tohu va-bohu

Jarvis Cocker, My Hero

2009-07-13T12:57:00.011+08:00

Once upon a time, a brave man had a sane response to Michael Jackson and his public image, and he heroically acted on it. I wish to briefly salute an iconic moment in the history of the fight against the forces of evil.
The former head of the band Pulp (and extremely good current solo artist), Cocker was present for Michael Jackson’s performance during the 1996 Brit Awards.

During the highly choreographed performance, Cocker got on stage and pranced around for a bit before security chased him off.

Cocker later explained that he didn’t like the way Jackson was surrounded by choirs of children and overt religious iconography, and he jumped on stage to poke fun at this. The singer - whose own lyrics are often clever, self-deprecating musings about the chasms between desire and fulfillment, between appearance and reality - has explained that while he’s not religious, he was offended by the Christ-like pose Jackson was striking.

Let’s be honest and admit the possibility that Cocker was also intoxicated in some way, that such silly behavior at an awards show is obviously attention-seeking, and that sure, maybe it was a dangerous thing to do on a stage which included a crane, a choir of children and someone dressed as a rabbi (?!) but no matter.

The important, brilliant thing is that Cocker’s instinctive response to seeing Michael Jackson was to leap in and take the piss out of him.

I wish some of the millions of people who’d seen and worked with Jackson over the years as he was transforming into a tragic freak had had an ounce of the same courage. Michael Jackson was a good singer and dancer, but otherwise almost every aspect of his life was a sad example of some of our most lamentable traits as a society.

The fact that few people aside from Cocker ever had the guts to stand up and point out that this particular emperor had no clothes shows the extent to which the sickness that produced the monstrous figure of Michael Jackson was not within him, but in us.

The current hagiographic treatment of the prematurely deceased Jackson only confirms to me that we produced this deformed creature, we created and fed his situation, and now that he’s dead we are clamoring to show off just how utterly we have failed to learn anything about our crime, about the poisonous human urge to put people on pedestals.

We grovel to the whims of people with more money or higher status than ourselves. We yearn to cheer and weep vicariously at the actions of celebrities who we expect to be superhuman. We love to worship living saints, interrupted occasionally by malicious glee at their eventual downfall.

Michael Jackson wasn’t a saint - in fact no human being in history has yet been what we think of as a saint - and yet we still love to set them up there above us and then pretend to be shocked when they fall. It’s all part of the same misguided, Manichaean, probably instinctive idealism that allows us to still believe in oxymorons like holy wars and Christian presidents and infallible popes and selfless celebrities.

It’s the rare hero like Jarvis Cocker who has the courage to point out, even for a few moments, that this whole sick cycle of saint-worship is a load of nauseating garbage, and for that I salute him. I suggest we erect a giant statue in his honor.

Blue Badger IRL

2009-05-09T13:03:00.010+08:00

Just a random déja vu thing that happened to me during our recent trip to Japan - twice. I like a certain series of handheld video games about cartoon lawyers. A typical case will revolve around bringing to light, through a long process of investigation and examining evidence, that the accused is left-handed when the murder weapon was a right-handed golf club. Or whatever.

Sounds stupid, and often is, but the gameplay is very similar to old-school point-and-click adventure games, and the dialogue can be surprisingly funny. The games are clearly set in Japan but, at least in the English translation, take place in fictional locations.

I’ve played through four games in this series now, and a couple of them make jokes about the police department having a silly-looking mascot - the “Blue Badger”. Here he is, in front of the police building, in the background from one of the games.

Well, the other week in Ginza I strolled past what seemed to be the police museum (fun for the whole family, right?), and it... er... just look:

Not hard to see where the video game designers’ grand inspiration came from. Here’s that pantsless police creature’s website, complete with theme song. Ah, Japan.

Then the same thing happened the next day. Strange-looking stadium from the game:

Real stadium:

Now, I have no illusions that I’ve discovered something new here. I’m sure that Pipo-kun the haunting police beast and that strenuously architecture-y stadium are as familiar to Japanese people as an igloo to an Eskimo, and that’s why they were parodied in these games. It just makes me wonder how many other caricatured landmarks, celebrities, myths etc. from foreign cultures I’ve been exposed to for years without having the slightest clue. And somehow I feel slightly let down that the Blue Badger turned out to be biting real-world satire and not just a strange, random figment of someone’s imagination.

I guess most works of art are like that - you can always deepen your understanding of them by studying more about the context they were created in, but that knowledge can end up tainting your enthusiasm for the artwork in the first place.

Like how taking a good, close look at Jon Voight’s face explains so, so much about Angelina Jolie, but also utterly destroys her hotness.

An American Nerd in Tokyo

2009-04-22T17:18:00.019+08:00

So: I’m not one of those guys who loves everything from Japan just because it’s from Japan. I wasn’t in an anime club in high school. I don’t own any plastic figurines of megacephalic schoolgirls striving unsuccessfully to conceal their undergarments. I don’t always know the appropriate Pokémon to deploy in any given combat situation. I think sushi is gross.

Nevertheless, I have in my own sad way been preparing for our recent trip to Japan for about 25 years now. It all began in August, 1984, when I read G.I. Joe comic book issue number 26. This was my first encounter with ninjas. Ninjas are totally awesome. I don’t think I need to say anything more on the subject.

We got our first Nintendo Entertainment System soon afterwards. An utter failure at old-school twitch games like Pac-Man, I was obsessed by Zelda and Metroid, where I didn’t die every ten seconds and where exploration was more important than getting a high score.

I could probably go on for thousands of words about the various things from Japan I encountered over the intervening decades and how they warped me into the magnificent specimen I am today, but let’s fast forward to early April, 2009. As we headed from Bangkok to Japan for my first trip there, I had only one goal in mind:

1) Buy the fanciest Shogi set.

In spite of being possibly the world’s worst chess player I’m very interested in regional variants of chess, and Shogi not only seemed like an intriguing mutation of the game (captured pieces can be put back into play by the capturer), but a great aesthetic creation, combining carved wood and evocative calligraphy in that special Japanese way.

Technically speaking I already owned two Shogi sets, but one was an embarrassingly cheap Chinese crapfest I’d bought in Malaysia and partially ruined by varnishing it with Dr. Sloan’s Liniment, while the other was a plastic pocket set I’d bought in Singapore. So I decided that whatever else happened during our vacation, I would try my damnedest to get a nice set as a souvenir.

After an abortive attempt to enlist the services of our hotel concierge in researching the surviving time-honored, family-run Shogi workshops of Olde Nippon for me, I reverted to my suburban American shopping instincts and resigned myself to buying whatever crap I could find in big stores downtown. I snatched up a box of pieces and a board (sold separately) in Takashimaya in Kyoto, but the set of pieces cost the equivalent of ten bucks and was barely a step up from my rough-hewn Chinese abomination, so I was still on the hunt.

As soon as I had a free morning in Tokyo, I lurched off up and down the chilly avenues of Ginza with great vigor.

Here’s me setting sail on my grand adventure. Note the traditional Shogi hunter’s cap.

Turns out a lot of the stores don’t open until 11:00, so I did a lot of standing around and drinking free tea in vestibules while my vigor slowly curdled. I finally found a set of pieces for around 3,500 yen in a big toy store, and almost bought it, but the paint job seemed slapdash and I kept looking.

Here’s me out and about in Ginza. My stern expression indicates dedication to the quest. (Actually, the picture was taken after the quest was over, and my expression was meant to convey immense, uncontrolled excitement and pride. I guess I have to work on my expressions.)

I’m glad I waited, because later in a department store called Matsuya I found a much sharper-looking set for only 2,500 yen or so. The characters were actually stamped or carved into the wood, not just painted on. I found it the most handsome set I’d yet seen, and at a price that wouldn’t force us to survive on ramen flavoring packets for the rest of the trip.

Elated, I wasted no time in sauntering back to my hotel room and fixing the moment of my grand triumph forever in time by taking the lavish photo spread you see here.

Shogi aficionados will note the unusual characters on the pawns. Instead of the normal “soldier” character that I recognize from Chinese chess, it’s a bunch of horizontal lines. I still don’t know what the deal is with that.

I also found a set of playing cards, an old game called hanafuda. Adorably (to a sucker for calendrical symbology like me), its 12 suits are based on the 12 months - on plants which blossom in Japan throughout the year and the animals which frolic amidst them. To my delight I saw that the set was actually made by Nintendo, and later research showed that it was the company’s original product back in 1889.

So why have I told you all this? Read on just a bit more, dear reader, to read for yourself the surprising punchline to this rambling tale of lusty Asian shopping:

Upon my return to Bangkok, while doing some more research into the rules of hanafuda, I found Nintendo’s page about their vestigial card-game division. Something about looking at this page, and considering my hanafuda cards, made me curious about the Nintendo logo. If the company had been around for over a century, surely its logo wasn’t always the English word “Nintendo” in a snazzy red font?

What was Japanese, so to speak, for “Nintendo”? Funny how I’d never thought of that before. A short search later I found the Kanji characters, matched them up to some characters on the hanafuda card box, and realized they looked rather familiar. Where had I seen that logo before?

Oh.

I had, utterly without knowing it and completely by chance, bought and brought back home with me both a Shogi board and a set of Shogi pieces MANUFACTURED BY NINTENDO. The circle of my life was complete. I had traveled the world only to find that what I was searching for had been with me all along. Nintendo Shogi turned out to be the twist on the Moebius strip, the final/first sentence of Finnegans Wake. To paraphrase Borges:

Others will dream that I am mad, and I [will dream] of Mario. When all men on earth think day and night of Mario, which one will be a dream and which a reality, the earth or the Mushroom Kingdom?

The Smartening and The Artening

2008-12-14T09:38:00.019+08:00

I just wanted to quickly point out that in Japan, the best-selling video game for the last two weeks running has been the latest in the series of Professor Layton games. In the UK, a recent release of an older Professor Layton game has also apparently been a great success.

I am cheered by this news because these games are little more than compilations of old math and logic questions, spruced up with beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and old-fashioned animated characters.
When you play a Professor Layton game, the experience typically goes as follows: you wander through a lovingly drawn area reminiscent of the LucasArts-heyday backgrounds on Curse of Monkey Island, click on a quirky character who looks like a reject from The Triplets of Belleville, and he or she says something like “I will give you this shiny gold coin if you can help me, young man. I have a rowboat, a fox, a chicken, and a bag of feed...”

Each game has over a hundred hard-core logic puzzles, disguised by an atmospheric point-and-click adventure interface. I’m usually turned off by games that lean heavily on reheated old puzzles, like the infuriating “Tower of Bozbar” and “Peggleboz” from Zork Zero, but Layton’s design somehow makes the old logic chestnuts addictive and charming.

The fact that these adorable games are so popular shows that there’s an enormous audience out there for creative video games which are both highly artistic and educational. Of course, people have been similarly excited about the success of Brain Age for a couple of years because it’s educational, but to me the Professor Layton games are much more interesting because I have to assume that they appeal to a younger crowd than Brain Age. Some of those nearly half-million Japanese people who’re already playing the newest game must be children, and it’s nice to think of their little brains stretching to figure out how to row that fox and chicken across the river. (hm - note how that phrase I just wrote, “how to row that fox” is like a tongue twister or something. Four different vowel sounds from “o” as the second letter in a word. English spelling must be so annoying for learners).

Also, nothing against 3D backgrounds or animation, but the fact that these are hand-drawn 2D is a tiding of great joy to me, both for nostalgic reasons and because I think it’s an eye-pleasing use of the small DS screen, where 3D environments can look like a blocky mess. There’s clearly still a place in the gaming industry for people who can draw and paint old-fashioned backgrounds, and that’s a nice thought.

In conclusion, everyone who has ever complained about how video games are violent or detrimental to children should please, please just shut up forever. This possibly includes, with all due respect, our next president.

We Did It!

2008-11-05T13:13:00.006+08:00

photo source

Newsweek Is-Weird

2008-10-27T23:09:00.017+08:00

Look at the odd hyphenation in the following extract from this Newsweek article:

“It is eerily quiet at Barack Obama's headquarters, an open expanse that takes up the entire 11th floor of an office tower in Chicago's Loop. It's nearly as silent as a study hall, which is appropriate, since most of the 20- or 30-somethings in it wear jeans and T shirts.
...
Like FDR and Ronald Reagan, Obama is an innovator in organizing and communicating. Roosevelt was the first to rely on labor unions, and he talked intimately to voters through the then new medium of radio.”

What made them not hyphenate the two phrases screaming out for it, “T shirts” and “the then new medium&rdquo? I guess you could make a case for “T shirt”, but the other thing is just a mess. The then new medium? Really? The author later goes on to use “reaching-out” as a noun. Ick. In the same article, I also found Newsweek’s quaintly Victorian insistence on two periods in “Ph.D.” a little strange, but that’s a different matter-entirely.

The impact will blow trees back and crack statues

2008-10-26T19:10:00.010+08:00

My favorite era in rap music was roughly ’94 to ’98, when East Coast hardcore was at its height. I loved the gritty, verbose, cryptic, violent sound of the Wu Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Mobb Deep, the Boot Camp Clik and related groups. It was dense, paranoid and clanking music best suited for headphones on the subway.

Hip hop didn’t get any more anti-commercial than the GZA, who epitomized the cold world of the mid-’90s’ stern, Biblical-prophet wordplay, while his groupmate ODB rapped like a street-corner drunk a few seconds from toppling over, crooning and ranting at passing cars. Somewhere between those two poles, between sesquipedalian urban Jeremiads and raving homicidal lunacy, lay the essence of the Wu era’s greatness, and it was all set to great beats from the likes of the RZA, DJ Premier, Havoc, 4th Disciple and Da Beatminerz.

For a few years, it seemed as if everyone was weaving dense lyrical webs of comic-book, kung-fu, Scarface and militant Five Percenter references over ominous beats. It all came to an end sometime before the turn of the century, when, to make a long story short, a shrewd buffoon named Puff Daddy dominated an era of dumber, openly superficial, radio-friendly rap which increasingly incorporated baleful R&B caterwauling (the kiss of death as far as I was concerned).

Things got even worse as Nelly-style silly sing-song cadences and lyrically vacant Southern rap started to catch on in the ensuing years. Instead of lyrics like Deck’s superb alliterative/assonant “Poisonous paragraphs smash ya phonograph in half / It be the Inspectah Deck on the warpath / First class leavin mics with a cast / Causin ruckus like the aftermath when guns blast / Run fast, here comes the verbal assaulta / Rhymes runnin wild like a child in a walker”, we had “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes”. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, indeed.

I thought for a few years there that hardcore hip hop was dead. As usual, I just wasn’t looking in the right places. People like Jedi Mind Tricks and M.F. DOOM were keeping the torch lit, and the web made it possible to find those few groups who were still putting out quality music. But for the past few years it’s usually been a depressing trickle rather than a steady stream of new stuff, and my old favorites seemed to have run out of steam.

Then, over the last couple of months, two albums from old favorites dropped which together have resuscitated my faith in hip hop. Heltah Skeltah, always the standouts in the Boot Camp roster, had been absent for almost ten years. Half of the duo, the hilarious Sean Price, had been putting out solid stuff, but it just wasn’t the same. Now there’s a new Heltah Skeltah album out, and it’s great. Don’t judge the following track by its slightly comical intro - things really get rolling around 0:30.

In addition, a great collaboration album between two of my favorite artists, one which plays to both of their strengths, recently came out. While they usually outshine anyone they share a track with, on their own solo albums, Killah Priest and Chief Kamachi can both be monotonous (Priest’s problem being a sometimes low-energy delivery and Kamachi’s Achilles heel being repetitive spoken hooks). The perfect solution was to have them combine forces on a tag-team album, and the result is electrifying. These elder statesmen of mythological-themed hip hop rap with infectious urgency, as if someone’s just slapped new batteries in their backs.

That’s all I wanted to say - I was worried there for a few years but clearly hardcore hip hop is back from the dead, and if you liked any earlier works from these artists, check out the new albums today.

Late Bloomers and Slow Burners

2008-10-15T22:51:00.012+08:00

Two things coincided today which had me thinking about Yeats’s ferociously powerful late-period poetry, and about one of the greatest fruits of that elderly incandescence, his “Among School Children” with its memorable chestnut tree (not pictured), the great-rooted blossomer which is leaf, blossom and bole at once.

The first was a touching article in the New Yorker which dwells on the work of an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson, who has been trying to study whether artistic genius and precocity are really as linked as we think. It turns out, to my great personal relief, that there are artists who try to “find”, and artists who try to “search”, and that the searching kind of art can take decades and decades before coming to fruition. The article’s story about the author Ben Fountain, and the years it took for him to gain success as a writer, and the support he got from his family, actually had me kvelling at work.

The second thing which set me thinking today was my absurdly delayed appreciation of most recent album by my favorite band, Sigur Rós. Without exaggeration, I’d say the first fifteen or twenty times I listened to the album, it left me cold. True, the first time I heard the new album was unfortunately in an airplane, and I missed half of what was going on because of the ambient engine noise, but still, I felt like my favorite group had let me down. It seemed like a barren, repetitive album.

Then, about two weeks ago, something clicked, and I swayed to music with brightening glance. I was listening listlessly to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust or, as I think of it because my bad German is better than my atrocious Icelandic, Mit (einen) Summen in (unsren) Ohren spielen wir endlos on my way to work, and the October sun lined up perfectly with the east-west grid of my neighborhood in Bangkok, and shone pinkly through the mist between the skyscrapers, and the entire world seemed to be singing out to me in joyful harmony through my iPod. I suddenly realized that the album was f*cking brilliant from start to finish, that it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard bar none, and for the third time in my life my daily commute made my day. (The first time involved a hot summer day, Weezer’s Pinkerton, a malfunctioning Honda Accord, and Route 6 in Connecticut, the second time involved Sigur Rós’s “Vaka”, a snowy winter morning, and Munich’s Tram 17.) Here is a picture of me this morning striding sweatfully yet manfully down Soi 51 on my way to work, in silent awe at the musical genius of Iceland’s finest.

I’ve listened to the album almost nonstop, over and over again, every chance I’ve gotten since. And not just certain tracks - I’m talking front to back. But - and here’s the point - it took me at least twenty listens before I had the “damn dawg this is a great album” epiphany. This is my favorite band we’re talking about here, and it still took months for their album to grow on me.

What happened to cause me to suddenly appreciate this music so deeply? Was it because the album is more subtle than their previous work? Is it just something that takes a while to become comfortable with? Or had I changed in the interim? Or was it the setting in which I heard it, riding the BTS above Bangkok at dawn, which caused everything to come together? How can we know, as Yeats asked, the dancer from the dance (or in this case, the music from the listener from the surroundings)?

Whatever happened, I wonder about the other things in life which I’ve been exposed to and been left cold by 19 times... just waiting for that magic number 20 to click. Imagine the authors whose work I would love if I read one or two more books. I can only hope I am lucky enough to have enough time on this planet to appreciate more of the masterpieces which I’ve overlooked in the past.

