Primal Fear and the Nutty Putty Cave

I've been in that cave the man got trapped in, the Utah Nutty Putty cave.

I had just turned 11 and moved to a new city. I was attending a hippie school with a serious outdoors bent, and to celebrate our first day and introduce some unit cohesion, we went out to the cave.

The cave was simply a hole in the ground, on top of a wind swept, hot and lonely bluff out about an hour from the city, within easy spitting distance of Utah Lake. There was no administration of the place then, and we brought no equipment other then hiking boots and palliative towels. The name of the cave,Nutty Putty, evoked the nature of the formation's unique mud, found nowhere else in the world, a geological singularity, a fascinating development.In laymans terms: the mud was exceptionally sticky and it got everywhere and took a million years to come off in the shower. I looked down into the hole, and up at my teacher, who I had met the day before. "You're sure about this?" I asked.

"It'll be so fun!" he said, encouragingly. I stiffened up my shoulders, and began to climb, down, down, down, everything getting darker, more slippery, my feet scrabbling for purchase on the slippery rock. It was only about ten feet to the bottom, but I wasn't even five feet tall, yet.

"HELL YESSS!" I heard, as one of my classmates flung himself down the hole, feet first, a flesh colored blur. He hit the ground adeptly: he picked himself up and regarded with interest the slime that now covered his feet and his hands.

"Don't do that!" my teacher said, desperately, from above our heads.

I'd been caving before when went down into the hole, in a huge and wild cave in Tennessee. That had been an adventure, something exciting and exotic, but the Nutty Putty cave was something entirely different: a hampster-tunnel made out of rock, just big enough to admit the body and not much else, a place that lent itself to wriggling and physical gyrations. I had a fear of heights, but nothing in the way of claustrophobia, and I began to enjoy it: we crawled through tiny spaces and into bigger chambers, we climbed up and over muddy obstacles, we chimney-walked through corridors and passages.

There were no stalactites or stalagmites here, no mysterious cave life, but it was an underground obstacle course and that was enough fun, for us. As we made our way back to the surface, my teacher stopped us, in the middle of a large chamber that could comfortably admit us all. "We're going to turn off our flashlights now," he said. All 12 kids did, with some sarcastic tittering tossed in. "Look, be quiet, just be quiet," our teacher said. "Now look around you."

The darkness was immense, all-encompassing, something that weighed on you, that pressed against your face. I felt as if my chest was being compressed, as if something was trying to push me into the rock that my back leaned against. It was disqueting, a horror: I focused on the sounds of the people around me, the assurance that they were alive. There were little phantasms of light around me, generated only by my mind (I knew that) - I wondered what they would turn into, if I was down here in the black for a long time. We kids had all gone quiet, totally organically.

My teacher broke the silence, after eight minutes. "That's pitch darkness. No light at all. Imagine what would happen if you got lost. If your flashlight went out."

"Horrible death," one kid said, trying to make a joke.

"Exactly," our teacher said. "So stay close."

We illuminated our flashlights, again. Our eyes adjusted to the light. We were quieter, now: still talking and laughing, but an aura of solemnity had taken us over, a bit. The class was a success, pretty much, from there on out, throughout a year of outdoors adventures of varying length and death potentiality. We had seen what could be the worst, what could occur if we pushed off too far on our lonesomes: it was inconceivable, too dire to consider. The things in the dark that came for you, the pressure on the chest, the endless, forever silence. Enough of a lesson.

I imagine the man who got trapped in Nutty Putty and give an involuntary gut-reaction shudder. I know just enough of what it must have felt like, for him, to truly disturb and terrify me, to imagine what he must have felt like. "He's now really in the bowels of the earth," a comment to the SLC Tribune page on his passing went. Good, god, let that never be me, I think, selfishly. It's an ancestral fear, one that is probably encoded deep in our DNA. Don't wedge yourself into holes, don't get caught out in the dark, and avoid the bowels of the earth, avoid death by wedging. Not that I blame the man who died - he was an adventurer, an athlete, he had made resisting certain instincts a habit, a habit that had brought him great pleasure, enhanced his life.

We can't succumb to cowardice and to our base and Darwinian (oh, that word is overused) natures when it comes to our lives, the risks we will or will not take. He's dead, it's a tragedy. The cave will be shut up forever, I've read. They couldn't take his body out of the place where he is - not in one piece. The authorities concluded that, both to protect the family and to protect the public, the cave will be filled in, rendered "a tomb." I can't come down on either side of that debate, if one man's misfortune should lead to the closure of the path he picked.

I can just consider primal fear again when I think of him, think of the cave: my first experience with the notion, conflated eleven years later with a current event, a pinpointed moment. I can't think too hard on it, or I'm not sure I'll sleep tonight, if my nightmares won't be crushing, claustrophobic.

Urumqi, Stanley Fish, and the Nature of the Sun

China Sends "Harmony Makers" to Urumqi - CNN

One should always be deeply apprehensive when China sends reps with coded names into the fray. Although those syringe attacks sound profoundly sordid. Best wishes to all involved.

What Should Colleges Teach? - NYtimes

Stanley Fish is running a great series on the teaching (and non-teaching) of basic writing skills to university students. As a college student, I admit I am often appalled at the level of writing skill supposedly college-level students display. Basic grammar and punctuation simply can't be ignored until a student waltzes their way into Freshman comp. I was lucky enough to have a few style task-masters in high school that eliminated that silliness from me before I hit college. Fish is on the right track.



The Top 15 Skylines of the World

I remember being blown away by the sheer height of Hong Kong. I felt as if I was stepping into a future that no one had told me about. We took the ferry around the island and I grew more and more amazed as the sun went down: They have buildings this big? This makes New York City look paltry, San Francisco look miniscule, London a mere imposter.

Turns out the HK skyline really is the most impressive in the world. I'd agree with most of these (having not seen Dubai or Shanghai). And San Francisco can't fail to stir the heart a little when it comes into view across the water.



Finally: Who doesn't love these guys? Infidels?

Decadence!, Doom Comic Books, The Horror of Ice Cream Men

I have been a bit bored lately. I am on vacation from school, back home in Sacramento. There are no jobs. There have never been many jobs for young idiots in Sacramento, and with the onset of the recession, there is exactly nothing for me to do but update my Twitter feed, over and over again. I am also getting back into drawing comics with somewhat limited success.

