and longer since I last made any attempt to make it look lived-in. Most of the flat surfaces -- including the bed -- were covered by a thick layer of unwashed clothes over which lay piles of handwritten notes, photocopied academic journals, and dog-eared library books.
The next few hours were spent writing. With the curtains drawn and my headphones on, I was completely cut off from the rest of the world and so didn't notice the time passing as evening turned to slightly darker evening. I emerged from my cave at about 9pm, having gotten so hungry that nothing I was writing was making sense anymore. I made myself a giant sandwich with the remaining edible items in my fridge and wandered across to Kristen's house. This had been more or less my daily routine for most of the last month -- unlike every other house in Homestall, Kristen's front door didn't lock automatically, so me and the flat's various other nocturnal inhabitants used to come and go as we pleased.
I found Kristen upstairs, neatly folding things into her enormous bag while intermittently carrying on a conversation with one of her friends back home on messenger. I tried to help, but it soon became apparent that my folding abilities were way below par, and so I was relegated to the task of keeping her entertained. Eventually the time came for me and Kristen to head down to the station so she could catch the shuttle bus to the airport. It was about 4am at this point, and even the hardest partying kids at gone to sleep. The only lights left on in parkwood were those of the students who were either really obsessive about their work, or were even worse at managing their time than me. As we walked down the hill I was stuck once again by how alien Canterbury could still feel to me. Even in the dead of night, there are still signs of life in London — night buses and minicabs plying the roads, the odd dog walker or insomniac. In Canterbury, on the other hand, all was silent. We didn't see a single person in the 40 minutes it took to walk down to the station, I only saw a few houses with lights on. We talked in whispers, like we were walking through a dormitory in the middle of the night, and listened to the click-clack of the suitcase’s wheels running over the cracks in the pavement. Every sound we made seemed to echo off the buildings around us, which was a little eerie after a while.
While waiting for the bus to turn up, we curled up into a ball on a bench and talked about our plans for the holidays. We were both curious to know if our friends would think we'd changed in the time we'd been gone. The bus turned up early, and we made our goodbyes. It would have been romantic for me to have stuck around, but I didn't. I was really tired. I walked back up to campus and slept until the next evening. I had a dream that I was in South Carolina with Kristen. South Carolina looked an awful lot like Norfolk in my mind, but it made me wake up with a big grin on my face. I was woken up by my phone telling me I had a message. It said “I got through security with no problems and I've spent the last of my English money on coffee. I'm missing you already, see you in the new year.”
Up to that point I'd not been entirely sure what the status of our relationship was, so the realization that she was still thinking of me left me floating somewhere above my own head. I wrote something back, but I don't think Kristen got it before she got into the air.

I kept that text message on my phone for years, saving it to my SIM card each time I changed phones so I didn't lose it.

Homestall Court, 2005.

When me and Kristen were both working on essays, we used to keep in touch using messenger. It seems like a slightly strange way of communicating with someone who lives a few doors away, but it allowed us both to preserve the illusion that were still working hard. It was near the end of the spring Reading Week – the University of Kent's term for a week where lectures were suspended so that students can frantically write their essays – and I was still a long way behind schedule. At about 11pm a message pinged up on my desktop that just said: ‘I can't see. please come over.’
I should explain at this point that migraines run in my family. My mum gets them from time to time, and when I was a kid my brother used to get these crazy ones that lasted for days and gave him strange hallucinations. I'd never had one at this point in my life, but I knew what they were and how they progressed. As a result, my reaction to the news that my girlfriend had gone blind was one of concern rather than panic. Unfortunately, Kristen had no such prior experience, and had recently heard that a relative had suffered an aneurism. She was getting increasingly panicky as her vision reduced down to a little circle of blurry light in the centre of her eye.
I was pretty sure that what Kristen was experiencing was a regular migraine, but I didn't want to be the one who had to explain to her parents that their daughter’s head had exploded. I dialled the number for the university infirmary, although I wasn't entirely sure that such a thing existed, and explained the situation. They confirmed that they did indeed exist, and told me to bring Kristen over so they could check on her.
The infirmary was over in Eliot College, about 20 minutes walk from Kristen's house. To this day I'm not entirely sure where in the building the infirmary was – both Eliot and Rutherford colleges were built on strange, eccentric floor plans that don't seem to obey the normal laws of physics. I was still frequently getting lost looking for lecture rooms even in my final year. We walked all the way over there with Kristen clinging onto my shoulder and me calling out various obstacles as we approached them. Given that it was chucking-out time at the campus bars, no-one gave a second glance to someone leading their partner though campus with cries of ‘step!’ ‘kerb!’ ‘gravel!’
In the infirmary a nurse gave Kristen some more painkillers and led her to a dark room with a bed. I was allowed to stick around, and settled myself in the chair next to the bed. For the next few hours I sat there stroking her head with one hand and trying to write notes for my essay with the other. Unsurprisingly, the notes I wrote in the infirmary were completely useless, if nothing else, because I can't write legibly in the dark.
At about 1am Kristen’s eyesight had come back, and she was feeling a little better. We walked back to Homestall and I set her up in my room so I could keep an eye on her. We talked for a while but she soon fell asleep. I turned the brightness on my monitor right down and went back to my work. A few hours later she was woken up by her phone ringing. It was her mom, who had come off work to a barrage of panicky text messages from her daughter and was understandably worried. Kristen explained what had happened, paused for a few moments, and then passed the phone to me.
This was the first time I'd ever spoken to a member of Kristen's family, and I don't think I made the best impression. Well meaning, caring, but more than a bit simple. Karen thanked me for getting Kristen over to the infirmary, and for staying with her until she felt ok. I stammered awkwardly and turned bright pink (luckily she couldn't see that bit). I've never been good at parents, or praise.
I fell asleep with my face on the keyboard an hour later, having brought the essay up the required length to hand in later that day. I doubted that it would be given a passing mark, but it actually did quite well. By a bizarre stroke of luck, my lecturer – probably under the influence of too much coffee – misread my argument as something much more coherent than it was. In her notes she even talked about its interesting subtext (I wouldn't know subtext if you hit me with it) and praised the validity of a point that, looking back, I am sure I never made. 

