Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2004 |
||
| <Y | Y> | |
# 03 Jan 2004, 04:45PM: Feeling Blank: Leonard has returned to Little Rock. If it hadn't been so early in the morning when we said goodbye, perhaps he would have saluted, LeVar Burton-style, and said, "I'll see you next time!"
# 05 Jan 2004, 11:41AM: What We Can't Say: Paul Graham, of Bayesian spam-filtering fame, talks about methods for discovering our heresies. And a traveler considers one himself.
# 05 Jan 2004, 07:13PM: Why in the world is it so difficult to find out when the Powell St. BART/Muni station transit store opens and closes? The other downtown stations' transit store information is perfectly findable on the web. But Powell is a ghost.
# 05 Jan 2004, 07:16PM:
Happy New Year.
I spent the 2003-2004 liminal time watching a lot of TiVoed TV with Leonard (Reading Rainbow, Good Eats, and some surprisingly palatable Star Trek: Voyager; I have grudgingly accorded Voyager canon status) and transcribing interviews I did in October with Christopher Kimball and Alton Brown. Christopher Kimball says "actually" in every sentence.
This month, a few friends of friends are moving to town for school. One of them, Lisa, stayed with me for a few days in mid-December while arranging housing. She loves Trader Joe's. I think she's more excited about living near a Trader Joe's than she is about her SFSU fellowship.
The TiVo gave Leonard and me a wonderful New Year's gift: the Reading Rainbow where LeVar Burton takes you behind the scenes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Outtakes! Crossoverness!
It's that time of year; ants think my bathroom is a neat-o place to be. Ack!
# 05 Jan 2004, 07:20PM: Late last year, Comedy Central reran a Nov. 18th Daily Show with Bernard Goldberg, author of Arrogance and Bias. I didn't find his arguments very convincing. Jon Stewart asked him the $64,000 question, namely, seeing as Republicans control all three branches of the US government, how could liberals be controlling the discourse with an anti-Republican bias? Goldberg didn't answer the question to my satisfaction.
# 07 Jan 2004, 05:25PM: Truncated Dac (tyl): I hear "Ratchet and Clank" and think of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
# 07 Jan 2004, 06:11PM: The Syndicate: Apparently my LiveJournal feed works again, and who knows why. Sabrina, Paul, Joe, John, &c. - care to lower the syndication cost?
# 08 Jan 2004, 11:08AM: Utter Mayhem!:
Now I know why I grab the Chron's Wine section from the recycling bins to read on BART. Today's article on wine clubs drones on and on, but then kicks in:
Like Ridge, many DEWN wines are made exclusively for the club. Unlike Ridge, Bonny Doon ships such eccentric blends as a fizzy Barbera, a Piedmontese grape called Freisa fermented with fresh strawberries, and a blend of 30 percent Viognier (a white grape) with 70 percent Syrah (a red grape).
"We do our best to mentally and emotionally prepare people for the utter mayhem coming their way when they join DEWN, but they don't always understand what they are getting mixed up in," says the winery's creative director, John Locke.
Adds Bonny Doon president Randall Grahm, "It's like, you signed up for weird wines, what do you expect?"
Probably California's most unusual wine program is, not surprisingly, that of Santa Cruz-based Bonny Doon Vineyard. The winery's Distinctive Esoteric Wine Network (DEWN) is one club that customers either love or hate.
# 08 Jan 2004, 04:49PM: Out Of Context Theater: "steve schultz's blog showed me the light. i now go out to wrestling parasite goth punk raves dressed as a schoolgirl."
# 09 Jan 2004, 09:33AM: Just Reread Gatsby: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the spam.
# 09 Jan 2004, 09:54AM: Exposure: Scott Rosenberg ponders cryptic spam subject lines. My favorite interpretation: "origami inflation -- Paper money is always at risk." He also links to Spam As Folk Art (recently updated!) and some well-done spam poetry.
# 09 Jan 2004, 10:20AM: I Knew Him When We Were Acquainted: Today's Qwantz reminded me of Humiliating Happenstances! by one K. Byerly. I may as well also link to his splendid Crime Over Time and How Do I Get Rid Of This Gun?. More like this.
# 12 Jan 2004, 12:34PM: Living High On the Sog (Tofog?): Mockmeat steak costs the same as mockmeat chicken or mockmeat hot dogs. I could eat soy prime rib every day.
# 12 Jan 2004, 06:45PM: "Did you find the fun you were seeking?": A plea to spend less.
# 14 Jan 2004, 01:47PM: Who Strikes the Public Sentiment, Say Who Will Be Our President?:
Thanks to Leonard, I have heard campaign songs from many US Presidential campaigns. The silly lines that stick with me:
I particularly enjoy, among others, "Wilson! That's All!"
# 15 Jan 2004, 10:19AM: I Want a President Who Has Written Fanfic:
Carol Moseley Braun offhandedly mentioned last night, on The Daily Show, that she believes that that the Bush administration is using fear to get us to not question their policies, and that "fear is the mind-killer". Rachel, Jeremy and I sat straight up. This was after she made the Vulcan greeting hand gesture in reference to the proposed Mars expedition.
Today Moseley Braun dropped out and threw her support to Dean. What are the odds that Dean has even read I, Robot, much less Dune?
# 16 Jan 2004, 10:58AM: Nibbling on Jerquee, baby carrots, and Christmas peanut brittle as I gird myself for customer service.
# 16 Jan 2004, 03:17PM GMT+5:30: Thanatos: Workers are tearing down a red brick building a block away. Salon's employees are oohing and aahing by the window. Reminds me of the powerful, awesome last pages of 21 Dog Years by Mike Daisey.
# 16 Jan 2004, 07:53PM: Aha! The film was Whatever It Takes (1 and a half stars).
# 20 Jan 2004, 09:34AM: Whose Bed This Is, I Think I Know: "And then he will lie in it." More Atticus nuttiness. Atticus may be the nonromantic equivalent, to me, of Daisy Fay -- I am growing to love him so much that when I meet him it may be a letdown.
# 20 Jan 2004, 01:46PM: Partition Was A Lesson: "The insight of our age is that borders sanctify difference, but that borderlessness spurs partnership." A proposal for Kashmir, via Tapped. Another bit in a long, extensive conversation I've been having.
# 20 Jan 2004, 06:07PM: Some Salon people have the "State" "of" "the" "Union" on. I remember when I made it a point of pride to watch the SOTU. Now I just wait bitterly for an elected president to give it. Maybe next year.
# 20 Jan 2004, 07:07PM: The Spamegorical Imperative:
New Spam as Folk Art is up. More Brendan-y, since I like his approach.Hey you there medicate thy self ck
Speaking of Brendan, I got some Ben Folds and Guster over the weekend. I also hung out with Alexei, Seth, Shweta, and Nathaniel, and got back in touch with Jade and with Mike Parsons. Getting back in touch with old friends makes me feel less mortal.
Wasn't this a Very Special Episode of ER?
# 21 Jan 2004, 11:25AM: "And I think we are stuck with this.":
Ellen Ullman discusses The Bug in a public Well conference. Hey, Sabrina, she says:My model for the essay has always been Cythia Ozick. She is
passionately smart. Or intellectually passionate. Or any way it's
possible to express the sort of mental intensity that becomes emotional
by nature of the sheer force it exerts.
# 21 Jan 2004, 01:20PM: I thought it was "champagne":
A roundup of censorship and other suppression of texts through the ages told me: "1954: Cole Porter's lyric 'Some get a kick from cocaine' is changed to 'Some get perfume from Spain' for radio airplay."
I first heard of this song from a Lois Lowry book. Young Sam sings the song at the top of his lungs around the house, and his parents ask each other, "What will the neighbors think?"
# 23 Jan 2004, 09:48AM: Dreampitcher:
Wednesday night, I dreamt about pledging to KQED. I dreamt that I would pledge at the $120 level and get the No Power No Problem portable crank-powered radio premium.
Yes, I slept through my alarm.
Also Wednesday night, I dreamt that my mind had posted on Slashdot, while I was asleep, asking for someone to call me and wake me up.
Last night, I dreamt I was a Dean supporter. I was trying to milk more money out of a household that had already donated to the campaign. As I left, I whispered, "Clark!" Perhaps I was undercover.
# 23 Jan 2004, 12:58PM: She's "Not A Thing Person"; I'm Sold!: I watched most of Howard and Judith Dean's interview with Diane "Straw Woman" Sawyer last night. As I had suspected, they said a bunch of interesting stuff that wasn't shown: here's the full transcript, or at least a less abridged one.
# 26 Jan 2004, 11:25AM: Over the weekend, I saw friends and had lovely conversations, food, and entertainment. But then I saw that someone had broken into my car, so that put a damper on the mood. Also, I missed part of Arrested Development. I call do-over.
# 26 Jan 2004, 02:56PM: Really selling the car now. If you know anyone in the market for a reliable sedan, please let them know. I'm willing to drive hundreds of miles to sell this thing.
# 26 Jan 2004, 04:42PM GMT+5:30: High school hierarchies and the attendant etiquette dilemmas are the closest I have ever come to the world of Anna Karenina.
# 28 Jan 2004, 12:51PM: Life's Medium-Sized Victories:
Gail bought a $3 gallon jug of AriZona green tea (with honey and ginseng!) at Walgreens last week for a Salon party. I just discovered the last fourth of it in the fridge and will probably finish it today.
Lots of pleasant phone calls today. Example: a subscriber who had wanted a cancellation and refund, mentioned cookies and spam, listened to my explanation of said phenomena, and decided not to cancel. Whoopee!
# 28 Jan 2004, 06:41PM: Are You An Asian Woman?: Stephen Colbert says The Daily Show could use one.
# 30 Jan 2004, 02:27PM: Reminiscences: I used to say "yup" as slang for "yes." This turned into "yupper," which turned into "yupper.com." The matching negative was "nupper.com." My sister hated this.
# 30 Jan 2004, 04:51PM GMT+5:30: Salon Brilliant Career (Mine):
On a midday errand jaunt, I bought some Fitzgerald and Trollope's The Way We Live Now at Stacey's. I asked some coworkers about Trollope and we talked about Victorian novels a bit, both the IT manager and the tech VP enthusiastically recommending Middlemarch. These are the conversations I suppose outsiders think we have all the time.
Yesterday I found out that everyone but me knew that jail differs markedly from prison. One is held in a city or county jail for under a year; a state prison houses longer-term inmates. I've gone my whole life thinking "jail" and "prison" were straight synonyms.
# 09 Feb 2004, 02:32PM: I just got back from a weeklong trip to India to see my folks. It is very nice to be home. I tried to use beverages to get me on the right sleep schedule during the flights back, but I feel woozy and someone has said that I look pale (!). Maybe this is because I have now watched one episode of The Kumars at No. 42 three times.
# 10 Feb 2004, 08:44PM: Clark Ends Bid: Leonard is coming home!
# 11 Feb 2004, 10:43AM: Alone: "Leonard Richardson, software developer with the Wesley Clark for President campaign, stands in an empty Clark campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Ark., early Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2004, as he talks about his plans. Richardson said he will be going home to San Francisco later this week after Clark announces his leaving the race for the Democratic presidential nomination."
# 14 Feb 2004, 04:01PM: Sex Taboos:
Two bits of news in the Bay Area that connect through the sexual taboos and laws at the heart of each issue.
First, a thrice-convicted sex offender, Cary Verse, has gone through a bunch of therapy, is taking regular chemical injections to retain his status as castrated, wears monitoring equipment at all times, and has been deemed fit for a one-year conditional release from the hospital. He tried living in a motel in Marin but was forced to leave; somehow it was chosen for him to try to live in Oakland, and various city officials want to find some legal way to make him move. He is a public hazard and has been unfairly dumped there, they say.
So: when the hospital, overseen by a government agency, pronounces Verse "fit for release," Oakland officials do not believe that. And they say they have enough sex offenders, and that Verse's last crime was committed in Contra Costa County and thus he should be released there.
Well, the way to make sure a person is never released in your neighborhood is to make sure he gets sentenced to life in a jail or treatment facility, not to play hot-potato. Or you could space out schools and playgrounds so that there is no space in the city that is more than half a mile (or whatever the required distance is) from a school or playground, and thus no space where it is legal for him to live. Or you could somehow decree that your city does not recognize any fit-for-release certificate, no matter who authorizes it.
That last one seems the most fitting for this situation. These officials are basically saying that they don't trust that certification, and are not willing to make the risk tradeoffs that respecting Verse's liberty as a citizen would entail.
The other issue: Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, directed his employees to issue marriage licenses to same-sex and heterosexual couples alike, so even as I write, huge lines of couples wait in line at City Hall and opponents of the mayor's move make speeches and legal motions.
I am incredibly sentimental. I cry when I see that "imagine a world without smoking" ad with the bubbles. I cry at really good compliments. And I cry when I think about or see people getting married. So of course even thinking about these couples getting married after years of impossibility brings me to tears.
But Gavin Newsom overreached his legal bounds as mayor. I don't think it'll hold up in the courts. California voters passed the marriage definition referendum (screw full faith and credit! they shouted), and
He said Newsom may lose that fight because the Constitution also stipulates that a state agency must follow a law that it disagrees with until a court has ruled on the issue. The same argument probably applies to local governments, Amar said. Newsom assumed a power I don't think he has, and I am uncomfortable with that.
On both of these issues I'm reserving further judgment. There are pertinent facts I don't know. But I want for us to pass and follow fair laws, and sympathetic people in both these situations (more Mayor Brown than Mayor Newsom) may be looking for loopholes in the law instead.Vikram Amar, a constitutional law professor at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, said the two groups have a good chance of eventually winning an injunction. Newsom, he said, is taking a novel legal approach by insisting that he is merely interpreting the state Constitution's right to equal protection in ordering the city to issue licenses to same-sex couples.
# 17 Feb 2004, 12:06PM GMT+5:30: This weekend I reread Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter. Today a loose window in the office is letting in mournful, wailing wind.
# 17 Feb 2004, 12:37PM:
Thanks to Alexei, Zack, and Patrick for a nice weekend, including movies, a game of Girl Genius, and several tasty meals with friends.
While with Alexei on Saturday, I realized that I had broken my nine-year streak of wearing black on Valentine's Day. I've gone past anger to indifference, which perhaps I intended all along.
# 19 Feb 2004, 02:41PM:
Brendan, a good houseguest and a friend, visited and now he is gone. I hope he is flying safely. On the other hand, Leonard is back! Gladness.
Today a colleague reassured me that I won't be outsourced to India basically because Salon couldn't stand the bad PR. Ha ha!
Saw Seth and Zack last night; the boys played Illuminati. It seems like a bunch of math that is only redeemed by silly card names. Maybe I am just tired.
# 19 Feb 2004, 04:21PM: Calling My Ex: Wil Wheaton runs his kids' first dungeon crawl and it's tender and sweet.
# 20 Feb 2004, 07:16PM: Getting down some insights about visiting a call center while I was in India. Getting over my "you are being self-indulgent" self-censorship.
# 23 Feb 2004, 11:01AM: Car got broken into again. The asking price is now $5000.
# 24 Feb 2004, 10:07PM: I just laughed so hard and long that my face hurt. I'm glad Leonard's back.
# 26 Feb 2004, 04:56PM: "Four hours of work, twenty years of bourgeois guilt GONE!":
Have now put myself on lists to volunteer for KQED and San Francisco Clean City Coalition.
Quote is from my stand-up act, re: my one day working for Habitat For Humanity.
# 27 Feb 2004, 12:39PM: I saw a lonely bit of refuse labelled "BASURA," which looked ominous. After a moment, I recognized the word as "garbage," from the "Solo Basura/Garbage Only" labels on SF residential trash bins. It had seemed foreboding because, in Hindu mythology, an asura is a demon.
# 01 Mar 2004, 12:53PM: "Ambiguous": On a nice place to live and an alternative to AAA.
# 01 Mar 2004, 07:04PM: Andy Holloway said thoughtful things about number-based roleplaying games such as Illuminati. "Perhaps I can make analogy to the way that music is mathematical in nature.....The numbers are just the rhythm to which [the story is] set."
# 02 Mar 2004, 09:18AM: bum-BUM:
"An infant believed to have died in a 1997 fire actually was kidnapped and raised by a woman who set the blaze to cover her path, authorities said. Now, the child's mother -- who recognized the girl at a party by a dimple -- is eagerly awaiting a reunion."
Also: "At the party, [the mother] told the girl she had gum in her hair and pulled out five strands for DNA testing."
Law And Order twists could be:
# 02 Mar 2004, 09:37AM: Just Like "In Cold Blood": March is a decluttering fling for me, so I'll be making a trip near the end of the month to take boxes of reusable stuff to SCRAP-SF and possibly the East Bay Depot for Creative Use (although evidently the latter is on the wrong side of the Wobblies).
# 02 Mar 2004, 03:55PM: Welcome, Squirrelly!: I am absolutely mooning over Defective Yeti's baby.
# 04 Mar 2004, 09:42AM: Yay!: A gorgeous day here in SF! I am eating beet salad for breakfast and have very few support requests to answer. Life is fantastic.
# 07 Mar 2004, 10:21PM: My Share of Leonard's TiVo: Leonard graciously lets me watch TiVoed TV at his house. My Season Passes: Namaste America, India Waves, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I tape Arrested Development at my place.
# 09 Mar 2004, 05:00PM: Publishment:
Tonight, Salon will publish my article on visiting a Bangalore call center.
Update: "A few subscribers have tentatively mentioned that I have a beautiful name, or that they loved 'Bend It Like Beckham,' but this was the first caller to call me out on the absurdity of my position. An American-born Indian doing call-center work in California?"
# 11 Mar 2004, 11:21AM: Aye, Caesar, And Not Yet Gone:
While in India, I had a signmaker make a canvas banner that reads, "REMEMBER YOU ARE MORTAL". I hung it up in my cubicle at Salon.
Some prankster has placed a sticky note reading "PROBABLY" between "ARE" and "MORTAL".
# 11 Mar 2004, 11:32AM: Waiting for Soydot:
A few months ago, I ordered a five-pound bag of Stonewall's Jerquee from Risingsun Health. Upon non-jerky-craving-frenzied reflection, the site looks a bit dodgy. But I did it.
Last week I called to ask whether my jerky would arrive anytime soon. The owner apologised profusely and told me he'd send me, at the same price, ten pounds of jerky, no, a case!
Now I await my jerky every day. I want my jerky. Where is my jerky?
Next time I am going with Vegan Essentials, which shipped on time. But still. Find me, jerky! Fly into my arms!
# 12 Mar 2004, 04:19PM: "Have You Forgotten About The Bomb?":
For some reason, Leonard mentioned the painting of me upon his hypothetical fighter plane, and I realized that you could sing a song about such a thing to the tune of Barcelona's techno song "I Have the Password To Your Shell Account" (off the Zero, One, Infinity album).I'd paint your bosoms
I'd paint your gorgeous gams
I'd paint your picture on my....fighter plane
# 12 Mar 2004, 04:53PM: I Have The Best Boss:
Over IM: "hey, you should get out of here.... it's been a crazy day and everything's basically done. get out in that sunny weather!" Have a good weekend.