In my days of sloth and langour, I have done some good reading. I fell in love with Isak Denison's beautiful "Out of Africa," one of the most incredible odes to the wild lands (as they once were) that I've read. This is Kenya before the safari parks and the Disney tie-ins, the place where a Danish society lady could run a coffee farm and shoot lions in her free-time. It's a mode of lost-Eden travel writing that really cannot be pulled off anymore (we've taken apart all the Ngong Hills she once roamed in, have implemented lawsuits). A must-read.

Am also slicing and dicing my way through a large quantity of Roman history. To those pessimistic, the similarities between their history and our own - a fall into decadence, a spread-out empire, et all - can be distressing. But I like to think I am no pessimist.

Linking.

Doom: The Comic Book!



The most epically horrible comic book in the Universe. "You are huge! That means you have huge guts!" (A very old link, but I have been going through my million year old livejournals of late and revisiting old funny crap. I suppose it is the modern equivalent of combing through one's sparkly middle school journals). What deranged soul wrote this. What deranged soul wrote this so I can be their bestest friend.



Speaking of old stuff: remember the Horrible History books? They were my most beloved Scholastic book club purchase. The cartoons and funny writing about the squashier aspects of history inspire me to this day. Perverse and sick. And British. Go figure.

New York Parents Battle the Dark Scourge of the Ice Cream Man



A band of distressed New York parents conspire to prevent odious ice-cream pushers from selling their heinous and melty wares nearby playgrounds. I so dearly wish I was making this up. (DECADENCE! DECADENCE! AUGUSTUS SHAKES HIS FIST AT YOU ACROSS THE ERAS!) Did Roman kids have their parents carefully monitor every olive and hot-roasted dormouse they put in their lovely little mouthes?

Ever since Katherine had an inconsolable meltdown about not being able to have a treat, Ms. Sell has been trying to have unlicensed vendors ousted from the park. She has repeatedly called the city’s 311 complaint hot line, joining parents nationwide who can’t stand the icy man or his motorized big brother, the ice cream man.“I fall into the camp of parents who are irate,” Ms. Sell said. She has equal disdain for Mister Softee and the ice cream pop vendor outside the park, but since they are licensed, there is not much she can do about them.


Historic Tale Construction Kit
The Historic Tale Construction Kit, one of the internet's most briliantly shining treasures. Check out the brilliant Something Awful competition for these of old.

Indian Dating Service for Dogs
Speaking of decadence, India now has a dating service for dogs. Really. (I suppose Nero DID make his horse a senator. YOU SEE)

The Tomb in Seville: Norman Lewis's Account of a Lost Spain

I returned from Spain recently and have been ambling through a profusion of Spanish history, attempting to make sense of an endless procession of kings, princes, corpulent dictators and bad-boy knights. Spanish history is a nilhist's pursuit: everything seems to end in war and terror, empires grow large and are tossed back to the ground, idealistic revolutions end in something exponentially worse. In the middle of this comes Norman Lewis, widely renowned as one of England's best travel writers. "The Tomb of Seville" was his last book, published in 2003 when he was all of 95, but it does not reads as some sort of enfeebled final memory.

In 1934, the young author and his Sicilian brother-in-law, Eugene, set off to find the family tomb at the behest of the patriarch, who knows it is located in Seville. The two young men cross the border from France into Spain and find they have walked directly into the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, an impending crisis that they (being young and foreign) do not fully grok. The tone of the book is a curious mixture of youthful fun - because what young person has not to some degree wanted to be involved in great historical doings, in revolution? - and premonition of something horrible on the horizon.

Throughout the book, Lewis and Eugene nervously shrug off the impending revolt, the impending rise of violence ("Surely not another revolution?" as Lewis remarks to Eugene as they are impeded from crossing the border at France). They walk into a shot-up Madrid and find themselves crawling on their hands and knees to cross the street, and still the are unflappable. The journey to Seville proves roundabout and convoluted owing to the "situation" - they are forced to detour north to Salamanca and down by way of Portugal, crossing over the river back into Spain not entirely legally.

Eugene reveals himself to be an aspirant socialist during their time in Madrid, and the author is forced to talk him down from immediately joining up with the Red Army and marching off to fight for social change. Lewis himself appears to have no particular political conventions, tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism for communism - as he remarks to Eugene, "Anyway, communism is only one of the modern religions. Trouble is, I'm not a believer." Eugene for his part, isn't fazed by his companion's skeptical view of the entire revolutionary affair: as he informs Lewis, "I can't tell you how lucky we are to find ourselves here, waiting for the curtain to go up." The curtain would indeed go up, but not as Eugene had envisioned it.













Seville cathedral.

Norman Lewis was always praised most for his clear-eyed and achingly simple prose, his spot-on descriptions of landscapes, and this comes through to great effect in this little book. There are brilliant passages throughout, evocative of a sort of faded and mysterious Spain, a place where a healthy portion of the people still lived in caves and vast wildernesses cut off one city from another, pre-bombings and pre-modern warfare and all of its incumbent trappings. The Spain Lewis describes is desperately poor but it is not ugly, not yet.

Further, there is a mysterious and ancient aspect to the people themselves, which Lewis - the son of an English physic medium - taps into and notes with clear-eyed detail. In Portugal, they are still burning witches, and the townspeople claim she gave herself up for the attention. Madrid's women flock to the slaughterhouses to drink fresh blood in the hope of warding off evil. Castilian men keep watch for foreigners and alert the village when unknown souls float through, far before tourists and tour buses and t-shirt shops. This is the primitive and backwards Spain that used to be, the pre-industrial Spain that did not entirely die until after Franco's passing.

The family tomb in Seville turns out to be a fantasy. Located in Seville's cathedral, it has been dismantled and taken out to the rubbish pile in the back - as the priest explains, only a Christopher Columbus really has the wherewithal to be buried in the cathedral forever, lesser mortals are simply allocated time. Eugene's father, the bombastic old Ernesto Corvaja, unexpectedly races to Seville immediately after, in the hope of stopping his son from joining up with the Reds and involving himself in an imbroglio far larger then he can comprehend. Lewis tells us at the end of the book that he got his wish and returned to Spain to fight on the side of the communists - he survived the battle, but would die soon after, weakened by the periods of starvation he endured during the fighting. He at least got his rendezvous with destiny.

