The Embassy of Canuckistan

All good things...

2006-06-03T00:16:00.000-05:00

This blog is shutting down. (If you're not sure why this is, consult the nearest node of the grapevine.)

I started up another one here. (At the moment it's just quotage from Wittgenstein, but future posts should have non-philosophical content, assuming future posts come into existence at all.)

Japanese lab creates 'Da Vinci' voices

2006-05-19T12:01:00.000-05:00

Now you can listen to Da Vinci too...

The mind boggles

2006-05-16T07:24:00.000-05:00

For some incomprehensible reason, I'm up in the morning, watching (I think) Good Morning America. I kinda feel that watching this show is making my IQ drop--as if waking up before 11am isn't bad enough. What's worse, they did a fairly lengthy segment about the Da Vinci Code controversy, and I think the very existence of this controversy (controversy!) is making everyone on the entire planet stupider.

The Da Vinci Code is a novel. Fiction. Bad fiction.

For example, opening the book at random, here's how chapter 20 starts (the emphasis in the quote is mine):

Emerging from the shadows, Langdon and Sophie moved stealthily up the deserted Grand Gallery corridor toward the emergency exit stairwell.

As he moved, Langdon felt like he was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.

I swear, that's exactly what's written. Not only does Dan Brown start the chapter by repeating the same verb in immediately adjacent sentences, that verb is the vaguest, dullest verb available in the English language. A writer of D&D novels or Harlequins would probably have to expend effort to produce prose that leaden.

Anyway, Good Morning America informs me that Catholics in India (supported by Muslims--yay interfaith cooperation!) are threatening a hunger strike in response to the movie release.

Also, some pastor has called the Da Vinci Code movie the greatest threat to Christianity ever. Ever! Way worse than being fed to Roman lions.

(And according to Jack Van Impe, whose broadcasts I've been following with great interest, the Da Vinci Code is also a sign of the End Times. So, OK, it's a really terrible book, but I don't think the ugliness of the writing is quite that momentous.)

Next they did a story on the "Christian Deliverance" movement, which, as best as I can tell, consists of Protestants who go around conducting exorcisms despite never having been to seminary or studied theology.

Honestly, getting exorcised looks like fun. You thrash around, spit, talk in a scary voice... I think I would be a great exorcee if I ever got the chance. I could insult the exorcist and his ridiculous moustache to my heart's content, and blame it on the demon afterwards.

Then again, the "recommended donation" is apparently $120. So maybe I'll give it a pass.

Mom's Day

2006-05-15T00:10:00.000-05:00

I don't usually go in for holidays perpetuated mainly by Hallmark. But every rule has an exception. So, here goes:

My Mom

My mom is a pretty good mom. Actually, really, she's a supermom. She's fed me a lot of really good food over the years. All kinds of food. Most of it was made from scratch. When I was in elementary school and junior high, she made me lunch boxes containing culinary delights that made the other kids gawk in open-mouthed wonder. And then I'd tell them: "It's too bad your mom isn't as good as my mom!"

Just kidding.

Anyway, given how much I love food (and how much I eat) I could stop right here--but I won't.

Here's another way my mom is a supermom: For the past few years, mom has been driving my sisters to and from school--the school being an hour away--each way. Just so they can go to a better school than exists in our little wee prairie town. She does this every day. It's pretty amazing. (Of course, she never did anything like that for me. But I'm sure that she would have been up for it if the occasion had arisen. Or so I like to think.)

When I was a kid, she used to scold me for getting 19/20 on a test. "If you can get 19 right, why can't you get just one more right?" she would say. She had a point. Anyway, I'm in grad school now, so I guess I must have ended up with a pretty good attitude towards academics.

And she's good about nagging. I mean, she still nags, of course, but she always prefaces her nagging with a warning that she's about to nag me. So, it's like I'm being nagged, but I still sort of count as an adult.

Anyway: To my mom: happy mother's day.

Missive missed

2006-05-14T01:47:00.000-05:00

How rude! Ahmadinejad wrote Bush a letter, but the man himself probably never even read it. From the BBC:

Mr McClellan would also not confirm whether Mr Bush had personally read the letter, saying only: "I would just leave it at what I said: We've received it."

But of course Bush didn't read it. After all:

...it was said to run to 17 or 18 pages of history, philosophy and religion.

So there are at least four reasons why Bush couldn't possibly be expected to get through the thing.

As far as I can tell, the major American news media aren't providing the text of the letter. We have to turn to the French for that. (In this single-spaced format, it only runs for 8 pages.) I'm not sure why the full contents of the letter aren't being made available here.

Walmart Moves to Trademark the Smiley Face

2006-05-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

You have got to be kidding me.

And so it begins

2006-05-08T19:36:00.000-05:00

I just got back from a short walk to and from campus and the grocery store. Along the way I sneezed my first few pollen-driven sneezes of the year.

I've got antihistamines, but I may have to purchase kleenex for the first time since coming to this fine city. (So far I've been making do with pq.)

The many uses of PQ

2006-05-07T18:07:00.000-05:00

In Canuckistan, the acronym "PQ" stands for le Parti Québécois, a separatist party advocating national sovereignty for Quebec.

Back in France, on the other hand:

..."pq" means lavatory paper - "p" for papier and "q" because it sounds like the French word for your rear-end.

As a properly anglo+francophone Canuckistani friend of mine remarked, the two meanings are really remarkably similar.

Some inspiration for the defenders of America's borders

2006-05-04T02:22:00.000-05:00

Malaysia, much like the USA, has historically suffered from the terrible disease of illegal immigration. Unlike the Americans, though, the Malaysians actually had the resolve to do something about it. They decided to act just last year. Let's review how that went.

March 1, 2005:

Malaysia begins migrant round-up

Malaysia has begun rounding up and arresting illegal migrants following the end of a four-month amnesty. Those arrested could face heavy fines, jail sentences and whipping.

That's showing those migrants! Of course, a bold move like this was bound to be resisted at first.

March 2, 2005:

Illegal workers hide in Malaysia

Thousands of foreign workers may have gone into hiding in Malaysia to avoid a crackdown on illegal migrants, immigration officials have said.

Oh, sure, some tried to hide. For all the good that did them.

International media coverage of the cleansing of Malaysia died down for a while after this, so one can only assume that the location and expulsion of illegal immigrants proceeded apace.

Another difficulty or two did crop up, however.

March 24, 2005:

Malaysia reviews labour shortage

Senior Malaysian politicians are due to meet on Thursday to discuss a labour shortage brought about by recent moves to expel illegal foreign workers.

A panel is expected to discuss how to replace an estimated 500,000 migrants who left under an amnesty that allowed them to avoid various punishments.

Malaysians have been told to take the jobs themselves.

But unemployment is low except among graduates, who have shown no interest in the dirty low-paid jobs on offer.

Nothing but a hiccup, though! The plan was basically sound, and just needed a bit of an adjustment. Thus, less than three months after the fines, imprisonment, and whipping began:

May 26, 2005:

Malaysia U-turn on immigrants ban

Malaysia is to relax immigration rules to allow former illegal migrant workers to visit the country to seek work.

Having persuaded illegal migrants to leave with a threat of fines, jail and whipping, the government now desperately wants them back.

It has even set up centres in Indonesia, where most of the workers came from, to speed their return as legal employees.

...Malaysia will now allow the Indonesians to enter the country on tourist visas, without the promise of employment, to seek work once they arrive.

It is an embarrassing U-turn from a government that wanted to make political capital from its tough stance on illegal immigration - and a sign of just how badly Malaysia's labour shortage is biting.

OK, so the hardline stance didn't work perfectly in Malaysia. But Malaysia's situation is completely different from America's. And, in any case, any anti-illegal-immigrant legislation in the USA would benefit from superior planning, as well as lessons learned from the blindspots in the Malaysian strategy (careful planning and learning from the past being strong points of contemporary American policy). Obviously America would come up with some way to accommodate the economic damage that would inevitably result from imprisoning and deporting its illegal immigrants--by, say, NOT DOING THAT.

The world is a sad, sad place

2006-04-30T22:44:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-30T02:02:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-27T23:12:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-27T21:55:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-23T20:47:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-22T13:43:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-18T00:29:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-04-17T16:59:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-17T16:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-15T23:41:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-14T23:25:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-12T12:16:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-11T17:46:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-10T19:55:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-09T23:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-09T12:18:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-05T20:54:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-03T14:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Pandora discovery!

2006-03-31T23:56:00.000-06:00

The following song, by Greg Brown, is best understood in its historical context, that being 2003.

Homeland (I Want My Country Back)

I want my country back
and a good dream to stand up for.
Got my hand over my heart,
but I don't feel at home here anymore

Big, big flag above the big, big mall,
and the shake rattle and roll to the core.
Things sprawl after they fall,
and I don't feel at home here anymore

Homeland of Sojourner Truth
and Chief Joseph before,
Many quiet words of wisdom drowned out by TV
and I don't feel at home here anymore.

Blind engineer, war train on the track,
many many a heart is sore.
We want our country back;
we want to feel at home here once more.

I want my country back.

Beautiful. Perfect tone for delivering its message. Singing voice reminiscent of the last, oldest, tiredest version of Johnny Cash.

First time I heard that song, I had no idea who Sojourner Truth or Chief Joseph were. I don't know if that makes me an ignorant freak or not, but I've looked them up now. Interesting choice of figures to represent his version of America-Ideal.

Interesting trivia: both of them tried to escape to Canada. Truth made it, Chief Joseph came excruciatingly close. Perhaps their stories could also serve to structure a version of Canada-Ideal.

He chose poorly

2006-03-30T23:17:00.000-06:00

I knew I should've held out for UT Austin.... Look at what I'm missing!

(With photographic evidence.)

(Link via Dadahead, who also provides a link to a different article that you just might not want to read.)

Kierkegaard

2006-03-30T21:09:00.000-06:00

I received an email from Amazon. The subject line was:

Save up to 58% on Christian Magazines!

I had to know how I in particular was targeted by this targeted marketing. So I read on:

As someone who's recently purchased Christian books at Amazon.com, you might like to know that we offer a large selection of Christian magazines as well. Subscribe now and save up to 58% on the cover price.

It took me a while, but eventually I recalled that (way back in November) I'd ordered Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript off of Amazon. And, as Amazon is well aware, there is no way I could possibly be interested in the works of Kierkegaard unless I were Christian. Even so, I find myself ill-inclined to accept Amazon's offer for cut-rate subscriptions to such periodicals as New Man Magazine.

