Cribs: Mongolian Edition

Since winter is approaching and it’s difficult to get in a wintry mood here in Kuala Lumpur, I’ve taken to looking for the most desolate and godforsaken frigid wastelands I can find on Google Earth, to get me in the holiday mood. I’ve been checking out fjords and icebergs and the Faroe Islands and so on.

I recommend the area around the Kamchatka Peninsula for a true scene of bitter, soul-crushing emptiness – I can’t really tell but I imagine most of what I see is fishing villages, oil outposts and Soviet military bases. So I assume everyone there probably looks a lot like Santa, except with fewer sleighbells, toys and jollity, and more vodka, knife fights and Russian Roulette.

So let’s take a little gander at a place I assume is pretty cold and desolate, Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia. I don’t remember the name having those extra “a”s when I was a kid. Maybe the city’s growing. I can only hope I live long enough to see them add a third and possibly even fourth “a” into the mix.

Here’s the city. Looks small and dusty, but presentable. There’s a big central square, a soccer field, and what looks like residential sprawl on the hills around it. Much less exotic than I was expecting. Maybe a closer look will show some local color.


Let’s zoom in on those hillside residences, shall we? Take a gander at how Ulaan Bataar’s middle class like to set up their cribs, just a few hundred yards from the bustling capital’s heart. Oh dear. Those aren’t... They can’t be...


They are. Tents.


Everyone apparently lays out a nice little yard with a big stone wall around it, and then sets up their yurt. Er, hello, Mongolians? Far be it from me to tell you how to live your lives but dudes if you’ve got the massive shipments of bricks and mortar for those sturdy fences you know what else you can do with them? BUILD A F&#KING HOUSE. Oh well. Sarcasm and cultural insensitivity aside, it’s pretty cool that they still live in those tents, even just outside the dead center of the capital city. ’Cause that’s how they roll. That’s probably what suburban Chicago would look like today, if we hadn’t kicked out all the Indians. Except with teepees, of course.

Here is a picture I just found of what those white circles in the Google Earth pictures must be. As I suspected, yurts, yurts and more yurts. Yurtles all the way down. Note that it clearly has a concrete foundation. Oh you wacky Mongolians.

Al O’Limerick

Wherein I try my hand, not once but frice... er, force?... four times, at an auncient Irish verse form as time-honoured and venerable as the beloved Shamrock Shake:

1. The Moistened Pedagogue
Malaysia: a substitute teacher
had sweat as a notable feature.
He sweated all day
tried to wipe it away
Others said, “what a damp, smelly creature.”

2. Customs Officials
or
Sure, Use Up an Entire Page of My Passport for One Stamp, You Stamp-Happy Ass
When traveling in Indonesia
The visa fee might well displease you
It’s thirty-five bucks
yet the government sucks…
Where’s that money go after they squeeze you?

3. Formatting Fatigue
I find it a tedious trial
to write things in APA style.
I forgot to indent
and down my grade went
I’ll be angry about it a while.

4. Bistromath
When having a restaurant luncheon
The math at the end doesn’t function.
When your friends add their share
the result’s far from fair
And you stifle the impulse to punch ‘em.

the courage to hate the olympics

I’m a vigorous, lusty man of grandiose gestures and consuming passions, and I live life to the fullest. Sometimes I sit for long periods of time, and – this is where it starts to get tricky; don’t try this at home – sometimes I lie down for long periods of time. As if that weren’t enough, sometimes I even play video games while sitting or lying down. One of my many extreme sports hobbies is interactive fiction.

Interactive fiction is basically just a fancy term for text-based computer games. They were popular in the 1980s. The most well-known game series was called Zork. I always liked these games because, like reading a book, they allow you to use your own imagination to picture what’s going on. Only within the last couple of years have video games started to have good enough graphics to compete with the mental pictures I used to draw when I played text adventures. Anyway, I’m still quite interested in the genre and often re-play old games or try some of the new homemade games being created by enthusiasts. I even programmed a very short game myself in Inform 6 for a grad school project this summer.

Anyway, while I was looking around at online interactive fiction resources the other day, I came across the writings of a text game author, a Mr. Stephen Bond, and to my surprise found that there is actually someone who’s more critical than I am. This guy hates the Olympics. That takes a certain pessimistic genius, and my hat’s off to him. I can’t argue with him, either – The Olympics do pretty much suck; I just never would have dared to take such a bold ideological stance on my own. I have no point here except that I wanted to give him a shout-out for providing me with some funny and thought-provoking reading material. Here’s an excerpt from a post I particularly liked, called “how to recognise people who try to command, control and influence people”:

The Only One in Control
The schemer must always appear in control of the situation, even when the situation does not require control of any kind. In fact, schemers usually lose control of things in a real crisis, but that is beside the point. One way in which the schemer maintains the appearance of control is by making out that the surrounding people are losing it.

For example, a schemer may tell someone to ‘take it easy’, even when that person is taking it easy, or say ‘Relax, we have plenty of time,’ even when the other person is relaxing and is well aware that there is plenty of time. Other typical phrases are ‘It's important that we maintain a sense of focus here,’ and ‘Let's keep our minds on the task at hand.’

Hypnosis
Schemers believe that they can bend other people’s wills by the power of mind alone. They are often seen attempting a form of hypnosis, which involves staring at someone in the eyes, addressing them by their first name, and telling them to do something.

“Tony, you'll do that for me, won’t you.”

The hypnotism attempt is sometimes accompanied by a pat on the back or some other physical contact. If the victim is demoralised enough, the hypnosis will actually work.

The Fawlty Tow’r

Why does everyone who wants to force themselves into a prefabricated poetic form have to write haikus all the time? Screw haikus.

Why not try to funnel our poetic juices into another juice box, as it were? I choose to let the capricious sun of inspiration play a high C until I live to be 100 Plus. Tetra Pak. NO MORE JUICE BOXES, CHLOE.

Crap. I’ll start again.

One of the many books I’ve started but not finished is The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser.

One of the many reasons that I haven’t finished reading this book is the strange and extremely restricting meter in which the poem was written. It has to be one of the most convoluted ways to write a poem I’ve seen. Here’s my first and so far only shot at a single stanza of Spenserian metre. Now keep in mind that old Spenser wrote about a jillion stanzas using the exact same rhyme scheme. No wonder his epic poem doesn’t make any damn sense. Anyway, here’s my one stanza. It’s a true story of a 21st-century manchild and his quasi-legal downloading:

Tonight I sought to burn a DVD
Containing episodes of Fawlty Tow’rs.
But what should I upon exam’ning see?
The disc could hold but one and one-half hours!
I’d thought these discs possess’d quite greater pow’rs.
Three episodes at most a disc would fit!
Thus my enthusiasm for it sours.
Now on my hard drive those old shows will sit;
I watch the tiny screen and feel an utter twit.

The Ruiner’s Lament

Kim calls me a “ruiner” because I’m so critical of everything. And because I’m often quite crotchety. And because I’m prone to believing critical movie and book reviews, even if the reviews are clearly written by blithering idiots. And because I’m prone to telling her what she feels are crucial details about the endings to things before she’s seen them. Hm... now that I think about it I suppose there might be a teeny tiny speck of justification for the title of ruiner. I certainly believe in preemptively detesting everything and everyone until I see clear and incontrovertible evidence of nonsuckiness.

Well, the spoiler has been bespoiled. I’ve been hoist on my own petard. A petard is a type of bomb named after “a loud discharge of intestinal gas,” by the way. Just because something’s in Hamlet doesn’t mean it’s not naughty.

Anyway, I’ve gone and done ruined something for myself, and that something is several of my very favorite poems, including the well-known “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by Yeats and “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell. I do not claim to have particularly refined or obscure taste in poetry; both of these are over-anthologized poems which most students are made to study at some point. I know I saw both of them ad nauseam in both high school and college, and strangely they never got old and I liked both very much indeed. Then came The Spoilening.

I recently acquired a copy of what Amazon calls In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poet [BOX SET] (I guess they’ve still got some kinks to work out of their titling system). It’s just what it sounds like, a set of recordings of poets reading their own work. The first one is Walt Whitman, apparently recorded on the very first record player Thomas Edison ever built – you know, the one made out of granite and powered by human blood. It’s an interesting and valuable piece of history, and a priceless record of one of America’s greatest poets.

Now future generations will know that Walt Whitman sounded like a big women’s blouse. (If you have Windows Media Player or RealPlayer, check out the samples on the Amazon page and see hear for yourself. I’m currently using a Mac and I vowed never to install RealPlayer again many years ago because of the stupid ads and extra programs they keep trying to rope you into, so I can’t vouch for whether or not the samples prove my point, but I’ll pretend they do.) I don’t know if it was the recording, or if old Walt was 90 when they recorded him, or if he just sounded kind of silly when he talked, but he has kind of an Elmer Fudd/Woody Allen voice. The line of powerful and stirring adjectives “Strong, ample, fair, enduring” from the poem, when read by its creator, sounds like “Steh-wroang, eaample, faiah, endoooring”. It sounds a lot less like a rousing ode to a great nation by a master poet and a lot more like Linda Richman from Coffee Talk getting verklemmt.

This, sadly, was not the most disillusioning of my discoveries. For whatever reason Whitman sounded kind of wimpy, but Yeats, doing “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, has an entirely different problem.

In case you’re not familiar with it, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is the most peaceful and meditative poem about harmony with the natural world ever written by a non-Japanese person. It’s about having a calm quiet place to think about, about calmly hearing the sound of water lapping on the shores, even when you’re in the grey city. It’s lovely and very, very peaceful and soothing.

The problem is that when Yeats, the author of this pleasant, soothing poem, reads it himself he bellows it out as if it’s Judgment Day. He has a booming “Grrreat Poetick RRRRECITATION!” voice that sounds as if he’s Moses reading the Commandments off the stone tablets. He sounds like Saruman on his little oration balcony at Isengard getting the Uruk-Hai really whipped up before they go and pillage something. Which would be great for many of Yeats’ poems, “The Second Coming”, for example, but which is just really, really crappy for “Innisfree”.

It’s such a soothing poem when I read it on the page. “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…” But when Yeats reads it, it’s like he’s just getting to the last line of a campfire story about hobgoblins and banshees: “FeRRRR PEACE… comes DRRRRRROPPING slO-O-O-O-O!” I understand that he came from an earlier time, when poets probably all had a sort of powerful Master Thespian declaiming voice they used, but now when I think of the poem, or even just see the words on a page, I think of that old man’s furious growling voice. It’s exactly like sitting down for a session of Zen meditation and hearing Gandalf hollering “YOU. SHALL. NOT. PASS!” every time you close your eyes. It’s just ruined it.

I won’t even go into what I think of Robert Lowell’s nutball voice. Let’s just say I liked “Skunk Hour” a lot more when I didn’t have the unforgettable mental image of it being read aloud by an effeminate Mayor Quimby.

Wallace Stevens on the other hand didn’t ruin his poem at all. I pretty much would have figured he had a silly voice – I mean, when you name a poem “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and include the lines “bid him whip/
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds,” you’re setting a certain circus-tent vibe from the get-go. So he’s fine in my book.

And then there’s Ezra Pound. That enormous poseur. Tell me if you hear this, but I could swear that he’s exactly copying Yeats’ “Grrreat Poetick RRRRECITATION!” voice and rhythm. Maybe young Idahoans back then sounded exactly like elderly Irishmen, I don’t know, but it definitely seems suspicious.

Ruined. All ruined. Damn you, today’s modern multimedia world of the future! Damn you to Hell, sir! Now I’m wondering what else I like in written form that would suck if I heard it aloud by the author. Maybe Dante sounded like Bobcat Goldthwaite. Maybe Abraham Lincoln sounded like Rosie O’Donnell. ARGH.

Now, I know I have been harsh on these poets’ voices, but I’m not saying that I would sound any better if I read poetry aloud. Au contraire, mon frère. On the few occasions when I’ve heard my own voice on the answering machine, I’ve been filled with an urge to punch myself in the head so that no one would ever have to hear that awful voice again. I’m just saying that I’ve discovered that some poetry is MUCH, MUCH better when left on the page. Again, I urge you to listen to the samples yourself and let me know if you agree.