Grimshill Court, September 2004.

I can't remember how the conversation with Ben had started -- perhaps it was inspired by song that came on the stereo, or by an offhand remark I'd made about his plaid shirt -- but after a few minutes I really wanted it to stop. He talked in a solid stream, seemingly without drawing breath, and before I could back away had told me more than I'd ever wanted to know about the recording of the Pixies' debut album Surfer Rosa. I'd only been at university for a few days -- most of my personal possessions were still in boxes -- but I'd already learned that there were some friends that I really didn't want to make.
He eventually stopped and asked me what my name was. I told him it was James, in the hope that this would inspire no further comment. I dread to think how different my life would be if he'd found out we had the same name. While he was digesting this piece of information and fiddling with the ringpull on his beer, I frantically scanned the crowd at the party for someone I knew.
I say it was a party, it was actually just what happened when a party had failed to materialise. I had set out that evening with a backpack full of beer looking for a party -- I'd made a few friends so far, but I'd not really clicked with anyone yet. I knew I wasn't the most interesting person around, but I figured that a man with a backpack full of beer is rarely turned away during Fresher's week. There weren't any parties to be found, however; the first few evenings had seen a few flats get trashed and no-one seemed willing to let a massive army of random strangers trample into the delicate social arrangements of a newly established student household. As the evening had progressed the various groups of wannabe-gatecrashers had coalesced into a small mob in the green space between two of the housing units. Someone had stuck their speakers out of an upstairs window, and an intermittently-functioning security light gave us enough light to see each other. It wasn't exactly buzzing, but there was beer and people to talk to.
So far the closest thing I had to a friend so far was my flatmate, Doug -- a lanky metalhead with a hundred-word vocabulary who hailed from the exotic suburbs of Guildford. He wasn't there, but I did spot a face I knew -- the flatmate of one of his friends from secondary school, a small kid with glasses and unkempt hair. We'd spoken briefly at the pub the previous night and he seemed interesting enough. John? Tim? Tom!. That was it. Someone shouted to Ben and he looked over his shoulder to see who it was. The light conveniently shut off at precisely that moment, plunging us into darkness and allowing me to make good my escape.
When the light began to warm up again I saw that Tom had moved slightly, revealing the person he was talking to. At first I thought it was a child, but as the light intensified I realised it was a very small woman. I hesitated at this point, I didn't really know Tom well enough to feel comfortable interrupting him while he was putting his moves on a lady. However, it was that or learn more about the microphone placement philosophy of Steve Albini, so I figured it was worth the risk.
The girl, as it turned out, was called Sarah, she was about three years older than me, and American. I'd never met an American before, at least not socially, so I was curious. I didn't realise at that point just how many Americans there were at Kent. If Tom was annoyed by my sudden appearance he didn't show it. We were all a little drunk, Sarah a little jetlagged. I don't remember what we all talked about, but I remember laughing a lot. As the crowd broke up in the wee small hours of the morning we discovered that we all lived in the same part of campus, only a few doors from each other, and walked back together.
The next evening Tom came and knocked on my window to ask if I wanted to come out to the pub. On the way we stopped off at Sarah's house, where we were introduced to her flatmates (who were all American). We put on our best English accents and said 'Jolly Good' a lot. They seemed to like us. One of her flatmates came with us to the pub. She was much taller than Sarah, with a shock of curly bleach-blond hair and a noticeably different accent. Her name was Kristen, she was from South Carolina. We spent most of the evening drunkenly arguing about something really trivial, I think it was whether Abbey Road was released before or after the White Album. Even though our first meeting ended with her calling me a "patronising asshole", she apparently enjoyed my company.

---

In later years I'd often see Ben around campus. He dated a classmate of mine for a while, and was in one of my lectures in the second year, but I never spoke to him after that first night. He will live his entire life completely unaware of what an incredibly important influence he had been on my life.

Giles Lane, November 2004.

[Me and Kristen are getting married in a week. We were friends for a while before we got together, so this is the closest I have to the story of how we met. The following probably conflates the events of several different evenings, as my memory is jumbled after all these years.]