# 15 Mar 2004, 03:53PM: They Call It "Whole Paycheck": Whole Foods has opened a grocery store and deli a few blocks from work. I am a variety fiend, so I adore the $6.99/pound hot bar, which is like a salad bar except that it has a hundred different dishes. I can get lots of little helpings of rice, salad, tamale, mashed potatoes, pudding, and garlic green beans in one meal. Outstanding! However, I sometimes end up paying more for lunch than I would had I gone to some outmoded pay-per-item restaurant. Also, when I pack several items into one box to eat at work, bit of food glop onto and into each other. Actually, garlic chocolate pudding is good.
# 16 Mar 2004, 01:03PM: I'd love to see "Dirty Story", and I'm concerned that Alton Brown recommends Ayn Rand (post of March 14th, 2004). And I'm sad that Patent Pending has been abandoned.
# 18 Mar 2004, 05:02PM: Blaaaah:
Blah. What a workweek. At least this weekend I am going to the zoo and buying a fish (unrelated, surprisingly).
I have transferred my car to an uncle in Southern California who is selling it on my behalf. I'm very glad.
# 22 Mar 2004, 12:37PM: I Have Fish!:
On Sunday, I bought two tiny goldfish at Aquatic Central, 1963 Ocean Avenue.
A week previous, I had washed off the existing gravel, put in water and some insta-ecosystem stuff, and turned on the air pump that bubbles the water in my four-gallon tank. The sound of the bubbler can be annoying and comforting; I dreamt of peeing at least once last week.
Yesterday I bought a net and food and water conditioner, picked out a fake plant for the fish to hide in (I'd wanted real but evidently a beginner shouldn't get too fancy with the ecosystem of the tank), and bought two "feeder" goldfish, one grey, one gold. (They are "feeders" not only because you can feed them to get them bigger, but also because you can use them as food for carnivorous fish.)
I had wanted pet fish, off and on, for ten years. I reasoned: I can talk to them and they won't talk back; they will not escape or chew on things or void their bowels or bladders where they shouldn't. I saw them as controllable.
But as soon as the owner passed me the plastic bag holding Dave and Betty, two little arrows hit my heart. So tiny! So helpless! The reason I wanted them is the very reason that I am keenly responsible now. They cannot fend for themselves at all.
So, yesterday, I anxiously watched them in my tank. Were they agitated? Was the water too cloudy? Had I fed them too much? What right had I to take over their lives for my own amusement? I couldn't think of any secrets to confide in them; I only thought of their welfare. In tears, I told Leonard that I just want them to be happy.
Leonard, who has owned fish, inspected my tank and my fish and reassured me. Dave and Betty have food, and plenty of room, and each other for company. They are safe from predators and have a bubbler, their reflections, an uneven rock surface, and a fake plant for stimulation. And they are getting acclimated to the tank, their new home.
So it is reasonable to believe that they are as happy as goldfish can be.
I like that my fish will be waiting for me when I come home. I worry about them, and I know they'll die, and I'll feel bad even if it's not my fault that they die. But at least they are happy right now, and I can derive pleasure from that happiness.
# 23 Mar 2004, 04:46PM: Scattered Notes:
I'd say "stay in school, kids," but I think that would mean I should go to grad school. Since my only real postgraduate options are law, academe, and education of mewling brats, I'll instead say "try not to graduate during a recession, kids."
I remember the word "Antinomian" mentioned in public school in the same breath as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. Mostly I remember an explanation involving salvation by faith and not needing churches. I wish I'd learnt the more interesting heresy of which Hutchinson was accused. But in a sense, I don't want kids to have access to such dangerous intellectual weapons. If I have kids, they won't get to read Max Weber till they're out of my house. I don't want to ever hear, "your authority over me is only traditional! I want a rational-legal framework and I want it NOW!"
# 25 Mar 2004, 11:41AM: I Promise No Fish In This One:
The summer between sixth and seventh grade, I carpooled with a wonderful Stockton Record reporter named Dana Nichols; his niece and I went to the same summer enrichment program. He listenened to KUOP in the mornings, and since I already loved public TV I was an easy touch for NPR. Gradually I switched from the local top-40/alt-rock station (with which I'd had personal and emotional attachment, not to mention great luck in winning phone-in contests) to the local NPR affiliate.
I worked at KUOP, the Stockton-Modesto public radio station, for a few months in a mid-nineties summer. I particularly remember the name Duncan Lively, as my teen ears perceived it as wonderful and impossible, and because he acknowledged a grammatical error I'd found in a fundraising script.
As it turns out, Duncan is still in public radio (or is he? Why do I see no date on this "press release"?), and I didn't converse with him enough to learn the neat fact that:
KUOP had a microwave that did not interperet "2:00" as "120 seconds" but as "200 seconds". This caused me one embarrassing incident.
Scott Mearns, the kind and attractive chief engineer, kept a daily diary of all the stuff he did at work. This helped him keep others accountable, among other things. Also, in my work for him, I looked up Material Safety Data Sheets on gopher, which was the first time I ever used the Internet.
I wrote Public Service Announcements based on press releases that schools, nonprofits, and agencies sent in. I devised a new filing system for them that helped DJs know which ones to read.
Greg Parsons, the father of my schoolmate Mike Parsons, was funny and smart. Carole, the administrator and poet, was wise. Jack, the news reporter, was stressed and helpful.
I served there in the morning, so every day I came in and smelled coffee everywhere and heard the voice of Bob Edwards piped throughout the office.
I continued to listen to KUOP throughout high school. On several Saturdays my mother and I spent two hours quietly preparing food while listening to A Prairie Home Companion. I learned about music from Schickele Mix and did physics homework in the early hours of the morn to The Diane Rehm Show, where I first heard sung ancient Greek.
The day I left for college, I met an ex in the Carl's Jr. near my house, the last time I ever saw him. It was a goodbye that should have come months before. What an ill-advised fling! (Actually, Angel gave me great advice; I just didn't follow it.) And that day's front page of the Stockton Record (by then, The Record: First in San Joaquin) described KUOP's upcoming programming shift - less music, more talk, more homogenous NPR. I left just in time.
Now KUOP has lost the six-hour block of classical in the middle of the day, and KUOP as an individual station doesn't really exist. And Bob Edwards is not the voice of Morning Edition anymore. Marx and Engels were right: all that is solid melts into air. Even the air.
For three years, he worked in the former Soviet Union as NBC's resident photojournalist and tape editor. Lively covered stories ranging from the plight of would-be Jewish emigres to the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
# 26 Mar 2004, 08:10AM: "A tale of two miseries":
Gary Kamiya is in the Middle East.
... ...it is the checkpoint that I will remember, because it's the only one I lived, if only for half an hour. It will remain, for me, a small vision of hell, like an obscure background in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Those silhouetted figures with guns, that smell of diesel fuel, the debris, the blank look of poor people fumbling for their papers, making their way home. One of the outer circles of hell, to be sure. But I felt in my bones it was not right. And as an American, I will carry that memory as a badge of shame. Because I pay for it, I support it. That soldier in the twilight is me. ...
Every American policymaker, every American who cares about human rights, or justice, or Israelis, or Palestinians, or Jews, or Muslims, or the Holy Land (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred site in Christianity, was empty when I visited), or just naked don't-blow-me-up self-interest, should come to the Calandia checkpoint. They should come to the rubble-strewn streets on the outskirts of Ramallah. They should stand at the No. 19 bus stop. This is not their problem: It is our problem. And then they should walk through the gates and into the Old City of Jerusalem, that divine gray maze that all three great faiths regarded as the center of the world and the terrestrial link with heaven, and see how hollow a man's prayers ring when he has not done what is needed.
I have just spent two days with decent and intelligent people, Palestinians and Israelis, who because of the stupidity of their leaders and the shameful folly of my government are living a life I would not wish on a dog.
# 26 Mar 2004, 05:14PM: Track Lighting!:
Salon just moved its office to a different floor in the same building. This one has more dot-commy-colored walls and I have to walk for five times as long to get to my cube or to refill my water mug. Upside: window view, for the 20-20-20 rule.
I feel off in an almost-empty old place or an almost-empty new place. Ephemeral - creepy.
Not very productive today.
# 29 Mar 2004, 10:41AM: Waah:
The Other Change of Hobbit, a sci-fi/fantasy bookstore on Shattuck, will close down at the end of May.
Patronize Borderlands in SF as much as you can.
The Other Change of Hobbit store cat was the first cat to ever sit on my lap and get me to not mind.Basically, we can't afford to keep losing money at the rate we have. My inheritance is eaten up, Dave hasn't gotten his, and there's only so far we can go with selling off our own collections. Not enough people in the door, not enough money per person coming in....
# 29 Mar 2004, 03:38PM: Sex Pistils:
I am now in a row of four cubes, each occupied by a female, and each female brought in at least one flower today.
However, I am probably the only one listening to KUSF.
# 30 Mar 2004, 06:12PM: Me, to Leonard: "I have to consider how to frame this so that you're always wrong."
# 31 Mar 2004, 12:31PM: Jerky: My 5 pounds of Original "Wild" Stonewall's Jerquee have arrived. Huzzah! Jerky for all!
# 31 Mar 2004, 07:05PM:
Our office has moved. I scavenged a footrest and a better chair.
Lighting is mediocre. Most of us have lamps; soft haloes of light escape the rows of boxes.
# 01 Apr 2004, 03:41PM: Sounds Like Leonard: I find that the excellent Everything Is Ruined (political commentary, mostly) and the fading-brilliance Dinosaur Comics make me think that Leonard wrote them, even though he didn't.
# 02 Apr 2004, 03:35PM:
After a week of slogging at work (but actually getting results, which is nice), I will now ostensibly relax with two or three hours of driving to/from a concert by Brother, whom Shweta and Zack champion.
TeeVee.org parodied Salon yesterday in incredible, almost loving detail. Of course, a subscriber to Salon Premium wrote in, outraged that our new acquisition was so rude in its "Letter to Deadbeats."
# 05 Apr 2004, 03:51PM: Names, Fish, Taxes:
Weekend: enjoyed driving with friends, concert was okay, lots of Bollywood music videos (Namaste America has the best commentary, India Waves has the weirdest choices and hands-down weirdest host), Zack lunch, changed aquarium water somewhat more successfully, Leonard time, "Arrested Development" (hilarious!) and "West Wing" (made my brain hurt with fiction/reality splicing), burritolike meal, cleaning, taxes, library, clock-changing.
Yes, I wince a bit at paying taxes, more because I don't trust these particular administrations to do the right thing with the money than because of some "they are stealing my money" sentiment. Yes, I am a tax-and-spend liberal. Because that is the function of government! Taxing and spending! What else should they do? Tax and NOT spend? Spend without taxing?
Dave and Betty are fine, and the aquarium ecosystem is setting up nicely. Evidently goldfish enjoy eating freeze-dried mosquito larvae ("bloodworms," a Klingon term if ever there was), which look as though they are alive but (the shop owner assured me when I called) are very dead. I use tweezers.
Puritans used to give their kids names like Flee-From-Sin and Mercy, and now rappers call themselves C-Murder and Ol' Dirty Bastard.
# 07 Apr 2004, 09:49AM: Reminder:
-"The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy [of] the Head of a civilized nation.
# 08 Apr 2004, 11:02AM: You Can't Violate the 4th Amendment On Television (Or Elsewhere):
The wonderful Newsaic site footnotes TV shows and comics to contextualize references to law, history, and current events. My favorite bit so far comes from a discussion of an episode of "The Practice" and admissible evidence.
Stephen Lee, the site author, also feels as I do about Daredevil's vigilantism.Remember that the exclusionary rule only applies to government action, not to actions by other individuals. If the woman had opened the closet door, that would not violate the Fourth Amendment. You as a private individual can never violate the Fourth Amendment; only the government can violate it... What this means for Batman, I'm not sure. If the courts see Batman as a private individual, then he can get evidence that the police cannot. But if the courts see Batman as a de facto agent of the police, as they probably should, then the same Fourth Amendment standards should apply to his actions. This may be the best reason why the police in DC Comics don't officially recognize Batman's existence and claim he is nothing more than an urban legend.
The best sort of geekery!
# 10 Apr 2004, 11:51AM: Fascinating: On Thursday a beauty school student cut my hair to resemble that of T'Pol from Star Trek: Enterprise. However, my hair defies the Vulcan Science Directorate in its unruly, emotional curls and cowlicks. And I will not sully my medicine cabinet with "glaze" (am I a ham?!) to keep my bangs hanging straight. But perhaps if I raise one eyebrow at you, it'll still work.
# 12 Apr 2004, 09:11AM: Report and Request:
Zack and I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and enjoyed it a great deal. Great performances, fun dialogue and visual effects, a simple story ramified well. Also, it tickled me that David Cross played virtually the same character he plays in Arrested Development. I didn't recognize Elijah Wood or Mark Ruffalo, either, which seems good.
My sister suggested that I should spend more time with children. She's right. Anybody need a free babysitter? Conditions: one kid at a time, for stretches no longer than 5 hours.
# 12 Apr 2004, 10:57AM: Funnymen:
My sister and I adore Seth Stevenson's work in Slate. Case in point: "They seem to say that we are all just transient shadows, not long for this world - it's our diamonds that are forever."
Also, Obaid Kadwani on Namaste America Gold yesterday completely inserted his own opinions on viewer shout-outs and celebrity gossip. Lots of fun. I would read his weblog.
# 13 Apr 2004, 06:31PM: SPAA:
Zed has pointed out to me my inconsistency in bashing
Indians who use Western or Westernized names. When I got picked
as an audience participant for his improv nights, I called myself Vicki. Fair cop, guv. No more.
Nandini and I, in varying amounts, put up with the like of
"Sandy-uh." Back when my sister lived in the Bay Area (she's in DC now), we diverted ourselves with spas, the one decadence we shared. Whether we visited the boojie-but-down-to-earth Piedmont Springs or the wildly luxurious Kabuki, we have uncovered a hankering for hot baths and seaweed wraps. You see, it's "good for you," like working out, only you don't have to do anything except loll! And complain about Anglicized names. When we treated ourselves to Kabuki a while back, I had to adjust to the nudity. Miles of surface area! One gets used to it, but not completely. (On co-ed days people have to wear swimsuits, so if you don't want to stick out for wearing trunks or bikinis, go on Tuesday.)
Of course, Kabuki has to do some maintenance during spa hours, so one has to try to relax, naked, while a clothed low-wage (probably) worker does some very non-relaxing task. How do rich people get used to this? I feel insta-conflicted if I see building maintenance people at Salon, even when both they and I are working.
The title refers to a tenth-grade mnemonic: Socrates, then Plato, then Aristotle, then Alexander. I make no claims as to the usefulness or veracity of this mnemonic.
# 13 Apr 2004, 06:53PM GMT+5:30: Tax Tips: According to Taxes And People In Israel by Harold C. Wilkenfeld, not only does Israel have a Tax Museum, but that selfsame Tax Museum's exhibits go beyond famous people's tax returns. The museum also shows old smuggling devices! Also, it's good to have meetings with taxpayers in private offices, not large open areas where taxpayers can hear each others' cries of outrage.
# 14 Apr 2004, 12:25PM: Also "The Screwfly Solution"!: Thanks to Sarah for pointing to the Sci Fi Channel's online archive of classic and recent SF/fantasy stories. Includes Nancy Kress!
# 14 Apr 2004, 03:09PM: Who lives in the username next door?:
Every week Salon Premium Help receives a few autoresponse emails of the type "this email address doesn't work anymore because I've changed it to avoid spam; here is the new address."
Everyone's in the witness protection program, hiding from the spam Mob.
# 14 Apr 2004, 04:33PM: "I forgot to hook up the hose to the server!": Perhaps Leonard will get a campaign-related kick out of "You know you are working too much when.....". Example: "sitting in your cube you think about how much more relaxed you'd be if you were in jail right now".
# 15 Apr 2004, 12:28PM: It Would Explain That Crazy Scott Rosenberg: A nursing mother in our office pumps breastmilk. When I catch a glimpse of her apparatus drying, it looks like drug paraphernalia. "Who's smoking crack at the office?! ... oh."
# 16 Apr 2004, 12:44PM: Letters, I Read Letters: Some people use dashes instead of, say, quote marks, which makes me think Emily Dickinson has reincarnated as a Salon Premium subscriber. Others use no punctuation at all; maybe they bought cut-rate keyboards off the back of a truck, or they treat all communications with the urgency of 911 dispatches.
# 16 Apr 2004, 02:58PM: "Piles of meth"?: Jason Kottke knows my weakness! Comments on "Ten weird state taxes (Illegal drug tax!)" include an Al Capone reference, always welcome hereabouts.
# 19 Apr 2004, 07:18PM GMT+5:30: On The Night-Table:
I could try to combine these trends by reading a sci-fi children's book about taxes, but I don't much care to reread Anthem.
# 21 Apr 2004, 03:08PM: Maybe Some Of That Philip Glass (or, Usually I Listen To KUSF, I Swear): You know, there is really no good melody for singing "guaranteed 35-minute music set."
# 21 Apr 2004, 05:57PM: A Lot Of Days:
I didn't know that Gavin Newsom is dyslexic. Nor that his favorite game is Twister.
"He knows a lot of things since he's been mayor for 100-and-something days," he said. "That's a lot of days." ...
One little girl asked Newsom whether he is married, and he told her all about former San Francisco prosecutor Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom -- and which news shows to watch for her legal commentary.
"You can see my wife -- she's on TV. She's a legal analyst, which means she's a lawyer," he said. "She's amazing. She's beautiful and smart! She's not dyslexic. She's got it easy -- so easy."
Nikolai Kisler, a fourth-grader, said he wished Newsom had explained how he became mayor. But he hastened to add that he's sure Newsom is qualified.
I guess the average non-dyslexic does have it easier.
# 21 Apr 2004, 07:54PM: Perhaps "Not Passive-Aggressive" Is Too Much To Ask: I am trying to figure out the best way to let jerks on BART know that they may not hog two seats by sitting in the aisle seat while the window seat goes empty. Generally I do what other riders seem too timid to do (namely, walk up, say "Excuse me," and take the seat) without any fanfare or edification. But soon my thought experiments will provide a concise, courteous, and non-passive-aggressive technique for hitting these jerks upside the head with the cluestick.
# 22 Apr 2004, 07:38AM: Also Sneezy:
Grumpy. Last night I dreamt that I wanted to go back to high school to brush up on math and foreign languages, but the teachers would recognize me and tell them to stop wasting their time and resources, and that Leonard was being a spoilsport about an interesting Gordon Korman book.
In real life, one reason for grumpiness: I start on the eleventh month of a job where I've made maybe one friend ("friend" defined as "person who actively initiates conversation and asks me out to lunch and/or other social outings"). Practically everyone else has been working there for 3+ years. Like joining a grades 3-8 school in 7th grade, which I have done and which also marooned me socially.
# 22 Apr 2004, 02:12PM: Yay!: Some NYPD officers have little magic boxes, okay, special cell phones, that automatically connect them to call centers where the operators speak lots of languages. That way officers can communicate with who don't speak English, and get almost-simultaneous translation. Huzzah for technology and call centers and multilingual people leveraging their skills!