Before I make a final decision on the matter, though, I should probably take a look at what I would be missing.

Healing 'Father Wounds'

The muscular young man poured out his soul to me as I sat listening intently. The frustrations and hurts cascaded out of his heart as tears streamed down his face.

And now I know. If I ever feel the need to learn about young men and their tears, feelings, and muscles, I know where to go. Until then, moving on....

(Actually, I did read on, and at least part of the article seems to be about how a man's relationship with God can fulfill emotional needs that are left unsatisfied by his imperfect relationship with his father. Coincidentally enough, I recently reacquainted myself with Freud's claim that religion is an illusion maintained by the transference of infantile insecurities onto a posited replacement father-figure. Illusions, for Freud, were not necessarily false, but, still, this is generally considered an unflattering portrayal of religious motivation. There are good reasons, including ones internal to psychoanalytic theory, to doubt that Freud's account can be applied as a general critique, but sometimes people make things far too easy for old Sigmund.)

In other Kierkegaard news, the old boy just got made fun of on the Daily Show. Stephen Colbert laying the smackdown:

Way to sock it to Denmark, Jon. It's the cesspool of Scandanavia. Hey, did you know that Kierkegaard was Danish? Yeah, listen to this: "faith is a matter of the individual repeatedly renewing his passionate subjective relationship to an object which can never be known." Whatever, bitch.

Precursor to Nietzsche my ass, Søren!

Ooh, nasty.

Actually, I looked up that quote, and I don't think it actually came from the pen of Kierkegaard. It would appear that it was lifted directly off of the Kierkegaard entry of the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For shame!

And for more on the connection between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, see here.

Battlestar Galactica Updates

2006-03-29T17:33:00.000-06:00

New Ron Moore podcasts 'enhanced' - and new blog posts to boot. :D Gonna need it to tide us over to October! Season 2 dvd's are apparently to be released in September some time. What luck!

The internet is hereby legitimated

2006-03-29T02:04:00.000-06:00

Pandora may well be the single coolest site on the entire web. Here's what you do: you enter the name of a musical artist or a song. The site calls up a song by that artist, or a song similar to the one named (not the one named, due to licensing restrictions). You listen, and, if you like, give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The next song comes up, and, again, you can give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The program tries to pick out musical features you seem to like, and chooses subsequent songs based on that.

The program has done an amazing job of zoning in on at least two strains of my musical taste. I seeded once with Smashing Pumpkins, and then with Bob Dylan, and it introduced me to a few artists and songs I'm going to have to acquire on my own. For example, a German band called Eisbrecher (not only do I like the style, but I'm a sucker for German lyrics). Or a live cover of Masters of War by Pearl Jam (OMGOMGOMGZZZ!!!!). Or this song that's probably fairly obscure, given that I could barely find the lyrics on the web:

Rod MacDonald: Who Built The Bomb? (That Blew Oklahoma City Down)

So who denied the bomb that blew Oklahoma City down?
"Not I," said the people, eyes glued to the screen
   as they pulled the bodies out from the scene.
"Those Arabs shouldn't have done what they done;
   what do you mean it was an American?
They should've gone on Oprah for
   'Guys who can't stop making war'
There's nothing I hate more than violence;
   if you ask me it would've made more sense
to let our boys win in Vietnam
   or drop the big one on Iran;
but killin' Americans, it ain't the same.
   No, you can't say we're to blame."

So who built the bomb that blew Oklahoma City down?

You can also arbitrarily specify new music to add to a developing playlist. I'm going to throw something purposefully cross-genre at it (Temptations and Nine Inch Nails?) to see if it can make anything out of that. (The program tells me that I have a propensity for "minor key tonaliy" and "extensive vamping", whatever that is, in both rock-ish and folk-ish contexts. So maybe it'll be able to figure something out.)

Schedule paradise

2006-03-29T01:29:00.000-06:00

The earliest any of my courses start this quarter is at 12 noon. I definitely have Wednesdays off, and might have Mondays off, too.

Courses I'm shopping (the list will be cut):

Analytic Philosophy
Hegel's Phenomenology
Philosophy of Language Seminar
Wittgenstein Seminar
Psychoanalysis and Political Authority

Some trivia.

1. The prof for the Analytic Philosophy course is going to take attendance, and factor it into the calculation of final grades. Wow.

2. Hegel courses are like rock stars at this university or something. For the first meeting, in a lecture theatre with a 60-student capacity, there were so many students packed into the room that they were sitting up and down the aisles and nearly spilling out the doors. A similar phenomenon was witnessed for the first few meetings of a seminar on Hegel last quarter (I had to sit on the floor, which made my bum hurt). How can so many people be so keen on studying a guy who's so impossible to read?

3. I think maybe half a dozen profs at this university do work with Wittgenstein in some form or another. It's kind of A Thing here. But this seminar appears to be the first course dealing exclusively with Wittgenstein since at least 2002. (Though he does pop up frequently in courses, and there have been reading groups and whatnot.)

4. The Psychoanalysis and Political Authority course is not actually in philosophy, and, at the moment, looks to be the one I'm most likely to drop. (If nothing else, it would free up my Mondays.) But the idea of the course is fascinating: to explore whether psychoanalytic ideas of transference can apply in the political sphere. For example, do people relate to their political leaders in ways which are systematically deformed by the unconscious persistence of infantile attitudes to authority? Upon first entertaining that question, I meditated briefly on the quality of political debate and reflection, and found the tempting answer to be: "Duh".

Sectarian splits: made or found?

2006-03-27T22:33:00.000-06:00

On the left and on the right, people are talking about the deep sectarian splits in Iraq. Here are two fairly random examples.

On the left, Prof. Edmundson on Leiter Reports:

But the fractious Iraqis--forming as portmanteau a category as "the Yugoslavians"--won't cooperate in forming a client goverment unless it suits their several, incompatible, bitterly sectarian aims.

That's right: we're talking bitter sectarianism, which is possibly the worst possible flavour of sectarianism.

On the right, someone I've never heard of on WorldNetDaily:

From the get-go, "Iraq" was a Western invention. The further one moves from the thin veneer of secular governance in Baghdad, the weaker becomes the notion of national identity.

The terror and corruption of Saddam's regime was insufficient to produce an "Iraq" from what the British invented.... This is why no central government has been formed in Baghdad.

I get the impression that this idea is more popular on the left than on the right. Still, there seems to be fairly widespread agreement that, once the old regime was toppled, the rise of Sunni/Shia violence was a natural and unavoidable expression of the underlying sectarian nature of the Iraqi populace. Of course, there is a divergence of opinion concerning the conclusions to be drawn about responsibility and blame. The conclusion on the left is that the Bush administration should have recognized this fact, and realized that the plan to reshape Iraq was doomed from the very start. The conclusion on the right is that, given that the invasion was necessary (or, if the reasons for invasions were lacking, we ought to leave that in the past and deal with the present situation), the outbreak of conflict was a natural consequence for which nobody ought to be held responsible.

Now for a dissenting opinion from Riverbend, who actually lives there (and, incidentally, is up for a book award):

I read constantly analyses mostly written by foreigners or Iraqis who’ve been abroad for decades talking about how there was always a divide between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq... but how under a dictator, nobody saw it or nobody wanted to see it. That is simply not true- if there was a divide, it was between the fanatics on both ends. The extreme Shia and extreme Sunnis. Most people simply didn’t go around making friends or socializing with neighbors based on their sect. People didn't care- you could ask that question, but everyone would look at you like you were silly and rude.

If sectarian splits have been there all along, pervading Iraqi society, why did so many Iraqi Shia and Sunnis coexist peacefully for so long? The standard explanation, I suppose, was that the oppressive rule of the Baathist regime kept everybody in line. But if that oppressive force kept them from killing each other, what was it that made them move next door to each other, become friends with each other, intermarry? Raising a family with someone towards whom you harbour deep and long-standing religious animosity is quite the undertaking, and seems a bit supererogatory: perhaps Iraqis were trying to really impress the Baathists by doing the opposite of sectarian trouble-making.

Edmundson compares the Iraqi situation to the breakup of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines following the death of the dictator Tito. The comparison may be apt for reasons other than those that Edmundson has in mind. It's been a while, but I have some vague recollections of reading Michael Ignatieff's Warrior's Honour. As with Iraq, many saw the brutal fighting in the former Yugoslavia as a result of long-standing and deep ethnic hatreds, but (as I recall) Ignatieff disagreed. Those hatreds did not precede the fall of Tito, when a stable social and political order was maintained in Yugoslavia. Rather, when the protection afforded to a populace by a state is taken away, and the spectre of anarchy looms, superficial differences--such as those between ethnic groups, or between religions--cease to be thought of as superficial, and are transformed into sources of deep conflict. (I remember an account of a member of one militia explaining his feelings of hatred towards the people he was trying to kill. He waved a cigarette and declared that, over on that side of town, they smoked an entirely different brand of cigarette.)

And one might think that this is what is happening in Iraq. Not the expression of pre-existing sectarian differences, but the spread and intensification of such differences, ones which previously played a minimal role in the consciousness of the average Iraqi. But then we have to reverse the standard order of explanation which accounts for the failures of government in terms of presupposed sectarian divisions. And we have to come to terms with the idea that, in addition to the concrete loss of livelihood and lives, the war is taking a toll on something else entirely. Riverbend writes, "It’s difficult to define what worries us most now." I think she's talking about the mutilation of the very structure of Iraqi society. It's unclear how that sort of damage could be repaired.

Reason to miss Vancouver #703

2006-03-26T17:47:00.000-06:00

Scott provides pictures and video footage documenting an episode of Vancouver hooliganism.

(sigh)

This is pretty much the best picture ever

2006-03-25T16:50:00.000-06:00

When nations grow up, they grow apart

2006-03-24T07:46:00.000-06:00

You build a nation, hold its hand as it forms a government, blow up its militants... well, a lot of the militants... some of the militants get to run the government or control large swathes of the nation outside of the government's sphere of influence... that sphere being the capital city and also the outskirts of the capital city and, uh... but, look, you blow up a whole bunch of militants for this nation, spend all this time and money and love and blood and sweat and tears on it--and what thanks do you get?

So the nation has growing pains, like it's going to execute someone for converting to Christianity, which doesn't make much sense however you look at it, and you find out, and, of course, you make a call, you ask what the problem is, you try to give advice, but you don't tell it what to do, because that's not your place any more, but you know you were trying to raise a democracy, which is maybe compatible with, say, executing children or black people, sure, but this is really beyond the pale.

