Comme d'Habitude

Four years ago I discovered that My Way was a French song and posted a rather feeble note remarking unjustifiably that the French words didn't seem to fit the tune. This month was the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Claude François, who composed the original version, and Marcel Berlins in the Guardian makes some much more pertinent observations.

In French, the singer tells how he tries to carry on as usual while his love is ending. When Paul Anka put English words to it, with Frank Sinatra in mind, he turned a "delicate French song about love, loss and regret into a crass hymn to selfishness, an excuse not to care for anyone else's feelings and a justification for bad and boorish behaviour. The rhythm of the music has changed too, from sentimental to aggressive, from I'm so sad to Screw you".

Yes, indeed. But Berlins reflects that while François may have resented this, he would have been consoled to some extent by the large royalty cheques that flowed in (and are still going to his estate).

You can hear the what the somewhat androgynous Claude made of it here.

Cilantro

I have long hated the taste and smell of this without ever having heard of it, for I have only just discovered that it is another name for coriander. I don't care if Cato recommended chopped fresh coriander as a garnish to encourage an invalid's appetite; great Roman statesman or no, the man was clearly a silly old fool, for its taste is foul.

The etymology of the word says it all: it derives from the Greek koris, meaning bedbug, and the foliage of the plant has an odour which has been compared, unfavourably, with the smell of bug-infested bedclothes.

(The seeds are another matter, and used in cakes, stews, breads and, for example, garam masala, are a pleasant aromatic spice with no reminder of the vile taste and stench of the leaves.)

Of course, anything which repels people of cultivated tastes—Tony Blair, say, or the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber—always has its admirers among the undiscriminating, and there are a few websites expressing their aberrant views. Happily, these are far outnumbered by sites like this one, based on the reasonable premise that no normally functioning human being would ever in a lifetime consider coriander/cilantro edible.

What matter to me if their star is a world?

[Robert Browning]

There is a restaurant twenty miles from where we live which we have visited as often as we could ever since it opened, for it is the best within fifty miles. This year it gained a Michelin star, and we feel slightly superior to the riff-raff who are now flocking to it just because a tyre manufacturer in Clermont-Ferrand says it's good.

Of course the extra business a star brings is not to be sneezed at, and happily the prices have not yet soared and the food and service is still exemplary; the only change for old customers is that one has to book even longer in advance than before. For the staff, however, the influx of braying foodies holding their wine up to the light and generally showing off their knowledge by being demanding is something of a downside. But we usually go at unfashionable times when the other diners are mostly, like us, quiet browsers and sluicers, and we will continue to go as often as we can.

I won't mention the name or location of the restaurant because it doesn't need advertising (it never did), but we are not so selfish as to want to to keep such a treasure all to ourselves. It may well be that there are readers of Other Men's Flowers who would like to visit it, so any attractive and amusing couples who live in south-east England have only to send me an email inviting my family and me to be their guests at dinner there, with a bottle or two of some modest claret and perhaps a couple of glasses of the 1963 Dow to finish with, and I will be happy to suggest a convenient date, reserve our favourite table and give full directions for finding the place.

Choo kiko wapi?

Any old East Africa hand will tell you that that this is how you say Where is the toilet? in Swahili.

Happily, I have spent very little time in Dar es Salaam and have never thought it important to memorise this phrase or indeed to learn Swahili. In fact it is a long time since I set out to learn any languages at all; I first started to acquire a knowledge of colloquial English many years ago and I am now as fluent in it as one needs to be to cope with everyday life, though of course I have forgotten much and sometimes have to pause when writing or speaking while I struggle to find the right word.

But for the past three weeks I have been wrestling with a new and difficult language called Apple. Having realised after a quarter of a century of subservience to William Gates III that there is a world outside DOS and Windows which should be explored, I have acquired a MacBook. Through something called a Time Capsule (a menacing little white box which gets hot) it connects to an assortment of venerable equipment (though not, sadly, to my lovely old black 1985 vintage Apricot, which sits on a shelf in proud isolation), and I have to communicate with this dissonant assemblage in two different tongues.

It's rather like a European trying to learn Japanese: easy enough to remember that doitashi mashite means you're welcome, and that F11 on a Mac does the same as Windows-Shift-M on a PC, but the whole mindset is different: you have to unlearn things that always seemed naturally right, and acquire habits that seem perverse.

Anyway, during March I have made some progress, thanks to the help of a kind friend who set it all up and is instructing me in the arcane rituals of Macdom; besides being a poet of note he is a technological genius with more than a decade of Mac experience behind him, and today is his birthday.

I haven't as yet done anything useful with the MacBook, but I have played happily and created some pretty things, like this display of a selection of my websites and blogs:
[I shall not report further progress or indeed return at all to this topic; I do not wish to be like Stephen Fry, an erudite and witty man who nowadays spends much of his time writing unspeakably tedious articles extolling the virtues of various bits of electronic kit that take his fancy.]

Recycling (1)

Recycling, v. According to the OED, the word was first seen in print in 1926 in the Journal of the Institute of Petroleum Technologists, referring to an industrial process.

It was not used figuratively until forty years later, and ever since then all kinds of things have been re-cycled: hot money (Guardian, 1969); the output of the secondary schools (Nature, 1973); workers without jobs (Black Panther, 1973); fads (Weekend Magazine, Montreal, 1974); OPEC funds (Newsweek, 1974); repeat offenders (Washington Post, 1978), and so on, to this day.

I'm punctilious about putting bottles, paper, and plastic containers out for re-cycling, and it has now occurred to me that I should take the same care with the contents of Other Men's Flowers. Of course, the 741 posts currently mouldering in OMF's archives are unlikely to cause large-scale pollution , or to contribute towards global warming by giving off methane, so they are not an environmental hazard: it is a question of energy-saving, an equally important concern. If at least some of these items are re-used there will be a huge reduction in the amount of energy expended in creating new ones.

So I have decided that, starting today, the first post in every month will consist entirely of some old items, unchanged but dusted off and economically re-packaged with merely a note of the category and a description linked to the original. All these appeared in 2004:

theatre
Are actresses all actors these days?

sport
Pea-pushing: A sport in decline

cinema
An inspired choice of a screen name

quotations
Noël Coward speaks

music
Comparing the great ones

literature
A sly tribute to Somerset Maugham

Another curious creature

A couple of days ago I posted illustrations of some imaginary creatures, and to follow this up I am devoting this post to a real one. Proving that the saying about truth being stranger than fiction is not only a boring cliché but completely untrue, here is a real animal which is far less strange—or at any rate far less interesting—than any fictional one could possibly be: Expert On Anteaters Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters is a perfectly cast and beautifully acted piece telling the tragic story of an interviewer who is finally reduced to speechlessness by his guest.

[Anyone to whom this masterpiece is unfamiliar has probably also missed other Onion News Network items. Get the flavour of their morning show Today Now and then sample some of its in-depth reviews of such items as Time Magazine's Annual List of the 299 Million Least Influential Americans.]

Curious creatures

In James Thurber's The Beast in Me and Other Animals, published in 1948, there was a collection of drawings which he called A New Natural History, featuring such creatures as the Hopeless Quandary.....

...the Whitefaced Rage and the Blind Rage.

I wonder whether Thurber got the idea from A Phenomenal Fauna by Carolyn Wells, with pictures by Oliver Hereford, which came out in 1901. I discovered this charming old children's picture book today in Project Gutenberg, where it was posted this week as an addition to its library of 100,000 free downloadable books. Here is the Brick Bat and its accompanying verse:

Oft through the stillness of the summer night

We see the Brick Bat take his rapid flight.

And, with unerring aim, descending straight,

He meets a cat on the back garden gate.

The little Brick Bat could not fly alone,—

Oh, no; there is a power behind the thrown.

Hwurl, hwawrl, wurl, wawrl

I have never been sure how to pronounce whorl; dictionaries give several variations but do not make clear which are the acceptable ones and which would cause contemptuous laughter if I used any of them in conversation with better-educated people.

Happily, it has not been difficult to avoid using it since I have rarely found myself participating in discussions about spinning machines, ethmoidal crests, the verticil of a flower, the convolutions of a spiral shell, fingerprints, or the action of drawing up with a pulley. The word has been used in connection with these things since 1440, but I have been able to lead a fairly full life without the need to use it in any context.

There is of course no problem when writing it, so I do not risk embarrassment by passing on the information that Jalebi is an Indian sweet consisting of a slightly fermented batter forced through a nozzle into hot clarified butter so that it forms loops or whorls. When these have set they are lifted out of the fat and dropped into hot syrup scented with saffron and rosewater, then drained and served.

Mere teeth-rotting delight to us, but in the Middle East this confection has interesting poetic associations and is mentioned in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. There is a poem in which a man describes how he fashioned a chain from the whorls and hung it around the neck of his beloved, and put rings of it on her ears. Very romantic, and of course he would be well placed for a nibble.

Patently obvious

Tipi Eisberg, a contributor to Martin G's Really Magazine, normally reviews the more intriguing American patent applications but has recently started selecting some and showing only the drawings, leaving readers to guess what purpose the devices are intended to serve. That this is not always easy may be judged by looking at the three currently selected (Week 08); you can find the answers by clicking on the drawings, but I will spoil these puzzles by revealing that these patents cover, respectively, an electronic device for training animals, a helmet for wearing in the water which enables you to squirt stuff at other swimmers, and a method of gas stunning chickens before slaughtering them.

But the simplest inventions are always the best, and my current favourite is An Apparatus for Improving the Taste of Beverages. Martin is greatly taken by the idea, as everyone may well be, of turning a bottle of plonk into something really good by putting a magnet in it.

One reason why I like this one is that although it is indeed very simple, its description runs to one sentence of 399 words; I like long sentences. The longest one I have ever posted was a mere 164, but that was in 2004, when I was young.

[Unaccountably, I missed Disposable protector for engaging a clogged toilet and containing splashes in the clogged toilet occurring during unclogging of the clogged toilet by a plunger when Martin published it at the end of 2007.]

The Pharaoh speaks

A rather feeble joke from Private Eye,

but it's a gorgeous picture, isn't it?

Fracas in mid-air

There was an item of news earlier this month which must have been of much interest to anyone compiling an anthology called Amazing Stories from New Zealand, and finding himself a bit short of content.

Reports in the Australian and New Zealand press were fairly incoherent, but most included some of the following details: 33-year-old Blenheim woman (or in some reports, "Somali refugee") attempts to hijack small commuter plane going to Christchurch, produces a knife and has another in her shoe, says there is a bomb on board and demands to be taken to Australia, tries to seize the controls, wrestles on the floor with the pilots, stabs one on the hand and the other on the foot, plane lands safely and armed police with dogs arrest the woman.

Two of the passengers, according to one newspaper "were named as a man and a woman".

Clearly an exciting time was had by all, and there were international repercussions: "...the England cricket team's flight from Christchurch to Wellington was delayed for two-and-a-half hours".

Nowadays the threat posed by two knives and a bomb does not dismay experienced airline pilots: one wonders whether the incident might have ended less happily if the woman had armed herself with something more calculated to inspire terror.

Julius de Basil and his icons

After all that depressing stuff I wrote about websites, let's have a nice picture of an icon. Nowadays we use the word most often in one of its two modern meanings. The OED says:

1a. An image, figure, or representation; a portrait; a picture or illustration in a book
1b. An image in the solid; a monumental figure; a statue.
1c. Computing A small symbolic picture of a physical object on a VDU screen.
2. Eastern Church A representation of some sacred personage, in painting, bas-relief, or mosaic, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship or adoration.
3a. Rhetoric A simile. (Obsolete)
3b. Philosophy A sign which represents its object by virtue of having some character in common with the object.
4. A realistic representation or description in writing. (Now rare or obsolete.)

Oddly, the other modern meaning apart from 1c appears in the OED as a draft addition from 2001, though it was recorded in print fifty years earlier:
A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, esp. of a culture or movement; a person, institution, etc., considered worthy of admiration or respect. (e.g. "Hollywood's female gay icons Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon and Jamie Lee Curtis").

But never mind about those, or about the bits of art that clutter up our screens. Meaning 2 has the best images, and here's one from the 6th century: the oldest icon of Christ Pantocrator (encaustic on panel, ca 6th century:Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai). My friend Julius de Basil, a bit of an icon himself, is dotty about the things, and has some nice ones among the family anecdotes in his blog.

Your genial host

In 2003 I started designing and publishing websites for individuals, small businesses and charities. They were simple, rather amateurish affairs, but adequate for their purpose, and some of them are still useful and remain on line. I charged very little or nothing for the work as it was an enjoyable pastime.

But of course I had to register the domains and buy some webspace, and I chose the cheapest host I could find, an outfit aimed particularly at students. I hadn't been a student since George VI was on the throne, but they were happy to accept me as a paying guest, and all went fairly well until last December, when it became clear that things were going wrong with my host: it became impossible to get replies to emails, their billing portal was inaccessible so that I couldn't pay for renewals, and technical support was non-existent. So I had to think of transferring my webs to a new host, and thus began a three-month nightmare.

For a start, wresting control of my domains away from the firm I had light-heartedly handed them over to four years earlier proved difficult since they would not co-operate, and I had to open an account with another firm, get a Domain Release Certificate and obtain Authorisation Codes (for the .coms) and get the tags changed (for the .co.uk ones) so that the domains could be transferred, and then find a suitable new host.

All this would be child's play, of course, to an experienced computer person. Well, I suppose I am experienced in one sense—I have been playing with the things since 1982—but I am not an expert: I was never much good with them, and most of the skills I acquired are either forgotten or irrelevant (who nowadays needs to write DOS batch files, or use DbaseII?).

But the real reason it all became a nightmare is that the kind of people who work in the Support departments of computer companies are not, to put it mildly, of the highest calibre; never before have I encountered in such a short space of time so many stupid, pig-ignorant, incompetent, ill-natured swine. It has been like taking a winter break at Conservative Central Office.

There were times I have needed every ounce of those qualities for which my name has long been a byword—the quiet diffidence, the mildness of temper under provocation, the reluctance to rebuke or even to criticise, the calm tolerance of human frailty—in order to stop myself from speaking out severely or even intemperately.

Then I was recommended to a vast telecoms outfit who are business-oriented but were prepared to accept my little account, and I started another transfer process. All went swimmingly until, after an exchange of some forty-eight emails and several hours on the telephone, I found out that they could not provide something I needed (FrontPage extensions, if you must know), and I had to start looking again.....

Finally I have got back to where I was last November, with the domains safely ensconced and the webs uploaded. My new webhosts seem all right, but it is early days yet: in response to one complaint I made to them I received an email which was addressed "Dear Individual" and read: "...I have checked the extensions on that domain name and can confirm that there was an issue. To resolve this I have tried removing and re-adding the extensions from here."

There was an issue... This is computer-speak for "Yes, there was something wrong at our end but we don't do apologies. Anyway, we have no idea what it was, but we may well have put it right now, for all we know."

Well, they had fixed it, so I suppose I must try not to worry any more....

The Isambard Look

Time, I think, for another Sensational Hats post. Most of the headgear featured in this popular series is in one way or another extraordinary, but this is an exception: for men of substance in Victorian times, hats like the one illustrated here were thought to be absolutely ordinary, in fact de rigueur, and you would be considered eccentric or possibly even subversive if you were seen in public without something of this kind on your head.

I have taken a holistic approach here and shown the hat not in isolation but as part of an ensemble which is very much of its time, with regard not only to the crumpled trousers but also to the massive chains forming the background; this was the age of real heavyweight engineering, when mighty machines were clanking and steaming rather than buzzing and flickering like the piddling toys of our effete age.

If ever a man had an excuse for displaying crumpled trousers and a waistcoat in disarray, it was the great Brunel in this picture, though his demeanour, coolly smoking one of his 40-a-day cigars, belies the stress of the occasion, the difficult sideways launching of the SS Great Eastern (two people were killed). This was an iron sailing steam ship he had designed, the largest ship ever built at the time, with the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refueling.

Sadly, Brunel suffered a stroke and died in 1859, just before the Great Eastern made her first voyage to New York.

Rhyming the Rhythm Method

When writing the other day about a Prophylactic Poetry Competition to celebrate the opening of National Contraceptive Awareness Week, I was quite wrong to suggest that it would not attract many entries: in fact, there were more than fifty.

I have to say, though, that the standard of those selected as winners and runners-up was not very high; most of them had uncertain metre and defective rhymes. I mean, "silly" with "willy" is OK if a bit obvious, but "johnny" with "funny" should have been grounds for instant disqualification.

Anyway, none of those I saw were in the same class as the one I submitted on behalf of one of my correspondents whom I know only as Outeast; he couldn't enter it himself because he lives outside the UK* and couldn't afford the stamp, so he sent it to me in a comment on this post. Pity he didn't win, because I had promised him that the prize would have gone to the Save the Children Fund.

The competition was clearly a success, but I am less certain about the NCA week which has just begun. It may well be that preparations have been hindered by death threats from the Vatican's hit squads, and that at this very moment heavy mobs from Opus Dei are tearing down the displays.

They do these things better in the United States. For instance, over there during National Gall Bladder Week every Main Street has its parade (with the Cholecyst Queen), its banners, and stalls manned by top brass from the Gall Bladder Society of America.

Let the final poetic word on contraception go to Tom Lehrer, who ended his version of the Boy Scouts Marching Song with:
....If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind,
And you chance to meet a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined,
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared....Be Prepared!

* I have no idea where; indeed, I know very little about him. Or her? I have an idea that she may actually be a young Turkish widow whom I remember meeting once some years ago under curious circumstances in the Levant. I do know that he/she is a poet of note: a sonnet of his/hers is included among THESE.

Cantuar cocks it up

Actually, he is formally known as The Most Reverend Father in God, Rowan Douglas, by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan, but that would have made too long a title for this post.

When I told the story of my shameful failure to accost Michael Ramsey, the one hundredth of this line of churchmen, when I encountered him and his sensational eyebrows some years ago in a corridor of the Okura Hotel, I compared him very favourably with his successors, the obscure Coggan, the sycophant Runcie and the slimy Carey, friend of Pinochet, but was non-committal about the next one, describing him in a kindly if patronising way as a little bearded Welsh fellow.

How wrong I was! Williams is clearly a remarkable man, having succeeded, with a few suggestions about Sharia Law, in putting back racial harmony in this country by a couple of decades and hastening the eventual demise of the Church of England by perhaps a similar period. If its leader doesn't have the sense to realise that his words were certain to give rise a flood of clips on TV news showing floggings and beheadings, how can this palsied institution hope to survive much longer?

We are used to celebrities pontificating on subjects way outside their area of expertise—if they have such a thing—and are merely irritated when we are told Prince Charles' views on architecture or medicine, or the Pope's on family life, though I suppose pontificating is what pontiffs are expected to do. But when an archbishop holds forth with proposals for changes to the English judicial system we can only marvel at their idiocy and his presumption.

Not all the effects of this are depressing. Hearing that most of the legal profession and all three political parties promptly and roundly condemned what Williams said is cheering, and the notion that having 26 clergymen of the established Church of England, the Lords Spiritual, serving by right in the House of Lords must surely now be recognised as lunacy.

National Ballet

I have absolutely no comment to make on this picture

The Gendarmes once more

I have noted before that quite often someone hits Other Men's Flowers in search of the lyrics of a song about two gendarmes which they mistakenly believe was written by Gilbert and Sullivan. I had always assumed that the familiar words were a translation from the French, for the song is from a comic opera by Offenbach.