# 24 Apr 2004, 04:24PM: More Gross Fish: I saw Betty poop. Awesome!
# 26 Apr 2004, 04:01PM: Enjoy: Sometimes people offer to me, say, a chance to go out and do something with them, or to share a dessert, and I refuse and say "have a good time." Leonard pointed out to me that I do this. I'm not sure what to make of it.
# 27 Apr 2004, 11:04AM: It's Been A Quiet Week in Riyadh: The Religious Policeman, Saudi Arabia's Salam Pax, has read Garrison Keillor.
# 27 Apr 2004, 12:59PM: Shopping Is Hard; Let's Do Math:
I spent my first 21 years hating shopping for clothes. I still find shopping laborious, not fun. But recently I've begun dressing more professionally for work as part of my "don't work in customer support forever" career plan. So I am acquiring new items.
Yesterday, after a blah day at work, I wandered for the first time into the San Francisco Centre, a creepy mall in the middle of downtown SF. Curved escalators! Too many floors! To its credit, its bottom floor connects to the Powell Street BART/Muni station to expedite fleeing.
# 27 Apr 2004, 04:27PM: Spring: At a BART station, birds have nested on the stanchions, and I saw an egg.
# 28 Apr 2004, 09:16AM: Dave: Dave, my grey goldfish, is dying, or at least very ill. He was lethargic this morning, floating sideways, getting caught in the fake plant. I isolated him and did what I could, but by the time I return this evening he may be dead. Betty, the orange goldfish who eats more, is fine. I don't know why.
# 30 Apr 2004, 09:46AM: Dave, my grey goldfish, died yesterday. Leonard and I buried him in my backyard. I hope he did not suffer too much in his death, and that I helped him live a happy life while he was with me.
# 30 Apr 2004, 11:00AM GMT+5:30: Compare And Contract:
Currently reading Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS by Richard Yancey. I find it quite enjoyable, as I did Scott Turow's One-L (memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School) and Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com.
Yancey got me with the premise and one of the first lines: "I had just turned twenty-eight, and was wearing a ten-year-old suit with a ten-day-old dark blue tie." Lots of close observations, complex cases nicely narrated, and a sense of suspense in the author's personal transformation. Like Daisey, Yancey uses dark humor and extended metaphors to persuade the reader that the demands of his job pressure him to act amorally and to become an amoral person. Yancey's story, though, is weightier; it tells more and covers a more formidable institution. And he doesn't paint his ethical dilemmas with the broad strokes that Daisey uses; I really won't know till the end of the book what he thinks of what he has done.
Just got to a section on clashes with tax protestors. Oh, the tax protestors. Leonard was kind enough to point me to a report on tax protestors from Reason that softened my heart:
...
Not merely Protestant, the tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom -- of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. It's just that, in this case, that world of words isn't a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series -- it's U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, it's like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillain's origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man.
The tax honesty movement's vision of the world is fantastical in another way. It is not merely obsessed with continuity; it is magical in a traditional sense. It's devoted to the belief that the secret forces of the universe can be bound by verbal formulas if delivered with the proper ritual. There are numerous formulae in the tax honesty spellbook, with rival mages defending them. Which spell is best: The summoning of the Sovereign Citizen? The incantation of the Constitutional Definition of Income? The banishing spell of No Proper Delegation?
The tax honesty folks similarly believe that their foe the IRS must also be bound by these grimoires of magic: that without the properly sanctified OMB number an IRS form holds no power, that without uttering the mystic word liable no authority to tax can truly exist.
And always, always, the ultimate incantation, The Question: Where does it say that I owe income taxes? Show me the law!
Their attitude toward the Constitution and the statutes and legal decisions regarding the income tax are uniquely Protestant, relying on a layman's ability -- indeed, obligation -- to read and study and parse the original documents himself, to come to his own personal relationship with the law and the cases, and to prefer his understanding to that of the priesthood of lawyers, judges, and accountants.
# 03 May 2004, 12:07PM: The Replacement Swimmer: Betty now swims happily alongside her new tankmate, Bill. I did not realize until after naming Bill that I'd created an homage to Pleasantville.
# 03 May 2004, 05:21PM GMT+5:30: Women:
Last night I stayed up too late watching Part I of the original Prime Suspect. Yes, the critics love Helen Mirren for a reason.
Women I have wanted to be (an incomplete list):
# 04 May 2004, 08:47AM: Cherry Blossoms:
Once upon a time, during my senior year in high school, my classmates and I all applied to the University of California at the same time. UC asked me to look at their list of scholarship categories and list the five I thought I was most eligible for. I remember codes for "first person in family to attend college," "descendant of Union veteran of Civil War," and, of course, "Jewish orphan studying aeronautical engineering." Who can forget "Jewish orphan studying aeronautical engineering"? Well, if I kill my parents and convert....eh, I don't really want to be an engineer.
Then, around this time of year, everyone in the AP English class got rejections and acceptances at the same time. What a tense morning.
# 05 May 2004, 08:56AM: As Though They Cater To Me Specifically: Berkeley Repertory will host Mike Daisey this summer for performances of 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com! I wonder whether the performance will live up to the book derived from the performance.
# 05 May 2004, 09:12AM: Hoji-Cha: Drinking "hoji-cha," a toasted green tea that a coworker gave me. The tea smells like some interesting intermediate of black and green tea, and he wasn't lying about the fuller flavor. I can really taste the toast.
# 05 May 2004, 04:56PM: How Do Dead Godzillas Stomp?:
Preparing for a trip to Japan?
"After your bath put on your "yukata" robe which you can wear throughout the ryokan. Put it on left-over-right (unless you are dead)."
"DO NOT PLACE YOUR CHOPSICKS STRAIGHT UP IN THE RICE. This is how rice is served to the dead."
# 06 May 2004, 10:47AM: Now I Have Seen Norm Howard: This morning I volunteered to take pledge calls for KQED-FM. Let me say that when you ask for public radio listeners who are willing to come into the Mission District at 6:30am to take pledge calls, you are selecting for an odd crew. I ended up talking to the same type I always meet, libertarian guys who use esoteric operating systems and consider improvements to the game of Risk in their spare time. I have to branch out.
# 07 May 2004, 08:33AM: I Be Walkin' Down The Street (to the Marsh's Mock Cafe):
I'm doing stand-up again. SAGE, a nice-sounding UC Berkeley mentorship program, asked me to do a $50/head fundraiser on the 26th, so between now and then I'm hitting area open mics (info may be out-of-date). Last night I did the Brainwash, to no acclaim but some guffaws. Let me know if you want to come along sometime.
People at the Brainwash last night (at least, the first 10 or so) made surprisingly funny. Has the scene gotten better since I withdrew last year?
# 09 May 2004, 08:26AM: You're Not Scottish, Stop Macking On Me: Friday and Saturday had comedy stuff. Evidently people do not know who Robert Rubin is. Also, evidently there are unfunny male comics who will awkwardly try to pick up any given non-white-haired woman, regardless of her obvious bemusement. Pretty tacky.
# 09 May 2004, 09:03AM: The Apple Cobbler's Children:
My mother taught me frugality in buying shoes -- twenty dollars per pair, tops. However, yesterday I paid fifty dollars for a pair of black flats (work/comedy shoes). I required more than one reassurance from my shopping companion that I had not paid too much.
Why do shoe stores and departments fill their women's shelves with frippery? Ribbons, straps, buckles, and I'm not even going to start with heels. Heels -- argh! OK, I started on heels. Freaking prescriptions for foot pain.
I just want durable, comfortable shoes to wear to work and gigs that will go with lots of outfits, that don't require dead animals for their material, and I don't want to pay more than thirty-five dollars per pair. Unreasonable? Suggestions? Update, May 10: Leonard's extended family agrees that it's worth it to pay extra for quality.
Also, I forgot to mention yesterday that I also prefer shoes made in countries that have actual labor standards. Man, I'm demanding.
# 10 May 2004, 04:36PM: Atari Bihari Vajpayee: A little joke. Anyway, Slate covers India's elections so I don't have to watch Namaste America and blink through the Hindi.
# 11 May 2004, 11:54AM: Probably No Connection:
Over the past three days, I met The Poor Man and The Claw, and got a free "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" mug as a "thanks for taking pledge calls" raffle prize from KQED. Also, I had a dream involving the birth of a baby and a snake.
Leonard cooks awesomely. Caesar salad, pesto, pastries, cookies. Maybe he should open a tiny illegal restaurant inside his house. How hip would that be?
# 11 May 2004, 08:05PM: Silly Word Munging:
Will update Spam As Folk Art with reader submissions soon, really.
Today I can't even compliment myself with the epithet of hack. Maybe tomorrow.
# 12 May 2004, 04:32PM: Again, Free Bagels: Today my seat neighbor during the KQED pledge drive professed to have gone to school with one R. Kelly (some singer). He also flirted with women who called to pledge their support. Well, that's one way to avoid the singles bars.
# 13 May 2004, 09:55AM GMT+5:30: Media Revue:
All three of these bits of media experience have something to do with the Middle East! And I didn't even intend it.
Last night's Enterprise provoked even more US/Middle East Allegory babble in me. The sphere-builders are... Ahmad Chalabi! No, the neocons! Ahmad Chalabi is the leader of the Reptilians. No, the reptilian is Prince Bandar! Tucker is Ted Olson! And the Council is... OPEC? a "Mirror, Mirror" UN?
The Council seems really legitimate as a government to everyone in it except the Reptilians, which I guess makes the Reptilians like the US. Are the Insectoids Britain?
Also, Enterprise pulled off a surprisingly assertive mix of heavy exposition, lighthearted banter, trippy sci-fi sets, and suspenseful plot. Good stuff.
West Wing broke my heart in "Gaza." The West Wing thesis on Israel/Palestine resembles Everything Is Ruined's:
The new NSC character, I like. Will Bailey's impatience with nuance discussions, not so much. The huge expository dialogue chunks, a crazed hive-mind talking to itself, I liked. How else to think about the Middle Eastern ourobouros?
Reading Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam by Daniel Dennett, Jr. From the Introduction:
"Forget it Jake, it's Jerusalem." Jerusalem is Chinatown. There's nothing you can do. It's a place where there is no right answer. You ask Jake what he did in Chinatown, and he says, "As little as possible." (That's also what he murmurs to himself at the very end of the movie.) "Chinatown" means basically what Heart of Darkness means for Conrad: it's the dark place where every action is a mistake.
...Nevertheless, all the contributions to the literature of Muslim taxation within the last forty years have been monographic in character and limited in area to particular provinces of the Arab Empire, with the result that there is no single work to which a student who might be interested in the general problem to turn; and if he attempts to master the secondary literature, he will discover so many conflicting data and opinions that his confusion will be increased rather than resolved. This book, therefore, attempts to present a broad view of the system of taxation as it existed in East and West throughout the lands once subject to the Persians and the Greeks, and it is based on all the evidence the writer has been able to discover. It is not, however, a synthesis of the latest opinion, for, as the reader will presently discover, I have views of my own and an axe to grind....
# 13 May 2004, 10:50AM: THIS is India Shining: The Congress party won the Indian elections, defeating the "Anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat? What anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat?" BJP. All right! I hope this portends badly for radical religious parties elsewhere as well. I'm talking to you, Likud.
# 13 May 2004, 07:56PM: What's Wrong?:
I am volunteering. I am reading tax history to figure out whether I want to study that sort of thing in graduate school. I am taking care of my fish. I am editing my wardrobe and home. I am preparing for the stand-up gig. I am trying to be a good friend and girlfriend. I am trying to do everything right!
Joe and I will hang out, I'll sleep, it will be better in the morning. It always is.
# 14 May 2004, 09:24AM: Better:
Joe gave good advice, and I slept off the despair. Well, most of it.
This morning, at the Powell Street BART station, three different musicians set up shop too near each other. One Asian stringed instrument, one cello, one recorder. Not a pleasant cacophony, but silly.
# 15 May 2004, 03:45PM: Another Obituary: Bill, my new grey goldfish, has also died. One day he was as lethargic as usual, perhaps a little frayed, the next he had passed away. I am going to leave Betty alone in the tank for a while.
# 17 May 2004, 01:12PM: The Underground Sound: Fortune has gifted me with a new work computer, one that makes it much easier to listen to audio streams. I have discovered the usually-rocking college station KSCU. Recommended!
# 17 May 2004, 02:34PM GMT+5:30: Death, Taxes, And Sumana Writing About Taxes:
Reading Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam. Dennett writes clearly and entertainingly, even though it's a university press book with a tiny audience. Good job! Also, he amuses me by saying, "Let us examine the Byzantine tax system of Syria" and actually meaning "Byzantine."
The Arab Empire experienced, of course, some of the same problems that the modern US and modern Israel have. If you use reduced taxes as an incentive for some behavior (such as conversion to Islam or investment in state and municipal bonds), then people will do that and your tax receipts will go down. If you reduce the incentive, then the interest group you have just created will grumble or rebel. If you tax everyone else more heavily to make up the difference, you're fomenting class war. If you try to make up the difference with deficit spending or spending cuts, you might lose credibility, or even the ability to govern effectively. (You can only cut police and military spending so much!)
Finally, from Waltman's Political Origins of the U.S. Income Tax:
Every action has an opportunity cost. If you are sleeping, you can't be writing, and if you are sleeping or writing the Great Customer Service Novel then you cannot be hyping your new one-woman show.
If we accord the income tax a high place in the patheon of bequests from the Progressive era, we must sadly note it is a legacy bequeathed only by racism. Were it not for the Democratic leadership in Congress being in the hands of those who wanted to spare the common man much of the taxes he bore in 1913, we would not have had the progressive income tax. But who were these economic humanists Ratner and others have praised? Kitchin, Simmons, Underwood, Hull, Williams, Garner. Every one of them was from the South, and they were all guardians of white supremacy. In fact, even their homilies on taxes are laced with crude racist stories and jokes. When they turned to such issues as black soldiers being armed during World War I or antilynch laws, their venom knew few bounds. To be sure, some were worse racists than others, and to be sure it can be argued that had they deviated from the "party line", their replacements might have been worse. And it is almost certainly true that without their votes and leadership we would have had much more exploitative tax policies. Yet, it is a sad tradeoff. Progressive tax policies were bought with impediments to any progress along racial lines. Before we celebrate the virtues of our income tax therefore, a tear is in order for those to whom taxes were secondary.
# 17 May 2004, 04:54PM: Is Something Missing?:
An old Jon Carroll.The incomplete life is the only life. People who live in Paris do not live in Fiji. People who run successful businesses are unable to compose folk songs. If they quit to compose folk songs, they still can't spend all day every day windsurfing in St. Kitts.
# 18 May 2004, 01:52PM: Bobby Flay, Tina Fey, Liza Dei: Happy 34th birthday to Tina Fey!
# 18 May 2004, 04:34PM: Fascinating: If I am not careful, I will spend two hours reading Malcolm Gladwell's archives on Saturday Night Live, SUVs, khakis, zoning laws, corporate memoirs, what have you.
# 19 May 2004, 10:48AM: Articulation:
If a commentator decries the overuse of Reservists in the conflict in Iraq, and notes that the government has instituted stop-loss policies and extended Reservists' tours of duty, then other commentators often respond, what did they expect when they joined the Reserve? they are part of the military and they have to earn their pay.
J. Bradford DeLong articulates why the Reservists actually are getting a raw deal:
But the more important thing is that we have already reinstituted the draft--in a peculiar way. Reservists--who thought that they were standing ready to reinforce the regular army in a serious war while the general draft and total war mobilization got underway--have discovered that that's not their role. Their role is to be drafted at a ferocious rate precisely so that the government can fight its war in Iraq "on the cheap," without disturbing the lives of college students who might demonstrate and attract TV cameras.
# 20 May 2004, 10:19AM: Easily Swayed: On the one hand, this summer's stoner movie Harold and Kumar go to White Castle remakes and explicitly references Dude, Where's My Car?. On the other hand, it has an Indian. So maybe I will see it. Then again, I never did see American Chai, nor fillum star: the Peter Patel story.
# 20 May 2004, 10:39AM: Oh no: Reginald Zelnik, an awesome and wonderful Russian History professor, has died. A goddamn delivery truck backed into him on campus. He was so funny and smart. He taught the most detailed, insightful lectures. It took me half the semester to realize he didn't need notes. I miss him.
# 26 May 2004, 09:51AM: "Coming Out as a Human": Leonard's phrase for Real Live Preacher's announcement. "My name is Gordon Atkinson. I live in San Antonio, Texas, and I'm the pastor of Covenant Baptist Church."
# 27 May 2004, 12:48PM: She Said Yes:
"Told that a banner would take two days to print, Mike grabbed some colored file folders and improvised a simple sign. The next day, as he crossed the stage, he kneeled and held it up for the entire Greek Theatre audience to see: "MARRY ME Jackey!!!"
Of course, I am so enlightened that I find the man's burden/privilege of proposal oh-so-obsolete. I prefer continuing, mutual discussion as a means to such huge and momentous decisions. Like the SALT talks.
But these stories still make me sniff.
# 30 May 2004, 11:38AM GMT+5:30: Books:
Reading The Greedy Hand by Amity Shlaes, a WSJ writer with whom I vastly disagree, which means John might like it.
Also reading James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, in which Jesus Christ's sister is born to a Jewish bachelor in Atlantic City in 1974. James Morrow loves probing ethical systems and religions in the context of fantasy. I'm sure tonight I'll dream of a booming voice directing me to render unto Him what is Caesar's.
# 01 Jun 2004, 04:27PM: Life, Drugs, And:
On Wednesday I performed stand-up comedy for a SAGE Scholars graduation ceremony/fundraiser. I did okay. They loved the immigrant jokes, not so much the satirical opening (clichéd quotes and axioms). I'd say that no one reads Yeats anymore, except lots of people in the blogosphere have the same poem on our minds: The Second Coming. Maybe we grope for meaning and find this bit of Yeats, as after the 2001 terrorist attacks we found Try to Praise the Mutilated World.
On Thursday I went to Cobb's and viewed Nick Leonard, Joe Klocek, and Brian Regan. As per usual (how quickly I forget!), the openers were funnier than the headliner. Mr. Regan has a gift for caricature, and he resembles Alton Brown, but I only laughed maybe 20 times in the hour he performed. That's 40 straight-faced minutes. Well, one man's meat.
Cobb's brands its Cosmopolitan (a mixed alcoholic drink) as "The Cobbsmopolitan". Next: Cobb salad, corn on the Cobb, a male swan as the mascot.
On Friday I met Leonard's old friends from the Clark campaign over dinner at Pomelo, which had more vegetarian entreés in my recollection than on the menu. The week had left me a bit jaundiced, but they handled my bitterness with good grace. I drank sake.
On Saturday Leonard and I left for Bakersfield to visit the Richardson/Whitney clan. Leonard's grandfather seems stable, which is good. I got to see A Day Without a Mexican, which sprawled but had several nice touches.
"Boomers," the Bakersfield minigolf/arcade, has a Disney-branded Dance Dance Revolution machine. Among other tunes, it plays "M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E" and "Macho Duck," a "Macho Man" derivative starring Donald Duck. Creepy.
Leonard and I came back to San Francisco, visiting some friends in Mountain View (evidently not a total wasteland) along the way. I checked on Betty, my one surviving goldfish. She seems fine. I wish she would poop in my presence so I could verify that her whole digestive system is working, but you take what you can get.