We got to the top of the hill just after the sun had dropped below the horizon, it'd been a long and enjoyably unproductive day. A morning’s shopping trip had turned into an afternoon playing frisbee in the park, which then turned into an evening in the pub across from the cathedral. We four; Me, Kristen, Tom, and Sarah had just completed the tiring hike back up St Dunstan’s Hill from town. As we crossed into the field on the edge of campus Tom darted off to our left, rummaging around in his satchel for his camera. After a few moments, and a few significant glances at Kristen, Sarah walked off after him.
At the time Tom was using this crazy-looking Soviet camera that he'd found in a junk sale, it was a sort of rustic version of my own 80's Pentax, all odd protrusions and non-standard mountings. All the markings on the case, as well as the little instructional booklet that he'd found in the box, were in Cyrillic, so it generally took him about ten minutes to get the exposure settings right. His photographer’s eye had been drawn to the whimsical towers and gables of St Dunstan’s college, an eccentric, Hogwarts-like private school on the edge of the university campus. I could faintly hear him enthusing breathlessly to Sarah about the quality of the light, the word ‘chiaroscuro’ was carried over to us by a gust of wind.
While Tom was off in his own little world, fiddling with the arcane camera, me and Kristen sat down on the grass. The contrast between the two halves of the sky was now at its most dramatic – the thin clouds along the western horizon were glowing orange, while the first few stars were beginning to appear in the east. Kristen said something about feeling cold. I opened my mouth to offer her my jacket, but before I could say anything she burrowed herself under my arm.
She didn't feel cold, in fact, I could feel the warmth radiating off her after the walk up the hill. I was frozen for a few moments, not sure how exactly to react, my knowledge of American social customs was still a little shaky – perhaps she was just being friendly, I thought. After a brief argument in my head, I rested my awkwardly suspended hand on her waist, almost pulling it away when I realised that her top had ridden up a few inches and I was touching her bare skin. There was no stiffening of her body or pulling away, no response at all in fact. I relaxed and looked up and the stars.
I started talking about how strange it had been to me, coming to Kent from London. How I was used to being able to see five, perhaps ten stars on a clear night, and how I initially struggled to sleep without the glow of a million reflected streetlights. I'm not sure if she was listening, or if I'd told her all of this stuff before. I was only half paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth. The the rest of my mind was fixated on my hand, and on what it could feel –  the curve of her hips, the softness of her skin, which had a smoothness that no skin of mine, not even my eyelids or the backs of my ears comes close to. She started talking about her own hometown, about the glow from the headlights on the freeway, the drone of the cicadas. Her description conjured up a feeling of enveloping, comforting warmth, where the darkness was somehow thicker and deeper than anything I'd known.
At this point my eye was caught by something in the sky over to my right, a tiny pinpoint of orange light moving up between the stars. To this day I'm not entirely sure what it was – perhaps a piece of space junk burning up, or a meteor, or some strange optical illusion created by a high-flying aircraft. I didn't say anything to Kristen about it, and she had by this point stopped talking. We sat in silence while Tom and Sarah slowly walked back towards us. As I looked more closely at the light. I fancied I could see a faint trail streaming out below it, like the exhaust coming out of a rocket.
All of a sudden the bottom dropped out of my head, taking the warm feeling with it. I suddenly felt very sober, very old. The librarian in my brain, issued with the query ‘what sort of rocket-like thing would be launched out over the North Sea’, had returned with a folder marked ‘Trident Missile’. Inside there was plenty of detail, diagrams and statistics about blast radius and fallout, people burned into shadows and earth turned to glass.
I have no idea where this thought had come from, and the sensible part of me knew it was stupid. There had been no recent rise in international tensions, and the cold war was over, right? but some nagging part of my mind couldn't shake the terrified feeling that I was watching the first moments of a catastrophe, the little bouncing rocks that come before a landslide.
After a few moments’ thought, I realised that above all else, I felt cheated. I could smell Kristen’s hair, feel her heartbeat against my arm and the gentle rising and falling of her shoulders. My mind went back to how lovely she'd looked earlier that day, smiling and laughing in the pub – her big blue eyes widening as Tom told a particularly gory story from his teenage years. I suddenly saw clearly all the hints I'd been too nervous to pick up on at the time.
I pulled her a little closer, rested my head on hers, and closed my eyes. There was no flash, no blast, just the sound of Kristen’s steady breathing and the approaching footsteps of our friends.

Morbid musings

When walking through a graveyard the other week (there's not much else in the way of green space round where I live) I noticed that there are distinct patterns to the demographics of the dead. Obviously, death can strike at any time, but if you plotted all the dates on a graph you'd see some obvious spikes emerging.

The first, obviously, is that of those that died in infancy or childhood. This demographic is most strongly represented in the old 19th century section of the graveyard. From the dates on the stones it would appear that, as a general rule, if you lived past about 10 without catching something horrific then you were pretty much safe for at least the next eight years. One interesting thing I noticed was that while this demographic is far less common in the newer sections of the graveyard, the average age seems to have dropped. Children below the age of one are a pretty rare sight in the older sections, while they make up the majority of pre-18 year-old graves in the newer sections.

As a reflection of changing social attitudes I find this interesting -- as infant mortality drops, people seem to become emotionally invested in their children at a much younger age. In some cases this tendency is taken to a stage that makes me a little uneasy -- there's a few modern graves in the cemetery whose stones record the names of infants who died two or three days after birth. I get the impression that the victorians would have classified these sad events as unusually drawn out stillbirths and moved quickly on, probably without ever giving the infants a name. These modern graves, however, are covered with flowers and cards -- something that I'd find understandable if it wasn't for the fact that the most recent of them records a death that happened more than 6 years ago. In a particularly morbid touch, some of the graves have flowers whose notes are signed by not only parents but also by "your little brother" or "your little sister."