John McCain Is A Colossal Jerk

2008-10-07T19:08:00.004+08:00

I urge you to leave this blog at once and read this great Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s life story. He is actually a much more despicable privileged asshole, f*ck-up and failure as a human being than our current president. He is a vile jerk and a horny, bitter, coarse little man. He’s been making all that pretty clear on his own over the past few weeks, but this article kind of completed the portrait for me.

p.s. I’m linking to the “print” version of the article, because no sane human should be forced to click through ten pages of hyperlinks to read one article.

Anastasius of Sinai

2008-10-02T20:30:00.007+08:00

Rembrandt is one of those painters who (whom?) I normally admire, but don’t love. Perhaps it’s just because his name comes up so often that I have tuned him out, or perhaps it’s because some of his paintings in the museums I’ve frequented, like his creepy self-portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, seemed somehow unpleasant to me. But I just stumbled across a painting of his which I haven’t seen before, of the learned Anastasius of Sinai, which captures what, to me, was great about Rembrandt. The murky light, the weight of the sage’s body, the strangely comfortable solitude. It’s a picture that distills old-school learnedness to its essence: a man, a book, a desk, a window. I could have done without the elaborate Turkish carpet/tablecloth, but nobody’s perfect.

Use Your Allusion

2008-09-22T21:29:00.015+08:00

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.

What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.

Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Ache Superior

2008-09-16T21:24:00.005+08:00

For some reason, I’d never heard of the online comic Achewood before about two weeks ago, although I realize in retrospect that I’ve seen bits of it used as avatars or posted on message boards for years. The website has like eight years’ worth of comics on it.

In few words: I have just spent something like five straight evenings reading Achewood every spare minute I had. I have been getting home from work and reading Achewood like my life depended on it. I have been poring over Achewood like it was a Ptolemaic stele and I was Jean-François Champollion. It is funny, obscene, melancholy and somehow comforting in its depiction of friendship, although I suspect that it would appeal more to males than females. Check it out. Note: the two things I’m putting on here are not representative - the strip usually isn’t about hitting broad targets like bad grammar or Comic Sans, and is usually more strange and subtle. But I thought these items stand well on their own without any knowledge of the characters.

Goodbye, David Foster Wallace

2008-09-14T22:48:00.011+08:00

One of my favorite authors is dead, by his own hand, at the age of 46.

It’s hard to think of another stranger whose death could have been more upsetting to me. David Foster Wallace was not only incredibly talented and funny, but his writing always had a humane and optimistic streak which I always respected, although I couldn’t share it. I read with bemused cynicism his article about how inspiring John McCain was and his monumental review of a dictionary which turned into a meditation on democracy, but at the same time I felt comforted that he was out there, being idealistic when it would have been easier to be nihilistic. I envied him his apparently sincere and principled search as much as I enjoyed his winningly, self-deprecatingly complex writing style.

The fact that he seems to have given up that search in suicidal despair only adds to the ache I feel at his death. I had several paragraphs more written, but I don’t want this to seem like a ripoff of Wallace’s sesquipedalian style, so I’ll just stop. I will miss him.

In almost every picture I’ve ever seen of him, Wallace was wearing a colossally silly-looking do-rag (à la Prison Mike), so I’ll just reproduce the cover of his best-known book, a cover which I feel represents both his refreshing style and the wide-open breadth of his unfortunately-curtailed literary ambition.

The Same River Twice

2008-09-14T20:19:00.015+08:00

After last spring’s resounding (in my mind) success of my model of the Pantheon, I immediately set out to craft a model of the Hagia Sophia. I made a lot of progress, but didn’t quite finish the interior. Or the exterior. The grand dome remains hovering suspended in midair, surrounded by virtual scaffolding.

Then we moved to a new apartment, went away for the whole summer, and I started a new job. SketchUp also didn’t seem to work with the new Mac operating system, and it kept freezing up. So with one thing and another, I haven’t really done anything in SketchUp for months.

One of my favorite places on Earth is the old part of the town of Freising near Munich, and not just because they claim to have the world’s oldest brewery. I took an entire course in Romanesque sculpture in college and remain fascinated by it, and the Bestiensaeule in Freising’s crypt was something I tried to go and see whenever I could when we lived in Munich. Well, I initially went just to see the crypt, but I started to like the whole cathedral complex, even though the main church had been renovated in hideous pink baroque. I’m not religious but have great respect for and curiosity about holy sites, and going to Freising, like walking up from Herrsching to Andechs, was one of my very favorite weekend pilgrimages. I feel lucky that I got to go there as many times as I did.

Last summer I had the chance to make a commemorative day trip to Freising, where I took over 100 photos of the area to use as reference material specifically for SketchUp. As this expedition’s protraction nearly caused my wife to miss lunch, it was a venture which was not without danger to life and limb. Well, today I finally got to use some of those reference photos. I spent the entire day working on a new model of the cathedral and adjacent buildings. The real thing looks like this from the front.

My model (which is still in the early stages, but which looks pretty respectable for one day’s work) looks like this. So far so good. I feel a bit better having started it. I hope to do the place justice. Since the outside is all cool white plaster, I think capturing it will be the easy part. The crypt, with its couple of dozen differently-sized pillars, will be another story.

However, my favorite photo from that day in Freising isn’t of the cathedral at all. It’s this picture of some kind of plants under the surface of a stream. The clear Alpine water and the sunlight from directly above made it look like the plants were glowing. It was very peaceful to watch them sway in the current.

Olympic Fever

2008-08-16T09:15:00.008+08:00

I was working on a post on here about how I dislike the Olympics, but it descended into a string of obscenities, so I’ve decided it was too negative and I’m taking it off.

Instead, here’s something we can all enjoy: The visual punchline for a joke about Chinese air pollution.

Mascot tracheotomy.

lollipop corncockle

2008-06-04T13:27:00.010+08:00

or, Spam Poetry Part Deux

The last installment of spam poetry unearthed an unpublished (because unwritten) complement to “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Today we turn to the later work of James Joyce. The iconoclastic Irish author may be long gone, but Finnegans Wake is still being written. It’s being written by the apparently Greco-Hindu pyramid schemer “Panakos Prabhakaran” and thousands of men like him, a veritable phalanx of creative pioneers unknowingly collaborating on one of mankind’s greatest works of literature.

The text, which has yet to be assembled in its entirety, currently consists of a series of disjointed e-mail messages about penile enlargement which are rotting in the junk mail folders of humanity. It only remains for a great man to piece together the fragments of this broken, Viagra-smeared Coriolanus. I am that great man. Here, precisely as I received it, is the first chapter of the daring, breathtaking sequel to Finnegans Wake.

lollipop corncockle

Hola,

Increasee once and foorever your sex drivve

Broke from her lips. Aynesworth heard it, and, harlequin
at home. At fast, he slept heavily, the front gate. That
was the same house that dr. Broiled a piece of ham, made
some good strong there could be no divorce no question of
marriage. About! But dr. Calgary was wrong. Places and times
i would ask jack brandiger to come there and live. This
work you are now in possession of about all bonum! Whether
it so prove, and whether i may lashing riders and jouncing
guns of the battery. Fellows, but i shall never warm to
any one again to look anything but murderous, why, you don’t
everyone is.’ ‘that is what i believed. It seems of lamentation:
poor little boy, he is going away had indeed before suggested
that the primitive.

I’ve done a bit of editorial research and it turns out that this masterful work is rich in poignant allusions to several neglected gems of our literature. To the alert mind of a scholar, it positively bristles with adroitly juxtaposed phrases lifted almost word-for-word from great works such as The Magic Egg and Other Stories by Frank Stockton, The Malefactor by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and perhaps most significantly the Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples by Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, the Marquis de Nadaillac. The hallucinatorily pornographic phrase “lashing riders and jouncing guns of the battery” is, in fact, from Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage”.

Master Prabhakaran in his subject line claims to wish to enlarge penises, but his bold poetic sensibility, which has fused these disparate elements into an aesthetically satisfying whole, has enlarged our minds. I must now begin the process of unearthing and annotating the rest of this hypermedia masterwork, as well as demanding that the Nobel Prize in Literature be immediately awarded to the author of what is undisputably our century’s greatest text. For it has something profound to say to each and every one of us, this, our majestic, eternal, unforgettable lollipop corncockle.

Astrology Useful After All

2008-06-02T12:19:00.042+08:00

I’ll be honest: my “efforts” to learn Thai died several months ago, right after I cobbled together enough monosyllables to remote-control a taxi driver.

Once I was able to meow and squawk commands from the back seat to make the guy slam wildly on the brakes, or lurch wildly from side to side, I was all set. Add to that my well-worn repertoire of four or five choice phrases to dazzle shopkeepers and waiters with, and I guess I unconsciously figured that I had pretty much all the Thai I needed for daily life. My brain stopped caring.

Lately I’m trying to slowly shift back into learning mode and pick up some of the basics I’ve been doing without. Sadly, I don’t even know some of the most essential words like “eat” or “see” or “walk”. And I certainly haven’t the slightest idea what the days of the week, or months of the year, are. The months always seemed especially daunting because they’re quite long, for Thai words. “November” is “Pruetsachikayon”. That’s just madness.

My wife, desirous of figuring out the opening dates of certain motion pictures while watching their Thai previews, asked me politely if I’d mind learning the months. After the echoes of my cruel laughter died away, I began to wonder if it might somehow be possible. Long words in Thai usually mean they’re borrowings from Sanskrit, and I’ve had success in the past coming to grips with Thai words I know are Sanskrit, like Thai “guru” and “maharaja”, which are derived from the Sanskrit terms “guru” and “maharaja”, meaning “guru” and “maharaja”. Well, those are stupid examples, but you get the idea.

By the way, the poster above is for Som Tam, an entire Thai kickboxing movie based around a racist stereotype (not that I really mind). The enormous shirtless white guy hulks out whenever those kids feed him papaya salad, because everybody knows those foreigners can’t handle spicy food. I guess it’s kind of like Popeye, if Popeye were Asian, and if instead of spinach he drank beer and couldn’t process the alcohol and hulked out after a few sips and solved mysteries in his enhanced state. Actually, that’s not any more or less silly than most superhero movies anyway. Never mind.

Anyway, I just looked up what the Thai words for the 12 months mean. What I discovered threw me for a hell of a loop. It’s nuts. We’re through the looking glass here, people. The names of the 12 months in Thai are THE 12 EUROPEAN ZODIAC SIGNS. The same exact things. Leo the lion and all. Was that goofy Battlestar Galactica mythology right? Were our ancestors from the distant space-planets of Virgon, Caprica and Sagittaron? Er... no, but check out the following list, mostly from wikipedia, with Thai month names followed by the old Indian root:

January
Makarakhom / makara “sea-monster” = Capricorn

February
Kumphaphan / kumbha “pitcher, water-pot” = Aquarius

March
Minakhom / mīna “(a specific kind of) fish” = Pisces

April
Mesayon / meṣa “ram” = Aries

May
Pruetsaphakhom / vṛṣabha “bull” = Taurus

June
Mithunayon / mithuna “a pair” = Gemini

July
Karakadakhom / karka “crab” = Cancer

August
Singhakhom / siṃha “lion” = Leo

September
Kanyayon / kanyā “girl” = Virgo

October
Tulakhom / tulā “balance” = Libra

November
Pruetsachikayon / vṛścika “scorpion” = Scorpio

December
Thanwakhom / dhanu “bow, arc” = Sagittarius

And it’s not a new thing. While it’s true that the Thais really only switched over to the Western calendar in 1889, those Thai month names are a thousand years old or more. This seemed even weirder than the time I deduced that “hello” in Thai is more or less the same word as “swastika”. I’m still not quite sure I understand how the whole months thing went down, but I’ll try to explain.

Apparently, a Greek guy named Yavanasvera went to India in around 150 AD and told them all about the wonders of the zodiac signs. For some reason this really caught on with the Hindu bigwigs and so, in addition to whatever system they already had in ancient India, astrologers started referring to certain months as, more or less, “Lion-Time” and “Scorpion-Time” and so on. I’m guessing that Joe Ricepaddy didn’t have much use for these obscure astrological terms, since I think most Asians went by the lunar calendar anyway, but they definitely entered into the Thai language at a relatively early date.

Just a guess but at least one of those pairs of names, “Karka” = “Cancer”, share the same Indo-European root word. Even more improbably, the Thai word for horoscope seems to actually start with “hora-” as well, which is pretty messed up. From a very interesting article which goes into great depth about the Thai calendar: “In fact, the Thai word for ‘astrology’ [ho:rasa:t] is derived from a Sanskrit borrowing at this time derived from Greek [hora] ‘proper time’, cognate [through Latin and French] to English ‘hour’.”

As if that weren’t enough excitement for one day, apparently a similar transmission from the ancient Near East happened with the Indian/Thai seven days of the week, which turn out to be named after EXACTLY the same things as the classic European ones:

Surya / Aditya (Sun)
Chandra (Moon)
Angakara (Mars)
Budha (Mercury)
Brihaspati (Jupiter)
Shukra (Venus)
Shani (Saturn)

In English only three of those match our current names, because some of the Roman gods/planets got switched with Germanic ones (Thor for Jupiter, etc.), but if you took a Romance language in school you should recognize that Tuesday = Mars-day, Wednesday = Mercury-day, etc. I guess I just always assumed that in Asia they had their own names for stuff like this, and I suppose they did, before the planet-day-naming fad swept the world.

This system apparently spread as far as China and Japan, where, if you’ll look at the handy chart some devoted wikipedian has crafted, they used to call Thursday and Friday Wood Planet Day and Metal Planet Day, after their names for Jupiter and Venus. So this means that by around a thousand years ago, from Greenland and Ireland all the way over to China and Japan and Mongolia and pretty much everywhere else, most of humanity unanimously agreed that we should call Sunday Sun-day, Monday Moon-day, and so on down the line for all seven days, with very few regional variations. W, as they say, TF?

This might all not seem like a big deal to you, but I’m in shock. I can’t believe that I flew to the other side of the planet, to a proud and strange Asian kingdom with thousands upon thousands of its own beliefs, rituals and unique cultural aspects completely alien to me, and the people here call August “Lion-Month”, after good old Leo the Lion.

I’m not sure I’ll remember all the Thai names of the months and days after today, but whatever happens I sure as hell have some good mnemonic devices to start with.

P.S. Apparently you can tell whether or not a month has 30 days by its last syllable of its name in Thai (-khom indicates 31, -yon 30). February has a unique last syllable all its own to remind us that it’s gimpy. I don’t know if that was a feature of the ancient names or a more modern addition. It’s a really cool idea to encode that calendrical information in the actual names of the months, but damn it I already know which months have 30 days, and the different endings make the Thai months a lot harder to remember than if they all just ended with the same suffix. Still, nice idea.

Arrow vs. Helicopter

2008-05-31T14:16:00.006+08:00

Uncontacted tribe photographed near Brazil-Peru border
Members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes have been spotted and photographed from the air near the Brazil-Peru border. The photos were taken during several flights over one of the remotest parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s Acre state.

As a sort of flipside to my last post about how we’re living in a science-fiction future, here’s something to remind us that many of us are still living in the Stone Age. I’m really glad that there are still folks like this out there, doing their thing. I hope nobody bothers them too much in the near future.

Notice how agitated they look as they shoot arrows at the helicopter taking their picture. Imagine what it must have looked and sounded like to them - talk about science fiction. They’re probably composing an epic storytelling cycle about the mighty Thunder-Falcon of the Gods as I type this.

Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts

2008-05-29T12:21:00.014+08:00

Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: May 29, 2008

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

I don’t have much to add. In addition to having possibly the best headline ever, I think the article pretty much speaks for itself.

Remember when the year 1984 came, and everyone joked about how non-futuristic things were compared to the book 1984? And then when 2001 passed and everyone joked about how mundane and non-futuristic things seemed compared to the movie 2001? Well, I think at some point between then and now, the crazy sci-fi future snuck up on us when we weren’t looking.

Except for the flying cars and sentient androids, we’re basically living in a Blade Runner / Neuromancer world. Let’s go through the major elements of a Blade Runner/cyberpunk-type setting, the things that would have seemed like futuristic madness 15-20 years ago:

-Widespread body implants and subcutaneous microchips? Check.

-Retina, face and fingerprint scanning, voice recognition software? Check.

-Clones, genetically modified mutants and bizarre transplants? Check.

-Unmanned combat drones and other battle robots? Check.

-Lobot-style earphones worn by half the random assholes on the street? Check.

-Videophones, tiny storage devices with massive capacity, handheld tricorder-like devices with nearly limitless functions, etc.? Check.

-USA in pathetic decline? Check.

-Orwellian newspeak? Check.

-Cartoonishly dastardly corporations, apocalyptic ecological disasters, sprawling megacities in odd places like Dubai and Ürümqi? Check, check, check.

-Everything suddenly turning Chinese? ENORMOUS CHECK.

And now we’ve got monkeys with mind control over robots. Aside from, again, the flying cars, we’re living in a futuristic dystopia. And, I have to say, it’s very nice. Any dystopia where I can play Mario Kart DS wirelessly, and where my mom plays Brain Age, is a very pleasant dystopia indeed.

P.S. I had no idea how difficult it is to find a picture of a chimpanzee wearing virtual reality goggles. Preferably one also holding a gun, as I seem to recall happening in the movie “The Lawnmower Man”. You’d think it would be a snap. It is a nearly impossible task. There are no pictures of virtual reality chimps out there. None. I wasted nearly an hour looking. Isn’t a chimp in virtual reality goggles, like, an iconic image we’ve all seen a thousand times? Oh well. If you find a good one let me know.

P.P.S. I don’t often cite my photo sources, mainly because I see this humble blog as the online equivalent of one of those collage posters middle-schoolers make out of stuff cut from old magazines. Also, citing sources is a friggin pain in the neck. But the photo above of the scaffolded apartment building is from a lovely site, one which I’ve spent a lot of time perusing, by photographer Michael Wolf. It’s great stuff, although my sense of wonder at some of the photos is a bit dulled by the fact that they look like the actual view from our new apartment.

Constant Dreams that I’m Constantine

2008-05-16T11:17:00.029+08:00

Telekinesis, I see through dreams
A conqueror of all the world like the Hebrew kings
I’m David, reincarnated over again
A gladiator of the universe, a soldier of men
A warlord across the field, returnin from battle
With blood upon my shield with an arm full of arrows
I’m a warrior, elephants kneel as I pass
Holdin skeletons of the soldiers that I killed in my path
With the heads of their leaders still in my hands
Hold it up, lightning strikes, brightens the night
Turns my hair white like Christ, then flash out of sight
Head back to the cemetery, my job is done
Volume One, Priest, Part Two is when God will come

-Killah Priest, from “The Law”, off the album Priesthood

Killah Priest has been pretty much my favorite rapper (hip hop artist, whatever) for about ten years now. He started off with some unremarkable verses on early Wu-Tang albums, then emerged as the most talented lyricist in the Wu-affiliated Sunz of Man, then finally dropped the amazing, instant-classic album Heavy Mental in 1998.