Today I am listening to KSCU and answering customer email. The Religious Policeman has posted several new items. I should get more tea. This week I will actually write that article I've been postponing for months. Life is okay.
# 03 Jun 2004, 05:06PM: Poor Akshay!: From 9 million to 265 to 2. The winning word: autochthonous. Second place: Akshay Buddiga, who fainted but recovered to spell "alopecoid" perfectly. I hope he is all right.
# 04 Jun 2004, 08:33AM: I Was Also Right About Carbs:
Bruce Sterling said,
What is their job? Their job is to monitor the party and see if enthusiasm is moving into an area of untoward radicalism. So they don't do anything blatant. What they do is stage small but effective party spoiling scenes.I have plants at the party. Who are there secretly and sort of organized with one another. And they aren't really made clear to the party members that they are there at all. They are covertly there. They are covertly organized. They have secret handshakes and recognition symbols.
I remember, when I was very young, I thought a similar scheme could stop the stock market from crashing or boiling over. A cadre would buy when everyone else was selling, and sell when everyone else was buying. People told me that such a scheme was unnecessary, since markets self-correct and investors act like that anyway. Now I believe that the pool of investors does not contain enough contrarians, and that probably buyers-in to my childhood fantasy would do well by doing good.
# 04 Jun 2004, 09:38AM: "Scum-Sucking Bottom Feeders":
The writer of a letter to the editor used this epithet, which doesn't quite work, in my view.
Jon Stewart has had the hilarious David Cross and the "Talking Points Memorized" Thomas Friedman on The Daily Show this week. Cross (who plays Tobias Funke on Arrested Development (Fox renewed it for another season! Yay!)) persuaded me to buy his CDs. Friedman whipped out his "more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria" message, leading Stewart to write down a recipe for "Thomas Friedman's Democracy Brownies". As Belle Waring said, "More federal than Syria? Frickin’ awesome!"
Is Syria's government really that monolithic? I mean, when I think "Syria", I don't think federalism or lack thereof is really the main problem. But what do I know, I majored in political science.
Speaking of Crooked Timber: these eminently contrarian, geeky people skewer all sorts of conventional wisdoms!
I will accept "chalk and cheese" as a valid metaphor.... Readers of a literary bent might have a go with "lightning and a lightning bug", but I've never really got it to work.... Well, a brighter shade of brown.
...apples and oranges are both fruits, both about the same size, cost about the same and have similar nutritional value. They're about the most eminently comparable things I can think of....
In taxation news: I walked through a corridor at work. Two coworkers occupied it, leaning against the walls while conversing and forming a narrow meniscus for passers-by. As I negotiated my way, one joked that I would have to "pay the toll". Most of the time, someone telling me that is a boyfriend asking me to kiss him, so I blushed bright red.
# 04 Jun 2004, 02:44PM: How Could I Have Missed This?:
Josh Kornbluth interviews Richard Yancey (Love And Taxes monologuist and Confessions ex-tax-collector, respectively).
I guess the answer is that I missed it because I only bothered to register at the Washington Post two weeks ago.
# 04 Jun 2004, 09:06PM: Annals of Compassion and Genius:
I was unduly cold and harsh to a customer today. I thought something like "why can't these people follow directions? why do they do any old thing and then whine that they didn't get the thing they wanted?" and snapped and wrote a snappish, condescending reply to someone who, as it turns out, was right, right, right, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
My boss found out and wrote me a gentle rebuke.
I thought I was going to have a performance evaluation today. I couldn't really concentrate on my work this afternoon, as the meeting got postponed, from 1 to 1:10 to 2:30 or "whenever the room goes free" to Monday morning. So now it will happen while my uncharacteristic and wholly without-basis outburst is fresh in everyone's mind.
Aren't I clever.
# 08 Jun 2004, 04:50PM: I Am A Nut:
I'm now basically stage-managing Heather Gold's show, "I Look Like An Egg, But I Identify As A Cookie". It'll run Sundays, June 6th through July 18th. Playgoers indeed receive fresh cookies at the end of each performance. You see, she bakes onstage, and the cooking is a metaphor. And every night is different, because she talks with different special guests as they stir and chop and so on. A neat concept, implemented well.
And there's music! And lighting changes! That's me.
# 09 Jun 2004, 03:50PM: Here Baby, There Mama, Everywhere Daddy Daddy: Leonard and I gave each other buzz-cut haircuts on Sunday. I have never worn my hair this short before. I wonder whether my scalp will darken.
# 09 Jun 2004, 03:52PM: "You're as manly as the manliest tree on the Isle of Man.": One of the best Five-Minute Enterprises yet: Hatchery.
# 11 Jun 2004, 09:29AM: "Very Bad News": Matthew Yglesias tries to spend his mother's last days with her. My condolences to him.
# 14 Jun 2004, 10:03PM: Post-Weekend Update:
My performance evaluation went fine. Evidently I am doing a very good job but we still have ideas for goals and improvements.
My haircut makes me look like Anjali from Alison Bechdel's strip.
On Wednesday evening a guy harrassed me on the street in my neighborhood. I responded calmly and prudently but he unnerved me; this hasn't happened to me before in my neighborhood. Among his blithering I heard him ask whether I was Iraqi. Real reassuring.
I left work early on Friday to talk about tax history with a Berkeley professor and then to see Mike Daisey. Both rewarding. Then I basically spent the whole weekend working on Heather's show. No major mistakes on my part - huzzah! I'd forgotten how tedious and nerve-wracking shows can be. No offense, Heather.
# 16 Jun 2004, 10:07AM: Listening To: Outside the Inbox, songs based on spam subject lines.
# 17 Jun 2004, 10:08AM GMT+5:30: Also We Were Eating Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto On Arugula: This morning on BART, the person next to me was reading the same issue of Smithsonian as I was.
# 17 Jun 2004, 05:02PM: Just Two Months Early For Independence Day: Two, two, two articles in today's Salon feature India or Indian-Americans. Philip Robertson, Salon's constantly-in-danger Iraq correspondent, profiles Sudip Bose, who is basically the Army's Dr. Bashir. (If only we had Sisko and Kira running this station, instead of Section 31.) And Charles Taylor (not the dictator) (I think) adores some epic cheese Hindi flick, noting in passing that Shahrukh Khan (whom you may recall from every Hindi movie since 1998) "sometimes seems the offspring of John Stamos and Jerry Lewis."
# 18 Jun 2004, 03:20PM: Fun And Tempting:
Fun. Dangerous, addictive, lose-track-of-time fun. Update: Also, camels.
# 18 Jun 2004, 04:56PM: Copy, Paste, Delete, Copy, Paste, Delete-No-Wait...: I can only stand this incredibly tedious task because I am listening to Do You Measure Up and the like. Also, I'm drinking my second cup of coffee of the day. I ordinarily drink coffee maybe once a month, while out with friends. Coffee, wine, and beer all taste awful. Another reason to go teetotal.
# 18 Jun 2004, 06:14PM: Men In Black And Blue:
Often, if I compliment a woman on her couture, she responds either with a compliment on my clothes or with a description of the item's provenance and bargain-basement price (e.g., "I got it while I was in [country], they use such great colors and textures there, and it only cost [amount]"). Both men and women sometimes respond to compliments with self-deprecation, but until yesterday I'd only seen women immediately, reflexively tell me how much they paid and where.
Yesterday, while waiting for a light to change, I admired a stranger's pleated/ruffled short-sleeved button-down shirt. It reminded me of Adam Parrish. I told him it was snazzy.
"Oh, thanks! Thriftmart, in the Mission, maybe six bucks."
We walked across Fourth Street, the crowd separating us, as I burst into guffaws.
# 22 Jun 2004, 04:30PM: Grumpy:
They should call it "allGoode Organic PuriTea with Peppermint, Red Clover, and Not Nearly Enough Licorice."
I've been sending some letters to soldiers via Books For Soldiers. Sample post: "My unit is deployed again. We have been on the road for the past three years and there are not many countries we havent been to over here. I hope that I can get some support for us. We are a group of 78 Marines. WE have access to DVD players, CD players, and a microwave. Dont have a lot of books or movies though."
I hope they enjoy my meanderings about public transit and my fish. Just bought some stamps, which didn't cheer me up as much as usual. Bah!
# 23 Jun 2004, 11:46AM: When I Get Depressed I Read Beliefnet:
Christianity (sort of) in Left Behind and Harry Potter.
While everything is pre-ordained in Left Behind, Dumbledore explicitly tells Harry that even though he carries some of the essence of Voldemort in him, he has the power to do good because he has the power of choice.
In that sense, despite their similarities, at their hearts the two series are different in a fundamental but not obvious way. Left Behind is fatalistic; Harry Potter sees outcomes determined by individual actions. Both provide a roadmap for how to live a good life, but in one case the key is morality, and in the other it is faith.
Finally, they both have a theology. It's not, as one might expect, that Left Behind is Christian and Harry Potter pagan, but rather that Left Behind is Protestant and Harry Potter is Catholic. One of the chief theological arguments between Catholics and Protestants has been over whether salvation is earned through faith or by good works. In Left Behind, the only thing that matters is faith in Jesus. Steele explains that church leaders had led so many people astray because they merely "expected them to lead a good life, to do the best they could, to think of others, to be kind, to live in peace. It sounded so good, and yet it was so wrong. How far from the mark!"
# 23 Jun 2004, 08:44PM: America's Moving Adventure: Leonard just moved slightly further from my apartment. It will now be slightly harder to visit him for dinner four nights a week.
# 28 Jun 2004, 08:09PM: Retroactive Continuity: Last night's show featured Carol Queen and Betty Dodson. Wow! I could pretend I named my fish after Betty Dodson.
# 29 Jun 2004, 07:15PM: I Could Tell You Stories, Wait, They'd Be Boring: This weekend Heather et al. take a break from the show, which will help my mental health significantly. Unfortunately, I cannot use that long weekend to prepare for my comedy performance tomorrow, because it's tomorrow. Between now and 8ish pm tomorrow, I have to come up with and polish four minutes of material for a contest of sorts at the SF Comedy Club. Come if you'd like.
# 30 Jun 2004, 01:03PM: "The government should pay for goods and services in wishes and fairy dust.": We should try not to spend much more than we earn, as people, as businesses, as governments. Note to Leonard: mentions agriculture subsidies!
# 02 Jul 2004, 09:47AM: Everybody's Working, Till The Weekend:
Jade and her friend Ari witnessed me at the SF Comedy Club on Wednesday night. I did pretty well but didn't win any prizes. At least some people got the "I am Indian, but I'm not just here for JavaOne" joke.
Last night Mr. and Mrs. Minutillo came to Leonard's for dinner and entertainment. Leonard and Steve found that the opening of "Stairway to Heaven" resembles a portion of Zelda game music ("Do you wish to continue?"), and Leonard used a small grill much like Andrew Northrup's.
Also, while accompanying the Minutillos on the Muni trolley, I picked up a lost cell phone that I gave back to its owner today. It would have been sort of fun to do the sitcom detective thing, where you call people off the speed-dial to track down the owner and/or make dates and announcements to shock and baffle the owner and her friends. But instead I just met up with her in front of the Old Navy this morning for the handoff. No flowers.
No play this weekend. What, a weekend to myself?
# 02 Jul 2004, 10:16AM: Also Includes "Really quick, is God on America's side?":
Sharpton, with whom I often disagree: "...George Bush has so let down what conservative -- I remember when conservatives were respectable."
In the same debate, Kerry: "...is this president a legitimate Republican or conservative? Because there's nothing conservative about driving deficits up as far as the eye can see.
There's nothing conservative about trampling on the line of division between church and state in America.
There is nothing conservative about letting your attorney general trample on civil liberties and civil rights, and be twice cited by his own inspector general for doing so...."
# 02 Jul 2004, 10:21AM: Wow, Sense!: Seems to me that Santa Clara county is doing the right thing vis-a-vis Cary Verse's re-registration. If your neighbors chase you from their community everywhere you try to live, re-registering (including your motel's renumbering of its rooms) can slip through the cracks.
# 06 Jul 2004, 07:56PM:
My grandmother has died. She was 85 years old and died of old age, basically, and was in pain for some time before her death. I did not know her very well (she spoke only Kannada, which I have never spoken well), but she was my father's mother and my last surviving grandparent, and now I feel a little less moored in the world.
My grandmother stayed with my family just after we had moved to California, to an ugly box house in the grungier suburbs of north Stockton. I remember that the day we arrived, my parents left with my sister to register her for school. I didn't know where they were going or when they would be back, and I broke into tears and my grandmother hugged and comforted me in her lap. She smoothed my hair and said reassuring things in her language, and helped me not feel so bad.
That was a tough time for my family - close quarters, a harsh landlord, a new state, worse schools, and of course having to take care of my grandmother. Almost all my memories from that year are bad. But I remember that Ajji was patient and kind. She helped cure my pain, and now her pain has ended, and for that I am grateful.
# 07 Jul 2004, 10:27AM: Roots and Canberries: I add fake ground beef to pasta or mixed-veggie dishes for the burst of protein. "You're wasting meat by adding it randomly as filler."
# 07 Jul 2004, 10:42AM GMT+5:30: Did You Mean: C.S. Lewis or Philip Pullman?: I've read James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter and Bible Stories For Adults and now I'm reading Towing Jehovah. Like, say, Stephenson, he loves naming things, "Father Thomas Ockham" for one. Lots of great analogies: "A choral gurgling filled the air, as if the museum were honeycombed with defective storm drains." As for Towing Jehovah (which Leonard insists on singing to the tune "Waltzing Matilda") specifically, the World War II re-enactment subplot bores me, but I still like the main plot so far. On the whole, I like Morrow, and taught a very interesting short story he wrote in my sci-fi class. His Christian and ethical fantasy amuses me, even if it's uneven. The similarly themed stories in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others are consistently good. I want to read more by both.
# 07 Jul 2004, 10:49AM: "I'm tired of being Bob Dole's straight man.":
Clinton gave the inaugural Dole Lecture at the University of Kansas six weeks back. Lots of jokes (Clinton and Dole: vaudeville waiting to happen) and also many thoughtful passages.
Now, here's my take on where we are. I don't ask you to agree with me, but if you don't, ask yourself what you think. When our country was founded, the founding fathers said they pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor to an eternal mission. What was it? To form a more perfect union. Now, there are two or three ideas that are important there. I'll just mention two of them. One is the idea of union. The only reason you unite is because you need somebody else, right? The only purpose for having a union is that you can do more with somebody else than you can do all by yourself or with just your crowd. The second and equally important thing, which accounts for a lot of the fights I've had in my political life is our framers were essentially both deeply religious and deeply influenced by the scientific revolution, and the rationalism of the 18th century. They did not say form a perfect union. They said form a more perfect union. What does that mean? That means we will never be perfect, because there will always be problems as long as humans occupy the earth and because nobody is smart enough to have the whole truth. Now, you may not agree with that. You may believe some people do have the whole truth and therefore they have a right to impose that truth on everybody else. But that's not what the framers believed. They didn't say we're going to form a perfect union. They said our kids will be able to have a union more perfect than ours, and our grandchildren more perfect again and their grandchildren more perfect again and we will never achieve perfection. And so we set up this government that had both enough power to do what people needed to do to have a union and enough protection from power to guarantee that the government could never become the primary force in our lives, that people could pursue their private lives, their personal lives, build their families, say what was on their mind, worship God as they please or if they didn't please. That's the way it was set up.
# 07 Jul 2004, 11:06AM: Tasteless Sudan Joke Inside!:
Sepoy shows his students the truth about colonial administration - with a role-playing game! "Several came up to me afterwards and said that British rule in India came alive as the behemoth bureaucracy I had been describing all semester (SO MANY TAXES!, she said)."
The game-aversion of years dating a gamer is beginning to fade. Just the other night, during a Nathaniel/Shweta work party, I played and enjoyed Apples To Apples and Once Upon A Time (which I keep calling "Once Upon a Story"). During one round, I added a bit of color by referring to an "Upstairs/Downstairs" dichotomy inherent in all hierarchies, which of course let someone else interrupt my turn by playing the "Stairs" card. Also, after one horrifying plot development in which the women on an island killed off all the men, I nicknamed the genocidal females "the Gyneweed."
# 12 Jul 2004, 06:10PM: Party, etc.: Happy birthday to Leonard. He had a great party with acres of food. I really need to face up to the fact that Leonard enjoys homemaking more than I ever will. My parents predicted that I would need a husband who would cook and clean for me - maybe that is how I will have to spin it if Leonard and I get engaged.
# 13 Jul 2004, 12:51PM: Bliss:
An okay Dinosaur Comics reminds me that Bill Nye has a "consider the following" shtick. I spent many pleasant hours in front of Bill Nye the Science Guy.
One year of high school I had gym sixth period. The last month of the year was the swimming unit. I'd barely swim through the tests, shower, ride the bus home through a heat I didn't mind, and flop in front of the TV with some corporate sugar soda and watch Animaniacs, Wishbone, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. For some reason I remember having a towel on my head; maybe I showered at home. My mom was in India so she couldn't shoo me from the tube. After a few hours my dad would come home from his job at Caltrans and I would make him coffee. ("Making coffee": use the microwave to heat up a cup of milk, then stir in instant coffee. Only after high school did I realize that most people make coffee very differently.)
I remember those afternoon hours as perfect contentment, possibly the happiest hours I ever had in that house.
Maybe that is why I compulsively watch Good Eats; Alton Brown himself is sick of the comparisons with Bill Nye, but it's a reasonable comparison.
# 13 Jul 2004, 02:02PM: The Chart Does Not Lie: Make A Cost-Per-Wear Chart and embarrass yourself into wardrobe reasonableness!
# 13 Jul 2004, 05:44PM: You Already Read Achewood:
For future reference, here is a list of my favorite Achewood strips. Caution: some require context.
# 15 Jul 2004, 11:25AM: Caution: Dark Fantasy, Rambling, No Closure:
Jon Carroll, like me, is thinking about Ralph Nader.
I overheard David Talbot's phone call with Nader in the office a few days ago. As I see it, the cycle of marginalization and radicalization has gotten to Nader, just as it gets to kids who become martyrs to any cause. Rebels don't conform when you punish them, they rebel harder, especially if they don't have any stake in the stability of their world.
I made a dark joke to my cubicle neighbor: Nader as a suicide bomber, strapping dynamite to his chest and wading through the Democratic National Convention.
Later I watched The Daily Show at Leonard's. Jon Stewart interviewed Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. Unlike, say, "serious political reporter" Cokie Roberts, Jon Stewart debunked the stupid "terrorism in Madrid changed the outcome of the Spanish elections" claim. (Polls of the Spanish, both before and after the attacks, favored the challenger. The incumbent just made it worse by trying to blame it on the Basque separatists.) And I asked aloud, "Why is Jon Stewart the only responsible journalist?" He is a FAKE NEWSMAN! I have to count on a comedian to hold up the standards of journalism because most of the press is on a fawning break? Aaron Swartz continues my train of thought.
And I wished so hard that Abu Ghraib and the September 11th attacks were a dream. I would wake up and it would be November 7, 2000. Even though that would mean Leonard would be a dream too.