So what happens? Does the nation say "Yes, you're right, good advice, thank you so much, I'm so glad I have you to turn to for help with this sort of thing"? No, no, there's humming and hawing and "Look, I'm busy, there are harlots to stone, we'll talk later, K?"

But then, finally, thanks be, there's apparently some sort of a decision, and what does the young nation do? Sure, maybe friends get to hear assurances (for whatever that's worth) that there will be no execution, and nobody would deny that it's great for a new nation to make friends and all, I mean, when you build a nation you want it to get out and about a little, but, really, it pains a nation-builder to hear about stuff like this second-hand.

(Well, maybe the phone call was during Dubya's nap time. Harper could have conference-called it, but, come on, nap time is nap time.)

Triangulation and abortion and the regressive Y chromosome

2006-03-24T01:53:00.000-06:00

A bit of stream of political consciousness.

1. Molly Ivins really doesn't like the Democratic establishment and its strategy of "triangulation". For example:

The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. [And similarly for health care, minimum wage raise, repealing tax cuts, the environment, etc.] That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

And:

I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there.... You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.

2. And the very idea of "triangulating" the "values voters" suffers from a fatal blindspot. In an excellent post, even by his standards, Slacktivist tells us why the "values voters" don't like liberals:

The answer, frankly, is that we're baby killers. ...this is how we are perceived.

Recognizing that means recognizing that lame euphemisms like "values voters" are misleading and confusing. It's not about generic "values," it's not even about religion -- the whole liberals-and-spirituality sideshow is an irrelevant distraction. It's about abortion. Period.

Speaking at religious gatherings, or making a show of religiosity, or some half-assed Saletan-style triangulation to "moderate" (i.e., abandon by degrees) support for abortion rights does little to alter this perception.

He makes this attitude terribly intelligible by comparing it to the attitude that the Good Guys have to pro-torture politicians. Read the post!

3. So we know that "values voters" are passionately opposed to abortion. But it's hard to make sense of that level of passion. Simply saying that they believe that it's murder gives their point of view a label, but I still wonder how you can get so very worked up about a clump of cells (whether they're genetically human or not).

Via Dadahead, here's one possible answer:

Almost none of their [prolife] policies make sense if they really see no difference between the death of a fetus and the death of a four-year-old. However, nearly all their policies make sense if they're seeking to make sure that women who have sex are punished.

And there's a pretty chart to back up that interpretation.

I'd go along with the idea that some (who knows how many) prolifers are straightforward misogynists, but I think it would be a mistake to attribute that motivation to prolifers generally. Then again, that pretty chart does seem to call for some sort of interesting explanation, and at the moment I don't have a compelling alternative.

4. From the same Dadahead post:

Abortion rights seems to be treated as something that women are supposed to worry about; as long as liberal men are on the record as being pro-choice, they feel they've done their part. The only time I ever get questioned about my gender is when I write about abortion; the notion that I could be a woman (I'm not) seems to cross people's minds only when I pay an unusual amount of attention (for a male) to the issue.

Surely not, I thought. But then, in an online discussion, two supposedly liberal men declared that they wished that Roe v Wade would get struck down, on the grounds that it would undercut a significant source of Republican rhetoric and allow the Democrats to focus on other political issues where they can make better progress.

Before I freak out a little, I'd like to note that that obviously wouldn't work. At the moment, the constitutional protection of abortion rights limits the scope within which Democrats and Republicans can fight over abortion. Strike the constitutional protection down, and the political battle over abortion will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

OK, now for a brief freak-out.

W.

T.

FUCK!
Look, I, too, have had occasion to wonder if the abortion issue is really worth it. But I didn't have to spend much time wondering. What's there to wonder about?

These guys agree that a woman has the right to control her own body. They just don't give a damn whether she can actually exercise that right or not--it's just not their concern--they don't have wombs. So, hey, might as well make it a strategic sacrifice in the political game--a pawn, if you will.

These two guys apparently arrived at the same conclusion independently. One can only assume that they are not alone.

5. Did you spot the sci-fi geekery in this post?

Breakin news!

2006-03-22T20:16:00.000-06:00

Chicago is excitement! I feel overburdened by material possessions! Is there no larcenous soul out there willing to help me out?

It turns out: probably!

I just found out that the apartment two doors down was burgled sometime today. It probably happened when I was home, and I very well might have heard suspicious noises if I weren't so sleep deprived and / or idly bouncing off the walls.

By the way, the title of this post is a pun.

Vancouver

2006-03-21T14:15:00.000-06:00

So far the weather has been awesome - all blue skies.

I met with an advisor at SFU and decided on doing the post baccalaureate in computing. I'm gonna start in the summer so the next thing to do is find an apartment and a job. :|

Don't look at me! No, look at me, look at me. Don't look at me!

2006-03-20T20:24:00.000-06:00

Via Jessica Wilson, an article about a study suggesting a link between insecurity displayed in childhood (lack of confidence, whining to nursery school teachers) and political conservatism in adulthood.

[The researcher] reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

I find myself somewhat persuaded, plus or minus a few dozen qualifications. But, be that as it may, I'm not too keen on how Wilson follows this up:

Funny -- just the other day I was musing to Benj that a lot would be explained if grown-up right-wingers turned out to have been those creepy kids shunned in high school by all and sundry. Someday, they fumed in their lonely smelly rooms, I'll take my revenge!

Which she then qualified with the following:

Supposing you were shunned in virtue of having the unfortunate conservatism-correlated personality characteristics cited in the above study (and also this study), then I don't see that in being shunned you were a victim of social abuse (ignoring, of course, whatever factors led to your having these characteristics); otherwise, my remarks aren't intended to apply to you.

OK, time for some armchair social science / psychoanalysis.

Basically, I don't think that there's any positive connection at all between a lack of social status in high school (or any stage of life thereafter) and the sort of insecurity picked out by the study. Insecurity that is evident in the nursery school setting could survive the transition into adulthood as an underlying personality trait, without being expressed in any obvious social dysfunction.

Indeed, it seems to me that, as consciousness of social status develops, a person who is fundamentally insecure is going to be especially focused on gaining and maintaining that sort of status. While a relatively secure person could potentially make do with just a couple of friends, a truly insecure person will never be able to collect enough friends or enough social status; and skill at whining (and the closely connected skill of strategic gossiping) can certainly be an effective means to that end. (See e.g. American Beauty.)

Sure, there are also relatively secure people who are just naturally friendly and outgoing. (I think I've met some, and, oh, how I hate them.) But I wonder just how common they are. (My impression is that the social environments found in high school and the business world tend to promote specifically unhealthy forms of gregariousness. So, at least in those contexts, I'd suspect that popular people tend not to be just naturally friendly and outgoing.)

And, sure, an insecure and whiny person could also be a terribly unskilled whiner--in which case he will indeed be socially shunned.

But the point is: if a high school kid is both insecure and shunned, the shunning is not so much a result of the insecurity as it is a result of a failure to develop certain social skills. In high school (and elsewhere), you generally aren't shunned for harbouring deep feelings of insecurity; rather, you're shunned for failing to conform to social norms at the most superficial level possible.

A new taste sensation

2006-03-19T21:10:00.000-06:00

I just cut myself an orange, but neglected to wash the knife first, which I'd used to prepare my dinner of absurdly garlicky green beans.

The point being, I just ate a garlic-infused orange.

It actually wasn't that bad, but my tongue was terribly, terribly confused by the experience.

On an entirely unrelated note, here are two cute misspellings:

1. "self-deceipt" -- found in my notes from a class on Hegel

2. "mutilingual" -- from a chat with Ben on MSN; I think this would be a decent neologism, which could of course apply to President Bush, but perhaps even better to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who is multilingually mutilingual

Chinese characters are cool!

2006-03-19T04:34:00.000-06:00

Today is the day I discovered Hanzi Smatter: dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture. I am so happy that this blog exists, and so choked that it's been around since 2004 without my knowledge (especially considering that this guy's received a fair bit of media exposure).

From the introductory post:

I have been a fan of the website, Engrish, for years. To my surprise, there is virtually no website existent for pointing out the faults in Westerners’ interest of Eastern culture, especially the usage of Hanzi (汉字), Chinese characters.

As a Chinese-American（美籍华人）, I felt it was my duty and honor to educate the public about the misusage of Chinese characters, Hanzi（汉字）.

Thus begins a merry romp through various bits of kanji/hanzi nonsense, with special attention paid to tattoos proclaiming (for example) "healthy woman roof", "thank you, come again", "upstanding hottie would allow one lucky run-away to make love to my fertile body", and "hand warmer, air conditioner".

After this discovery, I took a look at what else the internets had to offer on this topic, and ran across this article, which also looks at Asian-Americans using such tattoos to express their Asian identity. For example:

Ken Arata, 25, is planning to get his family name tattooed down his spine in kanji to show that his Japanese heritage is the backbone of his existence even though he does not speak the language.

Besides not speaking the language, he apparently doesn't know much about the culture, either. Getting a tattoo is a poor way of expressing your Japanese heritage, unless your family history is one of organized crime.

Bookshelf demographics, in centimeters

2006-03-17T22:22:00.000-06:00

Kant, & commentary: 26.5
Darwin, & commentary: 22
Kierkegaard: 15.5
Pittsburghers: 9
Plato: 9
Rorty: 8
Freud, & Lear on Freud: 6.5
Wittgenstein: 4.5

The large Darwin contingent is a result of a single course I took last quarter, which had a reading list so long as to be ungodly--as is only fitting for an inherently blasphemous area of science. This isn't really one of my interests, but maybe it could turn into an "AOC", as we say in the biz.

Rorty would be better represented, if only I knew where my copy of Rorty And His Critics was. The meagre Wittgenstein showing is probably pretty scandalous at this department. On the plus side, I spotted an old-school copy of Anscombe's Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus in Vancouver. I think it dates back to the 19th century or whenever my dad was in university, so once I claim that it should get me a lot of cred around here. ("Vintage" is still in, isn't it?)

Psychoanalysis is a new interest for me, thanks to Jonathan Lear, the same prof who got me hooked on Kierkegaard last quarter. I picked up two of his books on the topic, and they contain some of the best prose I've ever read in a philosophical context (setting aside Kierkegaard, who operated in a sphere of stylistic existence entirely inaccessible to mere mortal writers).

I'm back...

2006-03-16T15:51:00.000-06:00

So I'm back in Vancouver. We'll see what happens next...:)

Computer games live!

2006-03-15T00:27:00.000-06:00

It's been a long time since I've gotten really hooked on a video/computer game. Katamari Damacy was pretty good, but the variety of gameplay is pretty limited. My interest in games has really dimmed since the good old days when I would stay up for 30+ hours playing Civilization or Master of Orion.