As Senor Corvaja says, darkly, on their last day in San Sebastian upon shutting himself up in his room with some musty literature, "Excuse me, I am off to relinquish the modern world". Lewis's Tomb in Seville is one of the finest testaments to this past and gone Spain we have. Highly recommended.

Is it Really Time to Pony Up, Daniel Lyons?

I saw Daniel Lyon's editorial in Newsweek this morning and simply had to reply.

It's Time to Pony Up - Daniel Lyons

Back in the last downturn, in 2001, Jason Katz realized he was in trouble. His fledgling Web site, Paltalk, was trying to make money by giving away a free service and selling advertising. But suddenly advertising was drying up. So Katz—whose site operated chat rooms in which you could not only send text messages but also talk, the way you would on a phone—did something radical: he started charging people to use a premium version of his software, which offered some extra features. Guess what? Since 2004 he's been making a profit, and he's come to believe that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, people really are willing to pay for online services. "I think some companies are scared that they will cede users to the competition if they deign to ask someone to pay for a subscription to something—but that is obviously a mistake," Katz says.

Lyons is arguing that for internet-driven companies to survive, they will have to charge for their services. As major social media sites money-making schemes have proven profoundly unsuccessful, the hordes of users who depend on these services to make some sort of sense out of their lives will happily pay up to use them. As he notes, "If the service is so useful, surely people would pay." Further: " The really passionate members are kids in their teens and 20s. They spend hours every day on Facebook, and would be lost without it. You think they won't pay five bucks a month?"

Lyon's idea may sound both innocuous and delightfully capitalist, but he shouldn't be anywhere near so confident that people will pay. (Further, I've never heard a thing about this Paltalk service he's touting). As an un-elected representative of my Facebook-humping generation, I'm unconvinced. People my age have spent their entire lives seeking the newest and shiniest Free Thing, and social media sites are simply the latest expression of such. Lyons is making the fatal assumption of assuming that we are in any way loyal. We, the young twinkies of the Internet, are not.

Fact is, if Facebook or Twitter began charging to use their services, I am certain that some enterprising little punk would simply create a cunning (or improved) duplicate of same. Coding a Facebook or Twitter copy isn't that hard, and a mass exodus won't be that hard to orchestrate either - note how pretty much all of Myspace's casual users migrated with a quickness to Facebook a couple years ago. Face it, Mr. Lyons, I don't think we will pay five bucks a month. We'll just go elsewhere.

Facebook's owners get it. Facebook's head of marketing, Elliot Schrage, has said as much: ""Facebook is a free service, and we have no plans to change that."

There's a lot at stake: a pay schematic for a monster like Facebook would totally destroy what makes it so valuable: its monolithic penetration (teehe) into almost every market everywhere. Minus that incredible power to attract everyone, it loses a ton of its appeal, it's ability to bridge the entire world in poking and drunk-photo-posting unity. Without total access, Facebook is nothing special. The same goes for Twitter. Do you really think those Iranian protestors or those Mumbaiker civilians would have ponied up to use Twitter? The incredible capabilities of Twitter as a real-time journalism service would be completely lost.


That's true - but it still makes money.

Can social networking sites really make money? Yes - Myspace offers a model of how making a buck off humanities exhibitionist streak could be achieved. I have confidence that Facebook will also figure out how to use its zeitgeist in the pursuit of capitalism, without losing the universality that makes it so special in the first place. Turning to a pay schematic is not , the answer - no matter how apparent it may seem to Daniel Lyons.

I Live and Other Stuff

Hello internet. Back from Europe and will begin posting here again with a quickness. I'm still finishing up my Europe travel blog, which is over here. Spain, Switzerland, and Italy - not a bad ride. I am sad I did not get to comment on gems like the Uighur crisis, Iran's political situation and HOLY FUCK MICHAEL JACKSON BE DEAD but there will be more opportunities for such things. Celebrities die and life goes on.

waiting to go to rome la dee da de da

I have flown through this city about a jillion times and have never actually visited it.

In the airport in Chicago and awaiting my flight to Rome on American, which will doubtless be deeply unpleasant (but such is the price one pays for cheap-ass international flights). I do happen to have potent sleeping pills, 50 pairs of earplugs, and a volume of Winston Churchill's World War II, all of which will doubtless produce powerful soporific effects.

Will be blogging the Europe trip over here, by the by: Faine Devours Europe

It's incredibly hypocritical since I am a 20 year old college student/semi professional punk, but I really hate sitting anywhere near other students traveling abroad. All the giggling and gossiping and poking and nefarious card playing. Whereas I sit sternly doing Important Work (blogging) on my computer and reading the Important NYTimes. I am probably frittering my life away. I also hate people who can play cards because I can't play anything other then Go Fish, and even then I get really confused and have to sit out for a bit sometimes.

I really do like Winston Churchill's writing, however. My school education regarding WWII seemed to be about the HOLOCAUST and PEARL HARBOR and nothing else. I realized pretty recently that my actual knowledge about the details of the USA's greatest conflict is in essence nil and figured getting the account of the whole thing from the horses/Churchill's mouth himself might be a good place to start. The prodigious output of the man is what impresses me most: book after book after book after.... One wonders if he was familiar with the notion of simply screwing around. Of course, I don't agree with him at all about India - he thought they shouldn't be independent and would never pull it off, and we all know how that worked out - but beyond that point of contention, he's a great thinker and very interesting to read.

Reading Camus and not entirely sure what to make of it. I have also been re-reading all my Calvin and Hobbes books and find the juxtaposition of theories of the absurd with the Best Comic Strip ever to be really gosh darn easy.

Also read Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and very much enjoyed it. Sort of Owen Meanyesque with much more artistic merit and infinitely more surreality. Also great scenes of nastiness (horse heads --> eel infestations, et all) Made a stab at The Flounder a few years and threw up my hands in defeat...I may have to revisit it.