In any case, I will never hear those poems the same way again. And thus, faire Reader, was the Naturall Order turn’d upon its Arse, and the Ruiner him Self Ruin’d.

Shantih Shantih Sieg Heil

I’ve already done a post about something I saw on Bali that combined European culture, modern Asia and Sanskrit word origins (chess). Oddly, that was merely the second most mind-blowing thing I witnessed on that trip which combined those exact same fields of interest. If you are someone who does not already know Sanskrit but who happens to be as interested in connections between far-flung words as I am, prepare to be thunderstruck. Both of you.

As we were being shamanistically blessed by a woman along the side of the road (it was the van driver’s idea, and is a good example of why a trip to Bali does have redeeming features, despite what my lovely wife might say), she came up to my window (the Balinese witch doctrix, not Kim), smeared some grains of rice on my forehead, and reverently said to me: “Om Swasti asti blabitty blah blah blah…”. There was a lot more to the blessing than that, but who cares.

I knew the old Hakenkreuz was an ancient religious symbol – but I didn’t know that the exact same word more or less was still a friendly everyday greeting on Bali. What the heck? Then it hit me – and this is the moment of utter jaw-dropping etymological pyrotechnics – if “swasti(ka)” is some sort of cheery salutation then maybe, I thought, it’s the same thing as hello in Thai; “sawadee ka”.

It was like the globe had just twisted into a Klein bottle. Nazi soldiers and Thai monks went around saying the exact same word several times a day? That’s insane. That’s like learning that “colostomy bag” means the same thing as “fuzzy bunny”. A similar revelation which blew my mind back in the day was that “Aryan” and “Iran” are more or less the same word, but this swastika thing stretched even further across the globe, and was even more bizarre.

I haven’t actually found that much direct information yet about the connection between swastika and sawadee ka. If you happen to know anything on the subject let me know. Maybe the “ka” suffix part is just a coincidence and only swasti is really a leftover from Sanskrit, I dunno.

Sam Sees an Oliphaunt

In Bali recently I saw dozens of pairs of people sitting on the sidewalks in front of their souvenir stores and playing chess. I thought that this was really neat. I assume that the trend got started because among the souvenirs that the Balinese mass-produce are wooden chess sets, but even so there was something fascinating about seeing non-Westerners playing chess for fun. I suppose I’ve got a stereotype of chess as a highly refined and intellectual European pursuit, to be carried out in utter silence by perspiring Slavs or Icelanders with rumpled suits and enormous egg-like craniums. Seeing this reminder that this was just a stereotype and that it’s a fun game for just about anyone was quite inspiring. I’m trying to brush up on my chess skills. It is, however, difficult to polish a turd. I’m horrible at chess. It requires long-range strategic thinking which, as Kim knows from when we’re planning vacations years in advance, is difficult for me. But anyway, I’m working on it.

So anyhoo, a little internet research on the history of chess and what do I find but something INCREDIBLY INTERESTING. At least to me. The bishops are supposed to be elephants!

From this website on the Indian game which is apparently the direct ancestor of our chess set:

The pieces were raja (king), mantri (counsellor, ancestor of the ferz), gaja (elephant, later called fil), asva (horse), ratha (chariot, later called rook), and pedati (infantry or pawns).

The elephants/bishops used to move a little differently; if you have Java working properly you can play the old version here.

Not only is that little historical background into the pieces interesting in itself, but those Sanskrit or whatever names of the pieces are quite meaningful too. “Raja”, “Mantri” and “Gaja” are all still Malay words, and “Ratha” and “Pedati” really show their indo-european origins. We also used to eat at an Indian restaurant in Munich called Radha which I believe was supposed to mean “chariot”. As if that weren’t enough, “Mantri” a.k.a. Menteri or minister in Malay is supposedly the origin of the word “Mandarin”.

Overall I think I like chess better now that I know the pieces are all supposed to represent actual military field units and not some weird lathe-turned royal family out on a pleasant stroll with their favorite priests and a couple of self-propelled castle towers. Au contraire! Chess is the prequel to Advance Wars.