But now Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, has cooked up a new game, Spore, where you start out controlling a single microbe swimming around in maybe a drop of water, get it to eat, reproduce, and evolve. And evolve, and evolve, so that it grows, gets a backbone, musculature, maybe some lungs, feet, claws or tentacles. Its brain grows, too, until the critter manages to form societies, at which point you stop controlling the single critter and start controlling a tribe of critters, and the evolution stops being biological and becomes cultural and technological. The tribe becomes a village, then a city, and so on.

At every stage in the game, you're playing in a world fully populated with other critters (other tribes, other cities), with which you can interact in more or less friendly ways. These Others are drawn directly from the games played by other players: when you create a critter or a city, your creations are uploaded to a server and used to populate the game-worlds of other players.

How far does the game go? Pretty dang far, as seen in this video of Wright going through a demo.

It belongs in a gallery

2006-03-13T22:45:00.000-06:00

From Scott, an exquisite photo-essay (starring the new Buddhist Ken doll).

What does it take to get people worked up around here?

2006-03-09T01:41:00.000-06:00

1. I basically missed International Women's Day. In my defense, there wasn't a whole lot in the way of celebration around here. And, really, what is there to celebrate? Has pay inequality gotten better over the past year? Is South Dakota the wave of the American future? (Of course, women are still around, which I rather appreciate. But I take it that's not the point.)

2. A University of Chicago protest against some Marine recruiters ended in four arrests. I only heard about this just recently. Which is a little odd. Back at SFU, the news of such an occurrence anywhere in the Greater Vancouver area would have been beamed directly into my head mere minutes after the fact.

Physics is Magic

2006-03-09T00:54:00.000-06:00

Via Slashdot, some crazy cool physics news.

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

This is hotter than the interior of our Sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.

They don't know how they did it.

Um. What?

OK. I mean for the overall tone of this post to be positive and full of wonder. But, for the purposes of my own peace of mind, I would like to think that scientists are generally able to control whether or not they produce substances 100-some-odd times hotter than the Sun. Now, I know that there's a wide area, and many shades of gray, between completely random and perfectly predictable, but I strongly feel that physicists ought to do their very best to aim for the latter when it comes to producing the hottest substances in the solar system here on Earth.

Setting that aside:

One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.

Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved...

I hope the article was understating things when it said the scientists were puzzled by this. It seems to me that an investigation into an unknown energy source is something worth investing a little emotional energy into.

"Huh. Well, I'm assuming the fundamental principle of the conservation of energy continued to function during this experiment. I just haven't the darnedest idea how. Well, now, that's mighty puzzling, that is."

I'm assuming the response wasn't much like that.

Randomalia

2006-03-04T23:31:00.000-06:00

1. I spent some time tutoring this Iranian guy in programming back in Vancouver. About twice a month I would head over to his place, we would go over some Pascal code, and every once in a while he would take a break to complain about the Jews. Well, OK, he only mentioned the Jews once, and while I'm pretty sure he wasn't too fond of them as a group, he didn't even say anything about killing them or anything. He spent a fair amount of time telling me about Sufism, and complaining about fundamentalists and how they misinterpret the importance of the veil. And he never failed to serve tea. And so I was introduced to the Iranian way of drinking tea: rather than sweeten it directly, you place a lump of sugar in your mouth and drink the tea through it. Now, my student was a health-conscious fellow, and so he modified this method by replacing the sugar with these yellow raisins. Fabulous. But I have now kicked it up a notch, by replacing the tea with coffee, and the sugar with Hershey's semi-sweet Mini-Kisses (tm). This technique of drinking has thus achieved its apotheosis.

2. What would you expect from the website of a Department of Visual Arts--pretty pictures or Flash or something? (How did I end up at that page? Long, boring story.)

3. The 20th is only a couple of weeks away. That's not a lot of time left for planning, people!

4. I may be a cynical resident of the Ivory Tower, but when I found out one of the peeps back home has a chance at a job in Thailand teaching Burmese activists, I think I drooled a little.

Rice

2006-03-02T13:17:00.000-06:00

Typically when I'm buying rice I look for a bag with Chinese characters on it, or (depending on my mood) maybe "Basmati", or possibly something involving the word "Thai".

A couple of months ago, though, I foolishly bought a 20 lb bag of rice, a bag devoid of any writing or names suggestive of Asia. I guess I was out to save some money, and I did indeed save some money, but the tradeoff was meal after meal chomping on countless vaguely rice-shaped pieces of moist cardboard.

Well, we finally made our way through that tiny piece of hell, and as of yesterday our rice is Japanese. Well, California-grown Japanese-style rice, but whatever. I ate a handful of the first batch, with nothing on it, and almost cried.

The Katrina briefing video

2006-03-01T23:31:00.000-06:00

Link via Leiter Reports.

President George W. Bush, September 1:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

National Hurricane Center representative, with Bush online, August 28:

"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that is obviously a very, very grave concern."

There are a limited number of possible explanations for that pair of quotes. None of them are consistent with the idea that Bush is minimally competent to be the leader of a Boy Scout camping trip, let alone leader of the least of nations, or of America.

Sigh.

Song Tapper, via SFU

2006-03-01T16:02:00.000-06:00

I randomly dropped by the old alma mater's website, and ran across this story:

The simple, rhythmic bopping of a finger has led a trio of SFU computing science students to solve a musical dilemma - how to name that unknown tune.

They've created Song Tapper, which can be found at www.songtapper.com. The website has been designed to enable users to identify songs by tapping the melody on their spacebars. The site has grown from a few hundred songs to well over 11,000 tunes and attracts as many as 10,000 hits a day.

I tried it out successfully on the following songs:

I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night
Instanbul was Constantinople
Yesterday
Billy Jean
Closer
Super Mario theme song
Creep

I tried out some songs that don't seem to be in the database, but the system does pretty well with the ones it knows. Way cool.

Does DHS have an actual job?

2006-02-25T23:05:00.000-06:00

I take it that the job of homeland security officers is meant to have something to do with securing the homeland.

I'm not sure what that has to do with protecting federal property from bumper stickers.

...on February 7, at his day job for a federal natural resource agency, Scarbrough got a call from, of all places, Homeland Security.

An official told him to come out to the parking lot and said he was in violation of the Code of Federal Regulations.

When Scarbrough came out, he found two armed officers of Homeland Security, who told him he was violating the regulation against the posting of signs on federal property.

...the signs were really subversive, like “Honor Vets, Wage Peace,” and “Another Veteran Against War with Iraq.”

Or making sure library patrons aren't looking at porn.

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

An excellent question! Unfortunately, as far as the article goes, it's one that has yet to be answered.

Other questions that don't get answered:

Montgomery County will not specify how many officers are in the department's security division, citing security reasons.

Entirely reasonable. We wouldn't want to jeopardize DHS operations. They're the only thing stopping Bin Laden from gaining access to the computer terminals at Montgomery County libraries, and using them to view one of those clips of Paris Hilton.

I found the conclusion to this story somewhat confusing.

Still, Montgomery plans to train its homeland security officers "so they fully understand library policy and its consistency with residents' First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution," Romer said in his statement.

Because a key component of homeland security is a proper understanding of library policy. It's not a problem if homeland security officers spend their time on the job not doing their jobs--they just need to not-do-their-jobs better.

Unembedded

2006-02-18T11:29:00.000-06:00

Someone on Deviantart posted a link to this - it's a site with independent photojournalists' work in Iraq. I haven't seen work like this appear in the mainstream media, except a few on the BBC (like the ones Toby posted below, a few days back).

link here.

On Canuckistan and combustion

2006-02-18T09:51:00.000-06:00

Peter Tertzakian talking to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show:

Tertzakian: Canada is your largest supplier of oil--or, in the addiction metaphor, your pusher, I guess.

Stewart: Why haven't we invaded them?

Man, you guys have such short memories.

The War Of 1812

In 1812, Madison was mad,
He was the president, you know
Well, he thought he’d tell the British where they ought to go
He thought he’d invade Canada,
He thought that he was tough
Instead we went to Washington....
And burned down all his stuff!

And the White House burned, burned, burned,
And we’re the one’s that did it!
It burned, burned, burned,
While the president ran and cried.
It burned, burned, burned,
And things were very historical.
And the Americans ran and cried like a bunch of little babies
Waa waa waah!
In the War of 1812!

(etc)

Ha ha ha! It's been almost two centuries, and it's still funny.

But not just funny. If not for the bravery of the British and Canadian troops (and the incompetence of the Americans) in that war, Bush would now be our president, too (ohgodohgodohgod).

Some War of 1812 trivia: Jefferson predicted that invading Canada would merely be "a matter of marching"; the Americans thought that, once the British troops were taken care of, the population of Upper Canada would just let the American invaders parade through the streets of York--but instead they met with armed resistance from the Canadian militia. Plus ça change....

Anyway, on the topic of stuff Americans don't know about Canada, we recently treated some of our American friends to some insight as to how Canadians view the way that Americans view Canada. Recall: the Golden Age of Rick Mercer.

St. Valentine's Day

2006-02-15T03:46:00.000-06:00

A seminar got cancelled for some reason or another, so the prof scheduled a make-up session for this Tuesday, 7-10pm. The timing was never mentioned.

Academia rocks!

British troops videoed 'beating Iraqis'

2006-02-15T03:35:00.000-06:00

Story.

Video.

The anticipation voiced by the cameraman ("yer gonna get it") suggests that he expected that beatings would follow (i.e. this is not an isolated incident). It also sounds as if watching these kids getting beaten is arousing him sexually.

Tal Afar shooting

2006-02-15T03:12:00.000-06:00

A couple of posts ago I linked to this picture--old news, over a year ago, but it's such a terrifying shot that I'm a bit peeved that I'd forgotten about it.

I originally saw it on the BBC site, but I also found coverage on Newsweek with different (and uncensored) pictures, plus audio commentary from the photographer, Chris Hondros.

When you talk about war being hell, this is what you mean.

When any country says it's going to go to war, these are the kinds of things that we can expect. Because these are the things that happen in war. And I've seen lots of wars around the world and these happen in all of them. It's just that... Americans involved won't pay attention.

The official response at the time, according to the BBC: 'military officials extended their condolences for this "unfortunate incident" and were investigating.' That was over a year ago, and I can't seem to find any information about how that investigation went.

