The world is a sad, sad place

Sometimes in big huge ways, but sometimes also in all sorts of little ways. From BBC:

Canned love

The talking robotic doll tells its owner how much it loves her and welcomes her home when she walks back into the house.

The majority of buyers are retired women who live alone.

"Many elderly people buy these dolls, they think the dolls are actual grandsons and granddaughters," says Yuko Hirakawa from Tomy.

"You can speak to the doll and she will tell you she loves you so much. If you hold the doll, the weight is the same weight as a small infant."

Apparently, it provides comfort for lonely women who hold it in their arms.

Let me be clear: the trend of Japanese consumer robotics is, in general, entirely awesome. We are not too far, I think, from marketable robotic monkey butlers, roboguarddogs with vibroblade teeth, and power armour with mounted Gauss rifles.

But technology that calls attention to the relentless loneliness of the elderly? That's not rad. It's sad.

Envy and congratulations

Through Leiter Reports, I found out some news about a friend of a friend from undergrad. She is currently wrapping up a Philosophy PhD at Stanford, and looks like she could probably beat me up. More importantly, she has just been hired for a tenure-track position at UVic.

Envy! Getting on a tenure track back in Vancouver (Victoria would be close enough) is one of my longterm dreams.

I say "dream" rather than "plan" because there's really no reason to suppose that the opportunity will arise for me to even compete for (let alone actually get) that sort of job in the area. Job openings at particular philosophy departments are sporadic, and job offers are made according to philosophical subfield. If my chosen subfield (whatever that turns out to be) doesn't show up in the job listings at those places, that's the end of that. And even leaving chance aside, I'm not sure I'm going to end up with interests that would ever find a home at, say, SFU, seeing as how I keep getting obsessed by oddballs like Kierkegaard and Freud.

Which is a shame. I've decided that Vancouver really is the best place to live. Something to do with Commercial Drive, having large majestic chunks of rock standing between me and the horizon, and wanting to live forever. This has nothing to do with my personal attachment to the place--I'm abstracting away from that and talking about objective fact.

***

My number-two-sister and volleyball superstar, Kumi, has accepted a scholarship offer from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida. Bethune-Cookman has an NCAA Division I volleyball team, which makes it a great opportunity. Not only that, it's a Methodist and historically black college--all in all, it's like the whole college was designed specifically for her.

Introducing Generalissimo Canuckistan

An old internet meme, I think. But a good one. (Link only works for me in IE.)


Generalissimo Canuckistan wears the maple leaf proudly, and fights with hammer and sickle, because he's a commie. Of course he's really short, and probably can only reach the ankles of a guy like Captain America. That's why he has mad psychic skillz, represented here by weird circle thingies. The falcon is to coopt the raptor iconography of that other country; also because falcons are rad. Fumanchu moustache? Also rad.

Don't ask me to explain the topknot.

Long live the gourd

Over the past few weeks, I started revisiting my youth in the form of the Smashing Pumpkins, who played a formative role in my musical consciousness roundabout the mid 90s. Like probably a solid majority of fans, I feel that Siamese Dream was their best album, but in terms of first impressions, nothing matches my original exposure to the music video for "Bullet With Butterfly Wings". This video sucked out every drop of angst I had, froze it into solid form, sculpted that frozen angst into a sledgehammer, and then, for over four glorious minutes, beat me over the head with that sledgehammer made out of my own angst.

I may be pushing that imagery a bit much. Anyway, I was into the Pumpkins.

I must admit to being one of the herd who lost interest following Adore. As a result I never gave MACHINA: The Machines of God a fair shake. This was wrong of me. After a few recent listens, I feel that "Stand Inside Your Love", at least, is on a par with the rest of the SP oeuvre, with a full measure of that characteristic mixture of sheer rockitude coordinated with embarrassingly earnest expression (though perhaps not quite so embarrassingly earnest as the comments in that link).

Anyway, because I was busy cleaning up at poker at the time, I missed the big entertainment news heralding the return of the Pumpkins.

(Alternative explanations for this miss: I don't listen to music radio, and don't pay any attention to entertainment news.)

Apparently it's not clear who all exactly is going to come back to the band, but Jimmy Chamberlin seems to be a sure thing, which is key (without Chamberlin beating the hell out of those drums, it's mostly just Billy Corgan whining). The Pumpkins are a Chicago band, and Corgan ran this long whiny ad in the Tribune about how attached he is to the city--so with any luck, the new album will happen, and will be up to standards, and the corresponding tour will start in town, and I will be there for the first concert, and there will be a mosh pit, and I'll manage not to break my glasses while I'm in there.