Instead last night I dreamt that we had a second Civil War, and some group of fighters ambushed my train. They shot me and I tried to shoot back, and I died crying, "I want to live!"
People who actually care what the rules say always seem silly and irrelevant to powerful bullies. It makes us mad when you call us silly. "That's why I'm starting an antiwar militia."
# 19 Jul 2004, 07:59AM: Must Be Not Allergic To Gluten: I'm looking for a backup stage manager to train for "I Look Like An Egg, But I Identify As A Cookie", the show I'm stage-managing. Heather is extending the run and I may not be available for every show. If you like tech/scut backstage work, contact me.
# 19 Jul 2004, 10:02AM: Reassurance:
Sometimes I think it's useless to write boring letters to soldiers I've never met; ginmar reassures me.
Update: one of them wrote me back!
# 19 Jul 2004, 11:07AM: Full Faith and Credit Cards:
I got to see Steve and Alice this weekend. Man, their ceremony will be three and a half hours (including the reception) and I am going to cry the whole time.
Related: a coworker's planning on getting married in Las Vegas. Given that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," do other states recognize Vegas weddings?
# 19 Jul 2004, 12:30PM: A Friendly Request:
People of the world! If you are not resourceful, or if you plan on being a nuisance in some other way, please do not interact with me today. As Alice said in a slightly different context, in response to "Do you need a hug?": "No, I need a shotgun."
OK, I am better, partially because I am wearing a toothpastefordinner shirt ("if I had a dollar for every time I had sixty cents, I would be Canada", black on gold).
# 20 Jul 2004, 08:51AM: Tigers and Lions:
My neighbor and coworker Susan McCarthy has a new book out on how animals learn. Many funny examples.
As The Religious Policeman illustrates in his Saudi weblog, the Saudi royal family needs some reform. My suggestion: switch the House of Saud with the House of Windsor! The British royal family basically has nothing to do and tends to send its members to good schools and so on; they'd love to have a project. Could they really do a worse job than the House of Saud? And then the Saudi royals could romp around Britain doing no harm and scandalizing the tabloids. There is no way this plan could possibly fail!
# 20 Jul 2004, 05:34PM: Fast Food Alien Nation:
My parents lived in India for decades before emigrating to the US. We ate dinner at home (where I never ate enough for my mother's liking) almost every night, and the only friends who had us over for dinner were also Indian. As my sister and I grew older and ate outside the house more often, we realized that my parents ate almost nothing but Indian food. My sister, while at UC San Diego, took us out to a lovely Thai restaurant and expressed her frustration that my mother wouldn't try anything new, even though the Thai dishes we ordered really resembled Indian food.
When we visited our parents, we ate Indian food alongside them. When they visited us, my mother brought a supply of her own food, and cooked, and we went to Indian restaurants. Once, when my sister worked in development for the YMCA, she invited them to a fundraising dinner. Most vegetarians would have the pasta dish, but my mother couldn't eat that, so my sister arranged for a special dish of plain grilled vegetables. But someone else took it, and my mother went hungry.
They couldn't stand American food, and wouldn't try it. Except for franchise food. Even with their bad teeth and cautious palates, I guess they could stand the consistent softness of bland McDonald's hotcakes and Taco Bell bean-and-cheese burritos and vegetarian Subway sandwiches. And they are comforting and seductive in their own way.
When we lived in Stockton, we lived near a strip mall with a laundromat. Before we got a washer and dryer, we used to go there to wash the clothes every three weeks or so, and my mom would give my sister and me money to get Taco Bell dinners a few storefronts away. Oh, the freedom of walking to the Fancy Restaurant and ordering my food myself with money in my own hand!
The other strip mall near our house had a Subway we used, and a Carl's Jr where I had secret meetings with my first real boyfriend.
Then I realized what I'd been putting into my body - sodium, fat, and junk calories practically devoid of taste and nutrition - and stopped. I have these tender memories of fast-food franchises, which I could bloom like yeast in water by going into any one of thousands across the land, but now that I know how awful they are I can't ever go there again.
Last week, before the show, I sent a volunteer to get me takeout from the yummy but expensive Cortez downstairs. The volunteer learned that they won't do takeout (er, we're renting a room from the hotel, so it's basically room service, which you DO, argh). She left and returned with a toasted Quizno's sub of mushrooms and tomatoes and such a yummy tasty crust. So tasty! I ate it disgracefully. I'll have to find a locally owned independent deli that replicates that sandwich. It was chain food, but at least I was eating. That should please my mom.
# 21 Jul 2004, 10:52AM: Buy Me Some Pesto and Camembert: Tonight I go to a baseball game, courtesy of a Salon vendor. I think I last went to a baseball game when I was seven. (Was I the only girl on that T-ball team? I recall so.) I quizzed my coworkers on what to expect, what to wear, what to bring: "tell me of your earth past-time." Maybe I will catch something! A cold, probably.
# 21 Jul 2004, 03:47PM: Happy Greek Face, Frowny Greek Face:
Over the last few years, I've increased my theatre-going quite a bit. I was always in community and school productions up through the freshman year of high school, and now that I have disposable income again I'm back into live theater. I saw:
Tomorrow night I'm going to see Wasting Your Breath, the Mike Daisey memoir workshop performance. Only five bucks. Wow, something I might have been able to see while in college, except I was busy dating the wrong guy, swinging my moods, and generally being a dope.
Surprise, surprise, I only go and spend money to see shows I'm likely to enjoy.
# 22 Jul 2004, 12:32PM: You (Don't) Make The Call!:
Via Cyrus Farivar: "France Outsources, Senegal Calls". This is the true reason to colonise a country: you can use it for call centers a century later! I expect to see France using Cambodia, Spain using Mexico, and Portugal using Brazil any time now.
Years ago, I remember thinking the AOL call center in Omaha was a little weird. Ha!
# 23 Jul 2004, 02:51PM: My Name is Say and I'm Here to -- Wait, No:
Joe and I saw Mike Daisey's show Wasting Your Breath last night. I loved it. I also got to hang out with Mike and Jean-Michele Gregory for an hour after the show. Fun! We swapped tales of stage-management disaster, and it tickled me that he'd read my article about outsourcing. I also got to meet Johnny Steele, a quite funny and intelligent comedian (thanks for the hookup, Joe!). We talked a tiny bit about how to do non-autobiographical one-person shows. How do you frame a solo performance that is not "I was such a dope in college" nor just 90 minutes of jokes? In Continental Divide, characters mention that, in politics, people judge you on your worst mistake. I'm not ready to share my deepest regrets with an audience. What else do I have to share? I love the power of being onstage, but I don't burn with a message to share. Perhaps anecdotes.
I may go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival this weekend. Bah that Caltrain, which has a station in Gilroy, doesn't run trains there on the weekend.
# 23 Jul 2004, 06:30PM: Taken Out To A Ball Game: The San Francisco Giants lost to the San Diego Padres, 7-1. However, SBC Park ("Some Big Company", as an acquaintance quipped) has many amenities and my fellow game-watchers refrained from excessive rowdiness. A pleasant experience that I would undergo again.
# 26 Jul 2004, 06:44PM: Will Johnny Control?:
Didn't get to see Johnny Steele because his show sold out. Went to the Marsh instead and saw a showcase. Some pretty good stuff, one or two "you are embarrassing please leave please" comics, and then the superlative Will Franken. He was meta. He was spot-on. He was amazing, fantastic, hilarious, paralyzed me with laughter, the best comic I have seen in a year if not ever. Just wow.
Zack and I saw Control Room and really enjoyed it. Of course, when you make a documentary interviewing articulate reporters and spokespeople, you'll get lots of great quotes. Lieutenant Rushing, the military spokesman, really strikes the viewer with his combination of thoughtful curiosity and dedication to his mission. Provocative, counterintuitive, and insightful statements and questions fill the movie; I actually sat on the edge of my seat for much of the film.
Other movies I really want to see: Flavors, Garden State, Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle.
I can't recommend the Gilroy Garlic Festival; too many booths selling things, not enough crafts, activities, exhibitions, and rides. Maybe I'd prefer a county fair. Certainly I'd prefer the train to driving. Also: remember sunscreen, hats, and bottled water when traveling to the heartland in summer!
# 27 Jul 2004, 07:00PM: Argh: "Chasing Liberty" and "First Daughter" and "The Prince & Me" are THE SAME MOVIE.
# 29 Jul 2004, 11:26AM: Sci-Follywood:
A Fox News article on politics in sci-fi blockbuster movies quotes me, a sci-fi enthusiast. I get two sentences, probably the least interesting paragraph I said in that interview. More interesting points I made:
Both conservatives and liberals used to care about government barging in on people's privacy and freedom ("civil liberties"). Washington Republicans do not care about this any more (yet another way they are not really conservatives) and have forfeited this issue to liberals.
People care about a lot of political issues that never make it into Hollywood blockbusters because Hollywood blockbusters exist to make money, not to channel or poll political views. That is what polls are for. Polls would get very different responses if you charged $10 to answer a poll, or only polled people who think Will Smith is cute.
Many, if not most sci-fi and fantasy stories feature a team of protagonists who defeat the villain. Alliances are the answer, a lesson the Bush administration would do well to learn.
# 30 Jul 2004, 06:39PM: I Miss Retail Stories: Conspiracy or alien books, this person wants. Perhaps he would like some pseudohistory, or perhaps he is just open-minded.
# 04 Aug 2004, 10:24AM: Morose: One of my Salon colleagues has left for a poetry fellowship. I miss him. It's like a friend moving away.
# 04 Aug 2004, 10:49AM: Lately:
I took Caltrain from Millbrae to Mountain View and then back north to 22nd street. How very comfortable and cheap (about $3 one-way), even if there aren't enough maps and schedules posted at some stations.
I ate a cheap and quite palatable plate of rice and beans at Radio Habana, on Valencia near 23rd street. Very intimate, with outstanding and eclectic decor.
I visited the Odeon Bar at Mission and Valencia and caught the last half of Outfoxed (relatively fun), watched Will Franken perform (still funny, if not as supernaturally funny as when I saw him first), and participated in the Ask Dr. Hal question-and-answer show. You should do Ask Dr. Hal at least once.
I discussed housing with a cabdriver. He asked me what I thought of his moving to Reno. I said it depended on what he wanted to do with his life. He said he wanted to own a home. I suggested that lots of people have the same idea as he does, so perhaps if he is going to move and buy a house there, he should do it soon.
I vegged out at Leonard's place and we watched around ten episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Such awesome stuff. Two separate minor characters present critiques of the Federation. One Maquis member tells us that the Federation can't accept that anyone would want to secede; like the Borg, the Federation exists to assimilate. A protestor tells vacationers that they cannot afford their complacence and decadence, since the Federation is under attack. Interesting stuff in both cases. (Yes, Nandini, I know it is just a TV show.)
Last night Leonard and I played along to College Jeopardy! on the teevee. You know, I can't recall any time that I have actually enjoyed watching Jeopardy! with someone else more. I actually don't mind when I get something wrong and he gets it right, and I hardly gloat when the reverse happens. I'm just proud of him for knowing so much. This must be what it is like to have "friendly competition."
# 05 Aug 2004, 11:07AM: Reasoned Persuasion:
The other day I conversed, very politely, with a Nader supporter and did my tiny bit to persuade someone who did not wish to be persuaded. I'm an idealist and a pragmatist both, as is Sepoy. He's taking two weeks off to go register voters in Ohio, a swing state.
Lately it seems my address proves a handicap in actually working towards my political goals. And I'm not just talking about my letters to soldiers overseas, where I gloomily predict that the recipients will laugh at and reject any subtle or hesitant political statements I make because I'm "just another San Francisco liberal."
I live in California, which is not a swing state, so my vote won't make a difference in the presidential election. I live in San Francisco, so I can trust that on the local and federal levels my neighborhood's representatives will properly represent my desires. State referenda are basically the only way my vote will count this November.
So I have begun to fantasize about quitting my job, or taking a leave of absence, to go to Oregon or Pennsylvania or Nevada to live and work in the heart of Bush country, having conversations, persuading Republicans and centrists and wavering voters with Socratic questioning and my sheer goodness of will that Kerry is the better choice. It's grandiose, which has "grand" in it, and if there was a time this would be it....
# 06 Aug 2004, 02:11PM: Awesome: KSCU is playing an unreleased Moxy Fruvous tune from a 1990s demo tape.
# 11 Aug 2004, 05:43PM: Learning By Mistakes:
Salon offers various benefits for its subscribers, including free magazines. People who write to us about these magazines (usually "I never got it") sometimes forget the name of the periodical. A list of some magazines we have offered and some misnomers subscribers have given them (if I recall correctly):
At least one person believed that we had offered Lingua Franca, which we never have. Sorry, ma'am.
In other office comedy: the bathrooms on our floor stay locked, and all of us get keys. (Since I sold my car and don't have a locker of any sort, this significantly increases the number of keys on my keyring.) I've realized that a person walking towards the office exit with her keys already jingling in her hand makes for only one possible interpretation in the eyes of her colleagues, a rather overinformative one, so I have to remember to keep my keys in my pocket till I get out the door.
# 13 Aug 2004, 09:56AM: Airport:
My sister's in town! Last night Leonard made yummy mango stir-fry for us and we watched two episodes of The Daily Show (Nandini had been in Jon Stewart withdrawal).
I arrived early at SFO to pick her up and spent twenty minutes helping tourists use the BART ticket machines and figure out where to go. That was nice. Sadly, I did not have time to go to the West Field Road post office (open 6am-midnight EVERY DAY). I love that post office.
# 16 Aug 2004, 07:09PM: Bailey, Wavy Intonation, and Churches That Face Mecca:
Via Body and Soul, I found a wow wow wow article in the SF Chronicle about the possible Muslim roots of the American blues. Slavers captured African Muslims and brought them to North America, where they influenced our music. Sidebar: listen to the Muslim call to prayer and a snippet from some blues side-by-side and check out the similarities.
Lots of neat details, e.g., the melisma connection. Maybe now I know whom to blame for all those overly melismatic R&B singers -- the Muslims!
# 17 Aug 2004, 07:32PM: Happenings: My sister visited me. I went to Steve and Alice's commitment ceremony. I saw Will Franken's show. I bought a new tank cover for my goldfish. I ate Leonard's chowder. I worked. It's all a little fuzzy.
# 18 Aug 2004, 06:22PM GMT+5:30: Recurring: Just finished Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming. Yes, he writes the same book over and over, but it is a very good book.
# 19 Aug 2004, 10:42AM: Leonard: "Man, Jesus is so picky": Via Body And Soul, "Church Denies 8-Year-Old's Non-Wheat Communion". "An 8-year-old girl who has a rare digestive disorder and cannot consume wheat has had her first Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained none." Next up: the withering of the Fig Newton.
# 20 Aug 2004, 10:09AM: Alton Brown in SF: Well, not quite. He's in Palo Alto tomorrow and Santa Rosa tomorrow. Still, "Simon Super Chefs Live! Is a free, all-day culinary event featuring live cooking demonstrations and book signings by Alton Brown, as well as local chefs, wine seminars, and merchandise." Just so you know.
# 20 Aug 2004, 02:01PM: Week of Analogies:
Re: store membership/discount/loyalty cards: "I remember when going to the store was not like choosing a telephone company."
Re: "infatuation/falling in love" vs. "loving": "Falling in love is like the induction phase of Atkins."
# 20 Aug 2004, 05:25PM: I Am More Angry About This Than I Should Be: I just met Zephyr Teachout, Internet director for Howard Dean's campaign and ACT muckety-muck. Evidently she is wow. I just wish people had told me that she was wow while she was around instead of after she left.
# 21 Aug 2004, 08:46AM: Remnants: Leonard is in Bakersfield visiting his family. Today I help a friend of a friend move, and possibly see Not A Genuine Black Man at The Marsh. Next week I leave for a two-week vacation in Tokyo. I'm reading Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow. Sometimes I have to remind myself forcefully that my life is okay.
# 23 Aug 2004, 05:58PM: Ack, Nervous: I am not through my backlog of work, not by a long shot. I have to get done with it. I have to figure out whether to buy a Japan Rail tourist pass very soon. I hate the nervousness that eats my chest and stomach.
# 23 Aug 2004, 06:16PM: Doesn't Help: My colleague asks, "what do you have to be nervous about? I'm the one who's getting married!"
# 24 Aug 2004, 12:09PM: Sumanazilla Prepares: Much better. Mostly packed. Almost all the prep is done. Leonard will make me his awesome, addictive cheese puffs for the journey. I feel voracious just thinking of it. OK, I also need lunch.
# 24 Aug 2004, 04:40PM: Heck, I Worked On The Yearbook:
I got a compromise Japan Rail pass from JTB on Kearny at Market. Working downtown: your ticket to convenience!
Made copies of my passport's first page. I associate head-and-shoulders shots, especially grainy photocopied versions, with danger: reports of kidnapping, wanted/missing signs, obituaries, etc. Maybe if I'd had a more enjoyable school experience I'd associate mug shots with happy yearbook memories.
Coffee, Puzzlefighter, Spamusement!, and the general good customer service I've encountered recently (not mine, of course) cheer me. Leonard calms me down. Soon: cheese puffs. Everything will be okay once I get on the plane.
# 26 Aug 2004, 05:24PM: Public Transit Heaven: In Tokyo. At Steve's apartment. I simply cannot and will not chronicle weird English here - there is too much.
# 28 Aug 2004, 03:20AM: They Actually Do Say 'Arigato':
Surprisingly, I now know about twenty words of Japanese. Two or three "excuse me"s and "please"s each, "me," "one," "ticket," "you go ahead," and so on. Steve pushes me, gently, to do the polite meeting/parting rituals, and I feel awful when I can't do it right. These strangers are laughing at me! No, no, they are laughing politely to cover the awkwardness of the moment and to indicate friendliness. No, they are laughing at me because I am a fool.
It has been years since I went to a foreign country on my own and gibbered in a foreign language. I had forgotten that this particular embarrassment can bring me to tears. But things are getting better. I'm sure I'll be over it by the time i leave.
# 29 Aug 2004, 05:06AM: Life Lessons:
"Kawaii" is "cute." "Kowaii" is "scary." Take care!
If you are afraid of heights, don't go on the world's largest Ferris wheel. Just in general, "oh no, this action had this totally foreseeable consequence" feels very stupid.
You can try as hard as you like to not resemble the main characters in Lost In Translation, but a non-Japanese speaker will always have a hard time in Tokyo and feel angsty and alone.
# 31 Aug 2004, 01:20AM: Weird: Steve has only seen a few minutes of The Daily Show, ever, and hated it. And he thought Jon Stewart was a preening fratboy. Aieee!
# 07 Sep 2004, 04:31AM: Sumimasen, Gomen Nasai:
That's "Pardon me, I'm sorry" in Japanese. Probably the first phrases I learned here. Just back from Hiroshima, where I used them and felt them more strongly.
The typhoon cancelled my train and rerouted me so I didn't get to see some famous castle. But I am fine.
Leonard's grandfather Dalton has died. I grieve for him.
# 10 Sep 2004, 05:19AM: Fast Facts:
# 13 Sep 2004, 06:22PM: No Coins With Holes In The Middle?: Oh yeah, back in the US you tip at restaurants.
# 14 Sep 2004, 02:42PM: Imagine The Duet: I'll post about various depressing world events/phenomena soon. If anyone who reads this journal would care to cheer my day by posting some entertaining Zell Miller/Alan Keyes quotes in their own weblog, I'd be much obliged.
# 16 Sep 2004, 02:46PM: TV Misguide:
I flipped through TV recently.
The Oreck vacuum guy is badmouthing bagless vacuums (by extension this is a negative ad against Dyson) (extension! ha!) as "unsanitary" since dust comes back into the room when you dump the dirt receptacle into your trash. Infomercials hawk speed-reading software that would not materially increase my reading speed (as far as I can tell from the demo video) and a tri-wheeled Razor-like scooter that slaloms around the street. You don't have to pedal or push, just rock side-to-side to move the "Trikke" forward. How does it work? Handwaving about the conservation of angular momentum. The guy actually said "it's not really important for you or me to understand exactly how it works, just that it does." Gah!
Oprah's new Book is Pearl S. Buck's depressing and very good The Good Earth, which I almost typed as The Good Eats.
I watched about two minutes of Gilmore Girls and Leonard heard it from the next room, where he was reading Nabokov or Iain Pears or some thing, like he's Jeeves or something with those improving books. He asked whether I was watching a talk show. I tried to explain that aficionados of Gilmore Girls love the fast-paced and prolific dialogue, and ended up saying, "It's like The West Wing about life."
# 16 Sep 2004, 04:29PM: World Phenomena Worry Me:
Despite my pro-Democrat tendencies, I can see how US citizens who don't follow politics very closely could think the two major parties are "two houses both alike in dignity" and therefore write them off equally with "a plague on both your houses."
Topic for pondering: are Republicans more like the Montagues or the Capulets? Can you somehow shoehorn into this question the weird fiasco that leads the Illinois Republican Party to ask its members to vote for Alan Keyes instead of Barack Obama?
(Thanks, Sarah!)
Anyway. So I take a break from depressing US news to survey some depressing world news.
Russia. I remember when I thought "Putin might not be so bad; maybe they need economic improvements more/sooner than the freedom stuff." I am ashamed that I ever thought that. Russia under Tsar Vladimir is a ratchet, occasionally tightening and never loosening government control of public and private life. And it makes me sad that I wouldn't feel safe going back to that country that I liked a lot.
India and the subcontinent in general. The far-right network of Hindu fundie organizations, including the RSS (darn them for taking such a nice abbreviation), gets money from the Indian diaspora in, say, Silicon Valley. Oh, we're just collecting money for charities, for international friendship, that sort of thing, don't mind us. As maddening as it is to see anyone using religion as a pretext for violence and oppression, I find it even more maddening when it's my religion. (Yes, when I'm religious at all, I'm a Hindu.)
Meanwhile, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf has survived three assassination attempts in the past 12 months. He's one of those "pro-US strongmen" and evidently he doesn't just kill everyone who opposes him, so I kind of hope the assassins don't succeed. I should do more research to figure out whether I should be rooting for anyone at all.
Darfur. Yes, it is so ghoulish that I can't think about it. I am a small speck of a human.
North Korea. I wish I could just laugh at Kim Jong Il, since he is so ridiculous, instead of worrying about whether his arsenal could reach the West Coast, and wondering whether that mysterious explosion portends doom. To further this goal I shall watch Team America: World Police.
Hong Kong. The LegCo elections went okay but not great. (I keep thinking the Hong Kong legislature is the LEGO.)
In a political science and/or recursion sense my intellect likes the weird meta-electionness. Back in my UCB days I learnt about a three-level model:
Here in the US we supposedly believe that a government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed (Jefferson got it from Locke). I've been rereading Cryptonomicon so the legitimacy of governments reminds me of the viability of currency. If following the rules of the game is like putting gold into a vault to back your currency, then breaking the rules is like removing that gold and converting to a fiat money system, but since many currencies today are fiat money I'll have to work on my analogy.
Anyway, Hong Kong uses simple elections (ordinarily the province of the most superficial level of governance) to decide on the rules of the game and whether the Red control of Hong Kong has any legitimacy, not to mention the intermediate "what is desirable in general" ideology battle. Imagine a Hong Kong sample ballot:
For LegCo MucketyMuck (please vote for only one):
Anyway, it's meta. Leonard was on the right track; The international channel in SF should carry a West Wing ripoff set in Hong Kong and its name should translate as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
Referendum A: Resolved that The People's Republic should just get off our backs, man. Don't make us act like Taiwan!
Referendum B: Shall the city increase the number of antiphone booths from 4 per square kilometer to 6 within that same area? (ed: an antiphone booth is a booth where phones don't work)
Referendum C: Tapioca pearl tea: passé or retro trendy?
Referendum D: Instead of making noise about those silly "rights," could we all sit down to a nice orderly cup of green tea?
Ling "IndyMedia" Li
Wei "Jiang Zemin (Or Whoever It Is Now) Has The Mandate of Heaven I Mean The Nth Party Congress" Lo
Ralph Nader
# 17 Sep 2004, 09:25AM: Spicy ---} Endorphins: I have been gobbling the Herdez hot salsa like this for the past two days.
# 17 Sep 2004, 06:13PM: "Majors was laughing like a fool":
"It would be impossible for me to really describe a headman's house, but I'll try.....I was awakened during the night by a baby crying, and I thought to myself how much alike we all were, for there in the dark I might have been any place in the world. I could not tell the difference between that little savage's cry and the cry of any baby that I heard in any other part of the world."
-- "Behind Japanese Lines in Burma"
# 20 Sep 2004, 09:52AM GMT+5:30: Media:
Read Y: The Last Man, Volume I: quite entertaining. I need more! Finished Morrow's depressing This Is The Way The World Ends. Yeah, he is obsessed with submarines and silly names and big show trials. Still reading the better Blameless In Abaddon.
Have now (deep breath) actually started Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. (If I were incredibly hardcore, I could finish that and The Confusion by the time The System of the World went on sale tomorrow.) I was afraid to start Quicksilver and vaguely thought that I had to study the history of currency and the Enlightenment to prepare before reading it. Well, I'm fifty pages in and enjoying it, and of course Stephenson is exfoliating, I mean expositioning enough to keep me not-too-confused (i.e., it's not the cursèd Name of the Rose which is nigh-impossible to read without annotation if you didn't grow up Christian (I said nigh-impossible so you don't have to write me with exceptions)). I did say "gah" at the same thing that annoyed Leonard, but he assures me that it gets better.
I must admit that the Stanford college radio station is pretty good and, unlike the UC Berkeley station, has an MP3 stream as well as a RealPlayer stream.
# 20 Sep 2004, 06:50PM: What If: OK, maybe I was wrong about Partition.
# 21 Sep 2004, 10:50AM: Just Observing: If you are Fortinbras then you do not have a weblog. To the extent that you have a weblog, you are Hamlet.
# 22 Sep 2004, 03:45PM GMT+5:30: Lots Of Puns And Theodicy: Done with Blameless in Abaddon, thus 2/3 of the way through The Godhead Trilogy. Enjoyable enough. Alexei, I think you'd like it.
# 23 Sep 2004, 04:10PM: Twice In Two Weeks = Every Week: When a subscriber says "days" where the truth is "weeks" or otherwise mangles time, that makes me feel better about having once showed up to a party a day late. And almost showing up to a different party a week late. Zed, Mr. Shipman, you can back me up on this.
# 23 Sep 2004, 04:30PM: Will Franken, Today and Tomorrow: Will Franken plays The Dark Room on September 23 and 24, 2004. 2263 Mission Street, San Francisco (between 18th and 19th). Shows start at 10pm both nights. $7 admission. I plan on going both nights. Feel free to come with!
# 24 Sep 2004, 05:22PM: My Secret Leonard's Family Weapon:
My Leonard's Family Weblog Aggregator. Lots of updating today!
Also, it is not every day that I get to squeal excitedly, "Daniel Davies posted a new entry about health insurance!"
# 26 Sep 2004, 06:08PM: Listening To Jonathan Richman: I've now watched lots and lots of Will Franken and still love his stuff. Sarah, Damien, and Susan also seemed to enjoy his work on Friday night. Today: Alexei and I visited SF's celebration of World Vegetarian Day. Golden Gate Park, a stroll through the Haight, dessert and political ranting at Ben and Jerry's. Maybe the only reason I do things I regret is to get out of the rut, to stop feeling so predictable.
# 27 Sep 2004, 03:03PM: Seth, Don't Read This Till Tomorrow!: Years ago, I helped give Seth his Selfish Socks and a shirt with a Dawkins quote upon it. Tonight I give him a neat lawyer-joke shirt.
# 28 Sep 2004, 09:20AM: He Likes The Shirt: Went to Seth's birthday party. Met Annalee Newitz and made mock of Aaron Swartz, then felt bad upon discovering that he also enjoyed 13 Going On 30. Nice Riana gave ride home. I dreamt of Alton Brown.
# 29 Sep 2004, 08:26AM: Happy: Leonard made cheese puffs last night and filled them with douxchelle (sp?), a mushroom thing. We ate them and green beans with garlic and pine nuts, and watched some Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was as happy as I can remember being. Thanks, Leonard.
# 29 Sep 2004, 10:09AM: MacArthur Beefcake: Vamsi Mootha is HOT. *fanning self with handkerchief*
# 29 Sep 2004, 04:47PM: No Endless Recursion? Darn: I didn't even know LiveJournal had a "read the most recent posts by friends of your friends" feature until I saw a clickthrough from one such page in my referrer logs. I see I can't extend it forever.
# 30 Sep 2004, 04:33PM: Meera, Toll-Free: (888) 311-2FLY: Instead of trawling online, I am actually using a travel agency to arrange a domestic flight. How decadent!
# 30 Sep 2004, 04:48PM: Vegan Yum Or Blech Review:
Every once in a while I order snacks from VeganEssentials. A recent selection:
# 01 Oct 2004, 10:15AM: Zombie Kings:
Watched the presidential debate -- substantial and interesting, if nerve-wracking. I paced the whole time. Certainly a viewer could clearly see the differences between the two candidates. Bush promises to continue doing what he's been doing, and Kerry articulately points out what we could do differently.
Then I saw Shaun of the Dead with Joe. Zombies! Since I've never seen a zombie movie before - in fact, the only other horror movie I've ever seen is The Blair Witch Project - I missed a bunch of the in-jokes, but I enjoyed it and laughed. Best bits: the two or three highly absurd sight/sound gags.
# 04 Oct 2004, 06:20PM: Blah:
While talking with my mother, I asked whether maturity is just another word for giving up. She said no, that it is about self-control, and said other things and somehow I wasn't listening.
"Trying - Not Sure - Please Don't Make It So Hard - You're ripping me off guys!" That's a composite of some subject lines from help requests to Salon Premium.
# 05 Oct 2004, 01:58PM GMT+5:30: Erudition:
Sometimes I wonder what a Camille Paglia presidential run would look like, but Lyndon LaRouche saves me the imaginatory effort.
I highly recommend Mary Roach's funny and enlightening Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Not to be confused with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi. My bookmark for Stiff: a World Vegetarian Day postcard.
# 06 Oct 2004, 08:56AM: Full Faith and Debit: Last night, I didn't watch the entire Cheney-Edwards debate. However, I did see the bit where Edwards claimed that we don't need the "Defense of Marriage" Amendment, since no state has to recognize a same-sex marriage made in another state. Leonard and I looked at each other and said, "Huh? Full faith and credit!" But we had forgotten about the public policy exception.
# 06 Oct 2004, 09:49AM: Dot-Com Shocker: Someone spelled "unsubscribe" correctly!
# 07 Oct 2004, 04:34PM: I Can't Explain Why It's Spooky: Leonard and I saw the hits-too-close-to-home Napoleon Dynamite last night at the spooky UA Stonestown Twin. Maybe now I should call Leonard "Alexander TNT" or "Stalin Nitroglycerin."
# 07 Oct 2004, 06:45PM: This Will Hurt:
If you are healthy, and you aren't the caretaker for a baby or a sickly older person (etc.), then please don't get the flu shot, because there is a shortage this year. Or unless you are selfish! Argh. Is that harsh? The article profiles healthy youngish people who know there's a shortage, who know that healthy people need the vaccine less than children and the elderly (a healthy person who catches the flu might fall ill for a week; kids and old people die). And they take it anyway. How can that not be recklessly selfish?
I am pretty mad at Chiron, and at the market failure in general. There are some commodities that we can leave to the market, which gets supplies to demanders in the aggregate and in the long run. It is all right if there is a short-term shortage of Beanie Babies; I don't care if a five-year-old loses out one Christmas in the name of efficiency or profit. And then there are services that the government distributes to make sure they get distributed systematically and fairly. Some people believe that the only legitimate role of government is to protect its citizens from each other and from invaders. But our government has taken on a larger role. ( "... in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...") The police and military defend us, yes, and public schools teach us, parks provide space for recreation, the FCC licenses the privilege of using public airwaves, and so on.
Should health care in general be one of those services? If not, what about this specific commodity of vaccination against deadly diseases? Several biotech companies used to provide the shot for the US market; this year it was two, now one. Should we diversify our vendor list? Should we keep closer tabs on contamination in vaccine factories through government regulation and inspection? Should we make sure our vaccine providers make the vaccines in the US, where we can watch them better? (The offending Chiron plant is in England.) Should we specifically tailor tort reform to encourage vaccine manufacturers?
Should we be leaving this to private companies at all? Epidemics are national emergencies; if feasible, should the CDC make the vaccine itself instead of depending on businesses? (Analogy: sending the National Guard to fill sandbags, preventing a flood.) "[W]e haven't yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem"; is this one of them?
Last year's shortage and this year's debacle-in-progress have me joining lawmakers in pondering what we need to do for next winter and all the winters thereafter. Epidemics affect everyone; shouldn't we avoid them like the plague?
A healthy 30-year-old refuses to talk to the Chronicle about why she's standing in line for the flu shot at Walgreens. I want to tax more or divert taxes from other projects to make sure Claire, Ada, Joel, Frances, Shweta, Rosalie, and my other friends and relations get a fair shot against the flu. Who's being selfish?
# 07 Oct 2004, 06:47PM: Google Testimonies Provoke Wow: Did you mean: "choking dog"
# 08 Oct 2004, 09:20AM: Could Be Yemen:
KSZU has highly entertaining program descriptions. Note the nine hours of Indian music spread among three different shows every week.
I have the live streams of KSZU, KUSF, and KSCU in my mp3 player bookmarks. I have to switch more often than I'd like - I can't stand college DJ patter.
Title comes from a Jon Stewart bit that is still cracking me up hours later.
# 08 Oct 2004, 09:52AM: "First trip to the ER?" asked the paramedic.: If you do not already read One Good Thing (a.k.a. Buggydoo), allow me to point to this sweet, sad, funny, fantastic story.
# 08 Oct 2004, 01:51PM: "Why would I write my own epitaph?": In yet more Jon Stewart worship, an Amazon interview about the new Daily Show book.
# 08 Oct 2004, 04:21PM: Escapist or Papist?: I've been having vivid dreams for the past two weeks. All I remember of last night's: the Pope was in there.
# 11 Oct 2004, 03:58PM: Argh! Freaking Saudi Arabia!: Saudi women thought they could vote this time? Psych!
# 14 Oct 2004, 09:51AM: The Kind Of Post Steve Schultz Hates:
He told me that the "quick links to interesting articles" posts turn him off from reading my weblog. Regrets, Steve.
More thoughts on the flu vaccine fiasco.
I read this story of the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem maybe three times a year.
Nicholas Lemann on Al Gore and George W. Bush four years ago.
A slightly profane snark about the sense of smell in literature.
Update: Lemann on Bush now.
# 14 Oct 2004, 02:59PM GMT+5:30: Worldview Correspondence:
Yesterday I engaged a Christian evangelist (I'm assuming Protestant) on Market Street in conversation. He said that the Bible is literally true, that theories of evolution cannot explain the complexity of the human body, that people who were born and died before Jesus but didn't have a chance to hear about the Gospel went to hell, and that all the good works in the world won't save a nonbeliever. I didn't get a chance to ask for his theodicy. Also recently Susie, Kristen, Joe, Frances, and John have been very helpful in explaining bits of LDS theology and practice to me. Thank you all!
Evidently I am also obsessed with Catholicism. First I read all of James Morrow, now this: The Archbishop of Denver (which to Leonard sounds like the title of a novel) shows us the entire transcript of his interview with a New York Times reporter. Interesting bits:
I can understand that stance now: if you believe in the possibility of just wars, and you aren't a pacifist like John Dear, then you can consider abortion a more fundamental problem than poverty, pollution, etc. I'm not sure about whether the death penalty is a "fundamental" problem, though. I'd imagine more abortions than executions take place in the US every year [Update: Seth tells me I'm right
], but the Archbishop denied utilitarianism, so that's not the answer.
I wonder about the Church's policies on paying taxes to governments that perpetrate evil, or buying products from pro-choice businessowners, and so on all the way to shunning evildoers.
In Dogma, Kevin Smith's mouthpieces say many funny things about religion, specifically Catholicism. If I recall correctly, one says the doctrine of papal infallibility is what got them all into the current mess. Certainly I find it hard to believe that something supernatural happens to a guy once he becomes Pope and everything he says and does from then on is unquestionably right.
[Update: Thank you, Seth and Zed, for pointing out to me that this is an exaggeration. More information on Wikipedia and at a Catholic Encyclopedia - you pick your authority! More accurately, As Leonard put it, the Pope can put on an infallibility hat. Still hard to swallow.
]
But then again, I find many bits in Christian theology as a whole hard to believe, which is why that preacher on Market isn't having much luck with me.
And you can never justify it [abortion]. You can sometimes justify going to war. You may think that the Iraq war is horrible, but there may be sometimes when you can justify [going to war]. It doesn't have the same moral weight. And, it's not calculating 40 million abortions against 40,000 deaths in Iraq. That's not how you do the calculus. The calculus is on the intrinsic act itself. You know, and abortion is never, ever, ever right.
The standing is that if you know someone is going to do evil and you participate in that in some way, you are responsible. So it's not ... "if you vote this way, should you go to confession?" The question is, "if you vote this way, are you cooperating in evil?" Now, if you know you are cooperating in evil, should you go to confession? The answer is yes.
...the Roman pontiff when he speaks ex cathedra, that is when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, by the Divine assistance promised to him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility...
# 15 Oct 2004, 07:37PM: The Vaccine: A company in Emeryville has a factory in Liverpool that makes a mistake. So half the US's supply of flu vaccine becomes unusable. The sick and the elderly across the US stand in line for suddenly scarce shots. And then back near San Francisco, a 79-year-old artist stands in that line for hours, then faints from the heat and dies.
# 15 Oct 2004, 07:39PM GMT+5:30: Want More Profane Rants?: I bought America: The Book by the writers of The Daily Show. It is a jewel. It actually disturbs Leonard to hear my cynical laugh several times per minute while reading that thing. A sample from the audiobook.
# 18 Oct 2004, 05:17PM: More Jon Stewart Obsessiveness:
A Jon Stewart quotes page.