Our encounter with the authorities, and hers

2006-02-12T03:19:00.000-06:00

Around about 2 AM, someone rang up the apartment over the intercom. They said it was the police, and asked me to buzz them up. I told them I couldn't (that function is disabled in the building, presumably for security reasons), and would come down to let them in instead.

Kate and I wondered what it might be about. We'd had a bunch of people over for dinner and a viewing of Shaolin Vs. Wu Tang (given to me by Dave as a late present for my birthday, because Kate had to go and mention that I had such a thing). It might have been a little noisy, but everyone had left at around midnight, and we'd pretty much stopped making any noise at all by 1. So we were somewhat confused.

So I went down to let them in, and it turned out it didn't have anything to do with us. The cops had been called by someone else on a noise complaint having to do with some other apartment. When the guy who called them told them he couldn't buzz them up, I guess they assumed that that was just a problem with the buzzer for that particular apartment, and called on us thinking that our buzzer might be working.

Luckily my sleeping pattern is what it is, and so this little task was a minimal inconvenience. Still, there are things that I'd rather have done with my time than walking up to four large police officers to ask what they wanted with me. (Yep, that's four police officers on a noise complaint. In addition to the Chicago police, the university employs its own police force with overlapping jurisdiction, making the police presence in this neighbourhood fairly significant.)

Speaking of stressful birthday-related encounters with armed authorities, about an hour after mine, I read about Riverbend's.

Suddenly, two of them were in the living room. We were all sitting on the sofa, near my aunt. My cousin B. was by then awake, eyes wide with fear. They were holding large lights or ‘torches’ and one of them pointed a Klashnikov at us. “Is there anyone here but you and them?” One of them barked at my aunt. “No- it’s only us and my husband outside with you- you can check the house.” T.’s hands went up to block the glaring light of the torch and one of the men yelled at her to put her hands down, they fell limply in her lap. I squinted in the strong light and as my sight adjusted, I noticed they were wearing masks, only their eyes and mouths showing.

OK, so our experiences aren't quite comparable.

World Press Photo awards

2006-02-12T02:35:00.000-06:00

Screw the Olympics. I'm a bigger fan of photojournalism than I am of hockey (or whatever), so I don't think any gold medal would be able to stoke my patriotism more than Canadian Finbarr O'Reilly winning World Press Photo of the Year, with this shot of Mother and child at emergency feeding center, Tahoua, Niger.

The whole Winners Gallery is worth browsing through. Here are some that really need to be seen by everyone (and with all due respect to my fellow Canuck, I feel that some of them might have been worthier of the top prize):

Child labourer in a textile factory, Bangladesh
Indigenous family, Guatemala
Boy helps his father to dress, Sierra Leone
Reburial of Srebrenica massacre victims' bodies, Potocari, Bosnia
Car bomb explosion at Tahrir Square, Baghdad, Iraq

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This one is worth about a million:
Young girl grieves her parents killed by US patrol, Tal Afar, Iraq

(I've actually seen that last one before, with some more context, here.)

Warning: Not Safe For Contentment.

New Blog

2006-02-08T20:55:00.000-06:00

I started a new blog. I'm not 100% sure yet, but I may be leaving Chicago, and I wanted to really try to see it before I left. Seeing as I'll be doing a lot of this sightseeing on my own, I thought I'd keep all that stuff separate. You can see it at this site.

Radical new developments in business

2006-02-07T21:39:00.000-06:00

GM is in trouble. It's been recording billions of dollars of losses, quarter after quarter, with some business pundits perceiving the possibility of Chapter 11 over the horizon.

In response, GM is taking "radical measures": the guys at the top have agreed to make "personal sacrifices". The chief executive is halving his salary (to a mere $1.1 million, I guess), other directors are taking pay cuts, and no executives are getting bonuses for the year during which the losses accumulated.

Question: How is any of this radical?

What the hell is wrong with a business culture wherein it's radical for the remuneration of the guys running a company to be somehow related to the fortunes of the company itself? In what way is it radical to suspend executive bonuses (BONUSES!) while the company is losing billions of dollars?

They loaded the fortunes of GM into big, ugly, gas guzzling (dare I say: socially irresponsible) SUVs, and drove off a cliff. Now they deign to allow themselves to be adversely affected by this tremendous failure--and that is radical, and it's called a sacrifice.

Apart from the sacrifices of the company directors, some employees are losing their jobs entirely. Does firing 30,000 people count as radical, too? Ford announced a comparable round of lay-offs two weeks ago, and for some reason I don't recall it being described in such dramatic terms.

Chicago Cubs : Spring Training : Ticket Information

2006-02-06T23:54:00.000-06:00

Spring Training tickets for the Chicago Cubs vrs. Rangers. I'm hoping to go March 7.

Slashdot | NASA Science Under Attack

2006-02-06T10:24:00.000-06:00

(here's the article from the NY Times.)

Oh man...So now the Bush administration are dictating what scientists must or must not say?

This is from a memo written by George Deutsch (NASA press officer/presidential appointee) - he's the guy who insisted the word "theory" come after every mention of the Big Bang:

"The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator." "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

Miscellaneous Asiatown

2006-02-06T00:22:00.000-06:00

Well, that's kinda what it is, though they call it Chinatown.

A bunch of us went there on Saturday, and we picked a lovely day for it, too--chilly, snowing, windy. Luckily we didn't have to do too much walking, since Chinatown extends over maybe 3 blocks.

We went to a Chinese restaurant. Not like the ones back home. The names for some of the dishes were strangely different, though vaguely recognizable from American TV. They only gave us plates, so Kate and I had to ask for rice bowls, and then when they came they weren't bowls so much as oversized cups. Talk about culture shock.

We also saw a sign advertising some sort of medication with the key ingredient of "Testo-gland". It didn't say what it was for.

Still, we plan to back sometime, for bubble tea if nothing else. (With the uncooperative weather, cold drinks didn't seem appropriate at the time.) It's not terribly far by bus and train.

About the train. Half the train stations seem to lack ceilings. There are heat lamps installed in places, but those areas aren't actually sheltered by, say, walls. I'm sure that makes them very useful on the 3 or 4 nights of the Chicago winter when it isn't windy, but Saturday night was not one of those nights.

Hate of the Union

2006-02-01T21:19:00.000-06:00

So it was a day late, but we decided to have a State of the Union Viewing Party--complete with popcorn! I invited a bunch of people, but I could only get one British guy to come. For some reason none of the Americans I know can stand to sit through a Bush speech (apparently it's worse if he's actually your president).

Some days, it's good to be a citizen of the Commonwealth.

I must admit, we weren't entirely civil while watching the speech; there may have been some heckling. A skeptical outburst or two was heard when Bush started talking about what needs to be done about America's "addiction to oil"; and, whaddya know, the moment the speech finished playing and I went online, I ran across this story (via Dadahead), in which we discover that that bit of the speech wasn't meant to be taken "literally".

From my point of view, the flip-flop seemed to happen instantaneously, but, to be fair, in reality it took a whole day. (A whole 24 hours, though? The timing is somewhat vague.)

I actually kept my cool pretty well through the whole speech, I thought, until the bit near the end where Bush declared, "We've entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite." I sort of lost it at that point.

A Ghost in the Machine

2006-01-31T13:15:00.000-06:00

Actually the touchpad on my laptop is broken. :( This means that periodically, I lose all control, windows start opening, the menu bar moves itself around the screen violently, and the computer is generally unusable. Help! My laptop mouse is still en route from Japan...

I was this close to winning a Benz

2006-01-29T20:43:00.000-06:00

And a shopping spree of some sort.

That's what this guy told me on the phone. All I had to do was call this other guy at this number and collect my prize.

Here's where I was supposed to call.

I'm debating whether I should call or not. But it was a few days ago, so maybe I missed my chance. Sigh. I do so love German cars, not to mention shopping sprees.

Stupid US right-winger also stupid about Canada

2006-01-28T15:48:00.000-06:00

Via this story on CBC, I came across this silly little commentary on the Canadian election by American right-winger, Paul Weyrich.

In which Weyrich characterizes Canada as under the sway of "some premises of Cultural Marxism, which Canadians have espoused, such as same-sex marriage and abortion-on-demand."

Um, "Cultural Marxism"? As the CBC article dryly points out, "He does not say how these things are linked in his mind to Marxism, a doctrine better known for concepts of class warfare." Well, "better known" by some, I suppose. The association of Marxism with gay rights is particularly quirky, given what Marx himself said about gay people.

Furthermore, adds Weyrich, "The people of Canada have become so liberal and hedonistic that the public ethic in the Country immediately could not reversed."

Canada? Hedonistic? I never realized that US right-wingers saw us as such a hip people.

Weyrich worries that "Harper would not propose anti-abortion legislation soon, if at all." You don't say. The pro-life movement hasn't been a serious political force in Canada since the 80s; support for abortion rights continues to grow, and is highest in Quebec (82% in 2002)--which is a part of the country in which Conservatives would probably like to continue to be elected in the future.

Weyrich hits the nail on the head when he ends his article with the declaration: "But it is clear that Canada wanted change and enough Canadian voters felt that the Conservative Party was the instrument to realize that change." Indeed, the Conservatives were an instrument, a tool, you might say, with which to punish the Liberals for their corruption and arrogance.

There's also an interesting discussion of the struggle to keep the Conservative campaign from being associated with the American right-wing, which scares the bejesus out of most Canadians--an aspect of the election campaign missing from pretty much all of the American coverage.

Happy Battlestar Galactica Bunny

2006-01-26T15:47:00.000-06:00

More Firefly?

2006-01-26T08:04:00.000-06:00

Via Slashdot comes news of a proposal for a second season of Firefly.

World pretends it's been paying attention to Canada

2006-01-25T01:09:00.000-06:00

Canada is a quiet country. We like to keep a low profile. If nothing else, it makes it less likely that someone else will try to blow up a part of the place.

This makes the federal election problematic for the world media. They want to cover it at least a little, but in order to cover it they have to act like they understand it, and you can only understand the election if you've been paying attention to Canada, which is something that nobody has any reason to do.

Some case studies:

America

CNN and FOX"News" ran practically the same AP story on the election, declaring (respectively) "Harper's beliefs run in step with Bush, GOP" and "Relations with the Bush administration will likely improve under Harper as his ideology runs along the same lines of many U.S. Republicans." Are these networks on the payroll of the Liberal Party? Because Martin would have loved for Canadians to lump Harper together with Bush and the Repbulicans. Harper, of course, knows that the viability of his party depends on ensuring Canadians that he is nothing like Bush at all. Curiously, I have yet to see anyone in the mainstream American media hit upon this blatantly obvious fact--apparently they are still holding on to the faint hope that they might somewhere discover a significant population of non-Americans who don't hate the American president.

