North Pole Vault

I feel bad about not writing much on here lately. I think I’m just preoccupied that we’re moving in a few weeks. Oh well.

I’d like to introduce something beyond cool: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

It’s a frozen underground facility drilled into the side of a mountain on a remote Norwegian island, intended to hold emergency supplies of every type of plant seed on the planet.

Not only is this pretty much the coolest idea ever, but it’s being built in the coolest place ever in the coolest way possible. God bless Norway. The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg is also entombed in the side of a mountain (above); I guess when you have a lot of mountains this probably seems like the best way to entomb things. It’s also totally awesome. They just need to be careful not to wake the you-know-what:

The only way this could be improved upon from my perspective would be if it were a giant library instead of seeds, but seeds are OK, I guess. I believe the Germans have large underground document archives, and I’m sure other countries do, too, but something about it being on a frozen island really sets this one above the rest. And apparently it only cost 5 or 6 million bucks, which seems like peanuts for something as rad as this.

And - I am not making this up - the security system can’t be beat: “...the facility will also be equipped with motion detectors and possibly even CCTV. The presence of polar bears, which prowl the area, may be seen by some as providing an added layer of security.” I think that says it all. I tried to find the site on Google Earth, but it’s all snow.

Obviously (and I don’t want to belittle the scientific importance of the project, but this must be said) this would also be a great setting for a horror movie, first-person shooter video game, or a retarded Michael Crichton novel about how botanists are our enemies and must be destroyed.

The Meme Stops Here

I’ve been “tagged” with a “meme” by Kimbo. While this sort of thing can be fun, I am still a little grumpy about the term meme. I liked it better back in my college days when the word meant “speech virus”, not “unpleasant public blogsturbation”, but oh well. That crotchety reluctance of mine to let go of the past will surely make this trip down memory lane a particularly pungent and festering one.

1. Go to www.popculturemadness.com
2. Pick the year you turned 18
3. Get yourself nostalgic over the songs of the year
4. Write something about how the song affected you
5. Pass it on to 5 more friends

I will not do all these things. I refuse, on the grounds that I could never select only five friends to share this joy with. Please understand that I have far too many friends to ever narrow it down. I will, however, attempt the first four. Here goes.

November 29, 1992 - March 5, 1993: I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston
The reaction of space aliens to this hideous shrieking in an episode of Futurama pretty much says it all: “The humans are attacking! Pluck the lower horn and let’s get out of here!”

March 6 - March 12: A Whole New World (Aladdin's Theme) - Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle
After the relative high points of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, I was pretty disappointed in the corny superficiality of Aladdin and that includes this song. One of my least favorite of all crappy movie cliches is having a corny R&B song play over the end credits, especially when the movie is set in a time or place where violently sh*tty R&B songs like this are mercifully unknown.

March 13 - April 30: Informer - Snow
I assumed that this guy was another Vanilla Ice and never paid it any attention. Later, my black friend said this Snow character was actually OK and semi-respected in dancehall circles. At the time I was confused. Now I just don’t care either way.

May 1 - May 14: Freak Me - Silk
No.

May 15 - July 9: That's The Way Love Goes - Janet Jackson
God, no.

July 10 - July 23: Weak - SWV (Sisters With Voices)
Oh for Christ’s sake.

July 24 - September 11: I Can't Help Falling In Love - UB40
Ah, the band that singlehandedly turned reggae into flaccid elevator music, although to be fair the Police did pave the way. Eat sh*t and die, UB40, wherever you are.

September 11 - November 5: Dreamlover - Mariah Carey
What the f*ck? Simon Cowell must have blown a load in his little British boxers every four to five minutes throughout 1993, because damn this year seems to have sucked with an unfathomable, golden-age sort of Biblical suckitude that American Idol only dreams of.

November 6 - December 10: I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) - Meat Loaf
The second most unintentionally homosexual song ever recorded, right after “I Want It That Way”.

December 11 - December 24: Again - Janet Jackson
Again? Her? W, as they say, TF?

December 25 - January 21: Hero - Mariah Carey
I feel like killing myself. Somewhere, Simon Cowell’s giant, crimson, Frankenstein-rectangular head is cackling maniacally at me.

The fact that someone has saved that list and posted it on the internet is, to me, conclusive proof that there is no God.

What was I actually listening to in 1993? I was not very musically sophisticated in high school. I liked rock, and that’s it. Our family had just barely moved from records and tapes to CDs, and I mainly listened to tapes I made of “classic rock” radio and the emerging stirrings of grunge. Zeppelin. Cream. Hendrix. Pearl Jam. Stone Temple Pilots. I bought the first Rage Against the Machine album around this time, but not because I particularly liked hip hop (I didn’t, yet) but because aside from the vocals it sounded like the kind of rock music I liked. I tried to appreciate some classical music, but I only liked the kind with loud noises at the end, like Beethoven’s odd-numbered symphonies or the 1812 Overture. Classical music that sounded as much like classic rock as possible, in other words.