I promise I will produce more dumbass content for this blog in the near future. I have been spending a ton of time on Encyclopedia Dramatica of late. Although it is the conduit of pretty much everything offensive on the internet, it's also the website that can make me laugh my ass off more efficiently then anything else. I also find it amusing that /b and Something Awful apparantly originated LOLCats, a meme that is now being used by "hip" soccer moms. The Internet moves in mysterious ways, and we cannot know its intentions. That sounded cool when I thought it out.

Life Rules Edition One:

- Never eat at a restaurant with an Irish name unless you are in Ireland. Even then, you might be better off with energy bars.

- Plastic bags are the best travel item in the universe. I have like fifty of them in my backpack right now. With the little zip things. Oh man.

- The Scissor Sisters make everything better. Really!

More Perspectives on the Destruction of Kashgar's Old City

Kashgar's Old Town Bulldozed - Far West China

A great blog post about the destruction of Kashgar's Old City from someone who actually knows the area. It's a good approach to the situation: the NYTimes articles posited the Chinese motives as essentially evil, whereas the actual boots-on-the-ground situation is much more complicated then that. (As in all things).

China Razes the Cradle of Culture - The National

Another excellent article about the destruction of Kashgar's Old City. The National brings up an issue I hadn't considered before: many of the residents of the Old City's jobs and economic livelihoods were centered in the city itself. Since the city has been throughly demolished, their livelihoods have gone kaput as well - and the government has not provided any jobs to replace them. Uighurs are also at a considerable disadvantage in competing for jobs against the Han Chinese, who the government repatriate in considerable numbers to Xinjiang's border cities. Further, the sense of community that evolved organically around the old city will be gone forever, and that's going to be a pretty considerable loss for the locals.

But perhaps the Uighur's loss is more collateral damage in China's no-holds barred rush to modernization then a malicious effort at "ethnic cleansing", as noted in the article:

“I don’t see it as a deliberate attack on Uighur culture, but part of China’s policy to modernise and develop,” said Dru Gladney, the president of the Pacific Basin Institute and an expert on Xinjiang. He said it had more to do with cultural insensitivity than politics.


Urumqi, one of Xinjiang's biggest cities and a pretty swell place as I recall. Clean air was sort of a compelling novelty.

China, as is abundantly clear from its treatment of its historical treasures, (knock it down, build a theme park on it, knock it down then build a theme park on it!) feels it cannot spare the time and expense of maintaining "living museums". They are attempting to go from an agricultural and backwards economy to that of a super-modern economic power in an incredibly contracted space of time, and the government isn't much concerned about the sentimental stuff that stands in their way. This same attitude is evidenced in the Chinese unwillingness to adhere to international emission's standards : as they reason, everyone else got to pollute and mess stuff up on their path to giant economy status, why can't we? Aesthetics, such as historical monuments and clean breathable air, are definitely a secondary concern in China's eyes. It's not attractive logic to us in the first world, but there also is just about jack shit we can do to compel them otherwise.

From the standpoint of an amateur observer, it's interesting to compare how China and India are going about the business of becoming large, modern economies. China seems to be considerably more efficient, but India doesn't seem to be as willing to forfeit its cultural soul. A ginormous and inefficient democracy (but still a democracy) versus a communist-capitalist totalitarian state. I for one am gonna be interested in seeing how this all works out in the next forty or so years.

Yet another good article about China's efforts to absorb cultures within its borders:

China's Final Frontier - Prospect

China Destroys Stuff to Save It Again (SURPRISE!)

To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It - NYTimes

Kashgar's Old City: The Politics of Demolition - open Democracy News Analysis

China's comically loose interpretation of "protecting" historical treasures comes to the fore again, as the government moves to destroy essentially all of Kashgar's Old City. The government claims the move was done in the name of "earthquake protection" - an argument that doesn't hold much weight considering the Taklamakan desert city has lasted for upwards of 2000 years. The cheerily named "Resident's Resettlement Project" has continued Many suspect China's Han Majority are destroying the old city - a cultural touchstone for the Uighur minority and a religious center - as part and parcel of their efforts to absorb the troublesome natives into China's Borg-like majority. The Old City's residents have been included in the process in typical Chinese style:

The city says the Uighur residents have been consulted at every step of planning. Residents mostly say they are summoned to meetings at which eviction timetables and compensation sums are announced.

Although the city offers the displaced residents the opportunity to build new homes on the sites of their old ones, some also complain that the proposed compensation does not pay for the cost of rebuilding.

For their part, the Chinese government think the demolition of the historically precious city won't harm Uighur culture any: they intend to replace the buildings with "Uighur style" architecture and tourist-friendly attractions.

Residents of the Old City, some residing in family homes that were built over 500 years ago, are being efficiently repatriated into Soviet style apartment blocks - which, as we saw in Sichuan province, may be less earthquake safe then the ancient homes they are leaving behind. (By this logic, we should really start knocking down and earthquake proofing a healthy majority of, say, Italy.)

According to a NYTimes commentor who had spent some time in Kashgar, the residents saw it coming:

The Chinese had recently built the ring road and the encircling sea of "toilet buildings" as people call them - cement and white-tile Stalinist-style tenement buildings - inhabited by Han migrants (and which are certainly not impervious to earthquakes, as we saw in Sichuan), which seemed to be constantly pressing inward on the old city and its mosque. The Uighurs bemoaned that it was probably a matter of time before their final enclave was destroyed. That time has unfortunately come, eight years later. - Joshua L.

However.

To begin, I am personally biased here. I visited Urumqui and Turfan two years ago, and very much enjoyed experiencing Uighur country - it's like nothing else I've encountered, and entirely apart from the rest of China culturally and historically. Uighurs, a Turkic group totally distinct from Han Chinese, have waged a war against the Chinese government's control of their traditional territory since 1949. Although the Uighurs managed to free themselves from Kuomintang rule in 1933 and 1944, creating autonomous states, they were forcibly subsumed into the mainland in 1949 - creating a very similar political situation to that of Tibet.

Unfortunately for the Uighurs, the Tibetans play much better to crowds then they do - they lack a cuddly Dali Lama, have little hippie appeal, and practice a Muslim faith that isn't particularly popular in today's Western sentiment. As a result, the Chinese governments push against the Uighurs has gone on without much comment from the rest of the world, and Save Turkestan stickers just haven't taken off in the same way Save Tibet decals have. For their part, the Uighurs occasionally violent tactics against Chinese control haven't done much to win them sympathy from the government - which has, as some suspect, used charity as a front for destroying Kashgar in the name of diluting even further the realm of Uighur influence. Unfortunately for the people of Turkestan, the Chinese government is almost certainly going to win this battle. The Chinese, as we know, are spectacularly good at absorbing other cultures.

Still, as some noted on the comments section of the NYTimes article, the moaning and dramatics from us first worlders is a typical example of educated rich folks telling poor rural folks what is culturally relavant and what should be saved. The Old Town of Kashgar may be picturesque, but it also has no sewer system, little sanitation, and indeed may be vulnerable to earthquakes - and perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to lament a bit of modernization in these people's lives. I've spent some time in Beijing's hutongs - a similar setup to what exists in Old Kashgar- and although they are certainly quaint, they are also dirty, cramped, odiferous, and overcrowded. Historical and rustic neighborhoods are not always great to actually live in.

In this instance, though, I'm not sure the "stay out of their bidness" arguments holds much water. Judging from my vastly limited knowledge, the Uighurs seem rather happy with their Old City and would rather not move into the apartment blocks the Chinese have thoughtfully set aside for them. They want to stay in their 500 year old houses and do whatever the hell it is they've been doing for the past 2000 years, which seems to me a legitimate desire.

But the Chinese Borg aren't interested in sentimentality or preserving culture beyond what drives the tourist trade - and the added perk of weakening the Uighurs made the destruction of the Old City almost inevitable. The Chinese are laser-focused on bringing their economy up to world standards and their profile up to that of a superpower, and the preservation of charming little mud cities is extremely low on their priority list - we may recall the Three Gorges Dam controversy. For my part, I'm sad as hell that I'll never get to see Kashgar's Old City, but in the end it isn't my battle. I can, as always only spectate and complain.

Titanic Awards, Jesus Cheetoh, Comical Mariachi and Others

Nominations Open for World's Worst in Travel (!)

Doug Lansky had an awesome idea: compile the crappiest stuff in travel on an all-inclusive forum, then put out an award for the very most unfortunate travel adventure. Awards exist for worst airline (US Airways,) most overrated cathedral (Notre Dame, it's smaller then it is in pictures), and most aggressive beggars (India, I agree completely). I'm looking forward to many happy hours spent combing through horrid travel experiences. I cannot entirely explain it, but horrifying travel stories are infinitely more satisfying then pleasant, happy ones. If I read another uplifting story about a magical cultural experience filled with smiling, folk-dancing natives and delicious but rustic food and the sense of inner peace and escape - I will vomit, I will plotz, I will rebel.

Stories where someone is, say, drugged in an opium den and has their gallbladder removed for recreational drug purposes by a homosexualist dwarf with a wall-eye and then is grossly overcharged for the taxi ride back - now that's what I want to read about. I would be overjoyed if a travel publication devoted only to unpleasant travel existed, complete with glossy photographs of carnage and terror and helpful guides to countries to avoid at all costs. Perhaps Bruce Lansky will fill this gap.

Indeed, if I ever become a real actual travel writer, I intend to actively seek out horrendous travel experiences for the entertainment of my readership, will actually sacrifice my body and my soul on the alter of snigger-worthy bad holiday experience.

Nah, not really.












How to Tell If You Have Religious Food - Consumerist

Is your food touched by the mighty hand of our immortal creator? The Consumerist offers some easy steps for identifying if your snack food is divinely inspired. Is your meal ticket contained within the depths of your bag of Cheetohs Cool Ranch? Is the beetling brow of Moses lurking within your Funyuns? Only you can answer that question!







Endearingly Horrid Mexican Mariachi Music Video
I want to be best friends with these guys and frolic in their Mexican funland and we will eat tacos and jiggle our booties and oh my goodness, what a vision of perfect human joy.






To the Battlefield, My Fellow Dweebs! - Bad Science

Ben Goldacre opens a can of whoopass on the media's curious love of trash science (as he does all the time on his blog, you should really subscribe to it). This week, he tackles the supposed reality of "man flu," smart girls supposedly superior sex lives, and sunshine's effects on lifespan - and notes that perhaps online media can play a bigger part then it previously has in providing true medical info to the general public.

Linkage of The Evening, Linkage of the Day

Shellfish, not selfish - The Economist

New Orleans, beware: oysters are in serious decline all over the planet. These mighty (and mighty delicious) bivalves are in danger from pollution and alien invader oysters - oyster reef populations are only 10% of their historical abundance. The Nature Conservancy's report does offer some hope: measures to kick out alien oysters and better fishery management may keep us in bargain basement oyster shooters for a long while yet. And what would America be without them?















HOLY CRAP

Via 2 Blowhards: Amazing video of jellyfish.

If I ever become irredeemably, disgustingly wealthy, I shall install a jellyfish tank and have extremely fancy cocktail parties to their pulsations. It will be tres chic. I will name them all and consider them my only companions in my tremendous, echoing mansion. I am looking forward to all this very much.

Speaking of Newsweek, the New Republic's Michael Kinsley isn't sold.

Kinsley makes a good point: since Newsweek has dispensed with even trying to be a guide through the startling panoply of information out there, it essentially cancels out its own usefulness. Might as well spend your time sorting out the Internet instead of bothering with a news magazine, even it does offer in-depth assessment of all that crazy shit you need to be up on. Also true that Newsweek needs to not only offer quality content but super high quality content to compete with all the stuff offered online: good luck with that, Fareed and company.

I do hear a lot of people say that they prefer magazines because they can sit down and read through the current events and feel relatively informed. Magazines perform a needed function for many people who find the glut of online information overwhelming and confusing: a good news magazines combs through the news and picks out what you need to know, perhaps offering some through provoking commentary along the way. We can get opinion and analysis online if we want to know more about a particular topic, but for general breadth and condensation - that's why we pick up Newsweek. If Newsweek decides to shed what many feel to be its base and most important function, well, they're going to be in serious trouble.

Sword Hilt Umbrellas: Bitching

You too can carry an umbrella with a sword hilt handle. Come on, tell me you don't want one. I can see it in your eyes. Your eyes full of lies.