The Conservative victory, it is also claimed, moves Canada "right on socio-economic issues such as health care, taxation, abortion and gay marriage." (FOX version) I suppose that claim makes some sense if all you've done is figure out that the name of the party is "Conservative", but not if you've actually glanced at the party platforms, listened to Harper's statements, and/or considered the breakdown of votes in Parliament. (Well, gay marriage is arguably iffy.)

Britain

One might expect better from the BBC, seeing as how we are still part of the Commonwealth, we share the same head of state, we broadcast low-budget British shows on the CBC, etc. But, no.

"Canada has swung to the right" declared this article, only to be contradicted in this one, which pointed out that "it seems very unlikely that Stephen Harper will be able to effect much change at all."

The latter article also saw fit to recognize the blatantly obvious fact mentioned above: "the Conservative leader is going to have to tread carefully and not appear to be too cosy with George W Bush, a US president disliked by most Canadians." Unfortunately, it also made two clearly false statements about the NDP: first, that it's the "third largest party in Canadian politics" (not by seat count, anyway); second, that it is "unlikely to be in any mood to want to make deals with a Conservative government" (Layton would of course love to make deals with Harper, because that would mean Harper making deals with Layton).

[UPDATE: I dropped the BBC a note, and they deleted the bit that said that NDP was 3rd largest. Not so much as a thank you in return, though. Hmph!]

Australia

I found this article--and, amazingly, it actually manages to avoid being wrong on clear points of fact. It is also so short that the writer didn't bother grouping the sentences into paragraphs.

Temporary chaos

2006-01-24T19:28:00.000-06:00

I'm changing some stuff on the blog, so things might look somewhat unkempt for a while.

Basically I want to make the blog freer, which, as we all know, can be a messy job, and often involves random explosions, needless death, billions of dollars of waste. Really, a little aesthetic awkwardness seems like a mild problem in comparison.

addendum: Switching from Haloscan comments (which expire) to Blogger comments.

Canadian-American political dictionary

2006-01-24T16:29:00.000-06:00

So the motherland has had its elections, with the Conservative Party winning a minority government after approximately 3 generations of rule by the Liberal Party. Here at the Embassy, we recognize that there is ample room for confusion in interpreting these results, due to differences between the Canadian political spectrum and those of other countries.

Like, say, America. Are Dubya's followers smiling? Are their opponents despairing at the spread of right-wing politics beyond America's borders? It is worth keeping in mind that that the Conservatives are still a minority, and that in order to govern they will probably want to forge a coalition, with the New Democratic Party being a likely candidate. Every single Conservative motion in the House of Commons will require the cooperation of over 30 non-Conservative MPs, thereby eliminating the possibility that the more conservative strains of the Conservative Party will ever find political realization.

In addition, here is a useful summary of key terms in Canadian politics, and how they translate into the American political vernacular.

Centre/Centre: A political position characterized by views held by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Liberal Party/Parti libéral: A party characterized by views held by slightly more leftist members of the Democratic Party.

Consertive Party/Parti conservateur: A party characterized by views held by slightly more conservative members of the Democratic Party (there are quite a few more extreme Conservatives, but these are kept gagged and bound in a closet in Stephen Harper's Ottawa office).

Bloc Quebecois/Bloc québécois: A separatist party native to Quebec. Actually, I'm from western Canada, so I know next to nothing about this party, though I know that I don't like it.

New Democratic Party/Nouveau Parti Démocratique: Communists.

Attack ads/publicité négative: Campaign advertisement in which it is suggested that a candidate resembles George W. Bush.

American-style healthcare/système de santé à la mode américaine: A two-tier system in which the public (single-payer) healthcare system is joined by a parallel system of private medicine; a vile curse word with no real equivalent in American English.

The war in Iraq/la guerre en Iraq: An atrocious mess in which, thanks be, we never got involved.

Anti-abortion movement/le mouvement anti-avortement: Political stillbirth.

Cool New Toy

2006-01-23T23:47:00.000-06:00

We got a 'used' wireless router today. Well it was advertised on 'marketplace' - which is a bulletin board for people buying and selling stuff, which is generally used. But when we picked it up, it was still shrink-wrapped and completely untouched. So we got a new router for $30 less than advertised. And, I'm now able to blog from my laptop from anywhere in our apartment, and Toby and I can both use our computers at the same time. Which is cool, cuz we use our computers a lot. :D

An inspiration to us all

2006-01-23T22:43:00.000-06:00

Geniuses are Just Like Us

Richard Feynman, a Nobel prize-winning physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb and figure out the source of the shuttle Challenger explosion, visited strip clubs nearly daily near his home in California. He mainly worked on lectures and equations there.

Well, geniuses are just like us, except really weird.

We are the champions

2006-01-22T04:13:00.000-06:00

Busy day today.

1. I've joined an intramural indoor soccer team, and we've just played our second game. We improved a lot over our first effort, losing 0-7 rather than 1-13. I turned my left ankle rather painfully, and skinned my right knee; I also took a hard fall on my left butt cheek, but that didn't seem to do much damage. I mostly play defense, same as I did last time I played an actual game of soccer, which was probably, oh, about 12 years ago. I'm OK at breaking up plays, but after about a minute of actual activity I feel like sitting down and maybe taking a nap.

2. Kate and I got a ride with Dawn to Target. Very large store, rather disorganized, and there were no price tags on half of the items. For some reason it seemed like a distinctively American shopping experience.

On our way out, our receipts were checked by a guy wearing a badge that read (as I recall) "Target Protection Specialist". We spent some time debating whether or not that was sad.

In the parking lot we were approached by a guy asking for money, who claimed to have a car that was out of gas and full of hungry babies or some such. I coughed up some money, and then remembered Dave telling me that he's gotten the same line on a number of occasions, which increases the probability that it's just a line and nothing more. I try not to be cynical about these things, but I also hate being a mark. Maybe next time I'll ask the guy to introduce me to his kids.

3. After that, we all went to the Oriental Institute. Don't be fooled by that link's horrible web design--there were some fantastic exhibits there. My favourites included a Pazuzu figurine, a giant lammasu, and the 5.3m tall statue of King Tutankhamun. There was also a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which wasn't that spectacular, but was still kinda cool. We only got there 20 minutes before the place closed, so it will probably warrant a return visit.

4. Finally, we saw The Constant Gardener. It was a decent film, all about the evils of large pharmaceutical corporations. But the movie got really preachy at times (surprise!), and I kinda feel that films (similarly to Madonna's dad) ought not to preach, even (especially?) if they're supposed to transmit some sort of social/political message. And surely the film-makers could have had enough faith in the audience to trust that sympathy for the impoverished children of Nairobi had been quite firmly established during the course of the film, making it enitrely unnecessary to have those concluding slo-mo shots of the kids while touching music played in the background.

Concept of pluralism continues to baffle western civilization

2006-01-19T01:50:00.000-06:00

I ran across basically the same story as this over the break, and it looks like it's in the news again:

The Dutch government will announce over the next few weeks whether it will make it a crime to wear traditional Islamic dress which covers the face apart from the eyes.

The Dutch parliament has already voted in favour of a proposal to ban the burqa outside the home, and some in the government have thrown their weight behind it.

There are only about 50 women in all of the Netherlands who do cover up entirely - but soon they could be breaking the law.

Wow. That law makes no sense to me at all.

Dutch MP Geert Wilders is the man who first suggested the idea of a ban.

Great! Maybe he can explain what there is by way of rationale for the proposed law.

"We don't want women to be ashamed to show who they are."

So, these women who wear the burqa are doing so out of shame? I'd like to respond with a couple of suggestions. First, I rather suspect that Mr. Wilders doesn't know the damnedest little thing about Muslim women and why any of them wear the burqa. Second, if you're looking to improve a woman's self-image, I seriously doubt that ripping a piece of clothing off of her is a very good way to go about it.

"...Even if you have decided yourself to do that, you should not do it in Holland, because we want you to be integrated, assimilated into Dutch society. If people cannot see who you are, or see one inch of your body or your face, I believe this is not the way to integrate into our society."

So he's worried about integration! But I always thought that integration meant people getting along in a single society despite their individual differences. It turns out that it really means people wearing the same sorts of clothes. Well, that's OK. Some people are fond of peaceful, pluralistic societies, others are fond of dress codes. To each his own.

"We have problems with a growing minority of Muslims who tend to have sympathy with the Islamo-fascistic concept of radical Islam,"

And thus this proposed ban, which would not in any way prevent the spread of radical Islam, but would certainly help foster antipathy against the Dutch government. Brilliant!

"That's also a reason why everybody should be identifiable when they walk on the street or go to a pub or go into a restaurant or whatsoever."

I'm not sure what he's getting at here. Is he worried about terrorists hiding behind burqas? Given that there are apparently only 50 burqa wearers in the entire country, it seems unlikely that wearing a burqa is a particularly good way of slipping under the radar in the Netherlands.

I'm sort of baffled as to why it isn't blatantly obvious to everybody that this is an atrociously bad idea. Is there some sort of mental defect congenital to Dutch politicians or something? What's going on here?

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

2006-01-17T02:23:00.000-06:00

And wouldn't he be proud of the progress we've made.

Unspeakable horror

2006-01-15T23:41:00.000-06:00

While cooking today, I dropped a chopstick, which rolled underneath the fridge. Very, very bad luck. I looked underneath the fridge to see if I could spot the chopstick, and was confronted with a truly frightening sight. Judging from the non-chopstick material that I found there, that fridge has been sitting in the same spot for approximately seven centuries, if not millennia. The dust etc. that was lurking in that space had the appearance of a dense web of complexly interconnected strands, similar to the sophisticated sort of neural network that might produce, say, intelligent thought.

When I pulled the chopstick out, I think I heard something moan.

I did a nice thing.

2006-01-15T23:23:00.000-06:00

The other day Kate and I saw Shaolin Temple at DocFilms. Shaolin Temple is a truly epic martial arts film about the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, with corny special effects and atrocious acting. It was a great time.

"Oh! Crane style!"
"Now I understand why you made me stir rice for all those years!"

On our way back we ran across a shoulder bag on the lawn beside the sidewalk. I found a piece of paper with the likely owner's name (same as Sarah McLachlan, but spelt differently) and address. I unsuccessfully tried to return it to her that night, but I left a note at her apartment, so she contacted us the following day and got her stuff back.