The next big demographic is young men between the ages of 17 and 25, whose deaths are generally recorded on small white stones, decorated with just a cross or a regimental crest. The majority are from the First World War era*, a testament to the mind-numbing carnage of that war. With each coming year these stones disturb me more -- I'm now about seven years older than those kids were when they died, and can't help but think of 18-year-olds as essentially big children.

The last demographic spike before old age is populated by young women between the ages of 20 and 30. The cause of death isn't often mentioned on gravestones, but it's not hard to imagine what caused this. Happily this demographic almost completely vanishes in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine.

The thing that makes me particularly troubled by the deaths of these women is the fact that they are often buried in family plots with their parents, grandparents, etc. Every now and then you'll come across a woman buried in her own grave, usually beneath a touchingly inscribed gravestone composed by her husband, but these are the exceptions. On most occasions the men involved seem to have been all too happy to hand the mortal remains of their former loved ones to the in-laws with all the respect and reverence of someone returning a broken TV to the shop.

bleh.

As we've got a major cat-shitty garden problem at the moment, my thoughts have been increasingly turning toward supersoakers. As a kid, I fucking loved supersoakers. Me and my brother used the "stopping cats from shitting in the yard" pretext to obtain many hours of damp summer fun. We, and the neighbor kids used to swarm around the overgrown alleyways and bomb-sites round the back of our house, soaking each other with a variety of odd implements. The only-child from the top of the road had a massive super soaker 150, while some of the other kids we played football with favored simpler stirrup-pump like plastic things (powerful, decent range, ran out of water fast). The fat kid preferred to lurk round corners with a bucket (not very subtle, but effective).

Me and my brother favored the Supersoaker 50, the klashnikov rifle of the water-pistol world; cheap and reliable. It wasn't hugely powerful, but it was surprisingly accurate over quite long distances. The bottles it used were a standard size and used the same screw threads as coke bottles (which meant you could carry spares in your belt, filled with water and ready to go).

It was also good for use on the cats that tried to shit in our yard and eat our guinea pigs (we didn't have very exciting pets as children) -- it got them wet enough to make them run away, but not so wet that you felt like you were being mean.

Last night I flipped open the gigantic copy of the argos catalog we've got in the house and turned, by muscle memory alone, to the supersoaker section. Instead of the range of fearsome water cannons, however, I found only strange pink things with flowers and such on ("urr! gurls toys!", cried the sticky fat kid in my head). I figured it was silly to think that they'd keep the supersoakers on the same page that they were on when I was a kid (I mean, there's whole sections in the catalog that weren't there when I was wee small, like the array of mobile phones). I looked though the whole thing, though, and I found nothing.

A quick search of the internet revealed that they do still exist, but that they've gotten much more complicated since their inventor first pitched them to larami. They've now got all sorts of cosmetic doodads, non-detachable tanks, and other such gumpf. I also discovered that there's a whole internet subculture devoted to grown men who play with water pistols.

They take it very seriously.

I find this a little sad.I mean, don't get me wrong, when I was a kid I took the whole business seriously, but, you know, there came a time when I did genuinely only ever use the thing for chasing away cats.

Some of their home-made designs look pretty awesome though... might have to get me some plumbing supplies.

Unless it's pissing down with rain or freezing cold, I tend to spend my lunchbreaks walking around Islington, where I work. I get an hour for lunch, so I can usually cover a fairly long distance before I have to head back. Most days I walk in a long circuit that takes me down Essex Road, then north-west as far as Barnsbury Road (it's a distance of about 2.5 miles, I think).

Most of the walk takes me along fairly busy roads, but the northernmost section takes me through some incredibly peaceful affluent areas (multi-million-pound early victorian houses, general all-round loveliness). Here I rarely see anyone other than the occasional young mother pushing a pram that probably cost more than my bass. Today though, I turned onto one of the broad old avenues to see a young woman -- younger than me, I'd guess -- running down the other side of the street. She was running in that flustered "oh god I'm so late" way, with her handbag clutched to her side and the other flapping around while she kept to keep her balance in some not-entirely-appropriate shoes.

I probably wouldn't have paid her the least bit of attention if I hadn't been transfixed by her broad-brimmed summer hat, which remained poised neatly on the back of her head; held on my some unnatural force (or perhaps hatpins) while she ran.

As she passed by a small black object pinged out of her handbag and clattered onto the pavement. She didn't stop, nor notice this had happened. "Oh dear," I thought, "she's dropped her phone." I watched her get further and further away, willing her with all my might to notice that she'd dropped it, but my mind powers are sadly lacking.

As she ran round a corner and disappeared out of sight a small argument broke out in my head.

"you should run after her, and give that back"
"but I can't be arsed. I'm hungry and I've got to get back to work in a few minutes"
"really? You're that lazy?"
"I'm sure she'll notice that she's dropped it soon, or perhaps some good samaritan will hand it into the police..."
"A good samaritan, in north London? pffft. Do you remember how stressful it was for Kristen when her phone was nicked?"
"ugh. Fiinne."