Sitting around with funny people, banging out jokes and creating a television show. I have no hobbies, no outside interests. I'm fine with spending 14 hours a day putting a show together with tape and string. Joe and I wondered how the Daily Show does it - polished AND current political humor. One answer: several writers dedicate several hours per day to writing 7-10 minutes of material four times per week. Another answer: practice, practice, practice. When you have to pump it out anew each day, and you can't fall back on repeating a practiced set of characters and jokes, your craft gets fantastic.
The news is the currency of The Daily Show. I can't write a show on Jan. 4 and run it on Jan. 11. You've got to write it on Jan. 11.
# 18 Oct 2004, 06:50PM: Includes "Life Of Crime" Sidebar: Indian police kill Veerappan, Indian bandit king.
# 19 Oct 2004, 09:32AM: Sarah Said It Was An Adlerian Slip: I'd had to deal with this customer before. He was having an inexplicable and chronic problem and we talked often. He talked over me, interrupted me, misunderstood me, but always thanked me profusely for my help. Today I accidentally called him "Dad."
# 20 Oct 2004, 01:12PM: Politics, Food, Politics:
"...Specifically, he explored why it was that some people, at great personal risk, helped their Jewish neighbors in Nazi-occupied Europe while the majority did not..."
"...That's when Salmassi pointed to the door..."
Republicans for Kerry, Republican Switchers, Errol Morris's Republican switcher ads (best ones on MoveOn's site but that page starts a Quicktime video).
# 20 Oct 2004, 07:07PM: Come With?: I'm going to both Will Franken shows this week.
# 20 Oct 2004, 08:10PM: Lesson For Today!: Some things you can put off, and that will have some psychological consequences. Example: not writing the great American novel just yet. Some things you can procrastinate only with social, hygenic, and other such risks. Example: washing dishes. Then there are the health procrastinations, such as doctor appointments. And then there are the LIFE-AND-DEATH and LEGAL and BANKING procrastinations. DON'T DO that last set. That's my advice.
# 26 Oct 2004, 10:10AM: Yes, It's In The Tenderloin:
C.W. Nevius's personal essay handwringing in the Chronicle will find its way into the wringing hands of many a high school student. Great dark humor in the ending.
Tonight I watch Will Franken at 50 Mason.
# 26 Oct 2004, 03:30PM: I Will Never Learn This:
"I've spent a lot of my life trying to become better and better at what I DO. Somehow I thought my achievements might attract love. This has always been my fantasy. It's a crazy fantasy because I'm not good enough to do anything worthy of love. I don't think anyone can DO anything that would make him worthy of love.
Love is a gift and cannot be earned. It can only be given."
I gnash my teeth about justice sometimes. I don't get what I deserve, he gets more than he deserves, and so on. Life isn't fair. That's what our parents tell us and they're right both ways. Sometimes I get these wonderful gifts of love that are far more than I deserve and I find that very hard to accept. I keep asking "why." Well, love and deserving don't go together. It's a type mismatch. It's like trying to eat a verb. Life isn't fair.
# 27 Oct 2004, 08:48AM: Yet Another Kinship Between My Heritage And LDS:
BoingBoing points me to directions to merge fashion with modesty. My personal answer is to dress like a man and not care about fashion. Pants, button-down or tee shirt, done. I guess you need a skirt if it's hot and shorts are too immodest for your taste. But I'm glad these tips exist and I do use those layering techniques with white shirts to keep bras from showing.
Is it really that tough to find high-rise jeans? Maybe it's just that I shop for clothes about once a year and always go to thrift/vintage/charity shops. Clothes made for old people suit me fine.
Sari as prom dress! Good thinking with the black tee. All dresses that reveal midriff in public make me uncomfortable. This goes double for saris because I can't help thinking I should be using just a tiny fraction of the yards of fabric (which I'm pleating, folding, wrapping, and pulling, always unsatisfactorily) to cover my midsection. I gotta recommend a salwar kameez, a.k.a. pyjama juba (where English gets the word "pajama"). The big old tunic can be a dress in itself, or you can add the drawstring pants and optional sash. No pockets, but you are used to that, being a woman. Gaudy or simple embroidery and patterns - sure to make a splash at your next for-some-reason-I'm-dressing-up gathering!
# 27 Oct 2004, 09:12AM: No One Cares If You Smoke In A Bar In The Tenderloin:
Last night I tried to watch Will Franken perform at 50 Mason. I did arrive a bit late, after schmoozing with my Salon colleague Jeff, and saw the ever-friendly Mike Spiegelman, as well as a fella named Louie who evidently saw me perform a bunch of times back when I did the Squelch nights. But, since almost no one came, the venue decided to cancel the show. Instead, Will caught the end of the Red Sox victory over the Cardinals, and Will's friends (including Mike Capozzola and Dan Piraro) and I embarked on a short-lived "find someplace to do a set" that could have been a timeless picaresque. But no. I wish I'd gotten to see all these people longer.
I had to Google "Don Quixote is" to remember the word "picaresque."
# 27 Oct 2004, 04:23PM: Customer Service Lessons: If you are yelling profanity at the email on your screen because the customer has the audacity to suggest a deficiency in your website's help infrastructure, take a break away from the computer.
# 28 Oct 2004, 12:23PM: Even Better Than Usual: Websnark today discourses on the different purposes of his different journals and the permanent records we create for ourselves.
# 28 Oct 2004, 04:52PM: A Crying Shame: Andrew Leonard makes me cry and Malcolm Gladwell convinces me I'll never be a genius. Neither of these is a difficult goal.
# 29 Oct 2004, 11:47AM: Votes Count When We Count The Votes: Last year we lost and this year we didn't even enter; the person who usually does these sorts of things was out. This year I'm betting the folk-guitar "Vote for John Kerry" song will stick in many heads and the Kerry-o'lantern will win the prize.
# 31 Oct 2004, 08:56PM GMT+5:30: An Ad For Canadian Schooling:
If you ever visit my putative homepage, and you're viewing the page with graphics turned on, you'll see a bit of Russian at the bottom. "Ya mogu yest steklo; eto menya ne vredit," it says. This is a rare lie on my part. It means, "I can eat glass; it doesn't hurt me." A stray thought by some bored Internetter led to the I Can Eat Glass Project web fad, an attempt to translate this phrase into as many languages as possible and publish the results.
Another phrase of this sort is "my hovercraft is full of eels", deriving from a Monty Python sketch about a really bad Hungarian-English phrasebook. Today, whilst reading the really fun Gordon Korman book Son of the Mob [2]: Hollywood Hustle, a line jumped out at me:
And a few pages later:
Gordon, you keep surprising me....isn't the most romantic place in the world. But this is Willow. She could raise your heart rate in a hovercraft full of eels. She almost makes me forget that...
Maybe in Dad's mind, he can lie and tell the truth at the same time, just the way light can simultaneously be both a wave and a particle.
# 01 Nov 2004, 09:53AM: I Can Feel It Brushing Against My Eardrum: This weekend, while using a generic cotton swab to clean my left ear, I got a ball of cotton lodged in my left ear. Leonard and I tried to float it out, to tweeze it out, to get it out with another cotton swab - no use. Today I'm going to the doctor to get it tweezed/forcepped out, probably as per this useful document. It turns out Leonard and I probably shouldn't have tried what we tried; if you can't shake it loose or easily pull or tweeze it out, don't try to remove a foreign object from the ear yourself. However, punctured eardrums usually heal themselves within a few months. That's good to know.
# 01 Nov 2004, 04:59PM: Ear Cleared: In other doctor's office news, Highlights for Children is still lots of fun. Their "caption this photo/cartoon" contests get much more creative entries than those in non-kids' magazines do.
# 02 Nov 2004, 04:16PM: Election Day, 2004:
Things to remember about Election Day, November second, 2004:
Going to sleep at 1:30 the morning of, crying and praying. I can't tell where the cold draft in my room is coming from, and it frightens me.
Dropping my absentee ballot into a red box.
Breaking into tears of joy and hope when I see campaign signs and stickers, and the "I Voted" stickers my fellow citizens are wearing as badges of pride.
Working like a golem. Fuel: free bagel, leftover hash browns, vending machine potato chips and Pop-Tarts, coworkers' leftover Halloween candy.
Listening to songs by the Dresden Dolls over and over.
Running back and forth between customer service work at my computer and the big TV at the other end of the office.
Hope.
# 03 Nov 2004, 08:31AM: Election Night, 2004:
Things to remember about the several hours after that last hope:
Pizza, booze, CNN, increasingly grim jokes. I couldn't believe that Coburn won, Bunning won, that the GOP would be consolidating its control of the Senate. Obama was no comfort at all.
I talked on the phone with a few friends and found some solace in conversation. I talked to my parents a little bit; they're BJP supporters (!) and feel the same way about the recent Indian elections as I felt about yesterday's results.
I slept under my desk with a pillow of free promotional t-shirts, ate a mockmeat breakfast, read some blogs, did some work, and then found out that Kerry had conceded. My stomach fell. I confirmed it on TV, swallowed my dreams, congratulated the one Republican watching with me, started to cry, and called Leonard.
Now, work.
# 04 Nov 2004, 10:46AM: Cute Animal Pictures:
A baby elephant.
Another baby elephant.
A tortoise.
A baby penguin.
A baby panda.
A baby human.
A baby human and a fake baby dog.
An adult human and a fake otter.
# 08 Nov 2004, 11:43AM: The Clothes Make The Man Not Be Naked: If you are considering clothing purchases for yourself or others, and you are like me and know nothing of fashion or style, please read The Morning News on women's clothes and men's clothes. Or you could just ask John about men's and women's clothes since he is an expert on style and consistently looks like a million bucks. Do people still say that? I am imagining a creaky miser hoarsely yelling that in his pre-stagflation day a dame who looked like a million bucks really looked it.
# 10 Nov 2004, 07:59PM GMT+5:30: Not To Mention The Original Big Book: Two of my favorite Christianity bloggers: Real Live Preacher and Slacktivist. I imagine that the Preacher, a.k.a. Gordon Atkinson, would enjoy Douglas Coupland's book All Families Are Psychotic, and now I find that Fred Clark of Slacktivist enjoyed Infinite Jest. Leonard read that recently and I acted irrationally hostile towards him and it whenever I saw the book. I get irrationally angry at people who are doing things I don't have the guts to do. In this case that's both the reader and the writer of a Big Book. When did I stop reading huge books? When I started commuting on BART?
# 11 Nov 2004, 09:41AM: RIP Iris Chang: When I was a sophomore at UC Berkeley auditing Andrew Creighton's wonderful introductory sociology class, he had us read chapters from Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking first off to remind us what humans can do to each other. Yesterday Iris Chang died at 36, apparently by her own hand. My shock and sadness leads me to another of Dr. Creighton's teachings. Once, he told us that a close friend of his had leapt from a bridge years ago. If you ever consider killing yourself, don't. You're hurting the people around you for decades to come, he said brusquely. I wish Iris Chang had known that.
# 11 Nov 2004, 10:10AM: The Anointing: Steve Robertson knows Ashcroft stories and I need to get some from him - such an intriguing figure! I always figured I had an in with Ashcroft since Steve knew his son at Rice. Professor Spiro asks the same question I do - Ashcroft had a pretty consistent moral framework with which I strongly disagreed, whereas Gonzales would just do whatever Bush wants. Which is worse, a zealot or a hack?
# 11 Nov 2004, 03:50PM: Google Ads Come Through Again: "Sexy Chordate Singles"! I hope so.
# 11 Nov 2004, 03:57PM GMT+5:30: Deepavali, Dipawali, Whatever:
Happy Diwali!
While dressing up for work in a shimmery pyjama juba, a.k.a. salwar kameez, I discovered that I don't have any kumkum, a.k.a. kunkuma, a.k.a. bindi, a.k.a. the red dot you wear in the middle of your forehead or between your eyebrows. I used a marker instead.
Diwali usually celebrates the day Rama comes back to Ayodhya (don't get me started on temples and mosques in Ayodhya) after defeating Ravana, a ten-headed demon. I'm reading the first book of Ashok K. Banker's passable fairy-tale retelling of the Ramayana right now; I should time my reading so that I read that part of the story a year from today.
# 12 Nov 2004, 08:26PM: The Dot Isn't Just For "Dot Com": Some customers write highly coherent and comprehensive help requests, whether courteous or profane. And some write help requests that resemble in prose style the opening of Flowers For Algernon.
# 15 Nov 2004, 11:07AM: Shahrukh Khan Stories!: Fun anecdotes about Bollywood's popularity worldwide.
# 15 Nov 2004, 03:28PM: Yes, Important People Have Weblogs Too:
Interesting security/foreign policy weblog by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Includes the line "Then there's my plot to return to C-SPAN!"
I found it while Googling for my House of Saud/House of Windsor Freaky Friday proposal; it turns out he sort of agrees. "I want [the House of Saud] to mutate into the House of Windsor slowly and with great transparency," he said in September (six weeks after my jibe, ha!).
# 15 Nov 2004, 03:39PM: He Is The Franken. I Must Go.: Tonight I go to see Will Franken (more detailed, if more ephemeral, description) at the Punchline comedy club near Embarcadero BART station. Come one, come many!
# 16 Nov 2004, 04:21PM: Too Many Tears:
Margaret Hassan is probably dead.
"He had the lines around his eyes that signify a man who smiles cautiously and gravely, not because he has no humor but because he contemplates the consequences of everything, and must be an example. He had my father's eyes."
# 18 Nov 2004, 12:39PM: Verb, Noun, Whatever!:
A highly entertaining weekend and surprisingly entertaining week. Leonard cooked up a fantastic feast for Zack, Shweta, Andrew, Claudia, and me. I believe we had bread with artichoke-spinach-cheese dip, a beet-and-goat-cheese salad, a squash soup, bean patties with guacamole and yogurt, and ice cream pie. Leonard used butter-pecan ice cream and chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream in a coconut and chocolate graham cracker crust. People were moaning with delight at the ice cream. We had to pause playing Once Upon A Time (the collaborative storytelling card game) to truly appreciate the pie.
I love playing Once Upon A Time, not only because making up stories is fun, but because I get to see the idiosyncrasies of my friends. Claudia mixes it up with metatext and cites existing fairy tales, Zack foreshadows and archetypes well, Andrew inserts hilarious non sequiturs and then sequiturs them, and I like tying up loose threads.
Then I went ice skating for the first time, thanks to Claudia and Andrew. Tip: in-line skating skills transfer pretty well to the rink!
The San Francisco Zoo just keeps getting better. Zebras! Giraffes! If you go on a hot, sunny day you'll see the lemurs more active; if you go on a colder day you'll get to see the kangaroos hop.
Seth, Zed, Jennifer and I saw Will Franken at the Punchline and he was great, as usual. A pleasing discovery: the hilarious opener W. Kamau Bell, who does race humor that works.
Thought of the week: Weight Watchers, in its points-calculating frustration, is the D&D diet. "Roll....hey, I get a muffin!" Credit my colleague Rodney.
Last night: Dresden Dolls with Joe and his gal at the Great American Music Hall. I go to perhaps 1.2 concerts a year and this was worth it, even if I stood the whole time. Bonus: the opener, the Ditty Bops, was good! Bonus bonus: I met a random guy, who saw an acquaintance of his, who introduced her boyfriend, who was in the dorms with me at UC Berkeley! Thank goodness for the web of social connections, else I'd worry that the world wouldn't miss me.
This weekend: Mom! Awesome.
# 18 Nov 2004, 06:32PM: Wish List:
Life is suffering, as Gautama Buddha and George Orwell both said, and the less you want the happier you'll be, to paraphrase Buddha but probably not Orwell. That actually worked for me when I was younger, I think, but today I have been letting strangers get to me -- which means I want their approval -- and haven't meditated on nonreaction.
Susanna, Leonard's sister, has now twice requested a wishlist from me. Sorry for the procrastination, Susanna. I keep this wishlist and try to update it before my birthday and before Christmas. I'm glad that I've cut down on the size of my wishlist over the past few years.
I think I wanted for nothing once, at least nothing tangible, and I miss that. I was ignorant, and didn't feel in charge of my own life. How long does desire take to die when you never feel agency? I remember coming to the dorms and feeling the most enormous pleasure at choosing my own food in the dining commons. Now Leonard has spoiled me; I have tasted his fairy food and might waste away for the want of it. I've gotten picky, the way Ben Franklin bragged that he never did. I wish I didn't know how bland mediocre food is, how much more interesting other jobs could be. I want to forget everything extraordinary so I can be content.
# 19 Nov 2004, 09:43AM: Unexpected: Why does Apologies Accepted make me cry?
# 22 Nov 2004, 02:36PM: In Santiago And A Hospital:
For some reason, mild violence struck twice around Bush at APEC this weekend. Reporters scuffled for the best seats at a press conference, and Chilean and US Secret Service bodyguards got into a fracas over whether or not the Secret Service could accompany Bush into a dinner. (The AP reporters use "scrum" in both cases. When was the last time you used "scrum"? Too long ago, I'd wager.) Evidently Bush personally pulled a bodyguard out of the fight in a "let's settle down now" maneuver. I feel surprised that the President's corps of bodyguards let itself get distracted in this manner.
The more interesting White House-related story:
Rice had uterine fibroid embolization and is recovering well. Various stories emphasize, via some spokesperson, that her condition wasn't cancerous or life-threatening, and that she never went under general anesthesia, which are appropriate reassurances regarding one of the President's closest advisers and one of our nation's top policymakers.
I had never heard of this procedure before, so I Googled a bit and found out that UFE is one of those newer, smaller alternatives to big problematic surgeries. Instead of slicing through lots of healthy tissue to surgically remove a tumor or fibroid, doctors can use tiny injections or streams of particles to burn or starve the offending cells. Pretty cool stuff.
Rice just turned 50. She's never married and has no children. And, although several women have conceived and delivered babies successfully after UFE, "At this time, UFE is not commonly being performed on women who desire future fertility because its effects on fertility are unknown."
It sounds as though Rice (unlike Hillary Clinton or another American political pioneer, Frances Perkins) has made her decision to be a 21st-century Janissary. I'm glad she has the option to do that. I hope she recovers completely.
# 23 Nov 2004, 09:34PM: It's A Faaaaaaake:
Leonard and I watched a bit of an America's Test Kitchen about Chicken Diavola, which does indeed mean "devil-style."
CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL: So tell us a little bit about Chicken Diavola. Diavola. Am I saying that right?
JULIA COLIN: Yes. It's "Diavola," meaning chicken of the damned. To make this requires that you damn your soul to hell.
[pause]
KIMBALL: Okay, what do we do first?
COLIN: Well, there's this oath that you sign in blood.
KIMBALL: Does it have to be my own blood?
COLIN: Not necessarily. We actually found that pig's blood works best. It has a certain viscosity that we really liked.
KIMBALL: Uh-huh.
COLIN: We tested about fifteen different bloods. A lot of people think virgin's blood would be the blood you'd use here, but that's actually pretty thin. You don't want something that'll just run off the page. Pig's blood really has that earthiness and stickiness, so that's what we use.