Apparently the pub "got the better" of her, and while I don't like to moralize, I think one might want to reconsider one's style of alcohol consumption, if that leads to the loss of a bag containing the entirety of a semester's course materials, a cell phone, and an iPod. (Sigh. If only there hadn't been a way to track down the owner. I totally would've taken that iPod.)

This is a long weekend. I didn't figure that out til Thursday.

2006-01-15T01:37:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we got a ride from Dawn to the post office to pick up a bunch of parcels Kate had sent from Japan. It turned out to be a bit of an ordeal. Kate had addressed them to "Toby", but I only had ID with my full name on it, and apparently it wasn't enough for the last name and the first three letters of the first name to match. Kate pointed out that she was the one who had sent it, and was clearly identified as the sender on the postal form. The lady took a look at Kate's name and our Japanese address and remarked something to the effect of, "This is from Kenya or something." We weren't sure how to respond to that. "Kenya" is indeed a possible Japanese name, but it wasn't written anywhere on the label, unlike "Japan", which was. In the end, happily, I managed to get the parcels, but only after offering up a stack of cards plus a receipt with my address on it to the gods of the USPS. They turned out to mostly contain Kate's clothes, though, which was a bit disappointing.

Later that day Kate and I went to the departmental "Coffee Hour" (which generally lasts two hours, and has lots of beer, but never any coffee), and I introduced her to some of the other people in the department. (Well, I did some introductions. I missed some. The social graces are not my greatest strength.) This was followed by Thai food and random game playing.

Just this night we went to the Checkerboard Lounge for the first time, a blues club that has in the past hosted the Rolling Stones and some guy named "Muddy Waters". (Apparently Chicago has some sort of reputation for this sort of stuff.) Unfortunately the band had a few hiccups. Apparently the drummer had some trouble getting there, so they had to call up a replacement drummer. While waiting for the replacement, a lady who wasn't in the band sang a few songs about being an "old dirty lady" (I'll take her word for it), which was pretty awesome. The replacement, when he showed, did a great job for some guy they just called up out of nowhere, though he wasn't quite as good as the real drummer who showed up sometime around midnight. (What happened to him? Who knows.) Overall the show was great, though.

TIME.com: Best of 2005: Television

2006-01-14T13:57:00.000-06:00

TIME.com: Best of 2005: Television -- Page 1

Time Magazine has given Battlestar Galactica top honours in it's Best of 2005 TV listing. It's neat to see a sci-fi show get such recognition. :)

The Da Vinci Code

2006-01-11T11:47:00.000-06:00

Don't bother with this one. Of course, I heard it was great, and as a last minute attempt to fend off boredom on the flight from Japan picked it up. I couldn't believe it - not only does it have major plot and character problems, but it's boring. Really boring. I fell asleep about every 5 pages. I kept hoping it would get better, but it never did.

It's so unbelievable too - it takes a cryptographer pages to reveal to us that the numbered sequence is the Fibonacci, but at the end of the book several characters realize seemingly instantaneously the identity of the true evil-doer. The information is handed out to the reader so slowly anyone with half a brain will guess correctly before revealed.

Two thumbs down. I'm sorry I wasted the time on it.

I Leave for Chicago

2006-01-09T09:08:00.000-06:00

The day did not go well. Wanting the cheapest flight, I booked a connecting flight through Toronto to Chicago on Travelocity. There was one hour to transfer planes at the Toronto airport - I just didn't realize how little that is when the airport is laid out so poorly! The terminals are spaced out such that the bus ride between them takes around 10-15 minutes, not including wait time for the bus. Just to get to the bus is a whole other issue, since the airport has signs directing you to Terminal 2 buses, which mysteriously end. You are then left to figure out for yourself that you must make a turn, go around a corner into a recessed alcove, and then down some stairs. No signage here.

Of course, I did what I knew I shouldn't have, and flew Air Canada. I swear, and this time I really mean it, that no matter how cheap, no matter how convenient, I will never ever use Air Canada again. They were rude at the Vancouver Airport, and when I got to the Toronto airport my bags did not arrive (and considering by that point that I had 15 minutes to go through customs and board my plane, I didn't have long to wait). Air Canada lost my luggage. Of course there has been no apology and the Chicago airport assures me they should arrive today. The 4.5 hour flight to Toronto on Tango Plus had no food at all, not even peanuts. We did get one drink though. Great. They had an 'onboard restaurant' that had hotdogs at exhorbitant prices. Add to that that the Air Canada flight was delayed twice, once at the beginning and once upon arrival in Toronto, because 'the ground crew hadn't arrived yet', and it was a pretty frustrating day overall.

To top it all off, I got really sick on the second flight - some kind of cold or allergies I guess. :( Today I'm just going to relax and wait for my bags to come.

We're Back!

2005-12-27T10:43:00.000-06:00

Just got in yesterday night. :D

The China Files Wrap Up (II)

2005-12-20T17:22:00.000-06:00

August 31 - the Chinese tour

The biggest tourist draw in Xian is Emperor Qin's tomb and his army of terra cotta warriors. We knew we would probably have to take a tour for this one, and picked up a brochure for one at the hotel. Kate went down to talk to the front desk staff (it was always easier for her to talk to the Chinese people, since if I tried they'd just expect me to speak Chinese). She ended up booking a tour for us--but a Chinese one, with no English-speaking guide. It actually turned out to be a great experience.

The tour group

The rest of the tour group was absolutely fascinated with us, and a couple of the women especially were really friendly towards Kate. They couldn't say much, of course, but they spent a lot of time smiling at her.

There was one fellow in the group with decent English. He was fairly old, and one heck of a curmudgeon. He didn't take no crap from nobody. He shouted at the tour guide when there were delays, when they took us to a pointless tourist trap, when a tour stalled on something boring. He walked out of the restaurant we stopped at because it wasn't up to his standards, and managed to get the majority of the rest of the group to go along with him. (Kate, who had the misfortune of visiting the washroom at the place, agreed with his appraisal.)

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, some of the poorer people around tourist areas collect empty bottles from tourists in order to make a little cash. Well, at one point in the tour we were approached by an especially aggressive fellow who wanted our bottle despite the fact that we were still drinking it. Before I could really react, the old guy noticed what was happening, and apparently the situation infuriated him. He ran up spitting out a long string of angry Chinese until the other fellow ran away. For a moment I thought it might come to blows, but the old guy just turned around, I gave him my best "xie xie", he flashed a crooked grin, and we were on our way.

A taste of nationalism

This is one thing we would have missed with an English-speaking guide. Part of the Chinese-language tour took us to the site of the Xian Incident, where Chiang Kai-shek was captured and temporarily imprisoned by his own generals, who thought he was too obsessed with fighting the Communists despite the threat in Northern China posed by the Japanese. The average Westerner probably doesn't care much about this period of Chinese history, but Kate and I thought it was great. If nothing else, was an interesting glimpse into Chinese nationalism as cultivated by the Communist government.

The villa where Chiang was staying has been preserved, complete with the desks where he and his assistants worked, the beds they slept in, and the bullet holes in the walls. The generals responsible for capturing Chiang have, I suppose, been hailed as heroes in the history books; you could, for a fee, get your picture taken with a look-alike of one them (Zhang, I think it was) in a replica of his office.

When the villa was attacked, Chiang was alerted by the gunfire and fled up into the nearby mountains. He must have been quite the athlete, because he sure made it a long way. We got to see the place where he was finally captured, several meters up a crack in the face of a steep part of the mountain. Chains have been put in so that tourists can climb up to the very spot where Chiang was spotted, and there was a mob of people struggling their way up and down so that their relatives could take their pictures at this historic location. (The old guy mentioned above went up all the way.)

The Chinese tourists were every bit as enthusiastic about visiting the site of Chiang Kai-shek's capture as a little kid would be about going to Disneyland. This level of nationalism is remarkable. You don't see Canadian tourists flocking to the Plains of Abraham to get their pictures taken with someone dressed up to look like General Wolfe or the Marquis de Montcalm. (Is there a similar phenomenon in America? Nationalism can be pretty potent in the US, but I'm not sure if the same could be said for interest in American history.)

Song and dance

The tour took us to a pyramid-shaped tomb of someone or another--I think it was Emperor Qin's, but I'm not totally certain since there are apparently a whole bunch of pyramids in the area. In any case, we had to wait some time in the sun while some dancers went through this ridiculous dance routine complete with replica Tang-era costumes (made of polyester, nylon, and fake fur) and plastic axes and swords. (We thought this would be the low point of absurdity on our trip. Oh, how wrong we turned out to be.)

Terra terra cotta cotta

Archaeologists are still digging out and reassembling Qin's terra cotta army, and tourists can take a look at the work in progress. We decided to ditch the tour guide at the dig site, and walk around the complex on our own. (We ended up feeling pretty bad about this when we met back up with the group, and the tour guide apologized to us, her "foreign friends", for having such bad English.) The site is split up into museum exhibits and a series of pits in various states of excavation. In one tent, you get to see rows and rows of fully assembled soldiers and horses, while in others you get to see legs sticking halfway out of the ground, horses in 4 pieces, and whatnot.

On our way out, the tour guide stopped us and made a little speech. It was pretty clear what she was talking about, since just outside the gate was a phalanx of souvenir-hawkers, most of them brandishing miniature replicas of terra cotta warriors. Being with a Chinese tour group really paid off for us here, I think, since we got harrassed about 10% as much as probably would have been if we'd been in a group of westerners. We let our Chinese companions break through the ranks of the hawkers (which they did with ease) and we just followed in their wake. One guy with a small terra cotta warrior set shouted out some prices at Kate--I can't remember what they were, but I think that in the end we pretty much could've gotten the whole set for about a quarter. (So if you're in China and you're thinking of buying some of these things, keep in mind how much they're actually worth.)

The China Files Wrap Up (I)

2005-12-20T15:26:00.000-06:00

Previous installments:
Arrival
August 26 - Beijing
August 27, 28 - Beijing
August 29 - Beijing to Xian.

Picking up where I left off:

August 30 - Xian

We spent the day running and taxiing around Xian. Here are some highlights:

Great Goose Pagoda

This is a big pagoda, with I forget how many levels. You can go inside and climb up, which we did, and once we were up a ways we were able to look out onto the construction site adjoining the pagoda grounds, where they were putting up concrete replicas of Ming era buildings, because I guess the pagoda itself isn't impressive enough for tourists. (See some of of the finished products here.)