No other rapper (or recording artist of any kind, really) has ever combined mythological references, vivid description and flat-out weirdness like Priest. He’s like a Brundel/Fly combination of John of Patmos, William S. Burroughs and Erich von Daeniken. His most impressive moments on the first album include ... well, never mind. I just spent about 20 minutes looking for lyrics to quote, but the problem is that the people who have nothing better to do than type in rap lyrics are not the sharpest pencils in the box. I haven’t listened to some of those tracks for years but I can tell that the online lyrics are horribly garbled, game-of-telephone style. “The Iron Sheik” becomes “dying sheep” and so on.

Anyway, K.P. has a dense, dazzling, versatile-yet-consistent style whereby standard rap subjects like the plight of ghetto dwellers or battling one’s enemies are elaborated upon with blizzards of mind-blowing apocalyptic, hellish and messianic allusions. The unrelenting paranoia, horror and madness are balanced out by stunning poetic descriptions and occasional moments of humor or optimism. However, it’s usually pretty grim, heavy stuff. Sometimes Priest’s sanity itself is in doubt - Does he really think he’s “The One”? A magnificent yet disturbingly megalomaniacal verse about his own birth, from Black August:

They knew the time and the date of my arrival
Doctors and preachers opening bibles
Philosophers stood wondering
The sky thundering
Inhaling, old widows wailing
Windows open
Wind blowing, curtains across my head forming a turban
Do not disturb him, a stranger said
Standing at the side of my bed, placed a crown upon my head
My eyes were black pearls staring at the map of the world
Born to conquer, the angel then handed me my armor
Kneeled in my honor, revealed to me where I should wander
Until time to take over
Y’all reigns, been great but now it’s over
Now I lounge in castles surrounded by Greek statues

As a listener this sort of thing sets up a strange tension for me: Is this just a cinematically-described messianic spin on the standard rap boasting, or is this guy genuinely deranged? All I know is, either way he’s great at describing whatever he sets his mind to describe, however outlandish it may be.

Priest’s second album, A View from Masada, disappointed me both in terms of production and lyrical content, but after that slight misstep he’s been getting steadily better and better or, as I think I read on an interview with him somewhere, he feels he’s growing “younger and wiser”. He’s consistently honed his flow, broadened and deepened his themes, and gotten more judicious in his choice of tracks and collaborators. In fact, he has gone from being a neglected offshoot of the Wu-Tang empire who seemed doomed to wander in the wilderness of the deeply weird to a consistent and prolific veteran who can confidently mastermind cohesive group albums, including the stellar Black Market Militia.

Killah Priest’s work has in itself matured and gained substance over the years, but it’s also fair to say that since 2001 his strange preoccupations have been granted a great deal of legitimacy and urgency by outside events. Back in the mid-90s a rapper obsessed with Biblical warfare seemed merely quirky. But in many people’s eyes the real world has actually morphed into the sort of paranoid nightmare Priest has been describing all along, with Americans actually engaging in ghastly warfare in the Holy Land and Bush looking more and more like a many-headed Beast of Babylon. In other words, the vivid imagination that made him seem so odd in 1998 seems much more like prophecies of daily life in 2008. Of course, he wasn’t the only 90s rapper with pre-millenium tension and conspiracy theories, by far, but he was certainly the best at it, and he’s only gotten better.

While he is probably my favorite rapper of all time (or maybe tied with MF DOOM, although they’re like apples and oranges), I find I have to be in the right mood to really sit down and listen to Killah Priest’s albums, because they’re so dense and paranoid. Luckily, I now have an hour-long bus commute twice a day, which is perfect for catching up on the hip hop I’ve missed in recent years. I hate to admit it but, because I didn’t have a morning commute for three years I really hadn’t been sitting down and listening to new music as often as I used to. I actually hadn’t heard Priest’s most recent album, The Offering, all the way through, and I can’t believe what I was missing out on. He’s got a new album coming out next week called Behind the Stained Glass, and I will unhesitatingly get it (and I mean buy it, using real money, not... er, acquire it elsewise) the instant it drops.

Two highly recommended artists on a similar vibe are Priest’s long-time groupmate Hell Razah, who has really elevated himself to a powerful and intelligent solo artist over the past couple of years, and Chief Kamachi, whose excellent posse album Black Candles is probably tied with Priest’s Black Market Militia for my favorite hip hop album of 2005.

By the way, the post title is one of my favorite Priest couplets, from a track called “Think Market”. I would guess that the Constantine referred to is the exorcist character from the Keanu Reeves movie and not the Roman emperor, although with Killah Priest they’d both be equally possible, which frankly is why I like his work so much. I don’t have the track with me to check that these lyrics are absolutely accurate, but it’s something like:

I’m having constant dreams that I’m Constantine
Surrounded by demons, angels with armored wings

Gruesome Carnage of the Joyce Wars

2008-05-14T09:18:00.063+08:00

One of the best things about the series of tubes we call the Internet is that it can send you tumbling down branching paths of discovery that you would never normally venture along, or which would have taken months or even years of conventional library research or study. (Plinko from The Price is Right, above, was intended as a metaphor for the branching paths of discovery, and I’m keeping it even though it doesn’t really work. I always liked Plinko.)

Anyway, start researching something apparently straightforward like panda bears or Mark Twain, and you will almost certainly end up learning about all manner of outlandish bric-a-brac like mezuzahs, Port Foozle, Zam-Zammah, or even Plinko.

This is especially good for me because I love to read but have never been very good at the business of switching gears while reading: tracking down material from footnotes, looking related things up in indexes, cross-referencing, switching from book to book to verify a detail. Once I start reading something in an encyclopedia I just keep right on reading all the articles in alphabetical order until hunger forces me to stop.

For example, if I read that so-and-so was a follower of Wittgenstein or Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer, and if I am embarrassingly ignorant of just exactly what the hell a Wittgenstein is, I will more often than not just skip over the offending word without a second thought and continue reading about good old so-and-so. If this Wittgenstein jerk is really that important, I say to myself, he’ll pop up on his own and present himself to me when the time is right. So far this hasn’t happened. Wittgenstein might as well be a brand of floor wax as far as I know.

So, the Internet is a perfect way for me to fill some of those gaping holes in my basic knowledge. For example, after an hour on Wikipedia yesterday I finally, definitively grasped the difference between Plutarch and Petrarch.

One of my virtual research binges yesterday plunged me deep into a very interesting morass, something which I hadn’t known about at all: The cataclysmic Joyce Wars of the late 1980s.

The battle focussed on a new edition of Ulysses which came out in 1984, and which was intended to be somehow definitive. I’ll give as brief an overview of the kerfuffle as I can.

Apparently, the Joyce Estate, who in everything I’ve read seem to be colossal assholes, decided to commission a shiny new edition of Ulysses primarily for the purpose of renewing their copyright for another 70 years. The new book would then entirely replace all the older editions, and they would continue to rake in the dough.

So, to summarize the project: the greatest novel of the 20th century would be substantially revised and recopyrighted, not in order to make the book better, but so that the author’s great-grandchildren wouldn’t have to work.

Admittedly, Ulysses is a book with a very complicated printing history, and most scholars seem to agree that every edition so far has between several hundred and a couple thousand errors or problems in it. So, in spite of the Joyce Estate’s rather unscholarly motives for obtaining a “new” Ulysses at any cost, their project to create an authoritative new edition created a lot of genuine excitement and support among Joyce scholars.

Whom did the Joyce Estate select to edit this grand new edition? Hans Walter Gabler, a scholar working in Munich, who had conceived an idealistic, laboriously computer-aided editorial method that he was convinced would unerringly produce the Platonic text of Ulysses as Joyce would have intended it. Let me run that by you again. A German came up with a rigid philosophical basis for exactly how something should be done, and decided in advance that no deviation from the course would be accepted. What could possibly go wrong?

Gabler’s method involved creating a computerized (this was revolutionary when he started it in the late 70s) “synoptic” text which would cross-reference all the variations in certain versions of the text. However, it seems that there were several problems with his command of English, the way he proceeded with the edits, and his inflexibility about the project, and he ended up alienating two of the respected Joyce scholars who were supposed to be overseeing the new edition. The book was published anyway, and was supposed to serve as the definitive edition for decades to come. It was, in fact, the only edition being printed for much of the 1980s.

Then a relatively young scholar named John Kidd started poking holes in Gabler’s grand construction, claiming angrily in the New York Review of Books that Gabler had introduced hundreds of new errors not extant in previous editions. Kidd’s printed arguments centered on a couple cases where Gabler had misspelled the names of verifiable citizens of Dublin - names which had been spelled right in previous editions.

After Kidd’s first article in the New York Review, there followed a spate of responses and letters back and forth between Kidd and the Gablerites. The exchanges are all online, and even if you’re not into the minutiae of editing they’re still a great read. I’m personally very interested in Joyce and the approaches people take to editing his books, but I’m far from knowledgeable enough about the textual problems of Ulysses to be able to judge Gabler, Kidd or anyone else’s insights into what should be done about this ellipsis or that comma. However, I soon found what I knew about Gabler’s methods and attitude to be annoyingly... (can I say this?) Teutonic. God knows I love many, many Germans, and many, many things about Germany, but I think we can all agree that there is a certain... tendency toward philosophical idealism? in the region. A certain desire for everything to be perfect, even if it means sweeping imperfections under the rug in the form of massive self-delusion. I witnessed this firsthand in 2002, when everyone was deeply, deeply shocked that prices suddenly doubled after the Euro conversion. But... the government assured us prices wouldn’t change! This is impossible! This can not true be! In any case, I found Gabler and his refusal to admit that his project had any flaws annoying, Kidd entertaining, and the heated scholarly arguments riveting, particularly for the way that Kidd savagely eviscerated anyone who defended the new edition of Ulysses.

In these articles, anyone who tries to stick up for Gabler gets torn apart. John Kidd comes across as the optimal defender for Joyce: pugnacious, iconoclastic, all-knowing, playful, and credible. One of his responses is amusingly written as if from the perspective of a future scholar looking back on the debate after the dust has settled. He even makes little flights of sarcastic Joycean silliness like “Irony abounds. What redounds to Dr. Kidd rebounds. On several grounds, it sounds, he’s out of bounds” (this was mocking Gabler’s imperfect English).

Gabler, on the other hand, however brilliant a scholar he might be, could only in his own defense sputter condescending gibberish like “Dr. Kidd’s argument against the edition of Ulysses, then, is seriously flawed by an elementary failure to distinguish its critically editorial functions before a background of documentary referentiality which he tends to mistake for its representational aim.” Wie, bitte?

It was a classic David and Goliath story: Kidd showed several main figures of the Joyce establishment to be a wrong-headed clique of yes-men pandering to the Joyce estate, and called for the new edition of Ulysses to be pulled from the shelves and replaced with one of the older versions.

I spent the entire afternoon yesterday eagerly reading these articles and related material, and I felt a rush of surrogate joy when I read that John Kidd had been wholly successful in his crusade. Around 1989 Random House decided they’d lost confidence in the trade version of Gabler’s Ulysses, and ended up bringing back an older edition. Kidd had in the meantime been given an important-sounding post at a new Joyce Center at the University of Boston, and his own edition of Ulysses based on his painstaking research was in the works, and would be appearing soon. The End. The Joyce Wars were over, and the good guys had won.

A triumph for critics and nitpickers everywhere, I thought. One clever man had toppled a mini-industry and had very publicly given a pompous, inflexible German professor his comeuppance. Surely Joyce would have approved.

Then I did a quick search on Kidd, to see if his edition of Ulysses had ever come out. Nope. It turns out he’s unemployed, sick and crazy, spending his days wandering angrily around his old college quad, talking to pigeons.

In a quote in the newspaper article about Kidd’s sad state Gabler, glancing down from his pedestal in Munich, murmurs something condescending about how he feels sorry for Kidd, who by the way hadn’t raised more than a half-dozen serious questions about Gabler’s edition (according to Gabler). And this article was from 2002. For all I know, Kidd’s been institutionalized or dead for six years.

My heart sank. What a tragic, if grotesquely fitting, end to the whole thing. I’m glad Gabler’s 1984 edition got discredited, but he clearly didn’t learn any lessons. And in the end, the study of James Joyce probably destroyed John Kidd’s life.

Michael: You were flying today, buddy.

Buster: Yes, I was flying. But a little too close to the sun.

Lucille: You let him go in the sun?

A Word to Watch

2008-04-22T00:03:00.012+08:00

I am completely annoyed/fascinated by the recent mutations of the word “geek”.

People are no longer just geeks. One can geek out, and now, apparently, one can be geeked by other things. You can geek out on or about something, or you can just geek.

Geeking out has been around for a few years, but it’s recently shot up the charts. I’ve probably heard it a hundred times this year already and I’ve seen several utterly insane abuses of this term as well. For example, I just read an article where a US military guy said that when the shells started to fall on his unit, everybody “geeked out”. What? I guess geeking out is the new freaking out. I’ll just have to get used to it, the same way I got used to elderly people constantly saying “bling” a couple years ago.

Virtually Finished

2008-04-11T15:53:00.005+08:00

I’ve been working off and on the last couple of weeks on a model of the Pantheon in SketchUp, and after a six-hour push today I’m happy to announce that I think I’ve captured the basic dimensions and rough color scheme of the structure.

During the course of the modelling I learned a lot about how to more efficiently use the program, particularly about how to use groups and components, so I have a feeling that my next models will go a lot more smoothly. I have a long way to go - for example the column capitals aren’t even sculpted into any semblance of their real shape - but compared to my earlier buildings I feel as if I’ve graduated from fingerpainting in my own fetid waste to using a pencil, ruler and compass.

I’ve celebrated this virtual apodemitheosis by exporting a brief video showing a hypothetical person walking into my simulated Pantheon and looking around. I briefly flirted with adding music, then I remembered that every time I’ve looked at a YouTube tutorial video with random sh*tty techno music added, I’ve hit “mute” as fast as I possibly could.

A Dark Day for The New Yorker

2008-04-10T00:50:00.003+08:00

Not only are their cartoons often grotesquely incomprehensible, now they’re apparently written and edited by illiterate cretins. Take a few seconds to read what that caption is saying.

“IT IS ONLY EMISSION IS WATER VAPOR.”

New Yorker editors - what does that mean, exactly? It means you really screwed the pooch on this one. The correct use of “it’s” and “its” is confusing for many people. I understand that. But is it really beyond our grasp as a civilization? Come on!

Atlas Hugged

2008-04-07T14:19:00.019+08:00

I’ve always found something about atlases slightly depressing. I think it’s the way they reduce the entire world to something you can manage, catalog and scientifically measure. It’s kind of a letdown to see someplace as grand and exotic-sounding as “Urumqi”, “Hammerfest” or “New Canaan” pinned down as a boring little dot at exact coordinates. I would rather see maps with blank spaces on them, or maps of imaginary places.

Historical timelines, another popular visual aid, aren’t that great either. They usually end up being just lists of kings’ names, or else they’re sprinkled with entries like “1704 - Descartes publishes De Flatulentia” which always leave you wondering how they chose what to put in and what to leave out.

I just got a terrific book, however, that more or less fuses the concepts of map and timeline, resulting in a simmering stew of utter freaking awesomeness. That book is called, quite misleadingly, “The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History”, by my new hero, the late Colin McEvedy. The title is misleading for two reasons:

1) The atlas is clearly not really that new. The book’s maps are pretty low-tech, monochromatic affairs, something like what you’d expect to see in a middle school history textbook from the 1950s. Also, the author’s views are a bit Eurocentric and refreshingly old-fashioned.

For example, he seems strangely reluctant to admit that the Chinese invented anything. I’m not sure I agree with McEvedy’s claims that the Chinese stole the ideas of writing, the Iron Age, horse riding and the chariot from wandering Middle Easterners. Just reading those claims was like a breath of fresh air, however, since for the past several years we’ve all been beaten over the head with theories that the Chinese discovered not just the stuff they really did discover, but everything else in the entire world too, from soccer to America to chess.

2) The book’s title is also misleading because it’s not really an atlas. It’s more like a timeline sliced up and superimposed on a series of identical maps. Which, as I mentioned above, is awesome. Since the underlying physical map stays the same throughout the book, the focus is on what’s changed since the last map, so the reader doesn’t have the problem which often crops up with zoomed-in historical maps (at least for me) of trying to make sense of the historical information presented on the map while also trying to figure out where the heck the action is in relation to everything else in the world.

So this book doesn’t specify, for example, where every town in ancient Greece was - again, it’s not really an atlas - but it does have dozens of nice maps that show the general movements of the people who settled Greece, the major battles they fought against Persia, etc. Since so much of history is a series of confusing back-and-forth movements where the same countries can mutate and swell and vanish over and over again, reading something which is almost a visual flip book of those mutations is really neat (by the way, the maps here are not actually from the book I have, but from the next one in the series, medieval history, but that’s all I found online).

I’ve seen this book lying around before, but because of the misleading title and cheap-looking (at first glance) maps, I never gave it a chance. Man, I didn’t know what I was missing.

Because - and here’s the strangest thing about this supposed atlas - the writing is very good, and frequently hilarious. The author has the rare skill of being boldly judgmental where people usually bend over backwards to project a facade of objectivity. In the little essays which accompany each map, McEvedy speaks in a deft, iconoclastic voice which advertises that he alone is both intelligent enough to have absorbed the mountains of historical sources and current research and clever enough to cut through all the nonsense with a simple, clear pronouncement. This could seem obnoxious or unprofessional, if his writing weren’t so winning.

Here’s one of my favorite examples so far of McEvedy’s writing, where he gets snippy about the population of ancient Rome:

This brings us to the second blind spot in current thinking. Classical scholars are absolutely wedded to the idea that ancient Rome had a population of a million or more. Historical demographers have told them that this cannot be so, it flies in the face of what the Romans themselves said, and, given what we know of the size of cities in the ancient world, it makes no sense at all, but the academic consensus remains rock solid. It is almost as though admitting to a lower figure would somehow diminish the standing of classical studies. This is not sensible and we will have none of it: the atlas uses a ballpark figure of 250,000.

This sort of thing puts a big smile on my face, and in spite of the density of the maps and the tiny, tiny text I read the atlas cover to cover in one day. I plan to get the other books in the series on different time periods as soon as I can, but unfortunately I think the book I just finished was the one which had been revised most recently, with the others being decades old. I don’t really care, though.

The great writing and refreshing concept of superimposing different information on the same map throughout the book may have just pushed this book into the lofty category occupied by my previous favorite book which graphically represents history, A Street through Time. This is not a compliment I bestow lightly. A Street through Time is a very special book indeed.

Monuments of Unageing Intellect

2008-03-24T20:44:00.009+08:00

I’d like to embark upon a brief ekphrasis of a unique website, byzantium1200.com.

Some of my favorite poems by my favorite poet dwell on the splendor and mystery of Byzantium. I’ve always been fascinated by the Eastern Roman Empire, and not entirely out of Gibbonish dispassionate historical interest, but for some of the more romantic reasons that I assume attracted Yeats: the enticingly tragic idea of a vanished civilization; the strange and fascinatingly odd persistence of a shard of the Roman Empire into the 1400s as a shadowy, besieged offshoot made strange by ecstatic Christianity and Eastern pomp; golden mosaics and clockwork songbirds.