I jog across the road, hoping that I'll find a worthless make-up mirror or something else I can ignore without feeling too bad about it. Alas, sitting in the middle of the pavement is a shiny new iPhone 4, unharmed by its fall. I sigh, pick it up, and take off after her.

As I round the corner I'm struck by the thought that perhaps she's already gone into one of the houses along the street, and that I'll have to spend the rest of my lunchbreak knocking on doors and generally embarassing myself. Then I spot her, about a hundred meters down the road, jogging along a little slower now. I shout, but she doesn't hear me, so I run off after her.

At this point she hears a set of feet pounding down the street, turns, and sees a stocky bloke in a hoody bearing down on her. She then does what most women would do -- she starts running faster. I try shouting to her again, but my voice catches in my throat and comes out sounding like the crazed grunting of a madman. This doesn't help.

Luckily, I'm a lot fitter than I used to be, and I can chase down a young woman wearing inappropriate shoes pretty easily (I found that out today, by the way, it's not something I do all the time). I managed to get close enough to speak to her normally without having to shout. The sound of her crazed pursuer calmly saying "excuse me" in a clipped BBC-proper accent seemed to reassure her. She stopped and turned around.

"er. You dropped your phone."
I awkwardly proffer the phone, like a child giving a family present to a slightly intimidating relative at christmas.
"oh god, thank you!"
She takes the phone and smiles
"Thank you so much!"
I grin sheepishly, "that's fine... er..um.."

I turn round and walk away, feeling generally about as embarrassed as I do on the occasions when I've warmly greeted some who looked like a friend, but turned out to be a complete stranger.

Ten years at Crown Woods Secondary School has imbued me with a sense of deep embarrassment whenever I do something unusually noble or nice. It doesn't stop me from doing it anyway, but it does mean that I'm damned either way, caught between my conscience and years of backward social programming.

Names

This might mark a return to regularly updating this thing, or it might just be an aberration.

I've been writing a sort of potted history of the Austro-Hungarian empire recently, and it's got me thinking about names and translations. These days we tend to think of names as fixed, unchanging things—they're written on all your identity documents and require a lot of paperwork to change—but that hasn't always been the case. One particularly interesting example of this fluidity is the fact that people who travelled around Europe often used to transliterate their names depending on where they were. John would become Jean, Johann, Jan, János, or Giovanni depending on where you are. This is particularly interesting when you bear in mind that many parish birth registers, at least in continental Europe, used to record names in the Latin version (so John would be written Iohannes)—despite the fact that no-one would have ever used this form, or likely even be able to pronounce it.
This has led to some interesting confusions over what to call certain historic figures. Austro-Hungarian Emperors, for example, had separate royal titles in each of their kingdoms, with each styling their name differently. Deciding which spelling to use can be a bit tricky (do you go for the neutral latinate version they used on official documents, the German version they answered to personally, or one of the other variants?) and has bothered me a lot while editing this book.
The prime example of this confusion. however, is Mozart. He is known to history by the name Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but there is no record of him ever having used this particular handle. His entry in the parish baptismal record lists his name as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart—a strange mess of latin, pseudo-latin, and Greek that no-one is likely to have ever used. The first part Johannes Chrysostomus is a saint's name, included as a nod to Catholic custom—at the time of his birth this was a largely ceremonial detail, never actually used other than in religious contexts. For all intents and purposes, therefore, his given name was Wolfgang— Germanic name that, luckily for historians and editors, doesn't translate into other languages. His middle name, Theophilus, which literally means "loved by God," can also be written in Latin as Amadeus, in Italian as Amadè, and in German as Gottlieb (this was the version his father used when writing about him).
Mozart himself generally used the name Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, but this was dismissed as an affectation by his friends and associates, who usually called him Wolfgang Gottlieb. The only known example of Mozart signing his name Amadeus is in a silly letter he wrote to a young cousin entirely in pompous-sounding pseudo-latin.
Of course, this level of fluidity wasn't restricted to those who could switch between languages at will. Until fairly recently there was a distinct separation between languages as they were written and as they were spoken. A vernacular name that you used every day, for example, might be seen as too vulgar to actually write down—hence Mikołaj Kopernik becomes Nicolaus Copernicus. This still exists today in many cultures, particularly in the Arab world, where the gulf between Modern Standard Arabic (the formal language taught in schools) and local dialects like Moroccan Darija has widened to the point where the two languages are only just mutually intelligible. It also exists in English, to an extent. Few people write exactly as they speak, whether phonetically or stylistically. While I do actually talk with scrupulously correct BBC pronunciation that my writing suggests, my actual spoken language is peppered with far more idiomatic phrases and industrial-strength swearwords than my writing. When I try to include these in my writing, it often feels forced or out of place. My name stays the same though.

Floyd Rose

This is heavy nerd, feel free to skip.

When I was working on Ed's guitar yesterday, I took some time to reacquiant myself with the whimpering horror of the Floyd Rose Double Locking Tremolo.

This beast was invented in the mid-1970s by a chap called Floyd Rose (bet you didn't see that one coming). He came up with it because he wanted a tremolo that you could go Jimi Hendrix-style mental with, without pulling your guitar badly out of tune. In that regard, he succeeded—when properly set-up you can do just about anything with a Floyd Rose and it won't have any serious effect on the tuning. That, in my view, is about the only way in which he succeeded.