Then I went to college, and several things changed. I was quite lonely my entire freshman year. I had almost no friends and no car. But I had some leftover scholarship money, and walking down to the record store was one of the only things that cheered me up. Aside from the obligatory Bob Marley and Cypress Hill CDs that every college student is issued at the door, I bought many CDs in the second half of 1993 and the first half of 1994, including:

Pearl Jam, Vs.
Soundgarden, Superunknown
Counting Crows, August and Everything After
Lizst, A Faust Symphony
Beethoven’s Complete Symphonies, Solti
Holst, The Planets
Morricone, The Mission Soundtrack
Orff, Carmina Burana
Monty Python, The Final Rip-Off
PJ Harvey, Rid of Me
Wu Tang Clan, Enter the 36 Chambers

I’m the most proud of the last two, which I bought on whims after seeing like 20 seconds of their respective videos somewhere. Wu Tang opened up a world of new music to me, and Harvey’s has turned out to be the only CD out of all those which I still play regularly and her subsequent albums have been the soundtrack to a lot of my life. As you’ll notice, otherwise these albums were not much of a departure from my previous rock and rock-like-classical tastes, but the extra scholarship cash enabled me to branch out a bit into slightly uncharted waters. One thing I realize now, thinking back on that year, is how isolated I was. This was (I think) before you could “search for related music” on Amazon, and you basically still had to listen to the radio, or your friends, or read magazine reviews, to figure out what music to like. In lieu of friends, I had only the radio, and I only had two or three rock stations I listened to.

So I arrived at college pretty much only having heard whatever they played during “two-fer Tuesday” on Rock 105.9 or whatever. For a brief while there in college, I was physically around people who were actually playing and discussing music, which was new to me, and my tastes changed immensely based solely on what I heard on my dorm floor, the concerts I tagged along to, and so on.

That didn’t last and now, I’m physically and socially more or less just as isolated as I was back in high school, but here’s the thing: I don’t feel that way, because of the Web. I feel as if I’m almost as connected to new and exciting music, if not more connected, than I was in college, but it’s all happening online. Interesting. This is why record companies shouldn’t fear online piracy – nobody buys varied albums as foolishly and frequently as college students, and online we’re all basically living together in one big virtual dorm. If they’d lowered the price of albums to $1-$5 each, they’d probably have made way more money from CDs over the last few years than ever because everyone is all hopped up on recommendations from the web. Oh well.

The pig says “my wife is a slut”?

Until a couple of years ago, all I knew about the New Yorker was that it tended to feature strange short stories where someone boring, usually from New York, would go through their normal day and then stop and suddenly realize they’d wasted their lives, or something. I only knew this because one of my English teachers photocopied a couple of the stories and had us read them in high school, as examples of modern “slice-of-life” writing. I think John Cheever may have been involved somehow.

The handful of times I myself physically encountered the magazine, it was always in a doctor’s waiting room, and I would flip through the magazine, squint at the tiny, opaquely written reviews of strange foreign movies I’d never heard of, try to understand the strange cartoons, and give up.

So in 1998, when I saw the Seinfeld episode which poked fun at the New Yorker cartoons’ frequent lack of discernible humor, I had just enough previous knowledge to share Elaine’s frustration and see the point of the jokes. It was true – why would someone print cartoons that could not be figured out?

Since then, I’ve started reading the New Yorker web site. Since I’m older and more boring than I used to be, I now see that there are some really good articles and reviews in that magazine. I still avoid the parts of the magazine that involve the cartoons and fiction, however, because I felt I’d been burned enough before. I didn’t want to waste time staring at cartoons of two animals talking in an office, or read a story about an old man feeding the birds in Central Park, who realizes he’s wasted his life.

But from time to time the cartoons pop up in the middle of an online story. This happened today as I read an interesting article on the Anticythera Mechanism. There was a cartoon of a dog in a suit waiting at a suburban bus stop, saying “I remember when this was all farmland.”

Oh hell no. No they didn’t. Didn’t they learn their lesson after being mocked by Seinfeld?

THAT IS NOT FUNNY. I spent a minute staring at it. Dog. Bus stop. Used to be farmland. What the freaking hell? Why, New Yorker? WHY? Why mess with my head like that?

Enraged, I clicked around on the website and looked at some other cartoons. Most of them made some sort of sense. Even the ones that weren’t funny were at least recognizably attempted jokes. But then there were The Unfathomables. The five percent or so of the cartoons that just make no damn sense. Like this one, of Don King in a yoga position levitating above a catering table. WHY? DEAR GOD, WHY?

On this archive site, underneath the cartoons, there are little captions that describe the action. Only through that site was I able to decipher the cartoonist’s original intentions. I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you here, however, because I want others to feel my pain and wounded confusion upon encountering these incomprehensible monstrosities of cartooning gone wrong. Some of you will probably see the “real” “jokes”, but for those who are like me, just be aware that there are semi-humorous ideas behind these two panels, but they were both totally botched by misleading artwork - at least at the resolution of these online versions.

My question is, how did the editors let these by without suggesting slight changes so we could, um, GET THE JOKE? Unless you either have the exact same perceptual framework as the cartoonist, or work painfully backwards from the punchline and reconstruct the garbled original intent behind these comedic abortions, you can’t tell why they’re supposed to be funny. At all. They fill me with confusion and rage.

p.s. During my elaborate preparations for this article (stealing pictures), I found out that the writer of the Seinfeld episode is actually a frequent (and usually, in contrast to the above cartoons, funny) New Yorker cartoonist named Bruce Eric Kaplan. His name rang a bell because there’s a Futurama producer named Eric Kaplan, and I’d wondered if they were somehow the same guy. They’re not, but the writer of the old Seinfeld episode is indeed the still-active cartoonist “BEK”. Small world. I commend him on his script, which is clearly just as relevant today as it was almost ten years ago.

Shogi no Densetsu

As we all know, the most disgusting type of person on the planet is an American nerd who likes Japanese things. You might know the type. The sort of pale, basement-dwelling loser who is so socially, emotionally and aesthetically retarded that he (or she?) dreams about anime schoolgirls, and who furiously studies Japanese in the hopes of one day going there and sleeping with Asian chicks who don’t know what a slovenly dweeb he is. The type of person who collects Final Fantasy action figures, dresses up in Dragonball Z costumes, and will get into epic battles on message boards about the sexual habits of Pikachu.

I do not want to be this type of person.

However, I hereby confess that I am very interested in Japan and always have been. My only excuse is that the whole thing started at least 20 years ago, way before I knew what I was getting into. It began with the following formative experiences: 1) ca. 1983, the G.I. Joe comic books introduced me to ninjas (namely, Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes) and I learned how to make an origami throwing star, 2) ca. 1986, the Nintendo Entertainment System let me play Super Mario Brothers, Zelda and Castlevania while the Sony Walkman I got for my birthday let me blast the Back to the Future soundtrack, and 3) ca. 1987, I read James Clavell’s Shogun. It’s been all downhill since. Domo ari-frigging-gato.

Why am I publicly baring my shameful Nipponophilia this particular week? One word: Shogi.

My regular reader (hi Kim!) will recall that I have been learning that the game of chess is not just a boring European game with several fruity pieces (bishops? a queen? sentient stone towers?) but a gritty war simulator and worldwide sensation that swept the globe starting from around 700 AD. The prototypical battle game still exists in various mutated forms throughout all of Europe and Asia.

The original lineup, of the reconstructed Indian game Chaturanga, was supposed to represent an army: Foot soldiers (pawns), chariots (rooks), cavalry (knights), elephants (bishops), advisor/ bodyguard (queen), and general (king). The genius of the game was, and is, that each type of military unit moves in a different, characteristic way. All of the existing variations of chess maintain these six ancient army units, albeit with mutated names and some additions. Chinese chess enlarged the board, took the weird step of placing the pieces not inside the squares but on the board’s gridlines, added a fearsome catapult/cannon aptly called the pao, and introduced geographic features on the actual board - a river and two fortresses. European chess kept the ancient Indian board and piece count but sped up the game by greatly augmenting the powers of some of the pieces - which formerly could only move a square or two at a time - and gave them new identities in keeping with medieval European society, where queens, bishops, and castle towers were far more prevalent than viziers, elephants or chariots.

I’ve more or less discussed all this before, after I saw dozens of men on streetcorners playing Chinese chess in Vietnam, and people playing the primitive Thai chess, makruk, in Bangkok. But now I’m trying to learn what is clearly the most idiosyncratic and fiendishly complicated chess mutation of them all: Japanese chess, or Shogi.

Shogi is chess gone completely Japanese, by which I mean it is refined, complex, subtle, and damn near inscrutable to outsiders. Why haven’t you heard of it before? For one thing, you almost have to be Japanese just to distinguish the pieces. It’s played on an unpainted wooden board with unpainted wooden pieces marked on both sides with obscure characters. Why characters on both sides of the piece? All forms of chess have some type of unit promotion once certain pieces reach the far side of the board, in order to let those pieces continue moving. In European chess, the familiar promotion is when a pawn makes it across the board and becomes a queen. But Shogi takes this to the extreme, and when most of the pieces reach any of the far three rows, they power up, leap into the air and flip over, revealing their supercharged identities. A pawn turns into a gold general, a rook turns into a dragon, and so on - all with new moves. A further complication is that where Chinese chess uses a single character to identify each piece, Shogi uses at least two, and the names are odd: for example, the corner pieces are called “fragrant chariots” and the enemy king is the “jade general”.

Confused yet? I haven’t even gotten to Shogi’s most unique feature. Captured enemy pieces, apparently brainwashed or bribed to fight for your side, can be re-deployed, ninja style, almost anywhere on the board, at any time. This ronin feature is not found in any other version of chess, and turns the game’s tactics upside down. This is another reason why the pieces are all the same color - they might belong to the other side a few turns down the road.

In spite of all these obstacles and oddities, I learned how the pieces move and their various characters pretty quickly, and I just beat a Shogi Gameboy game, Minna no Shogi, on my second try, despite the fact that the pieces are too small to distinguish on the Gameboy screen. There’s probably a difficulty setting somewhere (I hope) that’s currently set on “wicked easy”, because as confidence-boosting as my Shogi victory was, if I bought a European chess game and beat it immediately, I’d want my money back. I have a second Gameboy Shogi game, Morita Shogi, and I’m hoping that’s tougher. The whole thing has also reminded me how chess-like my recent favorite games Advance Wars and Fire Emblem are.

Moving from the virtual world to the actual one, I already bought a Shogi set months ago in a toy store at the mall here in KL, a cheap Chinese production that consists of pieces that look like reject wood chips with writing on them, and a roll-up board that’s like a ’70s dinner placemat, but hopefully I will one day go to Japan and get the chance to buy a slightly fancier set. I have always been very impressed with the wood-revering Japanese aesthetic, and I like the unpainted, calligraphic look of the Shogi pieces. The tragedy is, of course, that I am not outgoing enough to play board games and will probably never play against anyone. Maybe someday I’ll have children I can force to play chess with me.

What’s my point here? Just that I was fascinated to find out that there’s Japanese chess, a strange evolutionary cousin to European chess. And I think the subject of what each variety of chess might say about the society that developed it is intriguing. For example, I recently read somewhere that asymmetry is a key feature of a lot of Japanese art and design - and Shogi is the only type of chess with asymmetrical layout of the bishop and rook. Could there be a connection between Japanese military or religious philosophy and the unique Shogi rules of re-deploying captured pieces? You tell me. And my Western brethren - if you like chess and know any Chinese, Korean, or Japanese people, ask them about their version.

Note: The title of this post, “Shogi no Densetsu” is what I believe to be “The Legend of Shogi” in Japanese. If you know better, by all means disabuse me of this notion per comment posthaste.

The Slow Blade

In Dune, there are personal force fields that will stop bullets but not something inserted slowly. “The slow blade penetrates the shield” is the fortune-cookie mantra young Paul receives from his gruff trainer. I recently experienced something similar (without the erotic overtones) in Vietnam, where the method of crossing the street requires a sort of suicidal Zen calm. With hundreds of motorbikes whizzing by, the only successful technique is to banish all fear and slowly and steadily walk across the street as if the traffic weren’t there at all. The bikers, with plenty of time to notice your slow-moving shape, swerve like a school of fish around you. If you tried to cross the same street quickly, letting your instincts take over, you’d be dead within seconds.

I flatter myself that I have a similar approach to things like posting on here. I don’t do it quickly or often, but I do it eventually. The last week or two, however, I seem to have been standing on the curb. I think it’s partly because I’m starting to get preoccupied by our upcoming move to Bangkok. We don’t have a lot of preparations to make and it should be an easy move, but it’s still messing with my head. I’ve started to worry about things like whether or not my books are going to get (even more) moldy while they sit in the shipping warehouse, which is an idiotic thing to worry about but disturbing nonetheless.

Another part of my not posting for the last few days, however, is because my homie Beez over at Intrepid Flame kindly honored me with a Thinking Blog award. This is one of those chain-letter deals where you are supposed to turn right around and nominate five other people. Or else... bad luck? Shunning by the blogging community? A Japanese girl crawls out of a well and starts haunting your VCR? I’m not sure what happens if you drop the hot potato, and I don’t want to clumsily betray the responsibility the Beezinator has placed upon me.

Problem is, aside from friends and family I hardly read any personal blogs regularly, and the ones I do read are more for humor than thought-provoking content. As I’ve mentioned before I like this guy’s archive of smart, unbelievably bile-filled writing, but I’m not sure that what he’s got going there counts as a blog. For one thing he usually only links to other things he’s written, an interesting choice that also strikes me as a remarkable hypertext simulation of painful introversion. So I waited a couple days to see if I could scrounge up five nominees. Then a few more days. Then a few more days. I think I’m going to have to give up for now. But at least I’m posting something! That’s a start! I’m halfway across the Vietnamese street, or something. If you have a suggestion for a “Thinking Blog”, let me know.