# 28 Nov 2004, 10:56AM: Then Again, Seeing "Kinsey" With My Mom Would Have Been Pretty Awkward: Sumana is back from a DC Thanksgiving. I picked up the slip opinion of Leocal v. Ashcroft at the Supreme Court, saw my old pal John Stange, sightsaw with my sister and cousin, and ate my mom's food. Fun things include the card game Uno, Spike TV's Bond movie marathon, the December 2004 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and the Mall at night. Neat things include the new WWII memorial, the DC Metro, and the improvements in the performance in my sister's laptop thanks to my maintenance. Blah things include the price of passport photos at Kinko's ($14 for a set of two?!) and the movie Ray, which focuses too much on drug abuse and womanizing and not enough on the musical innovation that made Ray Charles a legend.
# 29 Nov 2004, 03:44PM GMT+5:30: Books I Read When I Was Too Young to Really Understand Them:
Back to Eden. A denunciation of modern, unholy, unhealthy eating patterns, and a handbook of herbs and more natural healing methods. Lots of enemas. This fascinated me for the anecdotes; I just flipped through the real reference material. He and his kids and grandkids talked about life on a farm, the virtues of a vegan diet, what God wants, and grotesque cases (ER meets All Creatures Great And Small). The guy had a clinic that used "electric therapy" -- I'm not sure what that means.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I was about eleven when I picked this one up. Why it was in our house I have no idea. I learned from this book the sorts of things that other people my age probably learned from the kinds of movies that my parents wouldn't let me watch, e.g., a passing reference to key parties. The introduction contains one of the best Malcolm X quotes, "My coffee is the only thing I like integrated." Looking back, I am surprised that I never confused Alex Haley (who took X's dictation) with Aldous Huxley, and that despite the LeVar Burton obsession I share with Leonard, we still haven't seen Roots.
I Never Played at the White House, Art Buchwald. A watergate-era column anthology. Dave Barry : Art Buchwald :: humor : satire, right? I was twelve. Like Mort Sahl, Buchwald was cheerfully chauvinist in ways I now find annoying. I learned most of what I know about Watergate from this book and from old Doonesbury cartoons.
A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney, Andy Rooney. I think someone gave my dad this book as a gift. Mom and Dad used to call me downstairs when 60 Minutes had 10 minutes left to make sure I wouldn't miss Rooney's stand-up/journalism/blogging. If you ever read the passage in Richard Wright's memoirs where he reads Mencken for the first time....take away most of the profound and awesome power of the experience and you get a sense of Rooney's influence on me. I mean, come on. I'm not Richard Wright! I think the honesty of his voice and the variety of his subjects got to me. I might not love Malcolm Gladwell now except that Rooney got me when I was young.
Sex And The Office, Helen Gurley Brown. Hoo boy. How that book got into my dad's library I have no clue. I may be the only person who's read this book and not Sex and the Single Girl, which came first. If I recall correctly, this book has absolutely no depictions or descriptions of actual sex, but lots of explanations of office politics. I have never used the techniques that the book recommends to succeed in the workplace (maybe I should) or romance (thank heaven I'm fine there).
Don't get my family started on Lee Iacocca's autobiography. It was the only English-language book around at a house in India that I visited when I was nine. I know a lot more about the Chrysler bailout than most people. Most people who dislike the Ford family do so because Henry Ford was an antisemitic wacko; I did because of Iacocca's description of his firing.
# 29 Nov 2004, 04:02PM: More Than Reading Schneier At Lunch, This Reveals My Geekiness: Today I suddenly got mad about the Mercator Projection.
# 30 Nov 2004, 12:33PM: I Experience Cinema, You View Film, He Watches Movies:
I should have checked CAPAlert before taking my mom to Ray; it would have warned us about the excessive sex. Probably the only major movies out that I could comfortably watch with my mom are The Incredibles and SpongeBob SquarePants and my sister wanted to see neither. I believe the last movie that my entire nuclear family saw together was Air Force One in 1997.
While we pored over the free DC weekly paper's movie listings. I saw some arty Iranian film and commenced to needless mockery of Kiarostami. "Oh look, I put a camera in a truck and drive it along a dusty road for two hours and that's a movie. They're all named The Children of the Olive Groves or something. I'm Iranian, I'm censored, look at me."
I think it would be funny if Kiarostami were helping the Iranian reform movement by lulling the hard-liners to sleep with his boring movies.
# 30 Nov 2004, 05:02PM: It's Pompousness Night Here at Sumana's: Which is worse - listless lost apathetic purposelessness or strangled forced direction? The anchor that drowns or the loosed sail that any wind can blow away?
# 30 Nov 2004, 06:18PM: "the acatalectic record of mankind": Heavy metal yet again exceeds my expectations. Sort of via Airline Reviews.
# 01 Dec 2004, 05:26PM: Geeks:
Once upon a time I thought I would write a CES entry entitled "A Thousand Voices: Augury and sympathetic magic". But I have no idea why I would have done that or what topic I'd have covered. So instead I'll tell you that tonight Salon will publish an article I wrote about TV chefs Alton Brown and Christopher Kimball. For all I know it is not actually good, but people have told me it is good, so probably it is not awful. I'll post a link tonight or tomorrow.
While you are waiting for that, you might want to read Josh Kornbluth on Ben Franklin.
# 02 Dec 2004, 08:47AM: Includes A Link To Wikipedia!:
My third article in Salon and the only one that talks about Leonard the whole time.
If I could write this article over again, I would include more carping about food safety, more evangelism about teaching first principles rather than just recipes, more examples, and less cutesiness. But half a loaf is better than none.
Thanks to Kerry Lauerman and Amy Reiter for improving my piece a heck of a lot.
It's worth it to read a Cook's Illustrated, even if, like me, you seldom cook. The articles read as very accessible lab reports, with hypotheses, trials and errors, and conclusions (recipes). I find them much more useful than yet another three-recipe column that begins, "While staying in a small hotel in Tuscany ..." and extols the virtues of fresh, seasonal ingredients but doesn't teach any skills or methodology.
# 02 Dec 2004, 09:57AM: Spilling the Beans (Into the Soaking Water): An incredibly funny Good Eats moment: "Okay, they won't explode."
# 02 Dec 2004, 02:50PM: Painful!: "Turn round the questions asked of black people and you may get the point." Via Sarah.
# 02 Dec 2004, 06:43PM: An Incredibly Unbalanced Inflation Index: "PNC also calculates a core index, excluding the six swans a-swimming, because the price of swans is so volatile."
# 02 Dec 2004, 07:30PM: Dinosaurs Are Mentioned: More Alton Brown fanness: "He makes me feel special." and the perhaps obsolete observation that "it goes without saying that because it is fairly intelligent, it is woefully underpromoted".
# 03 Dec 2004, 10:54AM: Unitarians Be Walkin' Down The Street Like This:
Instant Messaging with Leonard about religion:
Sumana: I found out why they don't take vows and oaths
Leonard: uus?
Sumana: no, Quakers
Sumana: sorry
Sumana: no, UUs don't take oaths because they don't believe anything is true
# 03 Dec 2004, 08:48PM: In Progress: My obsession with Malcolm Gladwell includes watching a 45-minute speech that he gave to Lucent and taking the Connector test from The Tipping Point.
# 06 Dec 2004, 01:30PM: Thanks, Professor Bishop:
I'm watching Atul Gawande talk about "The Imperfect Science of Medicine". Actually, I am listening to his speech to distract part of my brain from the boring boring customer service stuff so I can do it without having to take as many breaks.
Gawande refers to a woman as "measuring out her days in coffee spoons." I recognized it! I'm edumicated!
# 06 Dec 2004, 06:41PM: December 11th: Yes, Will Franken's one-man shows at the Marsh take place at 11pm, when I sort of want to go to sleep. Oh well. This one is "Ohio! Ohio! Ohio! (You Can Say It Ten Times) And It Will Still Be There".
# 06 Dec 2004, 07:08PM: Aiee!: Gordon Atkinson! (she squeals as though he is the Beatles)
# 08 Dec 2004, 06:07AM: Pineapple Whatever:
Dahlia Lithwick, a Slate writer,
covers the interstate wine-shipping case with panache.
Every piece about these consolidated cases starts with the reporter going off to some exotic mom-and-pop winery in some state that isn't Michigan and proceeding to get loaded with the mom-or-pop vintner, who is desolate about their inability to sell $4,000 Shiraz over the Internet. Stupidly, I completely forgot to write that story.
# 08 Dec 2004, 07:58AM: Lessons From Web Publishing:
People who are used to the paper model of periodicals worry about missing an issue of Salon. I take an effort to mention our archives if I sense that a reader is in that category.
People who are not used to blogs and discussion message boards get confused when Salon links to Table Talk, Scott Rosenberg's blog, the War Room, etc. I think I've given my "a blog is like a diary" speech twice to Salon readers.
# 08 Dec 2004, 10:35AM: Why can't I photosynthesize? Why?
# 08 Dec 2004, 05:41PM: White Shirt - No Marinara, Please: I feel drained after a day of meetings. There is a party later where others may attempt to get me sauced. Evidently I am pasta.
# 10 Dec 2004, 10:20AM: I Miss Michael Rogin: First John-Paul Spiro got me to see Kinsey and now he is making me want to see The Incredibles.
# 10 Dec 2004, 01:13PM GMT+5:30: Media Matters:
Tim Goodman turned me on to Arrested Development and it is awesome and I love it. Even Leonard likes it. Something aside from The West Wing and Star Trek that I can watch with Leonard! It is so great.
Currently reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, which is also fantastic, detailed and observant.
# 10 Dec 2004, 07:45PM: Sorry, Sophomore English Teachers: To Kill A Mockingbird, a Flash movie that tops all other book reports.
# 13 Dec 2004, 05:00PM: TeeVee:
Leonard and I watched recorded episodes of House, M.D. last night. Hugh Laurie affects a grumpy US accent; otherwise I'd probably deem it trash. As it is I'm calling it my "guilty pleasure" because otherwise I have to come up with a rationale for wasting 44 minutes of my life on bad medical mystery.
Leonard and I also watched The Offspring, a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. (Data, alone among NextGen crewmembers, cares/knows about India; he names his daughter "Lal", or "Beloved," and notes that Data's Day takes place during Deepawali.) The third-to-last scene set us bawling. So sad!
# 15 Dec 2004, 01:10PM: Delicious Dioxin:
I need to update my menstruation products compare-and-contrast with new evidence (I first wrote it in April of 2002). In particular, perhaps I should research the "dioxin in tampons using bleached cotton" rumors. What reminds me of this? Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko's dioxin poisoning.
Another option being discussed by scientists is the use of olestra, a fake fat substance used in diet food that could act as a magnet to draw the poison out of the body fat into the gut for elimination. The technique has been proposed before for the elimination of other fat-soluble pollutants.
Dioxin, which settles in the body fat, lasts a long time in the body. Eliminating it quickly from Yushchenko's body would likely reduce his chances of long-term ill health. One possibility is a couple of courses of liposuction, a procedure that sucks the fat out of the body.
# 15 Dec 2004, 06:09PM: Egg/Cookie Redux: Advance tickets to the Egg/Cookie show are available and relatively cheap, and the show is fun. It's returning in January and February of 2005.
# 16 Dec 2004, 04:32PM: Aside From Saints, Psychopaths, And Children: We're also living in fear.
# 17 Dec 2004, 11:01AM GMT+5:30: Metahumor Discovery:
I have probably 150 Amar Chitra Katha ("immortal picture stories") comic books, and have been reading ACK for as long as I can remember. I learned most of my Indian mythology from ACK and press it on friends to teach them Indian culture and history. (Right now a friend has one of my Mahabharata sets.) I saw a recommendation for ACK and set off to the ACK online store -- fantastic! Ships anywhere in the world!
Click on "The Making of a Comic" to find out how much work goes into a single ACK. I started laughing uncontrollably when I saw that the ACK folk had drawn this section as an ACK comic. Metahumor works best when it's subverting something you have always taken for granted, not just taking a new joke one step further.
# 17 Dec 2004, 04:25PM: I'm Turning Into A Secular Mormon: Garments and fashion! Baptisms and mission policies! Brigham Young's Gandhi-like concern with home industry! I can see that Times and Seasons is opening LDS up to me in a highly interesting fashion.
# 20 Dec 2004, 10:20AM: What A Huge Fuss: Aha! Roger Ebert reviews the original film and confirms that Phantom of the Opera isn't a huge deal.
# 21 Dec 2004, 07:13PM: Regrets: I am staying in San Francisco in the few days before New Year's, instead of visiting John, Susanna, and other Leonard family members in Utah. Sometimes the necessity of work is really argh. I really hope I get to visit you all before you move!
# 22 Dec 2004, 05:48PM: Finally Created A "Religion" Category: Gordon Atkinson has his Nativity story up, and a posthumous baptism discussion that is pretty cordial even if the word "libel" escapes my lips.
# 27 Dec 2004, 05:44PM: Quality Of Life Increase: Shoutcast is cheering up my worklife immensely. (For those of you who don't know, I had a highly enjoyable Christmas with Leonard's family and am working part-time this week.) Instead of hoarding legal and enjoyable MP3s for a tiny playlist, or switching from college station to college station in desperate fear of DJ babble, I can listen to an infinite length of ska! And thus I don't curse at customers as much. We all win.
# 29 Dec 2004, 10:51AM: "Look at all these banjo lovers, not a dry eye in the place":
While pondering and practicing procrastination and its causes, I recall hearing a song from the Wodehouse-inspired musical By Jeeves on the satellite radio with Leonard a few days ago.
Here I am in an extreme position
General Custer out of ammunition
Didn't get here by my own volition
# 29 Dec 2004, 11:56AM: There Is A God (yes/no):
Part of my reason for my interest in religions is hereditary; my father, a Hindu priest, has always been a student of world religions. My sociological interest trumps my personal quest for meaning (as I implied to John while misjudging his offer to assuage curiosity). How do people figure out how to live? Well, sometimes religions tell them what to do, but lots of people only follow religions part of the way. They obey some rules but not others. Why?
Anyway.
Here's the PowerPoint description of Judaism. Includes "God has favorites and some nations have a special deal with God", as well as:
The children of this congregation also have taken field trips to other religious services, including a Reform Jewish Shabbas.
Our kids were more impressed by how long the service was. Two hours is a long, long time to stand when you are 12 years old, and some of them may not go on another field trip after this.
What do you believe? Choose!
There is a God (yes/no)
Currently I'm interested in the huge multidimensional Venn Diagram describing what I believe and how those beliefs fit into other religions. Evidently I am a Unitarian and I didn't even know it!
"Seeker-sensitive" actually does appear in the descriptions of nondenominational Christian churches in the SF Bay Area - I had previously only read that term in a Real Live Preacher anecdote about conferences among clergy.
In the course of this rambling I found a listing for the SF Quakers and found out how they run their Meeting for Worship, which has no pastor or priest. (I'd love to watch their meetings to check how they avoid the Tar Pit From Hell.) The Quaker meeting description includes the line "this is not a discussion group", which should also be in that song about the country club and the disco as well as the song about the wife and the beautiful house.
The Quaker listing is on the best GeoCities page I've ever seen. Martin Marks recently made me laugh:
(I do not know whether Leonard would mind if I embraced a stapler on camera to indulge Mr. Marks. Would it have to be a red Swingline à la Office Space?)
Anyway.
Had a long and interesting conversation with Seth last night. I surprised him and myself with my passionate denunciation of deliberate rootlessness as inflicted on children, in implicit defense of raising children in a religious tradition. So there is some personal quest here, as well as the "look at cute or clever or puzzling things I have found on the web" aspect. I don't know how I want to live my life and all I can do is be honest about it. Wish me luck, if you believe in luck.
They did not give us the little caps to wear. If we come back, we would probably want to weat them. Do they have a basket of loaners, or would we have to buy our own?
The spirit was a bit different at an Eastern Orthodox Easter service.We visited on Sunday, May 17th 1999, which was the last Sunday beteeen Easter and Ascension. This meant that a major element of the service was the repeated triumphal hymn of Easter: "Christ is risen from the grave, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!" One of our adults commented later that this was not unlike a stadium of football fans greeting the home team: "You know you are visiting the winning team."
There are many Gods, each person can decide which to pray to (yes/no)
There are many Gods, but only one of them is good (yes/no)
Do pets go to Heaven (yes/no)
Oh yeah, memo to Dan Brown: your novels read like extremely compelling Geocities pages. Please, please, please go take a writing course at your local community college. You are hurting the children.
# 29 Dec 2004, 01:23PM: In Other News, Stendahl Did Not Write "The Cream And The Clear":
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals didn't think Darlene Jespersen demonstrated that her employer discriminated against women. They required female employees to wear makeup. Regardless of whether that's a reasonable or constitutionally legal requirement, here's the laughable part:
[Judge Sidney] Thomas, in dissent, said a jury should be allowed to decide whether putting on makeup is more expensive and time-consuming than not putting it on, and also whether the policy imposed intangible burdens on women.
Jespersen argued that cosmetics are expensive and take time to apply. But she presented no evidence of the cost of complying with Harrah's makeup requirements, or how they exceeded men's burdens in following the company's short-hair and clean-fingernails standards, said Judge A. Wallace Tashima.
Yes and yes! Come on!
# 29 Dec 2004, 03:57PM: Grrrr: There are very specific customers of Salon Premium whose email addresses make me react in negative emotional ways. I hereby wish all of them enlightenment.
# 31 Dec 2004, 10:31PM: Filing Personal Moral Bankruptcy:
Via Kottke. What does it mean to be organic? The people who want to buy organic usually also want the food to be produced by a small, local, independently owned business or co-op that is environmentally friendly. But if all you look for is "organic" you might get stuff that has no pesticides but otherwise doesn't jibe with your principles and desires. The CEO of Whole Foods seems to have the right idea regarding organicity in depth.
I subscribe to Planet Organics for a fruit and vegetable delivery every other week. I just give Leonard all the groceries and he cooks dinner and invites me over all the time. Today Leonard and I went wild customizing the standard order to exclude some unwanted items (persimmons, eggplant, lettuce) and increase the vegetable : fruit ratio.
In the new year I should eat better -- more greens, fewer processed foods -- but I probably won't. But Leonard's nutritious food is getting to be the staple of my diet and we try to keep each other honest about sweet-eating.
Right now he's making brownies. New Year's is a special occasion, right?
I never feel prepared for a new calendar year. And I feel as though I have no cred with myself to launch a New Year's Resolution. I still feel as though 2004 is the future.
Now the brownies are in the oven and Leonard is playing a melancholy singer-songwriter tune on the guitar and the rain is really falling hard on his freshly planted rhubarb in his back garden.
I feel as though the attempt to live an ethical life, or to discover relationship compatibility, are like Peter Sarnak's bit about Andrew Wiles fixing the bug in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem:
The brownies smell great. They are familiar but exciting. That's how we get through the disorientation of January first - friendly stimuli that coax us through the membrane of midnight into the new year.
Happy New Year!
They're done!
PETER SARNAK: And every time he would try and fix it in one corner, it would sort of - Some other difficulty would add up in another corner. It was like he was trying to put a carpet in a room where the carpet had more size than the room, but he could put it in in any corner, and then when he ran to the other corners, it would pop up in this corner. And whether you could not put the carpet in the room was not something that he was able to decide.
Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2004 |
||
| <Y | Y> | |
Cogito, Ergo Sumana by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sumanah@panix.com.