The Floyd Rose is a wildly impractical piece of technology. In order to restring a guitar with a Floyd Rose you have to first chop the ball-ends off the strings, then clamp them into the saddles at the bridge (to do this properly you must turn the set screws so hard that you will inevitably strip quite a few allen keys over the years). Once they're all in you have to spend ages tuning the strings, letting the bridge adjust—which pulls them back out of tune again—then tuning them again. It typically takes a day or two before you actually have a guitar that is both in tune and has a balanced tremolo. If you're switching between string gauges or brands of strings it can take even longer. Once this is done, you have to clamp the strings in place at the nut, making large adjustments to tuning a fiddly and laborious process.

If you you try and change the tuning of an individual string (say switching to Drop-D tuning) then this will lower the overall tension on the tremolo, pulling all of the strings out of tune. Similarly, if you break a string, the increased tension on the other strings pulls them all out of tune, and sometimes causes more to break. The second fact makes it foolish to gig with a Floyd Rose equipped guitar unless you have at least one backup.

Ed has made several modifications to his Floyd Rose over the years (including adding extra springs and placing a block of wood under the rear of the tremolo) which essentially make it into a single-action tremolo, like the Wilkinson Tremolo on a Strat. This makes it less versatile as a tremolo unit, but makes it much, much easier to use.

Even so, the actual tremolo unit is a pretty shocking piece of design. The set screws that allow you to adjust the intonation are positioned underneath the strings, so you have to remove the strings in order to make any adjustments the intonation. You cannot raise or lower the saddles individually, which means that you can only adjust the action by tightening or loosening the bolts that anchor the unit in place. Also, the clamps that hold the strings into the bridge are positioned at a 90º angle to the string pull, which makes the strings more likely to break at that point.

All told, a guitar with a Floyd Rose Tremolo is like an old Rolls Royce where the driver's seat is not covered by the roof. It's a design feature that assumes you have staff to do everything for you, as it would be really unpleasant to do it yourself.

Tinkering

I replaced the busted barrel-jack on my Yamaha bass the other week (a relatively simple but very fiddly bit of wiring) and that reignited my urge to tinker with guitars. I can't begin round three of Ben vs. Refinishing (see these posts) until the weather improves, so the other day I took the opportunity to abduct Ed's guitar (the Stratobastard) for a quick bit of maintenance.

It's been more than three years since I made the alterations described here. Surprisingly, the electrics in the guitar seem to be holding up well—there aren't any settings that make it go dead, nor any that crackle or hiss. The only electrical issue worthy of mention is the fact that the pickup housing on the neck pickup becomes live when the pickups are switched into series. I know how to fix this, but I don't have the tools, nor the balls to do it just yet (It involves cutting the pickup casing open with a dremel-like  tool and creating separate ground wires for the casing and the signal ground). I'll sort that out one day, but it's not a pressing issue right now.

The main reason I wanted to get this guitar back on the workbench (it's a figurative workbench, obviously, as I do most of my tech work sitting on the floor in the attic) was because of a fretwork issue I noticed during its overhaul. I didn't have time to fix this problem back then, so the action has always been far too high for my tastes. Ed has never had a problem with this, but it has always bothered me. If he wants high action because he likes it that way, then that's fine, but I don't want the stratobastard to have high action because it's impossible to play otherwise.

I spent a few minutes raising and lowering the action, playing scales, and staring down the neck until I went cross eyed. Some day, I'll buy a set of relief measuring tools, but for now I'm more comfortable assessing the state of a guitar by eye and ear. What I figured out was that the guitar was suffering from a condition I call "the hump," where the fretboard has warped slightly around the neck join. It's something that happens as guitars age, and as the neck-wood settles into the join. It's another one of the reasons that I'm going off the idea of ever buying guitars that are less that 5 years old.

Ed's guitar didn't have the worst case I've ever seen, but it was bad enough to make the guitar unplayable beyond the 12th fret. The 15th fret, in particular, stood 2-3mm proud of its neighbors on the treble side. Extreme cases of the hump (the likes of which I've only ever seen on old mandolins) can only be treated by defretting the neck and planing down the fretboard, but this one was mild enough to be treated be re-profiling and re-crowning the frets (using techniques broadly similar to the ones outlined here)

While I was doing this I made a few very minor adjustments to the truss rod, to straighten out the neck a little, and fiddled around with the intonation on the tremolo. The end result is a dramatic lowering of the action, with none of the buzzing or dead notes that caused problems before, and once again, I managed to do the whole thing without injuring myself. Huzzah.

This statue is a late Roman copy of Phidias' legendary statue of Athena Pagos, the patron goddess of the Pan-Athenaic music festival. Sadly, the original was destroyed in a Herulian raid in A.D. 283, but we know what it once looked like thanks to this description from the ancient travel writer Pausania

"At the edge of the main stage, roughly forty paces from the beer stoa, stands the chryselephantine statue of Athena Pagos, patron of the festival. She stands on a retangular pedestal with the inscription MαΓςλαζζ inscribed at the base. With her right hand she is operating Hydrualis, her custom Moog microsynth, while she gestures with a bronze microphonos stand in the other."