Shaanxi History Museum

A good museum, as far as museums go. Traced the history of the area from about a dozen millennia ago or so, which was cool, although we'd already seen a lot of the same kind of material at other museums. Lots of focus on Qin and his crazy terra cotta army (more on which later).

Small Goose Pagoda

Actually more photogenic than its Greater counterpart, I thought. Picture here, with me at the bottom being really amazed or something.

Random food

We had lunch at a restaurant that we picked pretty randomly, without any help from the guidebook. We guessed that the restaurant specialized in local Muslim cuisine (there was a sign behind the counter displaying what looked like Arabic calligraphy), but we weren't sure (for reasons to be discussed shortly).

The menu had no English whatsoever, so I had to muddle through by picking out kanji here and there. I managed to locate tea, and ordered what I thought would be green tea, but the waitress shook her head when I pointed to it, and pointed at a different kind of tea instead. I decided to go along with her suggestion. It turned out to be camomile. It could be that the waitress thought it would be more to the taste of westerners (actually we really like green tea, and kind of dislike camomile), or maybe it was just that the camomile was the most expensive kind of tea on the menu.

I also managed to pick out a couple of dishes, with decent results. When we got the food, we were duly impressed, especially by this one dish. It had some sort of tomato-based chili sauce, these really tender potatos, and about two dozen cloves of garlic. Mmmm, garlic. Unfortunately, there were also these little bits of meat--bits of meat which seemed to include bones shaped and arranged like ribs--tiny, 5mm wide ribs. I'd been pretty sure that the description of the dish had the character for cow in it, but inspecting the meat led me to doubt my understanding of the menu. I must admit, I'm no expert on bovine anatomy, but, as far as I know, no part of your average cow's body matches the above description in the slightest.

We briefly considered the possibility that we were eating cat or something, but we were pretty sure that cat isn't Halal.

So, when you're in China, don't be afraid to stray off the beaten path and eat at random restaurants, because they can be really good, and there's a chance you'll get to eat some kind of meat you've never eaten before, some kind of meat that you'll never be able to identify, nay, not unto the end of your days.

Traffic

We climbed up a number of buildings that provided a good view of the city. The Bell Tower, for example, stands in the center of the old city, with main roads heading out from it in the four cardinal directions. Here's a good representation of Chinese traffic (if you click on the picture, you can zoom in and see more detail). I think the chaos pretty much speaks for itself. Note the number of cop cars (see the red and blue lights) cruising along in the midst of the chaos.

Great Mosque

This didn't merit much mention in the guidebook, but we thought it was sort of the highlight of the day. Among the virtues of the place was that it has yet to be turned into a tourist trap (the local Muslim community might object to that sort of thing). The grounds were arranged like a Chinese courtyard, but instead of being built along the standard south-to-north axis, it was east-to-west, facing Mecca. The structures were a seamless mix of Chinese and Arabic architecture.

The fellow who took our tickets at the main entrance to the place was obviously mentally disabled. Now that I think about it, he might have been the only seriously mentally disordered person I saw during my whole time in Asia who was leading a half-way productive life. (I seem to recall reading somewhere that Islamic tradition has a more charitable view of mental disorder than is common in many other cultures.)

The Muslim motif continues

We had dinner at a Muslim restaurant, this time one recommended by the guidebook. It was good food, but we feel the guidebook's write-up of the place was a little incomplete. Here's my tip to travellers: if you're in a Muslim restaurant (possibly only in a Muslim restaurant in China, or maybe only in this part of China in particular), and they give you a bowl with a round of dense flatbread in it, then you should tear up the flatbread into little pieces (without eating it), leave the little pieces of bread into the bowl, after which they take the bowl away, pour some soup/stew over the pieces of bread, and bring it back to you. Then, and only then, do you commence eating. The flatbread is not an appetizer. If you fail to follow the above steps, everyone else in the restaurant will look at you like you're doing something terribly impolite, which you probably are.

Sweet!

2005-12-19T08:08:00.000-06:00

Staying in the Kawasaki Nikko Hotel for my last two nights in Japan. I'm on the 19th floor and have a beautiful view over Kawasaki station and beyond. :D :D :D

Free internet as well. They even had an adapter for the N.American cable I have (we broke ours in China, and shorted out the room in the meantime). I'm gonna have a nice hot bath, drink some tea, and finish writing evaluations for work :(.

Riots in Australia

2005-12-14T19:12:00.000-06:00

From the mob:

"We'll show them! It's on again sunday... send this to everyone in your phone book... this is a straight up WAR! We must continue to come together to help the innocet an family's so every one can enjoy our beach's!"

Racism is bad, but those misspelling's are terrifying!

One Week Left

2005-12-14T05:20:00.000-06:00

In one week at this time, I'll be on a plane to Calgary. (!) The apartment is (slowly) getting emptier, and I am scrambling to get rid of stuff. I was going to stay in the apartment until the last day (Wednesday) when the inspection will be, and Teruo will come pick me up and take me to the airport, but then I realized that EVERYthing must go, including the curtains. Since Wednesday is not garbage day, I would have to throw them out on Tuesday, and this would mean sleeping in a room with floor to ceiling windows and no curtains. Long story short, I got a hotel room for two nights in Kawasaki, which, although I live (technically) in, I've never actually been to. It's going to be awkward juggling the last 5 days at work, cleaning out the apartment, and travelling to and from Kawasaki while working in Yokohama, but it was the closest I could get. To add to matters, the landline and internet will be cut tomorrow, so I can only be reached by cellphone until the 21st. See you all in a week (or so)!

The insurgency in the War on Christmas

2005-12-12T04:02:00.000-06:00

The news of the War on Christmas--and the resulting, I suppose you would call it, insurgency--must be pretty big, because it even came up on the BBC. Apparently, the fuss has something to do with the idea that, "We have reached an all time low point in our nation's history when human sensibilities are elevated above offending Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."

Offending? That's right, offending. Because, clearly, Jesus really cares whether you say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays". (He spent something like 5 verses talking about it during the Sermon on the Mount. "Blessed are those who say Merry Christmas, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven", etc.)

Indeed, Jesus must be terribly gratified that the most devout among his followers have such great faith that they are willing to fight for the phrase "Merry Christmas" at such high holy places of Christian worship as Target. (Did Paul not write, "Now abide these three: faith, hope, and soulless consumerism, but the greatest of these is soulless consumerism.")

But what do Americans know about the War on Christmas? Canadians know how to do a proper job of desecration.

Nothing, it seems, is sacred anymore, including the baby Jesus.

A rendering of the infant has been stolen from a creche in Old Montreal.

And in the days leading up to the theft, all the fingers on its right hand were broken off, except for the middle digit.

Which is pretty juvenile and mean-spirited. In such times of trouble, to whom is Jesus to turn for defense?

"This is plain urban vandalism by people that have no respect for religion," said Rashid Bouazouni, stopping by the nativity scene with his infant daughter in his arms.

"This is a place of peace where people should think joyful things," said his wife, Hamimi. "This is totally shocking,"

Hmm. Rashid and Hamimi Bouazouni? They're probably Methodists.

But caucasian Christian conservatives aren't the only ones defending Christmas. Kate and I were invited to spend the Christmas season with our friends Ben and Julie. Of course, we're atheists, and they're Jewish, so...

Have a Jewish-Humanist Christmas,
It's the best time of year.
I don't know if there'll be snow
But, Oy! It's hot in here.

Have a Jewish-Humanist Christmas,
And when you walk down the street,
Say Shalom to friends you know
And heretics you meet.
Unfortunately, they're out east, so we won't be able to meet up. Maybe next Christmas--

If there is a next Christmas!

Gah.

2005-12-11T21:06:00.000-06:00

Moving INTO an apartment is far easier than moving OUT of one. :(

Updates

2005-12-09T08:05:00.000-06:00

Well it's been awhile. In the last month, my dad has come and left Japan, I got rid of two major appliances, and I failed at the Nanowrimo contest (for the latter, my excuse is the business of guiding my dad around Japan).

I think Dad had a good time, we managed to do a lot more than I expected. He saw a lot of Tokyo, we did a weekend trip to Kyoto, and another to Hakone, and we went to Kasama, a pottery town in Ibaraki prefecture. Along the way, we picked up an older Japanese couple who invited us to their home for dinner (they made sukiyaki, really tasty, we drank lots of beer, and watched slide shows of their trip to Switzerland). They invited my dad to go on a road trip in their car with them, but there wasn't enough time. We had an adventure around Shinjuku on one of the last nights he was here - we were trying to find the Indian restaurant Toby and I had been to many times...the long and the short of it is that we walked around for an hour, gave up and started looking for an Ootoya we had seen awhile back, and in the midst of this undertaking ran smack into the original Indian restaurant. We had a lovely dinner, too.

I still don't know what I'll do with the rest of the stuff I'm trying to get rid of. I keep getting offers from wishy-washy people who never make up their minds...it takes a long time to sell stuff. :(

Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel

2005-11-29T17:01:00.000-06:00

Battlestar renewed!

New video blogs are also available on their site as well as deleted scenese from season 2. Off to watch now...

Winter schedule

2005-11-27T06:10:00.000-06:00

Dec16 - Toby to Rocky.
Dec21 - Kate to Rocky.
Dec26 - Toby and Kate to Vancouver.
Jan 3 - Toby to Chicago.

I figure Kate's immigration stuff should be done in January or February sometime.

America continues to dominate in the field of irony

2005-11-27T05:35:00.000-06:00

Ex-Fema boss starts disaster firm

The man who lost his job as head of the US response to Hurricane Katrina has started up a new firm - dealing with disaster readiness.
...
Mr Brown said his experience could be used to demonstrate how firms and agencies can better prepare themselves for unseen problems, and how to react when they arise.

His "experience"? As in, his experience in disaster readiness? No, no, no, that would be a kind of job experience, which would entail that he actually fulfilled duties of some sort in his capactiy as head of FEMA. I think the term to use here is "example", in the sense of "cautionary example".

He said the way he was criticised hurt, especially his family.

Oh, it always breaks my heart to hear about the pain that people suffered in the aftermath of Katrina.

But he added: "I'm moving on with my life. I'm doing a lot of good work with some great clients... My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me."

Well, thank God he's been able to piece his life back together, after all he's been through! Someone ought to write an inspirational biopic about this amazing saga. The title could be Comeback Kid: The Michael Brown Story, with the tagline: Though New Orleans fell, not all was lost....

Imitating art

2005-11-23T04:27:00.000-06:00

One: "According to the man steering this whole process, one of the aims of co-management is to break down the barriers between intellectual and physical labour; between those who do the thinking and those who do the work."

Two: "Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart."