No Reaction: Acquiescence or Apathy?

I pointed out that on a numismatic discussion list a coin collector had announced to his fellows that "archaeologists want to abolish private property" and remarked that not a single collector demurred. Buffy, the author of the "Barford-response" blog claims that I have not:

"cottoned on that when it comes to radical viewpoints, a lot of people simply ignore them. If a far right group hand you their leaflet in the street and you decline to read it or enter into discussion with them, does this mean you accept their viewpoint?.[sic] Of Course not".

Well, firstly in the example he cites, I am sorry, but it does. It means you accept them spreading this type of material about in the streets. I live in Poland, where that act is illegal, and I do not see why Buffy thinks decent people would walk by ignoring the fact that an illegal act was going on under their noses.

Nevertheless, what is being discussed is an opinion expressed on a discussion list, a list where members do not normally simply "ignore" points of view with which they disagree. I imagine that if somebody posted on a British "metal detecting" forum a similar opinion, that "all archaeologists are trying to abolish private property, first they take away your rights to detect, then they will be after your car, we must stop supporting and co-operating with the PAS"... Buffy is suggesting that there would be total silence, even though not everybody on UKDN or Detectorist.uk or Minelabsowners Forum etc etc agrees. Is that the case? Let Buffy try it and see.

Considering the number of posts there have been on the Moneta-L forum on "Government intrusion" and "Government theft" and other such-like topics, and especially the tone in which they are conducted, I think it is not insignficant that there was no response to Rieske's post.

Buffy then gets excited because he realises something:

Hold on, Mr Barford never questions my views on this Blog does he? so HE MUST agree with them using Barfordian logic. Yet another act of capitulation from Mr Paul M Barford- Hoorah

Well, first of all Buffy rarely expresses "views", just cheap jibes, and there is indeed a response to some of them here. There is no point trying to address them all, I have no intention of proving I am not a camel. That is not "capitulation", it means I have better things to do than play an anonymous critic's silly word games. He is just trying to waste everybody's time with his sniping.

e-rodentition gone wrong

In the schools to which I went, we learnt to use the plurals of nouns, both regular and irregular as well as the correct use of an apostrophe. It seems that in his rush to be cute, the mouse-loving legal eagle hate-blogger Buffy forgot what he, presumably, too learnt at school. In his efforts to cover up the fact that in order to present a fuller picture, there are two blogs to which he ought to be directing his readers, he forgot to delete the ‘s’ and in the process attacks the Barford Community Website Group, gratuitously accusing them of having produced a “one-sided” website for accessing of which “discretion is advised”:

The Paul M Barford Blogs in question.
CAUTION - The Blogs below may contain content that readers may find one sided in nature. It is therefore advised that readers exercise discretion before clicking. Thank you.
Mr Paul. M. Barford blog. http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/
And here, a Barford we can warm to, be inspired by and just enjoy for being............Barford.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~kroberts/barford/html/hist.html

This is getting so childish. It is not the fault of the local community that they live in a village with a name that sounds like mine (no connection by the way, my family is East Anglian as far back as it can be traced, to the 1500s). I note that the change was made just after the blog’s author received my comment directing him to the true URL of this blog – a comment though that it will be no surprise to learn has not yet been posted by the blog’s owner, who apparently would prefer to conceal from his readers that metal detecting and Buffy’s non-responses to the issues raised are being discussed here.

UPDATE 23/7/09: Mr Buffy/Welton has now edited his blogsite, removed a couple of posts into the bargain (he also seems to have some problems with the formatting doesn't he?). Now he refers to a "blog below". As I say, it's all getting a bit childish.

Metal Detecting in California

"It's guys like this get metal detecting a bad name", I can imagine the tekkies all wailing in unison. It is however supposed (I think) to be parody indicating what some epeople think of metal detectorists.


"Looking around the park, one has to wonder, what is the history of the park, what kind of people went there, when was it made, what activities went on there? The truth is we simply don't know [...] There's no records, we don't know the history"..."I don't want to dig too much here, [...] metal detecting is not permitted in the park, so I kinda go on the outskirts, and hope they are cool with that, or they do not see me...". "Some people say you should fill in your holes....". "Maybe what I really need is a girl detector".

Whose "prejudices"?

Buffet the cartoon mouse-fixated hate blogger says this blog reflects my “class based prejudices”. Perhaps he is unaware that despite the best efforts of its "partners" the PAS to give the hobby (seen as "dorkish" by many) some form of dignity, the hobby of artefact hunting with metal detectors which he tries so desperately to defend is indeed widely associated by society as a whole with certain social elements.

It was Minister of Culture David Lammy who a few years ago praised metal detecting as allowing all those underprivileged social groups (C2s, Ds and Es in modern sociological parlance) who had been previously "challenged by formal education" some kind of hands-on contact with history. This is published in the PAS annual reports as well as the Hawkshead review of the PAS. It was not me that said it.

In 1995 Laura Bushell, Carrie-Anne Brackstone produced a book called “Oi Pikey! A celebration of Cheap Living”,* which characterizes this social group pretty well. They give a list of “pikey pastimes” as including bingo, car boot sales, complaining, DIY, eBay and metal detecting.

* For the non-Brit: "Pikey is a pejorative slang term used in the UK and Ireland […] to refer to a wide section of the (generally urban) underclass of the country, particularly those on whom the lower middle classes look down [...]"

Heritage "Crusade" needs detectorists' approval?

Buffy the anonymouse rodent fetishist really does not get it. In the blog which he and his guffawing low-brown sidekicks think is an adequate "response" to the issues which conservationists raise about the exploitation of the archaeological record merely as a mine for collectables he attempts to claim that raising these issues is damaging... well what? He reckons it is damaging the relationships with people who "care about history". He has even produced a picture worth more than a thousand of his words: "Barford[']s Heritage Crusade Needs YOU" proclaims somewhat effete cartoon mouse with teeth sprouting from his chin.

Well, actually it does not, I have no "crusade"(and if I did, it would certainly not recruit the likes of the readers of blogs like his anyway).

Instead I have my own views about artefact hunting and collecting. I think there are good reasons for saying that certain prevailing attitudes to them, especialy in the UK, are utterly mistaken. Consequently I make attempts to articulate why, to help me think them through. I do not need readers, I do not seek agreement, in fact I would welcome well-articulated confronting ideas with a firm basis in logic and fact against which to test and refine my own models.

Mr Buffy's puerile "responses" really do not fit the measure. It seems to me that in response to my explorations of some issues, he is the one embarked on a "crusade", or rather a vendetta against a single person.

Metal Detecting: Night Vision Lithium Light

Over on ebay you can buy a light which is advertised as a Night Vision Lithium Light for Metal Detecting. I suppose it must be intended for when they want to go under dense low-hanging vegetation on heavily overcast days.
"This is a great alternative to the traditional head light or flash light which you strap on your head. This light comes brand new & complete with batteries. Lightweight, compact and made to take plenty of rugged treatment, the 5 LED cap light is powered by 2 lithium coin cell batteries for use up to 96 hours. Ultra bright white from 5 LED bulbs with 100,000+ hours or burn time. Completly water resistant, the 5 LED cap Light attaches under the brim of a cap for a number of hands free tasks". Oddly enough the same guy is selling the same product to metal detectorists for 99p, while he's posted them in another section for the huntin', shootin', and fishin' crowd for GBP 4.99. I wonder why that might be?









Left, American pays to be an "Upper Class Twit" for the week, Right, fairly typical UK metal detectorist .

Zer0

With reference to the little matter of the anonymouse critic of my main heritage issues blog announcing to his readers that I have deleted this one, I have just posted this as what seems to be the first reader's comment to Buffy's childish vendetta blog:

Dear Anonymous,
You claim you cannot find my second blog. The one where
I reply to some of the nonsense you and your guffawing detectorist and collecting mates and English, Welsh and Scotish archaeologist friends consider to be an adequate “response” (sic) to the issues I raise about portable antiquity collecting.

Frankly, I find this hard to take at face value, you could have found it by simply Googling the blog’s name. It seems to me that since nobody else has access to the set-up page, the most likely person to insert a “0” [zero] in one of the words in the place of the letter “o” in the URL of the other blog [thus rendering it useless] is the owner of the "Paul Barford and Barfordisation" hate-blog.

In case my suspicions concerning your motives are wrong, here is the correct URL, it has no “zero” http://detectoristcopywrite.blogspot.com/ You can now insert it at the top of the front page of your hate blog for the benefit of the readers seeking a fuller picture.

You will see I have added to it a few comments since you last visited.
Paul Barford

Let us see what happens, will he be a mouse or a man and admit his mistake?

Reading the news - detectorist style

It's not just the Americans that "don't do irony", metal detectorists don't get it either do they? So I wonder how many coins Mr Welton, Buffy and his pie-scoffing sidekick Julian Morgan have found which "date from between 206 BC and 195 BC." though are " stamped (sic) with the head of Emperor Augustus, while other date back (sic) to around 63 AD" and "were used from the third century BC until the middle of the third century AD". But certainly the report says: "The coins, stashed in a clay urn and buried around four feet underground" and "Landowner Peter Turner, 74, said [...] 'After digging down around four feet he saw the top of a large pot had been smashed and hundreds of silver coins were inside' ". I guess the landowner should know how big the hole was in his land. Unless of course somebody was telling porkies in the inquest.