You gotta fight for your right

On Saturday there was a birthday celebration. The intended format was a BBQ. This was perfect timing for me, because not 24 hours before I'd decided to go vegetarian for a month. But this is not about the trials of my meat-avoidance (it hasn't been that hard at all so far, and I don't anticipate all that much pain).

Anyway, BBQ. Outdoors.

As per Plan A, we gathered in a lakeside park. Some started to set up the BBQ, tried and failed to get the fire started, while others kicked a soccer ball around, and so on. At the same time, there was some preliminary consumption of alcohol by a few (maybe only one person, but I'm not sure exactly).

I'd wondered about this whole public consumption of alcohol thing, but more experienced lakeside partygoers had done this many times before, and said that if we kept it low-key (kept the containers covered, drank in cups, didn't start trashing the place), everything would be fine.

Well, they were wrong.

Almost immediately, we were joined by a smiling police officer, who proceeded to engage us in an uncomfortable conversation. The birthday boy and one other brave responsibility-taking soul ended up getting fined $25 each. Relatively painless, but you might say the mood was adversely affected. And this also compelled us to change venues.

No big deal! We relocated to the patio outside the apartment building of the birthday boy. This was pretty convenient, since he lived right beside the lake and our encounter with the friendly officers. No problem. In some ways it was a better location, with chairs and lots of tables. So we started unpacking the food, opening some of the packages, laying it all out. Still trying to get the BBQ started--by now it was 7:20-ish.

This was when the birthday boy found out that the building rules forbade any gathering at that location past 7:30.

Great. OK. Pack the food up, carry it off, rerelocate. The party lives on!

The third venue was the backyard of an apartment building shared by some other partygoers. This place was a bit further away, and walking with all the food and the BBQ wasn't really feasible. So, the stuff got loaded into cars, some people drove, others walked, off we went.

As we gathered at the new new locale, and started to file into the yard, the landlord popped his head out the window and started to have a chat with those of us who lived there. They explained that we were just going to have a BBQ. The reply? Don't make any noise, don't play any music; cook your food, then get inside; other than that, have fun.

What I'm trying to say here is, no party has ever gone off more seamlessly than this one.

Actually, it all turned out OK in the end. After some time shushing each other for amusement, we stopped caring about keeping quiet, and (just to be extra rebellious) engaged in some guitar-playing and sing-alonging, which was pretty awesome. In connection to concerns about our noisiness, I was informed (and I will cherish this forever) that my voice sometimes gets so loud as to cause a sensation in listeners that "borders on physical pain". Good times.

New Place

Just signed the lease on a place on the hill. :D Should be really convenient for school and work, since I'll have at least one job up there. And quieter than res too. That's about all my news.

An evening with Rusesabagina

Paul Rusesabagina, the inspiration for the movie Hotel Rwanda, has just published his autobiography, An Ordinary Man. U of C turned out to be one of his first stops in promoting it. It was a full house--about 500 people--which is pretty remarkable given that I only saw flyers for the event starting last week.

I'm still thinking about his speech, and the question period that followed, and so on. Some links and occurrent thoughts:

1. An NPR story on Rusesabagina and his book: Paul Rusesabagina, No 'Ordinary Man'.

2. From that link, a link to an NPR interview with Lt-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, commander of the failed UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, and a familiar figure to my fellow Canucks (I hope!). I think that NPR interview might be the most recently recorded one I've ever heard. It's very brief and very good, but be warned that parts of the interview involve very graphic description of the events Dallaire witnessed, and he tells it completely straight, pulls no punches.

3. There is a distinct difference in tone between Rusesabagina and Dallaire. On the one hand, Rusesabagina's narrative is strongly centered around himself--his book is, after all, an autobiography. Still, I found it a little off-putting. Dallaire, in comparison, probably isn't too fond of remembering that he was there himself, so the way he recounts events doesn't do much to remind anyone else of that fact either. On the other hand, Rusesabagina is able to pour a level of emotional investment into his words that Dallaire (understandably) can't seem to muster.

Like the book says, Rusesabagina started out as an ordinary man--a mere hotel manager who saves over a thousand lives cannot help but be a hero. Dallaire, on the other hand, started out as the man charged (in his own eyes, if not those of the UN) with preventing the genocide from happening. There is no hint of heroism or success in his self-image. "I failed, yes. The mission failed. They died by the thousands, hundreds of thousands." So maybe the difference in tone is to be expected.