As such, my idea of Byzantium is usually the sort of thing that regrettably looks less interesting the more closely you investigate it. Each new book I read about the history of the place threatens to diminish the allure of my romantic preconceptions. However, today I stumbled across something which is securely grounded in the actual history of the city yet which also, I feel, shares something of Yeats’s Platonic, clockwork-and-mosaics sense of wonder.

The website is nothing less than some driven person’s attempt to make a virtual reconstruction of the entire city of Constantinople. For some reason they decided to pretend to focus on the year 1200 A.D., but obviously the virtual edifices tend to have a timeless, golden-age quality. Over sixty buildings have been resurrected from nothing but dust, documents and the few stones which remain.

It’s not a museum exhibit, scholarly paper, movie backdrop or a video game, but something which intriguingly combines aspects of those more familiar types of project.

In fact, if you ask me this isn’t just an elaborate exercise in simulated 3D architecture. It’s a work of art that spits in the faces of Time and Ruin, and an example of mankind’s ability to put a heartbreaking amount of energy and effort into any sort of imaginative pursuit, no matter how clumsy or prosaic the tools involved might have seemed when they first appeared. Honestly, when you first saw Tron or played Pac-Man, did you think that in a decade or two people would be conjuring long-dead cities into minutely detailed virtual existence - for fun?
The site’s links section points to several other, similar online projects. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending the next couple of days perusing these - and wondering if I could ever do something similar with my pitiful skills in SketchUp.

Welcome to Browntown

2008-03-22T11:36:00.012+08:00

What’s up with the racial segregation of Slate?

For some reason, I find myself drawn to frequently check slate.com, even though their style of using multiple over-the-top headlines to attract me to the same boring article over several days is kind of irksome. I’m not that interested in much of their actual content, but I like that it’s relatively frequently updated. I like a lot of their political coverage, and their summaries of what’s in other magazines, but their TV and movie reviews are uniformly awful and always have been, for example.

I guess I keep going back because it was one of the more interesting free-content news-type websites waaay back in the day, along with Salon (which lost me irrevocably as a reader the very instant that they tried to force me to pay to read their crap, although I think they gave that up at some point), and I just haven’t broken the habit.

Also, watching the brilliant, booze-soaked, hyper-pugnacious Christopher Hitchens (pictured) sweatily contort himself into rhetorical pretzels trying to prove that he wasn’t wrong by supporting Bush’s war has been a mesmerizing spectacle over the past five years or so.

However, something odd has been happening recently. About a fifth of the featured articles on the website now have a huge greenish-brown splotch on their pictures. Clicking on any of these brown-splotch articles instantaneously transports you to an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT AND MYSTERIOUS WEBSITE, presumably separate but equal to Slate, cornily called “the ROOT” and done up entirely in tasteful shades of brown. You almost expect a Flash animation of LeVar Burton in shackles to race across the banner ads.

Why a different site? What’s with the ghettoization of the website? Clicking on a Slate article about pregnant women doesn’t take me to a separate, vagina-themed website called “the VAG”. Clicking on a Slate article about sports doesn’t take me to a separate website called “the BALLS”.

Why, then, this mysterious corner of what I assume must still somehow be a department of Slate? And why brown? Do brown-colored people love websites which appear to have been cobbled together from their own flesh? Are they easily startled and alienated by non-brown websites? The whole thing seems patronizing and stupid. Doesn’t this imply that the regular Slate is only for white people, or at least non-blacks?

And why is this mahogany-hued content shuffled in with the normal Slate articles, when it takes you to a different website? Why do I have to be bait-and-switched into taking the Internet equivalent of a bus into another part of town in order to read what appears to be a normal Slate article except that it happens to be about black people? I don’t get it, at all. Down with the brown splotch!

P.S.: Dear hypothetical pro-“the ROOT” commenter (Hypothetical in the sense that I doubt I’ll get any comments, not that the website doesn’t have supporters. For all I know, “the ROOT” is extremely popular.): Before you waste time pointing it out to me, yes, I’m sure that there’s a reasonable and well-written explanation, easily available online, for the existence of whatever “the ROOT” is and its apparently parasitic relationship to Slate. But I don’t care; as an average, indifferently interested Slate-surfer I was transported without warning to the mysterious world of “the ROOT”, and I felt like describing my initial reaction.

P.P.S.: Check out Jimi Izrael’s hip way of contracting “everybody” in the above picture. “EVR'YBODY”. He removed one letter from the word... and then put an apostrophe between two other letters. Why, Mr. Izrael, why? My brain hurts.

National Lamphun

2008-02-22T23:24:00.011+08:00

Here’s another chedi I modelled in SketchUp, this one from Wat Haripunjaya in the sleepy old town of Lamphun. I was going to post a shot of this one standing up in Google Earth, but the satellite map of that area is so unfocused that I can’t even find the town center, much less the temple. This model went much faster than the first one, mainly because I figured out how to match the perspective in my source pictures more accurately and so my guesses as to where things went weren’t quite as wild.
While it had the huge disadvantage of not being on a mountaintop, I thought this chedi (and its surrounding temple) was in itself a lot more evocative than the more well-maintained one at Doi Suthep which I posted about yesterday - this chedi was much taller, and was wearing a couple huge silk sarongs, and had bells and electric lights and things dangling off it and birds perching on it and so on. Overall it seemed older, and was clearly revered but had aged in a slightly grungy way.

I had a really peaceful, dusty afternoon strolling around Lamphun, and a fine lunch afterwards in the dimmest restaurant I’ve ever been in. It was a cave. There were lights, but they must have been like 4 1/2 watt bulbs. The food cost maybe a third of what it would have in Bangkok, which is already pretty damn cheap. And that was the tourist restaurant written up in Lonely Planet.

As a kid I had always wondered how all those billions of Earth’s people you hear about live on $1 a week or whatever. It always seemed odd to me that they didn’t just starve. I guess the answer is that no matter how wretchedly destitute some average third-world schmuck might be, there are almost always other equally poor people just feet away selling him large and filling meals for just pennies. At least that’s how it seems to work in Thailand. And now you know, thanks to that observation, why it’s probably best for everyone that I didn’t go into economics. Or social work.

A Jay kan clepen “Wat” as wel as kan the Pope

2008-02-22T00:20:00.009+08:00

Just something I made in SketchUp today. It’s the central... Stupa? Or chedi. I think this is called a chedi. Anyway, the shiny gold thing in the center of Wat Phra Doi Suthep temple, overlooking Chiang Mai. I wanted to do something small and completable, after all my half-finished cathedrals. So I just spent a couple of sometimes-frustrating but overall satisfying hours on this bad boy. I didn’t have any blueprints or anything to go by, just a couple photos from very weird angles that I tried to match as best I could.
Of course, the model captures nothing about what makes the real thing so moving: the brilliant gold plate glinting in the sun, the smell of incense, the people making their orisons circling the base, the feel of the courtyard’s cool marble under your bare feet, the breezy mountaintop, the sound of ringing gongs. None of that’s in the model. But I still felt something vaguely... therapeutic in calling into existence even a pale shadow of the thing.

The best Zelda level ever

2008-02-04T13:51:00.000+08:00

Meet Yeto. He is a yeti who wears a horse’s saddle for a hat. I don’t know why he thinks that is an appropriate hat, but that’s Yeto for you. He lives in the mountainous northern province of Hyrule, and when he’s not foraging for reekfish, he’s hanging out inside my favorite Zelda level ever, so far: Snowpeak Ruins from Twilight Princess.

I’ve been playing Zelda games for something like 23 years now, and slogging through standard dungeons like, for example, the water dungeon where you pull levers to turn on the water to different levels to make things happen, or the fire dungeon where you leap from rock to rock above a pool of lava, has gotten quite tedious. Even playing from inside a giant fish or tree doesn’t quite do it for me any more. A level I recently played involving magnetic boots and enormous swivelling electromagnetic cranes, which probably would have made my jaw drop as a kid, scarcely evoked an arched eyebrow of mild interest. I mean, that’s not even the first time that Link has walked on the ceiling, for Pete’s sake. I felt like I’d seen it all.

Then the other day I played this level, and my heart surged with game-playing joy.
I’ve always been partial to snowy levels, but what I particularly like about this one is that unlike most Zelda dungeons, it’s a “real” building: an above-ground building on a recognizably human scale, i.e., with furniture and walls, rather than a collection of vast polyhedral underground caverns. This real-building feel was also more or less the case with my previous favorite level, the Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time.

Snowpeak Ruins is a European-style chateau that’s fallen into disrepair, inhabited by two friendly abominable snowpeople who hang out making tasty soup in the kitchen and warming themselves on a divan in the foyer.
While Mario for some reason visits haunted houses, hotels and asteroids all the time, I don’t think there’s been a major level of a Zelda game before that was just a haunted house rather than an abandoned temple/dungeon/cave, and it’s quite charming to see the two yetis hanging out in their dilapidated home.

The atmospheric details of the level are terrific - almost every room’s rafters have holes in them that snow’s drifting through, and the snowy stone courtyard reminded me of being in the Festung Hohensalzburg. I also like the way that you approach it, which is after a fun but not too difficult snowboarding ride across a snowy mountain.
The whole thing - the restrainedly realistic (for a Zelda game) architectural design of the chateau, the fact that the level is not an evil ancient ruin but a friendly couple’s house, the snowy setting, the very cool weapon you get halfway through - I love it all.

I’m not done with the game yet, but I doubt that the upcoming levels will be as charming or memorable. I’m already kind of ticked off by the Temple of Time level, which combines three of the most tedious and frustrating Zelda level design chestnuts: The remote-controlled stone statue, the escort mission, and the time-worn technique of “backtracking through the exact same rooms all over again only with a new item so that some things are slightly different”. Bah. Snowpeak Ruins has very little cliché about it, except for an icy sliding-block puzzle and the fact that the enormous swivelling cannons you see mounted at several points throughout the castle are not, as it turns out, entirely decorative.

While I have great warmth in my heart for Yeto, I should mention that his beloved matryoshka-shaped wife, Yeta, is also a congenial host, although she has some issues with memory loss and susceptibility to evil magic. But I forgive her.

Mosaics Were the First Pixels

2007-12-13T22:23:00.000+08:00

I recently reported on my seeming inability to make a halfway-decent building using the program Google SketchUp, and I just wanted to share the fact that I have, in fact, just succeeded in virtually sculpting a moderately admirable edifice. It’s not nearly as nice as I’d like, but - unlike in the crummy real world, where when I erect a shoddy building it usually collapses and kills dozens in a fiery imbroglio that is quite tedious to cover up - I can always go back and improve it later. It’s a pretty accurate (as far as the basic proportions go) model of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, and I finally buckled down this afternoon and slapped textures on all the surfaces. I’d originally planned to make a much more realistic simulation, with textures on every surface taken from high-resolution photographs, but I ended up copying some and reusing them in a slapdash and haphazard manner because otherwise the thing was clearly never going to get done. All the major mosaics on the inside, however, are properly placed and pretty sharp-looking.

Here’s what the thing looks like on the outside.
Here’s what my model looks like on the outside.
Here’s a view of the inside.Here’s a view from inside my model.
Not bad, huh? Of course, the vaulted ceilings of the real building don’t have “GREATBUILDINGS.COM” watermarked on them every three feet, but as I said above, this was a rush job just to get the thing textured before I fell into the unique and irrevocable despair which we all know is so disastrously common to thwarted master virtual architects. Now, with at least some progress to show for myself, I feel like a virtual weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

The reason I chose to finish this lil building this week, by the way, is that it seemed like a Christmas-y sort of activity, kind of like decorating a tree only far, far dorkier. My other seasonal activities so far have been to try to read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in Old English and a recent obsession with keeping tabs on the gradual construction of the Christmas market in Dachau via a webcam. The charming village, that is, not the nearby concentration camp. You think your job’s tough? Just be glad you’re not head of the Dachau Tourist Board.

Back To the Future

2007-12-02T00:00:00.000+08:00

Futurama’s back! I can finally emerge from the Angry Dome.

After several years spent sitting out in the cold like the late, lamented Seymour, we now have a new DVD. It’s not quite as flawlessly comic or surreally original as many of my favorite episodes (the DVD in question is essentially a full-length movie, and the switch from fresh 20-minute TV show to resuscitated zombie movie seems to have hurt the comedy timing and originality a little), but how many shows could be shockingly resurrected two years after being cancelled and still rock?

The four-year run of this show was as good as The Simpsons during any of its peak years, if with nerdier and blacker comedy, and any continuing incarnation of it, even as straight-to-DVD movies, is something about which to rejoice. It’s like if there were suddenly a brand-new Monty Python film or Hitchhiker’s Guide book. I hope it makes several thousand times as much money as that similarly-resurrected-but-colossally-less-good show The Family Guy.

WHOOooooooooo! WHOOOOOOOOoooooooo! Whoooooooo.

What smells like freaking porpoise hork?

Dammed Yangtzes

2007-11-29T13:30:00.000+08:00

For some reason the last month or so vanished before I noticed it was gone. Whoops!

Here’s a random selection of the things I’ve done over the last few weeks, so they’re not forever lost in the muck and silt of the alluvial delta of time’s majestic Yangtze. No, it’s not a very good metaphor. Anyway, last month I:

-Failed to make any progress in learning Thai.

-Failed to quite write enough for National Novel Writing Month. However, I did get more written than during the average month, so I’m counting it as an overall success.

-Failed to complete my grand Sketchup model of the Cathedral of Freising (see below). Modeling essentially complete but project abandoned due to lack of photographs to use as textures.

-Failed to complete my grand Sketchup model of the crypt of Freising Cathedral. Project reluctantly abandoned because of lack of accurate information about the crypt’s layout.

-Failed to complete my grand Sketchup model of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, which is more or less finished but still needs all the textures added. I am determined to get this done, but putting textures on something turns out to be pretty damn tedious, and I don’t quite have all the photographic reference material I need. I thought by picking this that I’d be doing myself a favor, since it’s on the UNESCO list and I assumed that surely I’d be able to find pictures of it from every angle. Nope!

-Hunted down and bought a portable, magnetic Shogi set in Takashimaya in Singapore. This was the highlight of a delightful trip to the most charming quasi-Fascist city-state I’ve ever visited. I especially like the box the Shogi set came in, which says “LET’S ENJOY THE SHOGI GAME”. I will. Oh, I will.

-Found and purchased a bunch of Nintendo DS games at extremely low prices in downtown Bangkok. I’ve been playing some very entertaining games I’d been missing out on, including Phoenix Wright, Nintendogs and Rune Factory. I have also been playing Super Mario Galaxy, which I think is the first video game in my 25-year career of playing video games that’s repeatedly made me stand up and burst into loud, gleeful laughter while playing it. Something about jumping Mario not from platform to platform but from little orbiting moon to freakin’ moon like a non-gay version of Le Petit Prince fills my heart with inexpressible joy.

-Visited some great parts of Bangkok that I’d never even been anywhere near before, including the Little India district, which was probably the filthiest, most surreally hellish ghetto I’ve ever seen in my life. The center of the ghetto is a burnt-out rubbish pile with a gleaming 10-story Sikh temple looming over it. My brain had trouble processing the image. What is wrong with humans that gilding the dome of an enormous and immaculate temple clearly has priority over hiring a f*cking garbageman? Given the number of people in that disgusting slum who must die of cholera every week, I guess it’s a good thing they have a gargantuan whitewashed temple to mourn them in.

This is the grand, fanciful mega-temple which rises above the slums of Bangkok’s Little India district. Below is an image from Google Earth showing the burnt-out shell of the building next to it, which is the centerpiece of the neighborhood and which has clearly been used as a communal dump and unspeakably filthy sewer for several years. Way to go, ghetto dwellaz! Keep on praying!

-Celebrated Loy Krathong, although we launched our magical wishing bargelets a little early in the evening, before it looked like the picture below.

-Hanging out with my pal Elliette.

-Finally visited the famous Jatujak market, and spending a horrid few hours in that godforsaken maze failing to find carved wooden chess sets. I found a nice set which looked sort of like the picture below, but the guy claimed that it was a valuable museum piece he wouldn’t part with for less than 3000 baht. Kim put the kibosh on that.

-Enjoying winter in Bangkok. It’s quite cool and breezy. I’m serious. I had no idea the seasons changed here, but I guess they do. Right now it’s like a cool early fall day in Munich, i.e., Biergartenwetter.

1998 all over again

2007-10-18T20:54:00.000+08:00

I have only ever liked three musical groups enough to consistently buy their CD singles when I come across them (a measure of high respect if there ever was one): PJ Harvey, Radiohead, and Sigur Rós. Two of these groups released my favorite albums from them in 1997-98: Radiohead’s OK Computer and Harvey’s Is This Desire? Along with other, similarly haunting albums like the second Portishead album, 1998 was probably my best year in terms of atmospheric music for fall. As October arrived, I had plenty of melancholy, stirring music to listen to as I drove through the bleak Connecticut countryside.

In fact, the years around this time were probably my best falls per se overall, by which I mean that I was old enough to appreciate the beauty of the New England foliage, had a car in which to zip past the pumpkin patches and whatnot, and a good stock of music and literature to form the gloomy mental backdrop to how I saw everything. You’d think that being in Munich for five falls would have topped that, what with the Oktoberfest and it being the home of Rilke and Orff and everything, but in retrospect, Connecticut was the most autumnally satisfying place I’ve lived. As I discovered to my dismay, in Germany, the leaves don’t really all turn colors and fall, like they do in New England. They sort of individually rot and gradually surrender over the course of several months. It’s not particularly picturesque.

Anyway, my pleasant seasonal moods have taken a serious hit in the last few years, because I live in the frigging tropical rain forest. It’s hard to work up a real “halloweeny” feeling when you’re sweating like a pig in a Thai swamp. But luckily, two albums have just arrived that have saved my season: PJ Harvey’s White Chalk and Radiohead’s In Rainbows. To be honest I could have illegally downloaded both of them, but seeing that these are two of my very favorite artists, whose singles I’ve even gone to the trouble of buying, I paid to download the albums. They are both good, but the Harvey in particular is incredible.

It’s one of those old-fashioned, cohesive vinyl-LP sort of albums that barely goes over the 30-minute mark, but when it’s done, you can’t help pressing play again. Like a Beatles album or whatever. I have no words to describe how good White Chalk is. It’s precisely what the cover photo suggests: PJ Harvey channeling Emily Dickenson, or the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Most of the songs have rather quiet piano or dulcimer or whatever backing, and sound as if they were recorded on wax cylinders by some Victorian madwoman. There’s one particular line on the album that gives me chills every time I hear it. I won’t demean it by telling you which one it is. And so - and this is the point I’ve been laboriously leading up to - thanks to the ineffably great talents of the unfathomably great PJ Harvey, I have for the last two days sat here in sultry Bangkok feeling perfectly, exquisitely, joyfully “halloweeny”. The depth of my gratitude is inexpressible.