I was curious to know the original French words but so far I have not been able to find them anywhere. Geneviève de Brabant's two-act French libretto was written by Louis-Adolphe Jaime and Etienne Tréfeu, and the operetta was first staged at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, Paris in 1859. Thanks to Boosey and Hawkes it was easy to download the censor's copy of the libretto and I ploughed through it all to see if I could identify the words which became "We run them in..." A word search showed me that there were no gendarmes in the operetta (there weren't any in the medieval legend on which it was based, either, but Offenbach had an offhand way with legends—there were no Can-Cans in Orpheus' underworld) so I assume that the translator had simply interpolated a comic song in English that had no relevance to the plot. But I couldn't even locate in the libretto the original words which must have gone with the tune that we and the US Marines know so well.

Wikipedia tells us that Henry Brougham Farnie (1836–1889), a British librettist and adapter of European operettas, wrote the English version, which became very popular and was produced in New York in 1868. Some of his English-language versions of other operettas became record-setting hits on the London stage of the 1870s and 1880s, strongly competing with the Gilbert and Sullivan operas being played at the same time (and he wrote a song called Sweet Dreamer with Arthur Sullivan, so perhaps thinking that Les Deux Gendarmes is by G&S is not so silly).

By now I am bored with these public guardians bold yet wary and so I do not want any comments on all this. But I would still like to know the French words which were sung to that tune, and if anyone can find them and tell me or give me a link to them I will send £20 to the Save the Children Fund.

H. B. Farnie was not a bit boring. Apart from writing or adapting libretti for dozens of operettas, he wrote the first book on golf instruction, The Golfer's Manual: being an historical and descriptive account of the national game of Scotland, under the pseudonym, "A Keen Hand". Here he is, without a huge stovepipe hat but otherwise a typical Victorian, gazing at us sternly as eminent sitters for portrait photos usually did. No vapid smiles for the photographer: these were men of character, making no attempt to look cheerful. Glum, hirsute and even with a hint of anger, they seem to be saying: Look, I've just built The Great Western Railway and started work on the Oxford English Dictionary, and I've grown these terrific whiskers, you expect me to twinkle at you as well?

Good blog, bad blog

It has been said that the best blogs:
have a consistent style; are focussed on a particular theme; are honest and sincere; contain no offensive material; are planned to appeal to special groups, or to a general readership; are written tightly, without padding; are unpretentious, avoiding the use of words which few will understand; and are pleasingly styled, with original and striking graphic design.

Other blogs are:
inconsistent; unfocussed; deceitful and disingenuous; full of objectionable content; totally unplanned and therefore likely to appeal to hardly anybody; verbose and banal; show-offs, using rare words for effect; and based on a bog-standard template which the writer cannot be bothered to modify.

Foremost among these is Other Men's Flowers. During its four years on line it has attracted both brickbats and bouquets, and some of the former can be considered as compliments. Take the Weblog Review, for example: one of its reviewers gave the blog 2 out of 5 and wrote: I left this site feeling ripped off... feel as if I have nothing from it ... no bit of wisdom to carry on ... no real desire to return to this site at all, which is fair comment if a little blunt, but another noted that ...the vast majority of the posts are off topic and trivially nondescript.

This showed great discernment and I was much encouraged when I read it in 2004, for it is exactly the effect I have always aimed at.

What makes us good?

Earlier this month the New York Sunday Times Magazine had a cool and cogent article by Steven Pinker called The Moral Instinct which attempts to analyse the influences which have created our moral codes, or at least our sense of morality. He mentions Kant, Russell, Chomsky, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and a host of lesser-known philosophers, anthropologists, neuroscientists and psychologists—and quotes Chekhov—but it is not until near the end of the piece that he mentions a possible source of our morality which until recently most of mankind believed was the only one, and which many still do.

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem of how we know right from wrong, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not—if his dictates are divine whims—why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child; would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others—if a command to torture a child was never an option—then, Pinker asks, why not appeal to those reasons directly?

The article poses many other questions in its nearly eight thousand words, and attempts to answer some of them. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.