4. In the question period, Rusesabagina backed up Dallaire's claim (which he made to the UN at the time) that merely 2,500 more peacekeepers (about 5,000 total) would have sufficed to prevent the genocide. (As I recall, Dallaire's proposal was also backed up by a UN report made long after the fact.) 2,500! According to Dallaire, there were African states willing to send troops to Rwanda, they just needed someone to donate transportation and equipment. Nobody stepped up.

5. Rusesabagina talks about killings between neighbours, within families, within churches. Dallaire describes the militia leaders as possessed of an unintelligible, inhuman evil. If, as Dallaire says, the people he faced were devils, then that would make the events in Rwanda somehow easier to deal with. But I don't think it's that easy. The evil in Rwanda was a thoroughly human evil. To call it inhuman is in a way to excuse humanity.

6. Rusesabagina also brought up Sudan. As did a student who spoke during the introductory remarks. There is a student movement for divestment from Sudan, probably targeting U of C first, given this story: Bucking trend, U of C will not divest from Sudan. On the way out, I saw a signup sheet for the email list for the group. I almost signed up, but I didn't. I have certain wishy-washy philosophical concerns about consumers or investors engaging in activism qua consumers and investors. And the practical value of divestment is unclear, at least according to studies like this. On the other hand, this group may well have done their economic homework. Or at least I could have asked. I should have signed up.

7. During the Q&A session, someone remarked that, in another ten years, someone will probably make a movie about Darfur, and it will be critically aclaimed, and make people sad, and that will be the end of that. I sort of felt that this guy was coming from a position of formulaic cynicism--but he's probably right.

The solution to Canmore's rabbit problems?

The Eagleman

That is one magnificent raptor.

Some of you may know that I'm not the world's biggest fan of hunting, or animals, or the great outdoors, or, well, nature in general. But falconry is something I could get into in some possible world, apart from the fact that it appears to take a lot of effort.

(Maybe this is related to the first character of my name in kanji: '鳶', which is the name of the black kite. Badass name. Thanks, mom. Not that I resemble my namesake much. My eyesight is barely serviceable, and I can state from personal experience that my nails just aren't sharp enough to skewer the necks of small mammals. Also, when I was in Japan I saw on the news that the government had decided to allow a new set of kanji to be used in given names, and one of them was '鳶'. This implies that, at the time of my birth, my name was technically illegal.)

The state of Canuckistan

1. Bunny glut poses puzzle in Alberta town: Municipal and provincial governments haggle over jurisdiction while citizens languish under oppressive lagocracy.

Alberta is like the nonwimpiest part of Canada, and you know that Canmore must be pretty hardcore because it's the home of Mike (from Canmore). And yet it has fallen to these tiny yet ruthless bunny overlords.

In the absence of any government action, some Canmore residents have begun to trap the rabbits and release them out of town.

Trap and release? In Canmore? What, Canucks can drive picks through the skulls of adorable harp seals, but we can't shoot up some rabbits? Come on, people, break out the shotguns and make yourselves some stew.

2. My dad called my attention to this CBC story about our Foreign Affairs Minister cozying up to Condi Rice:

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay was so appreciative after his first visit Thursday with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he nearly ran out of superlatives.

"Like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm finally meeting you, I'm like your number one fan, will you autograph my butt?"

OK, I made up that second sentence, but the first one is pure CBC.

I'm curious how this story played out back home (or if it was much noticed at all). I'm hoping that Canucks generally still find the Bush Admin distasteful, but I suppose Rice's image is less polluted than the rest of the gang.

Leaving that aside, one wonders how Rice reacted to this outpouring of fanboyishness. The answer is subtly suggested by the story's choice of adverbs:

"We're very grateful and I personally extend my thanks to you for your generous and very kind invitation to be with you," he said as Rice smiled politely.

Ooh, "politely"? Couldn't have at least gone for, say, "warmly" instead? Just a hint of snarkiness there. Snark away, CBC News, snark away. You so snarky.

One last thing:

"Without sounding partisan, the previous government, perhaps, could have done more to engage at an earlier stage."

Simply declaring that you're not sounding partisan does nothing to stop you from sounding partisan. One would rather assume that you're declaring that you're not sounding partisan only because you clearly are sounding partisan. Similarly for "I'm not racist, but...", and so on. Why do people ever utter such disclaimers? Is anyone ever convinced by them?