Mysteries of the Third Dimension

2007-10-15T01:35:00.000+08:00

I love to draw, but I usually just doodle in pencil, and unless you count a few failed attempts to jazz up my résumé with fancy formatting, the last straight line I successfully drew on the computer involved the Logo turtle and an Apple II. However, I just completed my first 3-D building model in a program called Google SketchUp, which is the program used to insert 3D buildings into Google Earth, and which purports to make this sort of thing easy. It does. I just downloaded the program like an hour ago, and I’ve already made my own clumsy Romanesque chapel type thing. I normally hate online training videos, but the beginner tutorials they’ve got for this program were pretty helpful - at least the first few. After that, they went a little over my head and it was like that Troy McClure home improvement video on the Simpsons: “First, patch the cracks in the slab using a latex patching compound and a patching trowel... Now parge the lath!” Anyway, it seems like it’d be an ideal tool to create an entire Gormenghast of twisted castle architecture, but I’ll probably be lucky to end up drawing anything more complicated than a bunch of stacked crates. We’ll see.

Mi Biblioteca Personal

2007-10-01T21:33:00.000+08:00

The other day, I unpacked and set up my bookshelves. This was an unexpectedly emotional process for me. I hadn’t seen my precious, precious books in months during our move from the Lump to Bangkok, and I suppose I was subconsciously worried that I’d never see them again. Or that they’d all be moldy and damp and wrinkled. In fact, some of them are a tad discolored from some sort of mold, but overall they’re in tiptop shape, and since I actually took the precaution of wrapping my most expensive and treasured books (the Gothic Bible, for example), those came through just fine.

Adding to my verklemmt response to putting my books out was the fact that I’ve had these bookshelves for the past two years, but I never really got to face them in their fully-stocked glory, because they were in a closet. Seeing all my books finally on shelves out in the open, and marshalling them up and down a bit, I realized how much they mean to me. I also realized with a surge of pride that I shouldn’t have been worried at all, because since I’ve read almost every page of these books (aside from, obviously, a few bricks like “Increasing your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary” and “Orlando Furioso Part Two”), it wouldn’t really matter if something happened to these books, because they are now, in some way, inside my head and make up who I am. I’ve been lucky enough to have money and time to read for pleasure for most of my life, which many people throughout history might not have had.

I’d ideally like to spend months and months describing to the world each book on these shelves and why I love them, in the style of Borges’ Biblioteca Personal - but at some point, reading someone else’s favorite books becomes like listening to the story of someone else’s dream. The intense personal associations that make dreams or lists of favorite things so vivid also make them dull reading. I mean, how could I possibly convey what I feel about Calvert Watkins’ How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics? Words fail me.

So I’ll content myself for now with posting this picture of a couple of the best shelves. It doesn’t do them justice. Most of the pictures I took were too blurry to read the titles well. Maybe I’ll take some with a tripod or something later. Anyway, I’ll stop going on about how happy I am to see my books. And yes, you’ll notice that I sometimes arrange my books by color and size, like Pepys. I know it’s not the best filing system, but dammit if it’s good enough for Pepys it’s good enough for me.

Text Wins

2007-09-30T14:52:00.000+08:00

Unexpectedly and to my utter delight, a recent New York Times editorial by Daniel Radosh - in the course of a critical look at the new, super-modern game Halo 3 - claims that text games from the 1980s were the pinnacle of video games’ artistic achievement:

The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.
...
There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can’t play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these “interactive fictions” gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story.... Today’s game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

This is precisely how I feel, and it’s why I haven’t been that excited about the last few generations of extremely popular console games: first-person shooters, car racing games, and sports games. I don’t care how realistic a shooting or racing game looks. I could run through hallways and shoot people, or drive a car quickly, or play football, in the real world. I look to video games for something different.

I recently read an entire Wired cover story on Halo 3, about the psychotic lengths of ultra-monitored playtesting that Microsoft was going to to ensure that players wouldn’t be challenged too much by the game, and would be funneled through the levels one after another, never spending more than five seconds in any room.

Reading this article, it seemed to me that the designers had missed the point entirely. They weren’t making a game, they were making an interactive movie or digitized theme park ride. What’s fun about playing a game that’s had all the moments of confusion or perplexity streamlined by hundreds of hours of group-focus testing sessions? I want a person with some interesting ideas to invite me to explore an interesting world, not a group-tested simulation of what stimulates the average teenage boy. I’d much rather play Pikmin than Halo.

This is why I feel that a lot of the most exciting games of the last five years were purposefully developed for the “limitations” of handheld systems. I find that an excellent Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS game, Advance Wars for example, is usually ten times as fun as the latest Doom-type game where you run around dark hallways in circles emptying shotgun blasts into peoples’ heads. (Not that that isn’t fun, mind you, but I got tired of it in, oh, 1995 or so.) And this is why I still return again and again to play Infocom games from the ’80s, and to their excellent successors by passionate amateur writers such as Nelson or Plotkin.

Given this huge thumbs-up for text games from no less than the Gray Lady herself, this seems as good a time as any to complete my earlier story about how I put Zork and a bunch of other old games on my new cell phone.

---

I had no earthly reason to believe that my new cell phone would play Zork, aside from a vague idea that I’d seen something somewhere online about old text games being playable on Palm Pilots. But I didn’t have a Palm Pilot, I just had a phone. This idea was a complete shot in the dark. But what’s Zork? let me back up briefly.

Zork is a text game that I first played on my friend Michael’s computer when I was about 8 or 9, so in 1983 or so. It looked more or less like this.

I played it for several hours, and all I did was read somebody’s mail, find a bird’s nest and fruitlessly yank at a grating hidden beneath a pile of leaves in a forest. Most of the things I typed were met with responses like “You can’t see that here” or “You can’t do that”. But I was hooked.

A year or two later I somehow got (I can’t remember how exactly I acquired things back then... birthday present? saved up allowance? spontaneous gift from easily hornswoggled grandparent?) my own copy of Zork I for our Mac Plus, along with, later, Hitchhiker’s, Spellbreaker, a copy of The Lurking Horror, and a couple others. These games were incredible, but they were extremely difficult to beat without carefully scanning the packaging inserts, paying for hints and/or hearing solutions from other kids, and they scarred me for life. In a good way. But around this very same time, we got our first Nintendo system, and I started to see text games as somewhat old-fashioned. The golden age of the text adventure was drawing to a close.

Several spasmic waves of roughly biennial nostalgia have since prompted me to play through these old games on every computer I’ve owned, and I have even attempted to program a couple things myself in a modern, freeware text adventure creation language called Inform. I currently play this sort of thing on my MacBook using this program, where games look like this:

So, having been playing Zork since 1983 or so, I grasped my spanking new Razr, plugged its USB cable into my computer, and set out to force it to play Zork with me. This rite of passage would take several days of arduous work, eventually shaving years off both the phone’s and my life, but it was a success. I figured out that the phone could play small Java games, and that somebody had made this program, a scaled-down version of this program, for playing old Infocom games on cell phones in Java.

Only trouble is, the only game that the scaled-down program could play was a demo version of Zork 1, in the now-beyond-extremely-obsolete Z3 story file format. It took me a couple of days’ tinkering to figure out how to get multiple copies of the mini Java application uploaded onto my phone, each loading a different story file. But I did it. This is what Zork looks like on my mobile phone.

Being able to carry around in my palm a childhood treasure which, at the time I first played it, required a humming beige box and monitor which together were larger than I was, almost reduced me to tears, and I began playing it immediately. I just beat it a few hours ago.

Never mind that the applet only has one save slot, and that I have to type everything in thumb-punishing SMS style. I now love my new phone, not only because it plays Zork - but that’s a big part of it. Anything that can play Zork is my friend. Is not dirty. Is not fighting me. Is very nice.

(Those last remarks were in the Bengali-Thai-English pigin I’ve been using to communicate with one of my students this week. But that’s an whole other story.)

The Loch Nichada Monster

2007-09-18T15:04:00.000+08:00

I live in Bangkok, but I don’t really LIVE in Bangkok. I live in a pleasant, Epcot-Center-like community of the future, where cheerful Swedes and Koreans zip around on electric golf carts, jackbooted yet oddly childlike Thai guards pick flowers, nap and tickle each other at every corner, and everything - from Baskin-Robbins ice cream to the legendary “Strong and Bitey” Australian cheddar to my personal favorite grocery store item of any kind, ever (for the story behind it, not the taste), Weihenstephaner Korbinian - is available at the local store. Our apartment is near a pleasant artificial lake, ringed with tropical trees and a few apartment buildings, with the school looming in the background.

However, there’s a dark side. I’ve already mentioned the strange plague of albino geckos. There are also an awful lot of bats, and centipedes as big as a man’s finger. There are snails nearly the size of my fist that often get stepped on or run over, leaving a tragic, omelette-sized smear of invertebrate gore. There are glistening things that rustle in the undergrowth as you hurry down the slimy, uneven lakeside path.

And there are... things... in the lake. Large things. I don’t know what they are, but they thrash periodically. The sound is exactly like the sound of Shamu leaping ten feet into the air, through a hoop and slapping back down into the water. When this happens as I’m strolling around the lake, I always look, but a moment too late, and all I can see is a giant welling circle of disturbed water, as if someone had just dropped a boulder into the lake. I have no idea what sort of sea beastie could possibly be making splashes like that in a peaceful little pond. I am picturing something roughly dolphin-sized. With needle-sharp teeth and a taste for human flesh. I tried to take a picture of one of the splash blast zones earlier, but it didn’t come out. You can’t see it, but half of the lake in the picture below is rippling from the aftereffects of a creature’s vigorous, whalloping aquathrash. I’ll try to capture this phenomenon on film later today. If I don’t post after this, you’ll know what happened.

Under the Bathrobe of Gandalf

2007-09-12T21:33:00.000+08:00

Problem: I live in Thailand. I need to learn Thai. Yet I am too shy to talk Thai on the fly.

Proposed Solution: Read a Thai translation of a book I’ve already read. This has worked for me in the past, during such successful projects as “Read Heart of Darkness in German” and “Read somewhat less than half of Foucault’s Pendulum in Italian before giving up.”

New Problem: After some research which consists of walking into the bookstore and judging books entirely by their covers, I conclude that when Thais turn to fiction they apparently prefer to read nothing but Harry Potter, cheesy romance novels with amorous Conté-crayoned Hindu gods on the cover, some strange comic book series about a boy with a watermelon for a head, which might or might not be Japanese, and, for some reason, the Wizard of Oz books. I can’t find any familiar, easy books to start with. Except a few neglected shrinkwrapped Tolkien bricks on the top shelf.

Insane but Somehow Perfect Solution: Buy Tolkien’s The Return of the King in Thai and attempt to read it.

I’m pretty excited about this grand project. The book has a really cool green cover, with some pretty badass Thai fonts. The Thai version of the series title is, oddly, the same as the English one; it actually says, more or less, LORD AAF DAA RINGS in Thai letters. You’d think they could have come up with their own version, but whatever.

The book also came with a removable map. Thai pretty much looks like some kind of mutant Elvish already, so seeing Tolkien’s map actually in Thai letters (again, in an extra cool font with extra curlicues) is more or less mind-blowing. Those big letters say GONDOR. This map is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen in my entire life.

Let the great experiment begin! I just spent about an hour translating the first sentence. Thai has no freaking spaces between words, and the vowel notations are a bit obscure to me at this point, so to my untrained eye, after figuring out what I thought the letters were in English, the first sentence in the book looked like this:

PPPNMNGLDAAKMAJIJTSAKLMKANGKNDLF

Not very promising. But wait! PPPN? KNDLF? I know those rascals! Things snowballed from there, if snowball is the right verb to describe an hour of agonizing dictionary research. Soon I had produced the following translation:

“Pippin watch pass through out come from under dressing gown of Gandalf.”

Not exactly a masterpiece of lucid prose, right? I must have screwed up somewhere, right? Nope! It’s pretty much on target. The English version is:

“Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.”

I was close! Apparently, I can translate Tolkien from Thai. One sentence down, many, many thousand to go. Huzzah!

And by the way I just found out it’s Rosh Hashanah this evening, so to my triumphant huzzah may I add Shanah Tovah! I’ve got a good feeling about the year 5768.

Unfrozen Newhandythal Man

2007-09-05T18:42:00.000+08:00

I am notoriously (if one can be notorious among a circle of acquaintances which totals eight or so people) crotchety about getting new personal accessories. I have purchased probably five pairs of shoes in my adult life, one watch, one wallet - which is now gradually disintegrating from the punishing condition known as chronic tropical swampass - and most of my electronic equipment has been battered hand-me-downs from my much earliery-adoptery wife.

Why do I hang on to stuff for so long? While most people seem to be thrust into effervescent spasms of ecstasy by the act of buying a new car or cell phone every other year, for some reason, there’s something about buying new stuff that actually disturbs me.

I think it’s partly because no matter what you buy, they keep making better, cheaper ones every six months, and partly because I hate to admit that my old whatever-it-was is not good enough any more. If I have to get a new whatever-it-is every couple of years, then doesn’t that make me an idiot for buying the old one? Shouldn’t I have chosen better in the first place? Agh.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I am the polar opposite of an early adopter. Late adopter doesn’t begin to cover it. I am such a late adopter that by the time I adopt something, it’s old enough to be cool again in a retro kind of way. I am a T-800 grappling my way clumsily through a world of T-1000s, still rocking the same clothes, boots and bike I took off the first guy I met. So imagine my pleasure (mixed with vague uneasiness) upon my wife’s getting me a brand-spanking-new cell phone for my birthday. A gleaming, sleek metal phone with a camera and a sort of Tricordery flippy part and God knows what else.

Actually, my new phone was purchased slightly used, and the model has been out for a couple of years, but compared to most of my possessions it was if this thing was an example of some unimaginably refined future technology that had just been beamed down from an alien spacecraft. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to make of it, but excitement definitely had the upper hand over technophobia. For, within minutes of being presented with the phone, I had an idea for personalizing it, alien gadget that it was.

I decided I would force it to play Zork.
More later.

Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon

2007-08-11T12:06:00.000+08:00

The New York Times has posted a series of summaries and excerpts from bootleg Chinese Harry Potter books. I can only assume that this is the sort of insane story we’re going to see more and more of over the next year as random reporters head to Beijing for the Olympics and have to find material for their daily reports. I could make all sorts of jokes on the topic, but I think nothing could do this subject justice aside from letting one of these remarkable books speak for itself:

Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon

Summary: Harry becomes a fat, hairy dwarf after being caught in a “sour and sweet rain”; he loses all his magic and can get it back only by obtaining the magic ring. After he does, Harry becomes a dragon that fights evil. Voldemort has an even more powerful brother who makes trouble for Harry.

Excerpt: “Harry doesn’t know how long it will take to wash the sticky cake off his face. For a civilized young man, it is disgusting to have dirt on any part of his body. He lies in the elegant bathtub, keeps wiping his face, and thinks about Dudley’s face, which is as fat as Aunt Petunia’s bottom.”

Al Talk Thai Real Good

2007-08-06T18:43:00.001+08:00

I only moved to Thailand last week, and the last thing I want to be is one of those asinine Westerners who blither on about the uniqueness and beauty of Thai culture. Yes, it does seem like an endlessly fascinating country, but who cares what some random white guy has to say about it? Especially when so many of the white guys in Thailand seem to be mullet-haired German bricklayers on disability leave, with khaki shorts, nicotine-stained teeth and lonely, lonely hearts. I’m not sure the world is dying to hear their - or my - deep thoughts on Thai culture.

BE THAT AS IT MAY, I, a random white guy, did just see something interesting while leafing through the Thai dictionary.

You can get some insight into a culture by noticing the words that it borrows from other languages. Loan-words are often borrowed because the concept originally didn’t exist in the one country and spread from somewhere else.

For example, we borrowed the words for “ninja”, “glasnost”, “smørgasbord” and “ménage à trois” into English, presumably because those things were very rarely encountered in Merrie Olde England. Some stealthy Japanese person or filthy-minded Frenchman had to import them.

So, while perusing the English-Thai dictionary yesteree’n, what do I see but the following entries:

Lock: láwk
Lock: mâe kuncae
Key: kuncae

It seems pretty probable that the Thai word “láwk” is a loan word from English. And “kunci” (pronounced koon-chee) is frickin’ Malaysian for “key”. By the way, the expression “mâe kuncae” for “lock” is a typically adorable Asian way of defining a lock by saying that it’s... a key’s mother. Why not? As the box my desk lamp came in puts it, “Give happiness to all families”.

Results of study: Thai people had no word for “lock” or “key” until some English and Malaysian guys came over and sold them some.

Conclusions: Thais are a charming and peaceful bunch who knew no thievery until recent times? Maybe. I’m pretty sure the truth is more complicated than that, so draw your own conclusions. I’m off to feather my mullet.

They Do Move in Herds

2007-08-02T08:00:00.000+08:00

We lived in Malaysia for the past two years. In Malaysia, there were geckos. Many, many geckos. They were speedy little greenish lizards that like to sit out on rocks, or on walls in the evenings, and eat bugs. If you come near them, they either a) freeze and don’t move a muscle, b) scurry away, or c) leap straight off the wall or ceiling in complete terror, flip and flop around on the floor, and scurry away. They only do option C if you really surprise them. It happened to me about four times in two years. One landed on my shoulder. I shrieked like a girl scout.

Those were the days. I long for the days of option C.

In Bangkok, they have MUTANT ALBINO geckos that have GENETICALLY ADAPTED TO LIVING ON PEOPLE’S PAINTED WALLS. Just think about that for a second. THEY EVOLVED TO MATCH OUR PAINT SCHEME. These things are pale whitish yellow, they’re plump, wrinkly and impudent like old Finnish men in a sauna, and they are basically like having wriggling human fingers clustered hungrily around every light fixture. They’re smart, too. These translucent monstrosities stick much closer to the light than their dull-witted jungle-dwelling Malaysian cousins. In a few years they’ll have evolved heat shields which allow them to cling directly to the light bulbs. At this rate, there’s very little else for me to do but urge you to enjoy what little time you have left before the geckos become sentient and put us to work in their vast fluorescent bug zapping mines. I give us about five years.

You Had Me At “Makruk”

2007-07-31T18:54:00.000+08:00

Just a short post to say: We’re in Bangkok and things are going great.

I’m looking forward to absorbing Thailand’s ancient and noble Buddhist culture and shedding my sinful attachments to the meaningless material things of this plane of existence, but in the meantime... hey look at the cool crap I just bought!

We’re still jet-lagged and we’ve only been to the store twice in this country, once to an expensive local grocery store full of European imports, and once to good old Carrefour, but somehow I’ve managed to buy three or four toys already. Two of them are mysterious Japanese Super Mario items promoting the recent DS game “New Super Mario Bros.”. In both cases I had no idea what to expect once I opened the package, which added to the fun.

One was a tin case about the size of a pack of cards, which contained some Mario stickers and about ten tiny pieces of tic-tac size candy. The second one was a box containing little Mario and Goomba figurines, as well as some more diminutive Japanese candy. I will probably get some more similar things as I come across them. For some reason we didn’t get quite this kind of random Japanese item in Malaysia. I guess I’ve moved slightly north.