By the time Pausanias saw this sculpture it was already 650 years old, and had been left exposed to the wind and rain for some time. It is thought that this is why he makes no mention of the vibrant colors used to paint her clothes and make up. No descriptions of this particular statue's decoration remain, but chemical analysis of the remains of a similar statue at Delphi suggest they were originally neon green, orange, and black, with lots of chrome for the accessories.

Knifey-knifey

While sorting through the heaps of old stuff in my grandfather's study Kristen found this folding knife.When it came out of the drawer it had probably been sitting in for decades, it looked a little the worse for wear—black with tarnish and encrusted with years of paint and handsweat.

I'm not really much of an outdoorsman (quite a laughably long way from it, in fact) but there's something pleasing about this thing. It's so old and sturdy. I cleaned the blade with liberal quantities of Brasso and treated the handle to a few much needed coatings of teak oil. I think it cleaned up pretty well. I expect if I kept at it for long enough I could get the blade back to its shiny original state, but I feel like that would be a disservice to something this old.

 

I'm not sure how old it is, exactly, but it has some markings at the base of the blade that give me some clues. The first is the maker's name: J Roger, Sons, & Co. Sheffield. The second is the little logo on the other side (pictured below), which shows a little union flag with a crown under it. 

 

It seems that the company existed from some time in the mid-19th century to the second half of the 20th century. I know they used this particular logo during the 1890s, and possibly earlier than that. It was probably my great-grandfather's, but it may have been in the family for a generation before that. My dad's family are not in habit of throwing away good tools. The scratches and paint smears on the wood suggest that it has been used a lot over the years.

Being a office-working urbanite, I've got no reason to carry this around—and doing so would probably get me arrested—but I feel I should find something to do with it. I put a good edge back on the blade with a whetstone, and oiled up the hinge.

Perhaps I'll take up whittling.

Long distance running, ancient history, and stupid myths.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm currently working on a travel book on Greece. This involves writing the odd historical-interest sidebar or perhaps a little feature here and there on the local culture and events. When writing about the area around marathon I decided I'd combine these two and write about the history of marathon running.

Now, being a person with a near pathological fear of running long distances (with good reason, see here) I can't say I know a great deal about marathons. I was aware, however, that they were inspired by a classical myth but I couldn't remember the details. I opened one of the travel guides I'm using as an occasional reference and there it was--the story of Pheidippides. He was, the book said, a soldier who fought at the Battle of Marathon then ran all the way back to Athens to inform the Athenians of their victory. It's one of those tragic/glorious stories though, because he gets back to the city, delivers the message, and promptly dies. In addition to the marathon, this story has inspired some pretty crappy art, like this.(related side note, why was it decided in the 19th century that hardly anyone in ancient Greece owned any clothes?)

This story set off some pretty powerful bullshit alarms in my head when I read it. I mean, why the urgency? and more to the point, since when has a 26 mile run been enough to kill a fit young soldier? With most of these myths, I wouldn't have cared---if they say Artemis demanded a daughter-burning, who am I to question that assertion?---but this one was routinely phrased as if it was a historical fact, tied in with events that are known to have happened.

Being of curious bent, and having access to the internet, I decided to go a-googling. There dozens of repetitions of the same stupid sounding story. Interestingly none of these seemed to agree on the details, it looked like each one had been tweaked slightly because the writer, halfway through telling the story he'd been told, got self-conscious about the fact that it made no sense. They added in extra details like Pheilippides had already run to athens and back that day, or that he'd been wounded in the battle, or something like that. None of these changes made the essential flaw of the story--why?--go away. Among all these repetitions, however, I found one account that not only made more sense, but also cited its sources.

The source, it turns out, was none other than big-daddy Greek historian Herodotus (the same guy mentioned the other day). Now in most regards Herodotus is about as reliable a source of information as a sugar-crazed ten year old (see here), but when it comes to this period of history his account seems plausible enough. He was, after all, writing about things that had happened close to his home town and within living memory. The anedotes-heard-in-the-pub method he typically used is more reliable when there's a reasonable chance that the bloke in the pub was a eyewitness. Rather than attempt to summarize it, I'll just quote it here. Picture the scene, the Persians have invaded, there's a lot of them, and they need to be repulsed at their beachhead or everyone's royally buggered. The Athenians have put together an army, but it's not big enough...

And first, before they left the city, the generals sent off to Sparta [a distance of about 150 miles] a herald, one Pheidippides, who was by birth an Athenian, and by profession and practice a trained runner. This man, according to the account which he gave to the Athenians on his return, when he was near Mount Parthenium, above Tegea, fell in with the god Pan, who called him by his name, and bade him ask the Athenians "wherefore they neglected him so entirely, when he was kindly disposed towards them, and had often helped them in times past, and would do so again in time to come?" The Athenians, entirely believing in the truth of this report, as soon as their affairs were once more in good order, set up a temple to Pan under the Acropolis, and, in return for the message which I have recorded, established in his honour yearly sacrifices and a torch-race.

On the occasion of which we speak when Pheidippides was sent by the Athenian generals, and, according to his own account, saw Pan on his journey, he reached Sparta on the very next day after quitting the city of Athens- Upon his arrival he went before the rulers, and said to them:-

"Men of Sparta, the Athenians beseech you to hasten to their aid, and not allow that state, which is the most ancient in all Greece, to be enslaved by the barbarians. Eretria, look you, is already carried away captive; and Greece weakened by the loss of no mean city."