Richard Rorty missed

Richard Rorty gave a talk here, and nobody bloody well told me. When I find out who is responsible for this oversight, there will be roundhouse kicks to the face, mark my words.

More details, philosophical musings, and bitter tears, here.

A Word of Warning

Not that anyone I know would see it, but don't go see "Friends with Money". It's terrible. We would have walked out of the theatre if we hadn't been there with friends who picked it. :( 85 minutes gone from my life...85 minutes that seemed longer than any LOTR movie...:(

Curse you, waterworks

Yesterday I uttered a joke about the quality of the tap water in Chicago. And lo (as if the city of Chicago wished to say "now who's laughing") when I turned on the tap today, brown liquid came out, roughly similar in appearance to old urine. My water filter managed to pull through OK, but I fear it may have been permanently traumatized.

I'm debating whether or not to take a shower. On the one hand, I don't want to smell like BO. On the other hand, I don't want to bathe in filth.

Maybe if I run it long enough, it'll clear up.

Laughthink

The remainder of the Wright jokes.

My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I lost a button hole today.

I bought some powdered water, but I don't know what to add to it.

The relation of such jokes to Wittgenstein's view of philosophy is stated by the man himself:

I could ask: why do I sense a grammatical joke as being in a certain sense deep? (And that of course is what the depth of philosophy is.)

Thus following Wittgenstein philosophy transcends thought and humour and enters into the activity of laughthinking.

I have no idea what I just said.

I think I might know what Wittgenstein is getting at. But I can't be sure because the prof hasn't handed out the decoder rings yet.

Huh

1. On the newest product from Adidas:

The offending footwear includes a yellow picture of an Asian youth with bowl-cut hair, pig nose and buck teeth.

Bwuh?

An Adidas spokeswoman told the San Jose Mercury News that the company "appreciates all self-expression" and "had no intention of offending any individual or group".

Um, yeah. The artist who created the image, at least, purports to have his non-racist cred in order. But if the people responsible for marketing this are saying they had "no intention" of causing offense they're either differently abled in the head (golly gee, you mean people might be offended by this in some way?), or just plain lying. I'm leaning toward the latter, and thinking this is a publicity stunt.

2. Have you ever heard of Padua Academy?

It's a "Catholic high school for young women from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. It is a community rooted in the Gospel and modeled on the values of St. Francis de Sales and St. Francis of Assisi."

And these young women are passionately opposed to women's suffrage.

(I'm not entirely sure what the thesis of that video was, but I was amused in any case.)

Random things said by other people

1. I turned to the local PBS station, and landed in the middle of a British sitcom, just in time to hear some guy proclaim:

I am grappling with the most ancient dilemma of man: she likes me, but which end?

I watched the rest of it. One of the sits that got commed involves a woman getting a hot guy to ask her out on a date, which turns out to be a Christian discussion group. She proceeds to be incredulous that they actually believe in God, suggests that there are a whole bunch of regional gods (like MPs) who all report to Thor, and ends by promoting the value of premarital sex. The dialogue here was a little weak as far as British comedy goes, but then I wondered whether this sort of scene would make it on to a network sitcom in the US nowadays (back in the day Seinfeld came close), and for some reason that made it a little more enjoyable.

2. The other day, on the same station, they were broadcasting a sermon by some dude preaching social justice and working with / helping other countries instead of blowing them up. You know, good stuff. Then:

Amongst the people of the world, there are good people everywhere. There are people of faith everywhere.

Everything was fine until that last sentence. What's that last sentence doing there? The sermon was giving me a bit of a humanitarian-geek buzz, but that totally killed it.

It reminded me a little of Dogma, a movie which I kinda hated. It was meant to be impressive because it was all edgy and criticizing organized religion, but the take-home message was not the least bit edgy, and is pretty much utterly mainstream:

...it doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith.

And what if you don't have faith at all?

"Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in 'sharing their vision of American society.' Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry."

3. Random comment heard entirely out of context while exiting a cafeteria:

OK, OK. Look: Imagine you you thought Hamlet was a fantastic poem but a terrible play.

OK, I'm imagining, I'm imagining.

4. Quip from the prof of the Hegel course:

You should find this material pretty much incomprehensible.

Oh, good.

5. The Wittgenstein seminar involves a lot of jokes.

The sign in the window said breakfast served anytime. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

I got food poisoning today. I don't know when I'll use it.

I went to a general store. They wouldn't let me buy anything specifically.