Homage to Homage to Catalonia

Most of us are exposed to George Orwell in high school, wherein we are usually compelled to read Animal Farm (almost compulsory) and 1984 (only slightly less compulsory). Most of Orwell’s readers know him only through his fiction, and that’s a real shame: George Orwell himself was a charming and fiercely intelligent character, an excellent journalist and a deeply ethical and distinctly humanist man. Homage to Catalonia is one of his nonfiction works, and I think it's a great read for anyone interested in a boots on the ground and extremely readable account of the vastly confusing Spanish civil war. Further, I think some casual readers of 1984 would be surprised to find that Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war in the P.O.U.M, on behalf of the communists. That battle and his time fighting on behalf of the Spanish Republicans as a whole makes up the bulk of the book, although Orwell does devote some time attempting to puzzle out the politics of the various political parties that sprang up in the conflict- whether he makes any headway on this particularly frustrating topic is for the reader to judge.

The book begins with Orwell arriving in Catalonia, wherein he joins up with the P.O.U.M and heads directly to the Zaragosa front. Interestingly enough, Orwell wasn't all that sure who or why, exactly, he was fighting. As Orwell makes pretty clear in the course of the book, the Spanish political situation was so maddeningly complex, with anarchists, socialists, communists, Republicans, and nationalists - and that was just on the loyalist, anti fascist side - that even the combatants weren't sure what was going on. Orwell's defense of his actions is refreshingly simple: "If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: 'To fight against Fascism,' and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: 'Common decency." I've heard worse rationales. Many Europeans - and quite a few Brits- came over to fight for the Popular Front against fascism, which everyone could see was moving with horrible speed against Germany and Italy. It had a lot to do with honor. Orwell would later be greatly disturbed by the Communist party and Republicans turn against the P.O.U.M later in the course of the struggle. Indeed, the division between different Popular Front factions pretty much sealed their fate.

















Orwell's account of the Zaragosa front is pretty much directed entirely towards the profound boringness of much of war: lying around in trenches, stepping over shit, angling for chocolate, and hoping that the enemy will attack to give you something to do. Packs of fifteen year olds accidentally blowing each other away with guns and testicle-eating lice were just part of the ambience, as the P.O.U.M's spectacularly poorly equipped (but brave) fighting force traded insults with the fascist lines. Orwell also does a great job of conveying how incredibly backward Spain was at the time of the Spanish Civil War (which was how it remained til' Franco was done for) - people living in ancient habitations, taking their donkey carts out to the villages, and so forth and so on.

Orwell has a particularly vivid scene where he is forced to bunk up in a vile midden of a barn full of "rats, rats, rats as big as cats," trash from various strata of history, and human bones - hard to believe this is the same Catalonia now populated by vacationing Brits. I was perhaps most amused by Orwell's account of Spanish wartime propaganda: both Republicans/Popular Front and Nationalists were fond of positioning one another on opposing hills with loudspeakers and shouting insults across to the other side. (The P.O.U.M, as Orwell relates, were fond of taunting the poorly fed Nationalists with food: "We've got bread with fresh hot butter! Delicious bread with melted butter!" Psychological warfare at its best.



After an informative, helpful, and, despite all efforts, slightly mystifying account of the Spanish political situation, Orwell moves into the second quarter of the book, where he finds himself caught up in the Barcelona May Days after returning to the city on leave. I would prefer to refer you to the Wikipedia article and not attempt to explain the entire blasted thing but I will try: the Communist influenced Civil Guards decided to take an anarchist run telephone buildings in Barcelona, sparking street fighting between various Republican factions. Orwell was in the thick of it and his account of the street fighting, the aura of paranoia in the city, and the ridiculous aura of confusion surrounding the entire affair is rather priceless. Although Orwell spent a large majority of the conflict parked on top of a building reading Penguin novels, he was moved by the events and found himself completely disgusted when the communist press insinuate the P.O.U.M collaborated with the Fascists in the battle.

Due to this disillusionment, Orwell declined his original offer to join the International Brigade, and returned to the Aragon front. The third quarter of the book occurs after Orwell was shot in the neck upon his return to the front. He rather incredibly lives through the injury, giving us vivid and deeply distressing images of non too cushy Spanish war hospitals. He is deemed unfit for battle (temporarily) and returns to Barcelona. Thinking he might have a bit of a rest, he finds himself in the middle of conflict between the communists (who have decisively taken the city,) and P.O.U.M militia were being regularly taken into custody as "Trotskyists." His wife, who has been staying in the hotel in Barcelona, warns him that he must get on the move and soon to escape the Communists, who are taking in everybody regardless of nationality in an attempt to purge P.O.U.M sympathizers once and for all. In probably the books most wrenching moment, Orwell and his wife, prior to leaving, visit his friend and former commander Georges Kopp, who is being kept in prison.

Although Orwell, at the time of writing, seemed fairly certain Kopp was doomed, he made it out: partially in thanks to Orwell's testimony, Kopp made it to England, where he was nursed back to health by Orwell's brother in law and his wife. (Check out Kopp's later career via the Wikipedia article: it was incredibly ballsy, if you may pardon the expression). Orwell was forced to sleep in the streets a few nights to avoid detection in the hotel, but he and his wife managed to secure their passports and and catch the next train for the French border.

Orwell made it out and back to England, but the Spanish Civil War and his experiences within it certainly never left him. It would require a literary critic with a lot more gumption then me to tease out the strains of his experience in 1984 and other of his later works, but Homage to Catalonia stands alone as a deeply realistic, humanist, and oddly pleasant account of an under-discussed event in world history. Read it.

They are also making a movie of it. I really have nothing constructive to say on that measure.