Read all about it in the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1200126/Treasure-trove-silver-Roman-coins-worth-thousands-buried-field.html#ixzz0Ldx2j0ML

Radom spots Buffy's accusations of a "con" involving them

I see from the map of servers accessing the Buffy blog, that a number of metal detector users throughout Europe reads "Buffy's" revelations with great interest, including Radom in Poland. This would be presumably linked to Buffy's misrepresentation of the work done at the Witkowska tomb ("Context or Con Text?"). Frankly I would not like to be in Buffy's place if my colleague Witold Bujakowski catches up with him. Or the provincial curator of monuments for whom this work was carried out - or indeed the US team who led the work.

Hiding behind a curtain

Buffy the anonymous hate-blogger pretends he cannot see this blog anymore, so he has removed the link (the one that had the numeral "zero" in the place of the letter "o" which is why he could not get it to work) from his own blog. Of course the reasons are transparent, he realises that the reader of his blog need only follow that link to find that his "responses" to the Portable Antiquities and Heritage Issues blog were being noted and answered. They are then found not to be "responses" at all, but merely a series of personal attacks. Now based on the "wikipipedia" dictionary (sic) page he has cached away, he has concluded, from the fact it contains a paucity of information that its author could not find on the internet, that Paul Barford is "hiding behind a curtain". That is rich from somebody who cannot even put his real name under what he writes. Mr Buffy or Mr Welton whatever his name is, is coming very close to stepping over the line here with his speculations and innuendos. First about me and now he is attacking my wife into the bargain. This is intolerable.

By all means let us have some responses to the issues I raise on my blog, let us have some discussion with any "metal detectorists" able and willing to have a proper discussion. Are there any? Certainly the author of the "Barfordisation" blog has well shown his inability to fulfill that role.

This big red round thing Mr Buffy is what we call a "zero", recognise it now?

The zero and the anonymous sniper

Buffy ('What, no Barford Blog?? ') cannot find this blog through the use of the link he himself gives on his "Barford-response" hate-blog. Maybe if he'd paid more attention in school, he'd know the difference between the numeral '0' and the letter 'o', and then he might get it poor chap. Certainly at the moment, this detectorist-ghetto blog is still up and running and reserved for answering the likes of him.

Buffy is trying (Its been a bad week for Barford) to throw a smoke screen over the Wikipedia page that suddenly appeared a few weeks ago. He pretends "It seems that someone hijacked Mr Barfords Wikipipedia (sic)entry and caused the now known to be "less than erudite" one to enter a state of apoplexy before he had to have his own entry removed from the worlds favourite dictionary. (sic) And I missed the whole damn thing. Bugger!". Hardly "highjacking" when a Steve Welton was the entire author of that attack page from beginning to end. A Steve Welton whose writing style shares clear parallels with the idiosyncracies of "Buffy's". Perhaps they are just soul-mates, or maybe there is more in that relationship....

Now Buffy claims "Not all is lost though as I am fortunate enough to have been forwarded a Cached copy of the entry along with the story of events as they unfolded", well, I "wonder" who sent him that, then?

Anyhow, Buffy says: "not only is it amusing, Mr Barfords Wikipedia entry does shed a whole load of new 'personal' light on Mr Barford and his whole 'raison d'etre'". The fact that it was a 'personal' attack presenting untrue information as encyclopaedeic "facts" was the reason why the Wikipedia editors deleted it. There was in fact no "personal" information there, the self-appointed author quite obviously knew nothing about the subject he was writing about beyond what they found in the Internet. By the way Buffy must have had a long "holiday", as Steve Welton began writing that page at the beginning of May and it was deleted in the middle of June.

So one of the things Buffy derives "from the cached Wikipedia page" is that "Barford has no qualifications" (What, no Qualifications?). Well, that's not surprising as that "encyclopedia entry" totally failed to discuss my university background and work, since the author knew nothing of it. Yet Buffy quotes from the Unidroit-L list an old post of mine, the implications which he chooses to ignore. Perhaps he thinks I am lying, but really I do not feel any compulsion to prove myself to a mere "metal detectorist" who canot even put his own true name under what he writes.

Buffy makes a mock confession of having laboured under a misconception about my academic titles [In the circumstances, I find the mocking of Catholics in that post offensive, but cultural sensitivity was never any UK "metal detectorist's" strength]. Nevertheless he'd be hard-put to demonstrate the truth of that with reference to the state of his blog on 7th July, where the only title he uses with reference to me in his blog is "Mr".

Metal Detectorist in Dresden Court

This is a picture of a metal detectorist in a Dresden court.