My other main purchase so far has been a Thai chess (a.k.a. Makruk) set. I’ve already chronicled my feverish desire to possess one of these sets, and I’m still a bit in shock at the contrast between the difficulty I had finding one downtown, and the ready availability of the blasted thing in Carrefour, which, let’s face it, is French Wal*Mart. Anyway, I am pretty excited about finally having my hands on a set of these unique, elegant, vaguely Buddhist-temple-looking pieces, and I’m looking forward to playing against some Thais. Who am I kidding? I’m looking forward to playing against myself and pretending I know some Thai people when in reality I only know this oddly chubby horse, and I’m pretty sure that he hates me.

Gameboy Publishing

2007-07-11T04:02:00.001+08:00

Well, I'm writing from my graduate school classroom. On my Nintendo DS. I'm not usually into handheld internet things, but my computer wasn't working, so I got this thing online. It's agonizingly slow. This is really just a test, and I can't picture doing it except as a novelty. But I'm amazed that what's basically a gameboy can go online. Web-ready toasters and soapdishes can't be far off.

Note: As originally published, this had weird line breaks and some stupid ad for MSN or something on the bottom, because I sent the post via e-mail. I cleaned it up a little. Web browsing on the DS is pretty crappy - it’s slow and seems to disconnect a lot - but it allowed me to get online for one entire day last week when my computer wasn’t working, so I think it was worth it.

Spam Poetry

2007-06-11T08:36:00.000+08:00

I think my computer is being haunted by Charles Dodgson’s ghost. The subject lines of the last few junk e-mails I’ve received:

on dusenbury the magnetron
He material so hallsville
As chaseley between birdsboro
Or loxahatchee everything

I suggest we fire that infinite number of monkeys and instead put these penis-enlargement spambots on the Shakespeare project, since they’re clearly much further along. It was costing a fortune to hose down the typewriters every evening anyway.

North Pole Vault

2007-05-30T10:50:00.000+08:00

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

2007-05-13T23:12:00.000+08:00

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”?

2007-05-13T16:44:00.000+08:00

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

2007-05-09T23:42:00.000+08:00

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

2007-05-09T14:34:00.000+08:00

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.

Wizards & Warriors

2007-04-29T11:46:00.000+08:00

When I read a depressing a New York Times article this morning, I had some reactions I’d like to discuss below. It was a grimly matter-of-fact article on child soldiers in Africa. Apparently several of the horrible wars ravaging the entire African continent are now being fought mainly by small children, brainwashed and pressed into service by amoral warlords bent on plunder. As if that weren’t bad enough, the article describes the children as really good soldiers, because they can be made to do almost anything and kill almost anyone, especially - and this is the part I’d like to discuss - if you wow them with tales of sorcery:

Child soldiers... are often drawn into these movements, or kept there, with magic and superstition.

In many armed movements, children are taught that life and death depend on spirits, which are conjured up by their commanders and distilled in oils and amulets. Magic can spur children to do unspeakable things. It also bestows otherwise lackluster leaders with a veneer of supernatural respectability. “The commanders would wear certain pearls and said that guns wouldn’t hurt us,” Mr. Beah recalled. “And we believed it.”

Later in the article:

Just this month, in a shantytown near Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, enforcers from a group called the Mungiki — essentially a street gang that uses teenage muscle — hacked up several opponents in an effort to control the minibus racket. True to form, their leader has told his young henchmen that he rolled to earth in a ball of stars.

You read that right. Ball of stars. So here were my two simultaneous, yet quite different, reactions:

Reaction 1) “That is so friggin cool.”

An amoral army of brainwashed child soldiers with machine guns, following witch doctors who control them with zombie oils and amulets. A minibus mafioso who claims he rolled to earth in a ball of stars.

Human behavior doesn’t get any weirder than that. That’s so beyond sick that it’s cool. An army of magically controlled child killers. It’s like something Conan the Barbarian or John Carter of Mars would have to deal with. Tarzan Versus the Witch King of the Mungiki. The whole thing is inhuman and horrible and messed up but damn if it wouldn’t be perfect material for a fantasy/sci-fi novel.

-This reaction came from the part of me that has been more or less the same since I saw the first Star Wars movie when I was 5 or 6. I know the difference between fantasy and reality, but when I read something like this I sometimes regress to the level of moral complexity that Spielberg and Lucas brought to Raiders, which is HURRR HITLER WUZ PURE EVIL LOL HE PROBLY HAD BLACK MAGIC DUDE THAT’S SO RAD. I still find cults, magic, religion, myth, and everything related to another world beyond our own to be fascinating on a fantasy/video game/role playing/adventure kind of level. I just do. Oh well. My second reaction was, I think, a little more mature.

Reaction 2) “So this is how every religion on earth began.”

This is the depressing truth about human religions. They ALL started in more or less this way. This is the burning bush. This is the voice from on high. This is how it worked, and how it still works: One man, slightly more clever than the other idiots around him, wanted to make his followers obey him more mindlessly. Wanted to make his soldiers kill more ferociously. Wanted to make his decisions unquestionable. Wanted everyone to WANT to give him their time and resources, no questions asked. So what does he do? He simply says something along the lines of “I CAME FROM THE SKY. I HAVE MAGICAL AMULETS AND OILS. DO WHAT I SAY."

And it works. Every time. It’s that easy. It worked when Abraham, Moses, Jesus, M_____d, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, and all the others did it, and it will continue to work until the last human beings starve to death on a planet filled with pigs because they’re not kosher or halal. Sometimes the warlord himself doesn’t create the myth himself; sometimes it happens generations afterward. Most of those men were charismatic geniuses, or at least their advisors were, and were extremely clever at concocting parables, poetry, magic tricks, scriptures and other props to keep their charade going, but as we see from this article, you don’t even really need that stuff.

All you need to do is have a tiny spark of charisma, gather a group of people, and say some variation on “I came from the sky. I have magical amulets and oils. Do what I say.” And people will flock to you and do anything for you.

I hate the fact that our ancestors were so stupid, and I hate the fact that almost all of us now are still exactly as stupid. Folks, let me lay it out for you right here: A petty African thug who says he rolled to earth in a ball of stars is lying. We can all agree on that, right? And guess what? Followers who claim that a Jewish wizard was beamed into a virgin’s uterus from the sky 2,000 years ago are lying. Why is it so hard to agree on that?

Same with a certain gentleman of Arabic descent who will remain unmentioned here, and the same goes for the polygamous American crystal-ball treasure hunter, and all the rest. Obviously, I like a lot of religious ideas and art, I approve of many of the moral teachings passed down by many of these magicians, etc. etc. This post is just to point out the disgusting, manipulative “big man” complex that spurs on almost all prophets. In terms of their ultimately selfish motivations there’s really no difference between one prophet and another, aside from the longevity of their absurd ego trips, which depends on how convincing people find their confabulations. The African guy’s ball of stars story will probably only be believed for a few years...

...unless he gets a good writer to start on the Gospel of The Minibus Racketeer. Add a couple miracles involving AK-47s and rocket launchers, tack on few outlandish laws about how to properly treat pigs, foreigners and women, and hey presto a new faith is born.

Wicca

2007-04-25T00:57:00.000+08:00

Since around 7th grade, I have been hearing about “Wicca”. The new age movement of modern day here and now witches. Except that they don’t want to be called witches, they want to be called Wiccans (with a hard ‘k’ sound). At the time, I thought, OK, that name is dignified. They must be serious. Wiccans. Like African-Americans. It is quite a dignified upgrade.

Seventh grade was a long time ago. I have a revelation to share with every Wiccan on the planet.

MUFUKKA, “WICCA” IS PRONOUNCED “WITCHA”. IT IS THE SAME WORD, PRONOUNCED THE SAME WAY. A WICCE IS A WITCH.

Here it is in the dictionary. Wicce was a female witch. A wicca was a male witch. Wiccecraeft was... well, you figure it out. All pronounced more or less like we do now.

A lot of times, old English words were spelled with a slightly different system than we would use today, especially for sounds like “j” or “ch”. “Ecg” meant edge, and it’s the origin of the phrase ‘egg someone on’. Pronounced ‘edge someone on’, as in poke them with your sword until they get pissed off, but it just happened that nobody says it that way anymore. See how it’s the same word? And wicc- is witch. IT IS THE SAME EXACT WORD. I was bullied into calling one of my stranger classmates a ‘Wiccan’ in 7th grade; never again. The entire Wiccan movement is just a bunch of silly people who don’t understand that historical spellings weren’t necessarily the exact same as modern ones. Poseurs. Somehow I doubt they can understand the depths of ancient wisdom if they can’t even comprehend their own name from a few centuries ago.

Ismail Ax

2007-04-19T09:06:00.000+08:00

One of the side stories I’ve been following that emerged from the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech is the mysterious signature in a note and written on the killer’s arm, described in the news articles as “Ismail Ax”. Maybe I shouldn’t get caught up in such a minor detail when something this horrible has just happened, but I find it interesting that with the entire world speculating on the meaning and posting online about it, no one has come up with a good explanation yet.

It’s fascinating in a disturbing sort of way that even after what happened, even with the combined Googling and cogitation of millions of people, no one can figure out yet what this psycho’s thought process was when he put those two words together.

My guess at this point is, he’s a student - maybe it’s actually “Ismail A+”, but this will probably be proven wrong once I get a little more information.

Judging from his demented plays, in spite of all his angry-old-coot denouncing of “charlatans” and “debaucheries” this guy was not as bright as he probably thought he was, so I doubt it’s a complicated literary or Koranic allusion that he came up with himself, as some have posited. I would tend more to think it’s from some obscure rap song or video game. I guess we’ll see. Apparently there is some Koran story where Abraham smashes something with an axe, and some Fenimore Cooper story where a guy named Ishmael has an axe... But again, I doubt that this kid did a lot of direct scriptural reading in the Koran. I would think it’s a lot more likely there was some low-brow intermediate source, some song or Warcraft guild or Japanese cartoon or something that he was referencing.

Update (April 22)
It seems that the early news reports got the spelling wrong, and that it was “Ismael” or “Ishmael”. That’s a lot less interesting and much less random. It was probably inspired by whatever weird blend of Christian beliefs Korean people have, or by Moby-Dick. Ho hum. The thing that really made Ismail Ax so fascinating to me in the first place was the extremely random Arabic spelling. Oh well.

Donkey Kong in Post-Its

2007-04-15T12:50:00.000+08:00

I never liked Donkey Kong that much as a kid. It was too easy to die, the barrels were too unpredictable, and it was annoying how you had to line Mario up exactly with the ladder before he’d start climbing it. I also remember being vaguely disconcerted that the title character was a) not a donkey in any way and b) evil. I much preferred Burgertime, where it was much easier to stay alive and which didn’t have a brain-bending name. Nonetheless, this is like the coolest thing ever and I love it:

The UCSC Engineering building is currently hosting this... er, work of art constructed from some 6,400 Post-Its. Check out the site; there’s quite a bit of neat info about the project. I do find it disturbing that most of the students at this school were probably born long, long after the game was popular, and that this was essentially an act of reverence for an ancient and dimly-known idol. I guess some of the older ones might remember it from the annoying yet sort of Keanu-“whoa”-style mind-blowing part of Donkey Kong 64 where you had to actually play the original game on an arcade machine within the game.

Speaking of which, I think the whole idea of virtual machines and emulation of one computer or video game system within another is really cool. I use a program called Mini vMac to simulate the Mac Plus computer we had when I was a kid, and just the fact that the old computer is essentially a tiny program running on the new computer is still really fascinating to me. Note that while emulators like this are often used to play copied games, most of the things I play are games I already own, or which are so old there’s no way anyone is still trying to make money off them, or both, as in the case of Zork here, which I’ve bought several times over the years and which was made shareware by the publisher during a promotion for a new game a while back. In fact, you can even play this and a lot of other similar games online in a Java applet, which is pretty dope.

Köttur ættleiddi mús: A Mammalian Mystery

2007-04-14T19:37:00.000+08:00

Every once in a while I check an Icelandic newspaper’s site, just to see if I can understand the headlines. Unless it’s something like “Bush Visits Camp David”, I’m usually in way over my head, especially since I’ve been lax in my Germanic language studies lately now that I work next door to my apartment and have no commute. I now realize that before we moved here, I did most of my linguistics reading on the tram. No commute equals no book-learnin’. I is dumb and they be stealin’ my bucket.

So anyway, on the Icelandic news site I saw the headline “Köttur ættleiddi mús”. I figured that here was a nut I could crack. CAT SOMETHING MOUSE. How hard could it be? My first clue that this was not going to be easy was that it mentioned its source as the kínverska eftirmiðdagsblaðinu Yanzhao. That I could decipher: Chinese evening newspaper Yanzhao. What on Earth would a Chinese evening newspaper have to report about a cat and a mouse that would be picked up by the Icelandic press? I tried to read the story, and gave up. I just didn’t know the crucial verbs about what the cat was doing to the mouse. My best guess, before giving up and searching for the English version of the story, was that the cat was afraid of the mouse.

WRONG!

The truth was far more terrifying.

And far, far sexier.

Turns out the cat loves the mouse, according to what I think is the English version of the same story.

On the morning of April 11, a woman surnamed Zhao said that the cat in the warehouse of her unit had caught a mouse outside and kept the mouse and her kittens together after her birth.

The cat was brought to the warehouse specifically in order to catch rats, as rats were very rampant in the warehouse. Just three days ago, the cat caught a grey mouse, but surprisingly, she didn't eat it, instead raising it with her kittens. Seeing this, a staff of the unit threw the mouse outside the warehouse, but the cat got the mouse back and put it in her net again.

What's more, the cat pays special attention to this small mouse. As long as the mouse is not within the scope of her vision, she will immediately stand up to look for it anxiously.

Experts say this cat's behavior is certainly a special case. They point out that many animals will present some changes in behavior and character during breastfeeding.

Well, I’ll be. There you have it. The most trivial, retarded newspaper story in history, with suspiciously anonymous pictures that may or may not have been staged after the fact by devious Chinese journalists, and I got suckered into it by a partially-deciphered Icelandic headline. And this hopefully ends my unbroken string of posts about cute animals. I don’t know what happened. I hate cute animals. Well, I don’t hate them all but I find the idea of blogging about them nauseating. And yet I keep writing posts about them, one crappy animal post after another. Hopefully this offensively cute story will be the digital enema that finally blasts the cute animal incrustations from the innermost twistings of my brain’s colon.

Dispatch from the Median Strip, Ant Highway

2007-04-09T00:56:00.000+08:00

I have an ant problem.

Normally, my desktop is topped by the bottom and top of this laptop and its virtual desktop, that is to say, the top of my lap habitually rests slightly below the wooden top of the upper desk whereupon the top of my laptop... I’ll start again. When we recently went on vacation, I whisked my valuable laptop into its prophylactic sheath slash carrying case and thus left my actual desk’s top temporarily bare and void of electronic equipment. In other words, a week ago I shut this damn computer up like a bad clam with avian flu and crammed it into a crappy satchel. Then we went on vacation.

Little did I know, at that time, looking back, the repercussions that this would, as time went on, have, in the future, on the history of the desk, and upon its present, which is to say, the future, and current, present, condition of that desk. It was a fateful decision which would change the life of my desk, and of myself, for ever.

During our 6-day absence, a colony of ants apparently used the middle of my desk for an essential conduit from their sleeping quarters en route to their formicious workspaces. There is clearly no way that this aforementioned colony of ants can survive without making the trek from... wherever they come from... past the center of my desk. They must have found some rich and yielding foodstuff or ant booty of some sort somewhere beyond my desk, and chosen my desktop as Highway One to Ant Economic Development Site Alpha.

By returning from vacation, unsheathing my laptop and installing it on my desk’s top, I clearly destroyed the ants’ rich culture of highwaymanship, vis-a-vis my desk. Generations of ant had used this desktop to roam freely in search of ant treasure, only to now be cruelly rebuffed by the vast detour of my laptop’s gleaming, translucent, rectangular hull. But no mere plasticine hull can quell these ants’ unquenchable moxie. These ants are young, they’re driven, and they’re ABSOLUTELY SURE that the path to ant greatness lies on the other side of my desk. And so they’ve chosen, like the intrepid pismires they are, to CHARGE mightily up and over the obstacle, damn the consequences, and to continue to seek the hidden treasure which lies beyond.

SO, FOR THE PAST 48 HOURS, ONE ANT HAS CROSSED MY KEYBOARD EVERY TEN SECONDS. I CAN’T F*CKING STAND IT ANY MORE.

Why must I be forced into the role of genocidal maniac? Why must these ants test my gargantuan largesse? Why must I watch weeping as they fruitlessly zig-zag through the labyrinthine keys of my laptop before, at their tortuous journey’s end, encountering my implacable thumb? Why must so many thousands suffer so that one highway is diverted a few inches in some other direction?

Ant Queen, if you’re reading this: B*TCH TELL YOUR F*CKING DRONE PEONS TO QUIT WALKING ON MY F*CKING COMPUTER. I WILL SQUISH EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM. FOREVER. UNTIL THE MULTITUDINOUS SEAS RUN INCARNADINE WITH ANT BLOOD. IT’S YOUR MOVE. IT IS CURRENTLY GO TIME.

THIS IS SAVING PRIVATE ANT. THIS IS ANTLER’S LIST.

THIS... IS... SPARTANT!

I, Pilipino Varmint Detective

2007-04-07T18:33:00.000+08:00

Well, we’re back from almost a week on Boracay island, in the Philippines. It was extremely beautiful and relaxing; however, the trip there and back was a little rough. To get there we had to take a taxi ride, a plane ride, a bus ride, another plane ride, a tuktuk ride, a ferry trip, a long ride in a jolting, dust-choked, rattling, swerving motorcycle sidecar, and finally a steep trek on snaking paths through a weird cliffside construction site.

It all took slightly more time than going to the moon, only it was less fun than a real moon trip because astronauts get to do cool things like poop into a vacuum tube. Man, if Kim didn’t have this weird hang-up about leaving me alone with the Electrolux, I’d be kickin it astronaut style right now.

ANYWAY, interestingly (for me), the Philippine language had a lot of words in common with Malay. Some of the basic numbers, colors, animals, vegetables etc. seemed to be almost the same. I don’t know what percentage might have been borrowed from modern Malay and what percentage might have gone back to a common ancestor, but even I could hear some similarities. Another cool thing can be seen in the picture above: all the boats around Boracay had outriggers or whatever they’re called, side thingys, which made them look sort of like they might be able to fly or transform into giant spiders or something, which I liked.

Anyway, it was a great trip and all sorts of interesting things happened, but I’ll just briefly describe one, the mysterious incident that just caused me to spend at least an hour of fruitless googling: The Nameless Varmints.

As we were lolling indolently in our bamboo beach chairs and stuffing our greasy gobs with great oozing slabs of pork and mahi-mahi one balmy evening, I noticed a commotion down the beach. Several people were crouching excitedly in a circle in the sand. Heaving my sun-blistered pink bulk slightly to the side and squinting Costanza-style until my vision was at least 20/20, I could perceive two small dark shapes swirling and spiralling around the people’s bodies, like the psychotic Jewish ghosts from the end of Raiders or the CGI scarabs from that mummy movie. This called for closer investigation.

Approaching the group of people, I saw that it consisted of several cooing German tourists and a small local family who had apparently brought two wild jungle animals out onto the beach, possibly to sell them to German tourists. They were small and ferret-like - the animals, not the Germans - with soft, jet-black fur, cute little foxy faces and long, fluffy tails. I preliminarily diagnosed them as seeming to fall within the spectrum of ferrety, mongoosy, stoaty, marteny, minky sorts of creatures. “What are those? What are they called?” I asked the man who had found them, he said, in the forest near a construction site. “Wild cats?” he offered, but without the air of zoological certitude you’d like to see in a case like this. He sounded like he was just making the name up on the spot. I nodded and returned to my chair.

The fun was not over, however, for the family sitting next to us had seen the critters and one of the women borrowed one of them. So for the rest of their meal I got to observe the little beast crawling all over the torsos of the people sitting next to us, licking their faces, sniffing their ears, and so on. It was really quite cute and apparently harmless and unafraid of people, but I was a bit disturbed that they’d brought an unknown feral jungle creature to the dinner table with them.

My guess that it was a mongoose was met with grunts of indifference from the family, who were more interested in taking pictures than comparative zoomorphology. I guess anyone stupid enough to allow a wild animal to cavort around their dinner table is probably stupid enough to be content with the idea that it’s some kind of very small, thin cat. I was sort of relieved when they returned the furry organism to its finders. It seems extremely likely to me that they contracted badger AIDS or something from the mystery weasel, and I pray that their deaths will come swiftly and painlessly.

So, back here in my command center and with the vast and naughty resources of the Internet at my beck, I assumed that I’d be able to ID the hairy little objects with scant difficulty. I was wrong. Dead wrong. (Note that I didn't say “... at my beck and call”. Just beck. Why does call always have to be included? I think we should bring back beck.)

After hours of surfing the closest I came was that the things remind me of martens, a North American version of which you can see above, cavorting in the snow. I think Organism X looked just like that picture, except with black fur and no snow. But I’m not sure they have martens around Boracay, and unfortunately the closest-looking animals native to the area seem to be the following two sad specimens:

1) The horrid, scrawny, coffee-pooping musang or civet cat, seen above glaring off into the distance in psychopathic rage, and which seems too short-haired, nasty and spotted to be our culprit, and

2) The revolting, burly, whiskery, slothy binturong or bearcat, a wretched, scruffy beast which looks like the deformed lovechild of a dying koala bear and an obese wolverine, and whose curiously intelligent, baleful eyes seem to be begging the viewer to put it out of its misery. If there’s any animal which I despised the instant I saw its picture, it’s that accursed binturong thing. I’m probably going to have nightmares about it.

So I’m no closer to cracking this case than I was before; the critters were probably some sort of marten or stoat but that’s as far as I think science can take me. And now I’ve got the ghastly, indelible thought that some fine morning I’ll throw open my bedroom window and there’ll be a binturong staring in at me. God that thing gives me the willies.

If I Looking For Bucket

2007-03-23T08:01:00.000+08:00

I’m sure this has been around forever, but I just saw it the other day. It somehow captures the entire tragedy of existence through the plight of this unfortunate sea creature. Who among us, indeed, has not at one time or another been cruelly robbed of our bucket by the inescapable workings of Fate? It’s pretty much my new favorite image of all time, although I still like the Hopkin note.

good hyphen bye, or: who misses dash?

2007-03-22T01:01:00.000+08:00

This is one of the first sentences in a recent New York Times article:

“WASHINGTON, March 20 — Al Gore... returns on Wednesday, a heartbreak loser turned Oscar boasting Nobel hopeful globe trotting multimillionaire pop culture eminence”

WHAT THE &^%$? Has the paper evolved beyond the need for any punctuation? Those last 13 words didn’t strike anyone as possibly requiring any sort of hyphenation at all?

This is an extreme example but I’ve seen other weird non-hyphenated things there lately, like “teen ager”. What gives?

Haiku Week, Day 7

2007-03-14T20:57:00.000+08:00

Fever, sweat, mucus
Writhing in a wool cocoon
Waiting to emerge

Haiku Week, Day 6

2007-03-13T23:47:00.000+08:00

Resonating tones
In a hollow wood chamber;
Ribcage and heartbeats.

Translato-Bot Strikes Again

2007-03-12T17:23:00.000+08:00

I’m going to interrupt Haiku week just for a second for a brief note to share a few lines of superb machine translation I just stumbled across.

This little gem of inadvertent robot humor is from a blog of random news articles about animals, apparently translated by a malfunctioning Brazilian android or something, with the imaginative name of “Animal News”.

Monday, January 22, 2007

The bees of the assassin infest the area of Katrina-Ravaged

The residents of the flood-damaged parish of the St. Bernard, still that recovers of the Katrina hurricane, have a new preoccupation: bees of the assassin.

The article goes on to explain that “Sometimes they call the ‘bees to you of the assassin’ because their intense attacks can be fatal.” Who would have guessed that Portuguese-(or whatever)-to-English translation mechanoids were also such masters at writing kung-fu movie dialogue?

Haiku Week, Day 5

2007-03-12T13:02:00.000+08:00

Thunder came early
Shattered the midday silence
The path was flooded

Haiku Week, Day 4

2007-03-11T17:29:00.000+08:00

Paper hummingbird
A creased and discarded leaf
Fallen, torn, reborn

This one’s not as complicated as usual. It’s a little ode to my most complex piece of origami to date, a hummingbird from a design by Peter Engel. It’s interesting to me that something like that can be made from the photocopied scraps in the recycling bin.

Haiku Week, Day 3

2007-03-10T20:02:00.000+08:00

Flames dancing on sand
God’s voice, madness or mirage?
Same thing in the end.

Since yesterday’s post partially involved me poking fun at avant-garde music, I thought I’d show I’m not a complete Philistine by mentioning that I really like Moses und Aron, an unfinished modern opera by Schoenberg that I recently acquired. The music is very atonal and strange, and the opera’s subject is a tough one to wrestle with, but I definitely like it.

The opera is about Moses (obviously) and how the Burning Bush, when it’s giving him his mission, suggests that his brother Aron be his mouthpiece. The opera’s Moses is a real puritan, and knows that his God can’t be portrayed in pictures or described fully in words. So the paradox of trying to convert the Hebrews to an invisible God he can’t talk about without diluting the message really messes with his mind. His brother Aron, on the other hand, has no trouble giving the people what they want, via magic tricks and fancy speeches (well, singing), and eventually he and they are worshipping the Golden Calf while Moses is away.

Moses comes down from Mount Sinai tablets in hand, furiously confronts Aron, and when Aron points out that the Ten Commandments are also nothing more than a graven image themselves, Moses smashes them in frustration and cries out “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, which is more or less “O word, you word I lack!” He can’t figure out how to convey his message, and the opera cuts off there, unfinished after the end of Act II.

The compelling thing about this words-versus-ideals version of the Moses story for me is that it’s such a strange mix of old and modern concepts, and a weird jumble of ideas which I admire and things which I am a bit wary of.

I’m not sure whether Schoenberg’s Moses is more like a brave modern artist or intellectual, trying to create something new but realizing that all messages are distorted by the media they’re portrayed through – or more like a stereotypical religious fanatic, unable to accept any other ideas or thoughts except those he imagines are being beamed into his head directly by the Supreme Being. In the planned (but never composed) ending, Moses triumphs and, flanked by soldiers, scolds Aron for his wickedness, and Aron drops dead. Was Moses a brilliant, principled reformer or the type of guy who would have put a hit out on Salman Rushdie, or both?

I think the composer himself wasn’t sure, and I assume that’s why one of the reasons he stopped working on the opera and never finished it.

Anyway, as another irony for an opera which hinges on communication breakdown and ends with “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, I can’t find the text for the opera anywhere online, so my understanding of it is currently fragmentary, based on random summaries I’ve read online and the few words I can understand in the recording. And I guess the final irony is that I was supposed to convey this all through the succinct medium of haiku, and I’ve ended up taking hundreds of words to explain myself. Oh well. I can only imagine how long my version of the Ten Commandments would be.

Haiku Week, Day 2

2007-03-09T23:56:00.000+08:00

Screech of angry owls
Under old wooden rafters
Disorients me

Tonight we went to hear some very interesting musical performances at the Central Market Annexe, which is a cool old set of renovated colonial-era buildings with nice wooden rafters. No owls though. The owls are like totally a metaphor for the musicians we heard. Two of the performers were playing their laptops. Here’s the website of one of them. I’m not sure how they did it, but they were sort of looping and reverberating all sorts of recordings and sounds to make a kind of sonic collage. One guy played an electric guitar with a set of screwdrivers.

Unfortunately, while I am all for artistic experimentation, these very interesting concepts often sounded, in execution, like a thousand smoke alarms going off at once while a million kittens were being thrown into the world’s largest blender. For some reason all the acts tended toward high-pitched shrieking feedback tones that physically hurt my ears. Note to free-form jazz musicians and laptop sound pioneers: less high-pitched squealing, please. You can experiment all you want with muffled thumps or dull clicks, really. I’ll sit there for hours enthralled by muffled thumps. Make muffled thumps your main focus. Not ultra-high squeals. Anything but squeals.

However, while I was being tortured by many of the the sounds I was actually very interested in the intensity and obvious creativity the musicians brought to making noise. And who am I, I thought, to judge these guys’ experimental music? I wondered if I were up there deliberately trying not to make sounds that sounded like normal music, what I’d come up with. So I was interested, entranced, bored, confused, excited, physically pained, shamed and made contemplative all within the space of a few minutes. Not bad for a free concert, and I’m glad we were invited.

Haiku Week, Day 1

2007-03-08T23:15:00.000+08:00

Spring’s tall grass breeds pests
Ancient crabs cling to their turf
Gorilla loin-spawn

Ok here’s the deal. I’ve recently been told in a friendly but firm way that my posts are too convoluted and long for normal human browsing. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, I guess I just figured that everyone’s interests were exactly the same as my own and that therefore anything I wrote on topics that interest me, no matter how rambling, would be inherently riveting. Oops. So I’m going to post nothing but haikus for at least a week as penance, although I have in the past said I would avoid the form. This poem deals with the very real and very interesting possibility that some of our lice originally evolved on gorillas, and the larger idea that human evolutionary history can be traced by studying parasites and more specifically head and pubic lice, as discussed on this extremely interesting article. I will not be quoting from the interesting page, even though I find it very, very interesting. If you’re interested you’ll have to click on the link yourself. Thank you.

Right Ho, Jeeves

2007-03-07T13:30:00.000+08:00

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but certain authors, musicians etc. have names that are so annoying or colorful that I develop a judgment about them before reading or hearing their work. For example, I’ve always had trouble taking the idea of someone named “Saul Bellow” seriously, and I really haven’t read much by him. I avoided the excellent English writer Anthony Trollope for years because I thought he was French. I think I initially didn’t like Radiohead as much as I should have because their name is such a corny example of the most overused and annoying “alternative band” naming scheme ever, which is simply to make a new compound word: Candlebox, Audioslave, Stereolab, Soundgarden, Superchunk, Sparklehorse, Silverchair... This retarded band-naming scheme ravaged the countryside all throughout the ’90s, only to be replaced by the almost-equally irksome formula “The ___s” in the early oughts.

The name prejudice works the other way too, though: I’ll always have a soft spot for Rainer Maria Rilke, no matter how incomprehensible much of his poetry is to me, because of the way one of my literature professors, who was from Scotland, rolled the “r”s. You should have heard the way that guy said “Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov”. He could have charged admission.

Anyway, three British authors who(m?) I long avoided because their names sounded unbearably pretentious, and therefore I assumed their work would be too, were Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and P.G. Wodehouse. Those names are so fine, so foppish and so prancingly fancy that I wasn’t even sure if the authors were male or female, and I wasn’t eager to find out. Just forming your mouth to say “Evelyn Waugh” makes you feel like an enormous upper-class British twit – try it, but be warned that you might want to punch yourself in the face afterwards. Astonishingly, I recently learned that Evelyn Waugh, apparently something of a sadist, gave his son the only name that could have been worse than his own: “Auberon Waugh”. Try to imagine anyone other than the Queen saying that with a straight face.

Long story short, those guys with the fancy, fancy names are three of the greatest comic novelists of the last century and I highly recommend most work by any of the three. Waugh is my least favorite because he is the least funny and the most racist, upper-class and reactionary. A lot of the Waugh books I’ve read involve poking fun at the lower classes, “modern” anything, and black people. His Decline and Fall is worth a read. Kingsley Amis is also quite mean-spirited, but less upper-crust and much funnier. Lucky Jim is the best starting point for Amis.

The most humane, funniest and by far my favorite of this little trio I’ve arbitrarily assembled is P.G. Wodehouse. He wrote light and cheerful stories which mostly take place in a sort of idealized comedy England where everyone says things like “pip pip” and “right ho” and “what what” a lot. His most famous characters are a young idiot named Bertie Wooster and his superintelligent butler, Jeeves, but all the characters in all the books are almost equally funny. The plots are usually a standard sitcom-style setup where a misunderstanding forces two young lovers apart, and getting them back together involves pretending to be someone else, stealing a valuable object from a country manor, public speaking gone horribly wrong, tricking horrible old relatives into loaning you money, mistaken identities, etc. If that all sounds like very old-fashioned, superficial comedy, to some degree it is, but the way Wodehouse writes makes every line fresh and hilarious whether you’re a fan of Edwardian England or not. Here’s a passage from The Mating Season, not one of his best works, but with the following passage (slightly edited for length) where the narrator, Bertie Wooster, describes waiting to break into a house to intercept a letter or something:

...That was why on the following morning the commodious grounds of The Larches, in addition to a lawn, a summer-house, a pond, flower-beds, bushes and an assortment of trees, contained also one Wooster, noticeably cold about the feet and inclined to rise from twelve to eighteen inches skywards every time an early bird gave a sudden ‘cheep’ over its worm. My nervous system was seriously disordered, and one of God’s less likeable creatures with about a hundred and fourteen legs had crawled down the back of my neck and was doing its daily dozen on the sensitive skin, but did Nature care? Not a hoot. The sky continued blue, and the fatheaded sun which I have mentioned shone smilingly throughout.

Beetles on the spine are admittedly bad, calling for all that a man has of fortitude and endurance, but when embarking on an enterprise which involved parking the carcass in bushes one more or less budgets for beetles. What was afflicting me much more than the activities of the undersigned was the reflection that I didn’t know what was going to happen when the postman arrived.

It was just as this morale-lowering thought came into my mind that something suddenly bumped against my leg, causing the top of my head to part from its moorings. My initial impression that I had been set upon by a powerful group of enemies lasted, though it seemed a year, for perhaps two seconds. Then, the spots clearing from before my eyes and the world ceasing to do the adagio dance into which it had broken, I was able to perceive that all that had come into my life was a medium-sized ginger cat. Breathing anew, as the expression is, I bent down and tickled it behind the ear, such being my invariable policy when closeted with cats, and was still tickling when there was a bang and a rattle and somebody threw back the windows of the dining-room.

If you thought that passage, especially the phrase “...but when embarking on an enterprise which involved parking the carcass in bushes one more or less budgets for beetles”, was good, then please keep an eye out for Wodehouse next time you’re at the bookstore. If you enjoy eyestrain and/or are a cheap bastard, many of Wodehouse’s early works are starting to appear at Project Gutenberg. On the other hand if you didn’t like the above passage, then God help you.

I think I was inspired to give Wodehouse a chance in spite of his fancy name by a recommendation from Douglas Adams in, I believe, The Salmon of Doubt, and I’m very grateful to Adams for possibly introducing a new generation to these books. I’ve probably read two dozen Wodehouse books in the last two years and there are like 75 more where that came from. For me they’re like the literary equivalent of watching Seinfeld DVDs: you’ve seen it all a million times before, you know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’s always funny and it always cheers you up. By the way, I decided to write this post when I realized, in retrospect, that my post about being a Chinese detective was written in a very Wodehouse-y style.

the tragedy of human cognition

2007-03-05T12:54:00.000+08:00

…nice phrase from an interesting article on the New York Times website about scientists studying how all humans might have evolved with a predisposition to believe in supernatural beings. To clumsily sum up the 11-page article, our brains are so good at imagining reasons and causes and sympathies for things that happen in daily life, which helps on a survival level, that we automatically tend to deduce that an unseen God or gods is hiding behind the scenes on the larger scale. Another factor seems to be that being in a religious group might have provided powerful advantages throughout history, because fanatics cooperate better than non-fanatics (as we’re seeing in Iraq). Here are some good passages from the article:

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead…. So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently.

…

A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.”

…

The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics.

A particularly interesting paragraph for me was one towards the end about how it probably takes more courage and mental discipline to be an atheist than a believer:

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.

Amen to that.

Live from The Lump

2007-03-03T18:02:00.000+08:00

To soak your mental adult undergarments in the stream of consciousness which led to this post, please see the previous post.

In my last post I made fun of George Lucas, but I really owe the man a lot for coming up with the character of Indiana Jones. Those of you with a freakishly misused memory for details will remember that in the third movie the map with no names in Henry Jones Sr.’s grail diary leads them to the Turkish city of Alexandretta, now called Iskenderun. How is this relevant to anything? Read on to find the mysteriously unsatisfying answer!

By the end of the Dune series so many thousands of years have passed that some of the names of major planets have changed. Caladan has become Dan. Giedi Prime has become Gammu. And so on. When I first read the books in high school or whenever, I thought that the mutated name of Caladan was confusing, odd and implausible – why would anyone abbreviate “Caladan” as “Dan” and not “Cal” or “Calan” or “Can” or something else? It just sounded wrong.

Now that I’ve been to several different countries and have seen something of the different ways that languages work, I’m not as annoyed by “Dan” for “Caladan”. Maybe in the Dune universe there was a huge tonal emphasis on the last syllable of proper names. Maybe “Cala” was the local term for “The planet called” and the “Dan” part was always the more important element. Maybe the planet was taken over by a race of people whose language didn’t have the sounds for “c” or “l”. There could be several plausible reasons for the change. And even in English, while last-syllable abbreviations aren’t that common they do exist, for example ’nads for gonads and (I think) ’sucker for... well, you know.

One place in the real world where I’ve seen especially unique place-name evolution is Turkey, where old Greek cities were renamed by Turks whose language was completely different (European languages are of the Indo-European family, while Turkish is what I think’s called a Finno-Ugric language. Or maybe it’s just Turkic? Look it up yourself.). On a trip to Istanbul a couple of years back, I was fascinated to see the ancient city and region of Anatolia called “Antalya”, and the ancient city of Smyrna called Izmir. Note that the only similarity between “Smyrna” and “Izmir” is the “’smir” sound, which has moved from the first syllable to the second in the new name. Much odder than “Caladan” becoming “Dan”.