Oh Dear Lord We're Becoming the Internet

Is the Internet making us dumber, a nation of ignoramuses, eventual patsies for the rise of our computer overlords? Are we outsourcing our brain functions to the machines that live on our desks, and is this outsourcing not even bothering us. That's the thesis of Robert Carr's widely read article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", anyway. According to Carr, his constant Internet use is chipping away at his "concentration and contemplation." Carr suspects (with plenty of evidence) that we as humanity are actually being reprogrammed by the Internet, programmed away from the lengthy books that we’ve contented ourselves with for the past few millennia. At the end of his essay, Carr arrives at the source of his discomfort with Google's attempt at creating an "artificial intelligence":

It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Therefore, Google is sapping us of our ingrained contemplation and reasoning power and replacing

According to Peter Suderman at the American Scene, however, Google may be doing the opposite: it may be making us smart The Internet may indeed be teaching us to think like it does - but is that necessarily a bad thing? To quote:

Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.

So instead of making us stupider, the internet is making us smarter in a different way, changing us from encyclopedias to comprehensive indexes. Therefore, we may simply need to change our definition of what an intelligent person is. Instead of putting up a smart person as someone who can summon up the kings of Poland back 400 years or the subspecies of lemur or whatever, we might have to start being impressed by the person who can find the salient information the fastest, a society where brilliant Google-fu will become more important then total recall. Concentration and contemplation may start to lose their import, as uncomfortable as that sounds to us now. Deep reading and contemplation may begin to lose out to wider (and shallower) skimming. But odds are good we will know more stuff on the whole.

People who have an ability to both find the stuff and aggregate it will, then, be at a serious advantage in the future. Fast readers and thinkers used to have a leg up in the past, but I think they’ll have an even stronger foothold now – after all, the most successful bloggers spend their entire working day scouring the web for info, contemplating it,and putting up real time analysis and opinion. As Sunderman points out, making connections between material and adding to the universal index and cataloguing the world’s information will become of imperative importance – simply absorbing a whole lot of information will no longer be “enough”. Old school rumination may lose out to online consensus building, collection, and contextualizing – but is that necessarily going to ruin us all? We used to “become” books and think like they did: now we are quite literally “becoming” the Internet.

Newsweek’s new model, interestingly enough,is a sort of capitulation to the new speed of journalism – they’ve decided to focus more on in-depth analysis and less on reporting simply what happened. Let’s see how their model works for the future of print journalism. Will people be willing to divide their time between shallow and instant information and deep analysis? Or will people simply pick one?

I also take umbrage with Carr’s belief that the internet somehow stifles ambiguity and contemplation. I’d argue the opposite. We’re now able to access pretty much any information we might possibly want at any time. I don’t know about you, but I think that that sort of access has increased the quality of my contemplation. Further, if we’re talking ambiguity and fuzziness, I think being allowed access to pretty much every possible side and aspect of an argument actually increases our ability to see the all-important grey area. (Of course, this precludes some convincing arguments that people simply use the Internet to read about stuff they already agree with.)

Still, there’s gotta be some drawbacks to trusting all our knowledge to the internet. There’s always the chance that the internet could be destroyed or temporarily knocked out, bringing some future generations internet-centralized knowledge crashing down to earth with it. I do not think the model of being Internet or index smart only is in any way sustainable as the world is now: the internet’s penetration into most of the world is still incomplete or vague, and even my high-speed connection goes down inexplicably now and again. We’ll need to be pretty much certain the internet can 1. reach us all and 2. is extremely reliable, like turning the light on, before we can rely upon it for most of our knowledge and chuck a lot of the hard memorization our educational system currently relies upon.

I don’t think it is possible to retard the flow of thinking-via-internet vs. thinking via-books. My generation is already pretty finely tuned to getting our information via internet indexes, and future generations will only be more so. We’re simply going to have to figure out how we can most effectively blend stationary information and mobile/internet based information. And I don’t think we’ll have to chuck out ambiguity and contemplation in the pursuit of knowing more and knowing better.

my generation is comprised of academic whores and i am all the same

We're whores, whores!


We have, I am afraid, been lied to.

Let me begin with some context. My generation, on the whole, is really lousy at rebellion. We (of course I refer to the upper middle class) were raised by Baby Boomers with a bottomless tolerance for pretty much anything: we had nothing to rebel against, and if we did rebel, we’d look irrefutably stupid. We decided early on that the Man was okay and would produce for us, and therefore we bought into The System hook line and sinker, placed all our bets on the Achievotron, the mechanics of American success.

AP exams, endless homework, ceaseless jockeying for Ivy League positions, we did it all, 110% certain that our freakish work ethics and desire to Change the World. We were certain that our inherent uniqueness, the specialness our parents had assured us we carried within us from birth onward, would give us all we wanted and more would allow us to become Captains of Industry and Titans of Philanthropy. We believed all this.

And then the economy broke, fell flat on its face, and the path was not so clear anymore. Uh oh.

So what are we, my generation, us bright eyed and bushy-tailed Generation Y’ers to do about this whole terrible mess? We could, it is true, simply buckle down and work harder, become resolute in our ambition to bust our asses as hard as Asian kids do every day, to throw ourselves on our knees before the idols of Kaplan, Hah-vad and college admissions boards everywhere to deliver us, oh please.

Or we could, for once, try a little rebellion, a little freedom, a little peace n’ love. Most of all, I think my generation could use a little healthy, positive, cynicism. It don't take a genius to see that the advice us Generation Y'ers has been given our entire lives is in fact total BS - that working hard and punching the ticket and volunteering with sick African children will not earn us meaningful careers and repute and Wikipedia entries. We are, we are now forced to admit, living in a world that does not find us special and often even finds us expendable. We as young people, as Generation Y, are going to need to reset our expectations. We are going to have to adapt to a less glittery future, or we will go completely insane. What form will that adaption take?

















They knew how to rebel! They smelled bad and failed geometry and they didn't even care!

There are some good options. Our predecessors in youthful rebellion – look at Generation X, look at our own parents – seemed to do quite well with cynicism and distrust for the elder generation. Perhaps we must regard our own parents and authority figures with a gimlet eyeball, demand more of them, refuse to roll over and do what they say because they said it.We should listen to what the sixties idols (whose music we adore) are talking about, perhaps get a little of that anarchist and rebellious spirit – not that these movements really made the world any better, but they at least declared independence, freed their adherents from believing every cotton picking thing authorities and parents told them was good and true. As a helicopter parented and independence deprived generation, we are going to have to man up, we are going to have to cut the umbilical cord and separate ourselves from our parents encompassing petticoats and find our own path – because the system we bought into, it is evident, is not going to provide for us any longer.