Guess the comedian. (It's not Wittgenstein.)

6. Everyone here loves Chuck Norris Facts. You might, too.

There is no chin under Chuck Norris' Beard. There is only another fist.

One of many.

Choose your words carefully

Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary for the UK, is absolutely, positively, clearly and distinctly certain that Iraq is not in a civil war.

Not in the least! Rather, the situation there is merely a high level of slaughter.

Now, I'm sure this is a technical term in the world of foreign affairs, but its precise sense escapes me at the moment, and, to my untutored ears, it's hard to hear much of a practical difference between civil war and high level of slaughter.

I guess what I'm asking is: How are these terms calibrated?

Presumably, high level of slaughter stands on the conflict-o-meter at a somewhat higher level than happiness and fuzzy bunnies, or pillow fight, or even raucous BDSM party.

But how does it compare to sectarian strife? daily massacre? blood-dimmed tide?

See, in Canada we measure these things in metric, but I guess the UK still uses old Imperial units for this sort of stuff, and I just don't get it. This scale makes even less sense to me than degrees Fahrenheit, which is already pretty absurd.

Prospective week ends

The prospective student staying with me ended up being around for only a couple of days. It turns out that he'd visited Harvard the previous week, and was off to Princeton right after he was done here, and it occurred to me that I have ex-classmates doing PhDs in philosophy at both of those places. I asked my guest if he'd met/heard of either of them, and apparently he was (probably) going to stay with the one at Princeton while visiting there. Small world.

This also brings an element of personal competition into the picture. Which university will be selected? Which of us was the better host? (If apartment tidiness is a factor, I've definitely lost that one.)

Prospective-student-campus-visit-week came to a magically delicious end last night with a hastily planned outing to the Pontiac, which is where I first discovered Live Band Karaoke last year. Was Live Band Karaoke on last night? Oh, it was on, though only two of us actually sang. Nate sang an amazing rendition of Snow's "Informer" to the tune of Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion". I took a shot at Blur's "Song 2" (the "woo hoo" song). It was pretty awesome until this 30-something guy who was probably way too lonely for his own good decided to make friends with us (where "us" does not include any of the guys).

After that we went to a hip hop club, and people spilled beer on us. That was also not so fun.

Overall, though, great fun. And it was all free, paid for by the Philosophy Department as part of the budget set aside for entertaining the prospectives. They should visit more often.

Update

After some moments of confusion I've got my schedule sorted out (sort of) for summer, I've got three courses going but I'll get Thursdays off (yay!). It looks like I'll be TAing, but I've applied for a few other part-time jobs as well...

Don't have a place yet, but I'm working on it.

In other news, one of my photos won 3rd prize in a contest! (There it is on the left)

I got a six month subscription to DeviantArt. :D

Oh, and I found this magazine, it's pretty interesting. It's called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. My mom got it for me at the library. It was founded by the scientists of the Manhatten Project, it's supposed to serve as the consience of the scientific and security communities. Anyway, it's got some interesting stuff.

Mmm, new blood

A crop of prospective grad students is currently going through the same process I went through about a year ago: the campus visit.

I volunteered to host one of the prospectives at my hovel during his stay. He was supposed to come in yesterday from Toronto, but his flight got cancelled twice due to severe weather conditions. And they were indeed severe. I rode shotgun to O'Hare to try and meet up with the second (attempted) flight, and on the way we drove through the storm. At that point in time, the road disappeared. By which I mean, we could make out the taillights of the cars immedaitely ahead of us, but where the lines might be, where the side of the road and concrete pillars and whatnot might be--we could only guess at such details. It was mildly terrifying. I think we might have shouted out a few curses, but it was hard to tell due to the deafening din of the car being pelted with hail at machine-gun speed.

So, it was a wasted trip, which was inconvenient, but I can sorta understand why they turned the flight back.

The rest of the prospectives made it through, though, and I had lunch with some of them today. This class is shaping up to be really international, with the prospective students hailing from a variety of countries, and having lived in a different variety of countries. Apparently only one out of the whole bunch is currently living in the States.

It sounds like mostly they got accepted to way more universities than I did, which makes me wonder if they might be smarter than me. So I guess I might have to end up sabotaging their studies in order to protect my own tenuous position--I hear that's how things are meant to work in the cut-throat world of academia, and it's about time I got used to it!

Then again, one of the prospectives got on my good side right away by saying that we're way cooler than our counterparts at Columbia (screw them anyways!). So maybe I'll play nice instead.