Here are some of my favorite real-world distortions of city-names over time, moving roughly in order of increasing strangeness (some of these spellings were copied from this wikipedia article to save time, so take with a grain of salt):

Italy
Akragas -> Agrigento
Mediolanum -> Milano (I read somewhere that it’s possible the old, old name of this city was “medioplanum”, or in the middle of the plain, but it lost the “p”)
Neapolis -> Naples

France
Aquae Sextiae -> Aix
Lugdunum -> Lyon
Vesontio -> Besançon

Spain
Caesaraugusta -> Zaragoza
Carthago Nova -> Cartagena
Wadi al Kabir -> Guadalquivir

Germany
Augusta Vindelicorum -> Augsburg
Colonia Agrippina -> Köln
Castra Regina -> Regensburg

Turkey
Alexandretta -> Iskenderun (Turkish version of “Alexander” is “Iskendar”. What I think happened to the name is the “ks” sound in “aleks” got switched around (a.k.a. metathesis) to “sk”, and maybe the “al” got dropped entirely because it sounded like Arabic for “the”. Just speculation though, I’m not a historical linguist)
Antioch -> Antakya
Anatolia -> Antalya
Trebizond -> Trabzon
Smyrna -> Izmir
Ephesus -> Efes

With all this in mind, I would like to present a linguistic theory or supposition of mine:

I believe that the word “Istanbul” is not, as the main Wikipedia entry and many other people claim, from a Greek phrase meaning “to the city” (eis tin polin), but is rather just a slightly garbled version of “Constantinople”. My reasoning is pretty simple: conSTANtinoPLE has the sound “stan” in it, while “eis tin polin” does not. Q.E.D. However, I’m open to convincing otherwise – if you buy the eis tin polin theory let me know why.

To bring this all back around, I also believe that Constantinople was a major inspiration for Tolkien’s city of Minas Tirith. Just look at the way the rectangular mountains surrounding Mordor resemble the coastline of Anatolia, which leaves Gondor approximately on Greece and Italy, and the Shire is pretty much where England would be. Constantinople was, like Minas Tirith, a large city left over from a once-great empire, surrounded by huge rings of walls and long seen as a bulwark of the West against the East.

I’m not saying that Minas Tirith is a direct fantasy version of Constantinople, just that it was inspired by several aspects of it. Also on the subject, from what I understand Tolkien’s two major versions of Elvish were designed to be a fancy old version of the language, like Latin, and an evolved later version, like Italian, and that he spent a lot of his time thinking about how the language (and names) would have changed over time, so for example from Quenya to Sindarin the name Carnistir became Caranthir. The miracle is that someone so detail-oriented and obsessively nerdy was able to write a story that had any interest to outsiders at all.

P.S. As to the post title: The Lump is what I hope to get people calling Kuala Lumpur in the future. It’s much quicker to say and quite poetic, don’t you think?

My Two Trilogies

2007-03-03T13:11:00.000+08:00

I read the Lord of the Rings and Dune trilogies pretty early on, around 5th or 6th grade. I blame all my problems on this early warping of my impressionable mind.

As I remember it I was introduced to both series by my Uncle Fred, who gave me his copy of The Hobbit first and the other books a year or two later, which is probably the best way to be introduced to that stuff. The cover, which was by a very prolific (and, in retrospect, annoyingly unimaginative) fantasy book cover artist named Darrell K. Sweet, was typical of Sweet’s work in that everyone has tight-fitting clothes, immaculate hair and looks like they’ve just dressed up for Ye Olde Renaissance Faire (see above).

No, now that I think about it, I remember two copies of The Hobbit floating around our house (one with a blue cover and one yellow-orange but both with that horrible cover painting of Renaissance Midget Bilbo cowering before a huge glowing eagle) so maybe it wasn’t entirely due to avuncular donation and my dad had always had one, but from what I can recall it was definitely Uncle Fred who was into Dune. I read the first four books in the series in middle school. At the time I was struck by the major differences between the form of the two series.

The Lord of the Rings books told one long, exciting story with a clear beginning and ending. The Dune books were a bit different in that the first book was a great story, then the other books were incredibly boring adventures of random descendants of the characters from the first book. I now know that this was due to the fact that LOTR was actually written as one long novel, and that the later Dune books are the way they are because the author was deliberately choosing to concentrate on analyzing future history over storytelling, but at the time I expected an LOTR-level literary unity from every trilogy or series I read, and the Dune series seemed like a mess.

My main problem with Dune in middle school could be summed up in two words: Duncan Idaho. I remember having very little interest in reading volumes and volumes on the exploits of several successive clones of the most excruciatingly boring minor character from the original book. Each of the later Dune books takes place long, long after the events of the first one, and for most of the time the only character around from the first book is a clone of this guy Duncan Idaho. Not only does he have the most boring, generically American name in history in the middle of a book where everyone has an incredibly cool name like Baron Vladimir Harkonnen or Duke Leto Atreides – I always imagined Duncan Idaho as a potato farmer – but the character is actually boring beyond belief. Since he’s usually a clone, it usually takes him the whole book to figure out what everyone else in that time period already knows. So he’s like Unfrozen Caveman Potato Farmer.

Now, of course, while I am still bored silly by Duncan Idaho and a lot of his pals, I appreciate the later Dune books a lot more. Setting the later books in the far-distant future of the original Dune’s already far-distant future allowed Frank Herbert to make a lot of interesting comments on civilization and history and, above all, the human desires for immortality and stability. By the last Dune book there are like a dozen different ways beliefs and characters from the past use to continue existing forever: religion, cloning, technology, telepathy, becoming a giant worm (as seen on another bad paperback cover from my youth, above), martial arts, and several I forget. The storytelling takes a back seat to these philosophical speculations on immortality – for example, I think the plot of the last Dune book pretty much was hundreds of pages of philosophical discussion where no one does anything, leading up to like one page of action where one of the characters uses a supersecret ancient martial arts technique to kick the evil leader in the head really, really hard.

A third book series that had an almost equal impact on me was Hitchhiker’s Guide, although like Dune it ceased to be a trilogy long ago. However, this has gone on long enough so I’ll have to give Douglas Adams his due later.

These random thoughts on two book series led to some more random thoughts on city names, which on my wife’s advice I’m spinning off into another post.

And to be honest, another trilogy which had an even bigger impact on me, from an even earlier age, was the Star Wars films. But if George Lucas can retroactively go in and ruin his movies decades later, then, hell, I can go back into my memories and retroactively wipe out all knowledge of ever having liked Star Wars. It seems only fair.

Apostasy and Topology

2007-02-26T21:49:00.000+08:00

Why does Salt Lake City seem to be the epicentre of the blogging world? Is it something to do with the contemplative stimulus of the solitary and desolate distances of the Utahan landscape? Pent-up repression producing a flowering of online creativity? The pod-people-like peer pressure of the sinister-sounding mass movement known as the bloggernacle and its army of bloggernackers, nackers, naccers and bloggerns? Housewives from polygamous households with a lot of free time because the washin’ and sock-darnin’ and grub up-rustlin’ are divided up so efficiently among all the womenfolk? Dooce envy? My relatives? All of the above?

Whatever the case, according to my calculations, aside from my current hometown of Kuala Lumpur, by far the most viewers of this site from a single location have hailed from Salt Lake City, the sedate, decaffeinated heart of “Stormin’” Mormon country.

If I continue on this topic for much longer I’ll just end up poking fun at the LDS, which is certainly not my goal today (although, while I will refrain at this point from sharing my thoughts on the religion per se, I would like to mention in passing that I find their global proselytizing efforts despicable, as I find the similar efforts of most such organizations. Enticing poor and gullible people around the world to abandon their traditions and then give you ten percent of their money is one of the least admirable human activities I can think of). I’ll stop before I get worked up.

AHEM ANYWAY, I was perusing this lovely google analytics map of the locations of my literally half-dozens upon half-dozens of readers (note the [relatively] enormous dot on Salt Lake City) when I realized that it’s a four-color map. You should check out the previous link but basically, the idea of four-color theory is that almost any map you can imagine can be colored in with four colors, no matter how many neighboring countries or whatever you add to the map. A map with thousands of fictional territories on it could be colored in with only four colors, and no two adjacent countries would be the same color. I had real trouble accepting this in high school, and I spent a lot of time trying to draw maps that would disprove the idea.

I was under the impression, probably influenced by the Wikipedia article, that “although the four color theorem was discovered in the process of coloring a real map, it finds no application in practical cartography.” I guess at least one person at Google must have disagreed and thought they’d try it out. I’m assuming the idea was that the colors of the countries shouldn’t interfere with the superimposed dots, so they wanted as subtle a palette as possible.

I got kind of excited about this because, while I’m not really a mathematics person, I do have a sort of armchair amateur layman’s fascination with Moebius strips, Klein bottles (seen below in origami form), prime numbers and so on. I’m the sort of chap who is mildly curious about the Fibonacci sequence and the related sorts of things, things of the sort that poseur authors like the vile Dan Brown usually assume people will think are mysterious and mind-blowing, and incorporate in their idiotic thrillers. Mathematics as magic with Einstein as Gandalf and M.C. Escher as Dumbledore, essentially. I’m not proud of it, but that’s pretty much the level I’m at.

In high school I did a report on the branch of math called topology, and at the time it made a big impact on me, particularly the four-color theorem, the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem and the idea that a coffee mug and a doughnut are essentially the same shape. However, it’s not a subject that really comes up a lot in daily life, so after I presented that report in math class my topological interest lay dormant for 15 years or so. (Speaking of that math report, I realized only upon watching the videotape afterwards that I had been so nervous that I had been bouncing up and down on my tip-toes during the entire speech. And thus was born my second most painful memory of public speaking in school. The first involved me pretending to be abolitionist John Brown in front of a packed auditorium in middle school and the less said about that, the better.)

Now that I’ve looked around a little, it seems that one of the interesting recent applications of topology is mapping the internet, which Ms. Cofino has been investigating recently. I suppose in “cyberspace” (ugh) where distances don’t matter and points of connections do, we’re all bouncing around from one site to another and never quite getting where we were headed, sort of like that pedestrian in Königsberg. Or like stops on the Salt Lake City subway system. Or something.

Haiku time

2007-02-23T01:21:00.000+08:00

Through the glass, no snow.
A crow’s shape crosses the square
How much have I missed?

This is basically about me checking webcams in Munich and the Alpine region all month, trying to see some snow. Aside from one day a few weeks ago it seems to not have snowed very much this year, and this was supposed to express the thoughts about passing seasons, global warming, homesickness etc. I always get from the whole checking the webcams thing.

Lost in Other-Siding...

2007-02-20T01:58:00.000+08:00

...Starring Birdbeak Murray and Dark-Red, Son of Johan.

I somehow happened upon a goofy news blog with the following article:

Wikipedia is broken in sites of cover 10 of the E.E.U.U. In line popular encyclopedia of Wikipedia of the foundation of Wikimedia cracked superior list ten of most of the Web site popular in the E.E.U.U for the first time in January, according to networks of comScore.

It seems to be a Spanish article machine-translated into English, about Wikipedia cracking (“broken”) the top 10 list (“superior list 10”) of American “in line” sites.

Man that sucks. PLEASE hire professionals to do your translating work for you, or at least pay a native speaker to look the stuff over.

It could be worse, though. I own a couple of Asian movies with English subtitles which were clearly not translated by humans, and it’s almost impossible to watch them. People will be having a karate fight or whatever, and the subtitles will say stuff like “Woman woman snow punch wanderings? Not whelm inner carbuncle!”

Good fer what ails ye

2007-02-19T19:14:00.000+08:00

On my first visit to a Malaysian pharmacy, one of the first items that caught my eye was a shelf filled with giant bottles of cod liver oil, fresh from a factory in England. Below that was “gripe water” intended to keep my baby free from “wind”. The boxes and bottles on the nearby shelves were a bizarre mix of Victorian advertisement, Chinese characters, and primitive, clumsy company logos like sailboats, axes and old men. By the time I’d gotten to “Three Rifles Brand Wound Paint”, which featured what looked like a developmentally challenged child’s shaky drawing of a tiny nurse applying something with a paintbrush to a bodiless arm ten times her size, I was hooked.

Now, I personally think Eastern medicine is fascinating from a historical and cultural perspective, like astrology, but, like astrology, I am inclined to think it’s bunk wrapped up in flim-flam and slathered with hokum and hogwash. Let me rephrase that: I do not doubt the apparent efficacy of either alternative medicine or astrology in many situations, but I have what I like to think is a healthily skeptical view of the processes behind that efficacy. I would say the average Eastern medicinal concoction might hover somewhere around 75% placebo effect and 25% effective remedy.

However, I am not writing in order to poke fun at Eastern medicine, but to note that I’m in the Lost World of Western Medicine. A strange and fantastic pharmaceutical otherworld cut off from modern evolutionary developments, where mighty 1800s snake-oil cures still roam proud and free, untouched by the mass extinctions which cruelly cut down their non-Malaysian brethren. There are products here, like the cod liver oil, that no westerners aside from Abe Simpson have used in generations.

Let me put it another way. My grandmother, for example, used to constantly talk about the limitless health benefits of mustard plasters and witch hazel. What the hell are those things? They both sounded bizarre, medieval and excruciatingly painful, and I’m pretty sure that they were. Well, I’m guessing Grandma could easily have walked into a Malaysian pharmacy and found everything she’d need for her home-brewed polio vaccine or Irishman-bite remedy or Coalminer’s Elbow poultice or whatever you need a mustard plaster for.

It’s tough to say who’s behind this time-warp. There are a few European companies that seem to sell olde-fashioned products here, such as the cod liver oil people, but most of the pseudo-Western remedies seem to be made by Malaysian, Singaporean or Chinese factories, possibly ones which were set up BY Europeans, before the Great War, to harness Asia’s teeming millions to produce the latest high-tech products. Now, these factories, presumably cut off from their ties to colonial oppressors, have for generations soldiered on in isolation, like that Japanese soldier alone on that island, turning out for the domestic market strange, vestigial pharmaceutical products which Europe has long ago left behind. It would be like today’s America suddenly switching to a new type of footwear, dooming Chinese kids near the factories to wear Nike and Adidas for the next 200 years.

Anyhoo, I have tracked down and captured one of these specimens in the wild. Long thought extinct, the rugged “Sloan’s Liniment” is a living relic, an evolutionary dead-end which bears witness to an entire world of bizarre interactions of Western and Eastern quack medicine.

The label on the front shows what seems to be a crude Daguerreotype of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with a reproduced signature I interpret as “DrSamlSSloan” underneath in a strangely feminine cursive hand.

On the side of the bottle are:

“FOR EXTERNAL USE for the relief of muscular Rheumatism, Lumbago, Stiff Neck, Neuralgia, Sciatica, Sprains, Bruises, Chilblains and Muscular Cramp.

DIRECTIONS: Apply the liniment liberally with a soft flannel cloth or a piece of cotton wool. Do not rub. Sloan’s Liniment is strong enough without rubbing, which might harm a tender skin. Do not bandage.

ACTIVE CONSTITUENT
Oil of Turpentine 40% w/v
Also Contains:
Oleoresin Capsicum
Camphor
Oil of Pine
Methyl Salicylate
Oil of Sassafrass
Menthol”

So basically, it’s turpentine with a little pepper, pine oil and mint. Yeah, that’s going to help my sprains and bruises. And as for the uses and directions, I don’t really have anything to add to their comedy perfection. It’s like Grandpa Simpson poetry. Lumbago? Chilblains? Oil of Sassafrass? “Do not rub”? I don’t have the time right now, but maybe in a future post I will apply and rub the dickens out of the sh*t, in the name of science.

Dr. Sloane, if you ever really existed, my hat’s off to you, Sir, not only for your fine turpentine liniment but also for your excellent work on Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Update

I thought I was exaggerating too wildly and poking a little too much fun at the remedies in the above post, so I did a little research into Sloan’s Liniment. Well, turns out everything I wrote up there was pretty much right on the money, except that his signature doesn’t say “Sam’l”, it says “Earl”.

According to one very interesting source, Sloan’s Liniment was part of the snake oil fad of the late 1800s. The article says that while they didn’t make the claim that it was made from snakes, Sloan's was part of a long list of products that had the same ingredients (turpentine, a dash of pepper) as the celebrated snake oil. The only active ingredient (and I use the term loosely) seems to be the pepper, which makes the skin feel hot. I guess that explains why rubbing it in is verboten.

I didn’t know there actually was snake oil, I just thought it was a disparaging term for quack tonics. Other competitors, according to the very informative article, included Dr. Thomas’ Eclectric Oil, Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery and the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company’s Swamp Root Kidney and Liver Medicine.

Now, what are the chances that one of those absurdly fraudulent Wild West medicine products would still be being manufactured some 120 years later, on the other side of the world, with the exact same frigging label? The whole thing is too wacky.

Now, Americans and Europeans all have, to some extent, a stereotype that Asians are wise and filled with ancient lore when it comes to healing. So let’s think about this for a moment. People in Asia clearly still use Sloan’s Liniment by the gallon, since it and a dozen similar products are available in every shop. What does that say about the discerning nature of their ancient medicinal wisdom?

If the average Asian pharmacy-goer is clueless enough to shell out for some 1890s mustachioed carnival huckster’s sideshow paint thinner (with a dash of tabasco) and dab it on their chilblains, why on Earth would they be the go-to continent for info on what roots and herbs to mix with ground rhino penis and make into a tea to cure cancer? Why would I let anyone who keeps the Sloan’s flying off the shelves tell me what parts of my feet they should stick needles into to clear up my kidney stones? I’m sorry, Eastern medicine, you’ve been punked. By Dr. Earl S. Sloan, M.D. Oh no, wait, that’s right, he wasn’t a doctor. He was a veterinary school dropout and horse trader.

Heeere’s Crabby!

2007-02-13T21:28:00.000+08:00

Well, I was so intrigued by the complex modern origami I described in my previous post that I printed out Robert Lang’s fiddler crab “crease pattern” and started folding away, with utterly no knowledge of the techniques involved.

After about an hour of pre-creasing and tentative folding I started to see how the creases more or less might work, and started bunching the paper up along the folds. It started to look like a sea urchin or something, but I could see no sign of a body or other reference point. I didn’t know what was legs and what was claws.

I then looked around and found some more real-world shots of the finished model, and tried to use them for reference.

But I still had no reference points for where the main body area was supposed to be. I tried for a while then eventually just sort of manhandled it into a vague crab shape. It looks both scary and sort of retarded, like the Garthim from The Dark Crystal. Scroll down to see my masterpiece, if you dare.

I looked around a bit and I now realize that this is like the only asymmetrical origami model in history. The guy designed it using some sort of portal to the 24th dimension, as far as I can understand according to this interview. It’s probably the hardest possible thing to start with. So I don’t feel bad that mine looks like it scuttles on the short bus. I’ll just have to start with something easier, like an origami model of a brick, rock, or fruit roll-up.

Vielfalt

2007-02-13T10:57:00.000+08:00

I just read a great article about a modern origami master on the New Yorker website that blew my mind just with the written descriptions - then I actually searched for pictures, and now I’m really impressed.

I urge you to read the article for yourself, but basically the artist is a young, respected American laser physicist who is now living the dream of professional origami folder. Surreal and fascinating. I’m going to need to investigate this subject further. Maybe I can print out some designs and figure out how to make them myself...?

Slightly later: Here is the plan of the fiddler crab above; apparently most designs are made from a single sheet of uncut paper. I think I will have to start smaller. FYI the title is German for “manifold”, well, the noun version of manifold, which would be what? diversity? complexity? Doesn’t have the same ring.