Thus did Pheidippides deliver the message committed to him. And the Spartans wished to help the Athenians, but were unable to give them any present succour, as they did not like to break their established law. It was then the ninth day of the first decade; and they could not march out of Sparta on the ninth, when the moon had not reached the full. So they waited for the full of the moon.

So there you have it. Pheidippides wasn't a tragically unfit soldier, he was a professional long-distance runner, and the job was urgent because the Athenians urgently needed to know if they'd be getting any reinforcements.

It has to be said though, if you didn't know which was from the more authoritative source, you'd definitely assume that the 26 miles story was the more authentic one. I mean, look at the details-- A man running about 300 miles in 2-3 days? The God Pan appearing to him and having a little chat? The Spartans turning down the opportunity for an ass-kicking? None of these seem plausible.

Despite these anomalies, however, I think this may actually be one of the few cases where Herodotus got the story dead right.

While it sounds crazy, the distance Pheidippides covered and the time that he did it in isn't impossible. In 1982 a group of RAF officers (who, being handlebar-moustached British officers, were of course familiar with their classical history) asked local historians to draw up the most likely route Pheidippides would have taken to Sparta. Surprisingly the paths and roads Pheidippides would have taken have changed very little in the last two and a half thousand years. The three officers managed to run the course in 36 hours. A feat that is doubly impressive when you consider that they had no decent maps, spoke no Greek, and spent most of the trip being attacked by village dogs. Since then, the race has become a fixture in the ultra-marathon community, called the Spartathlon. The record for Pheidippides' route is held by the Greek runner Yiannis Kouros, who covered the distance from Athens to Sparta, over hills and across rivers, in just 20 hours and 25 minutes.

As for Pan appearing to him, this doesn't seem implausible to me at all. Ultra-endurance athletes are no stranger to Mr Hallucination, or even Mr Full-Blown-Psychosis, as is described in fascinating detail here. It may have actually been a confused goatherd standing by the side of the road, but I don't doubt that Pheidippides thought he saw Pan.

As for the last one, well, this is a minor error on Herodotus' part. He had a tendency to ascribe strange ritual motivations for all sorts of decisions, when he actually just didn't know why things had happened the way they did. The most likely explanation is that the Spartans just weren't logistically ready to march a huge army halfway across Greece at such short notice. It is interesting to note that they did mobilize a week or two later, as Herodotus describes:

After the full of the moon two thousand Spartans came to Athens. So eager had they been to arrive in time, that they took but three days to reach Attica from Sparta. They came, however, too late for the battle; yet, as they had a longing to behold the Medes, they continued their march to Marathon and there viewed the slain. Then, after giving the Athenians all praise for their achievement, they departed and returned home.

I love the way that the Spartans were willing to march 26 miles out of their way just to poke some corpses and marvel at all the gore. Truly, there has never been a manlier culture... "Duude, look, that guy's been cut in half!....man, that's totally badass..."

So there you have it. The real story of Marathons, in which we learn that marathons should be 150 miles long.
 I doubt as many people would be up for that though.

P.S. If you were wondering where the more commonly recounted story came from, it's generally thought that it was invented by a Roman historian a few centuries after the event. He'd probably read the account in Herodotus, but mixed up the story of Pheidippides with the actions of the Athenian army after the battle---anxious to get back and defend their city against a possible secondary attack, they made the march home in just a few days.

SPAAAARRTA!

Another quote from an ancient Historian, this time Thucydides (460–395 b.c.), who wrote the following in his History of the Peloponnesian War

For I suppose if Lacedaemon [Sparta] were to become desolate, and the temples and the foundations of the public buildings were left, that as time went on there would be a strong disposition with posterity to refuse to accept her fame as a true exponent of her power. And yet they occupy two-fifths of Peloponnese and lead the whole, not to speak of their numerous allies without. Still, as the city is neither built in a compact form nor adorned with magnificent temples and public edifices, but composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas, there would be an impression of inadequacy. Whereas, if Athens were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any inference from the appearance presented to the eye would make her power to have been twice as great as it is. We have therefore no right to be skeptical, nor to content ourselves with an inspection of a town to the exclusion of a consideration of its power

I've just been writing a section for a travel guide where I noted that, while it is a historically significant site, there's bugger all to see in Sparta.

I think Thucydides is staring at me.

Ten Thousand-Daktyloi Stare

I'm currently working on a book about Ancient Greece, and I found this quote when reading Herodotus' account of the Battle of Marathon in 490 b.c.

A strange prodigy likewise happened at this fight. Epizelus, the son of Cuphagoras, an Athenian, was in the thick of the fray, and behaving himself as a brave man should, when suddenly he was stricken with blindness, without blow of sword or dart; and this blindness continued thenceforth during the whole of his after life. The following is the account which he himself, as I have heard, gave of the matter: he said that a gigantic warrior, with a huge beard, which shaded all his shield, stood over against him; but the ghostly semblance passed him by, and slew the man at his side. Such, as I understand, was the tale which Epizelus told.

I did a quick bit of googling and found that yes, this is indeed widely accepted by psychologists as one of the oldest known descriptions of what we would now recognize as an extreme case of post traumatic stress disorder.