And if the demise of that system means we are not all going to be able to become hot-shot bankers or heroic philanthropists or environmental lawyers, then we are going to have to accept it. There are more ways to make a living on this earth then glamour positions. There are more ways to be happy and successful then punching the ticket, toeing the line, and following the career track to its bitter (and now uncertain) end. And we, Generation Y, are going to have to accept that, embrace it.

I'm going to try to do what I can to deal, and I suggest that you, my poor and startled twenty-something counterparts, try to do the same. I think it is good advice. I do not know if I will be able to take it.













Oh Jack, you oddly bewitching bloated alcoholic, we need ya!

But it's so hard. We do care. Look at my story. I've driven myself to the brink of total and complete wack-job behavior in my college career, all in an effort to secure the almighty 4.0. When I was in high school, I had myself convinced I wouldn't be beholden to the almighty Achieve-O-Tron when I was 15 and on a really obnoxious Jack Kerouac kick. Of course, that was wishful thinking, By my junior year of high school, I had totally bought into it. I did community service and obsessed about the right schools and had happy contemplative thoughts about nice careers and accolades in interesting magazines.

By the time I hit college, I was totally inducted into the cult: after a bit of mild partying, I buckled down, certain that if I got anything less then A’s in all my classes that I would be rejected from all possible graduate schools, end up in a dead end job, and would witness plagues of locusts, toads, and blood. By the end of my time at Simon’s Rock, my first college, I was in such an achievement-whore state that I would become hysterical with fear upon checking my grades, would almost lick the feet of my professors in an effort to get an A, torpedoed my social life in the name of flash cards and paper-writing and overall intellectual development. It was no way to live, not for a pay off that was abstract then and seems so much more abstract now. I was a total mess by the time I left the Rock, but I had a 4.0 in hand, and I figured things might be all right.
















I was going to stay in India and drive one of these. True story.

I almost did it: I almost broke free of it all last year, when I was working in India. Unlucky circumstances almost (ironically) freed me up forever. My transfer application to the University of California system, which I had almost entirely betted on, was rendered completely useless by a screw up on my guidance counselors part. I discovered I had been rejected from every school I applied to from an internet café in Bangalore, and, as you might expect, freaked out completely. Despite the 12 hour time difference, I wrote groveling letters to the UC’s admissions board, rallied my favorite professors to write letters on my behalf, hoping against hope that the UC’s would reconsider.

Nope: the math class I had taken (in belief that it would transfer) was Required At All Costs, and therefore, my perfect grades and perfect extracurriculurs and perfect shit-eating little grin would not be permitted to attend any UC campuses (thank you very much). I was devastated.

And then I started thinking. I realized these things:

1: The USA educational system had, despite all my hard work, had, in essence, told me to take a hike, had made irrefutably clear that my specialness was, sadly, simply not Special Enough.

2.: There really was no compelling reason to go back to school, or even back to the United States. (They had all rejected me, I had by proxy rejected them, and anyway many great writers didn’t even go to college, it was true).

3. Perhaps specialness, overachievement, and punching the ticket were not all there was to life. Perhaps my life in Bangalore – containing, as it did, long evenings at disreputably reputable nightclubs, mysterious seafood curries, and general high adventure was better then what I had left behind.

I was almost ready to stay in India. I suspected it would be easy to find work as a night club promoter or luxury hotel employee in town – I knew people who knew people – and living expenses were next to nothing on the Subcontinent. I could make a new life there. I might never have to go back. I could, at least theoretically, snag myself an Indian real estate maven, have a tremendous wedding involving white elephants, and divest myself of all learning for the rest of my life. These were all possible .

But I was not brave enough to break away, not yet. I played my last card: I applied to Tulane University in New Orleans at the very last minute primarily because I still could and because I have ancestral routes in the Big Easy. I was astonished to find I had been awarded not only admission but a hefty partial scholarship. I moved to New Orleans.

I like Tulane, and I like New Orleans. Tulane has been good to me, and I’ve been able to explore my interests, meet interesting people, and take engaging (and small) classes. On the whole my college nightmare, such at it was, has worked out nicely. But still I wonder.

For I am still a grades whore, a sniveler, a desperate adherent to the cult of Achieving Shit. I still go into minor fits when a teacher sends out the wrong homework or I get a question wrong on a test, and my heart still drops twelve feet into my stomach (are hearts above stomachs, or stomachs above hearts – by the way?) when I find I cannot understand some scrap of material. I was ready to break away but I did not do it, and I find that I am still as much of a slave to the Achieve-O-Tron seems as far away and impossible as it did before. But I know I have to do it. I know I should do it. I should start caring less.

But to walk away from the Achieve-O-Tron is in essence impossible: when I think of doing so I think of working in a McDonalds and being terrifically bored for the rest of my existence. But of course that is not really the case; of course you can survive and do exceedingly well sans Ivy League degree and multiple awards. I will try as hard as I possibly can to believe this and act on it, and, fellow Young People of America, I hope you will do the same. It’s about the only way I can see out of this, about the only way we’re going to be able to to keep our sanity and our wits about us. I hope we’re up to the challenge.

california ungovernable (surprise), transsexual childrens, riaa lawsuits ahoy

Is California Impossible to Govern? - The Economist



According to this editorial, California's troubles may be bigger then we think: hell, we may be ungovernable. California's direct government system, two-thirds rule. and profoundly bizarre districts have turned the sunshine state into America's most sterling cluster-fuck, with the worst bond rate of the 50 states and a 42 billion dollar gap in revenue and spending. Arnie, meanwhile, spends much of time promulgating dire results if the ballot measures don't pass: fling open the prison doors! Sell our children to Thailand! Turn Yosemite into a Chinese mall!

I love my state, but it's impossible *not* to conclude that we're in serious trouble. I suggest we seriously considering splitting up into Hippie California and Silicon California and make the problem a little bit smaller. I'm certain 2/3rds would vote for that - right? Right?



14 Most Ridiculous Suits Filed by the RIAA and MPAA - Brainz.orgc

Brainz explores the most bone-ass stupid lawsuits put forth by the RIAA and MPAA, including measures targeting a 42 year old senior mother who didn't know how to use file sharing software, a retired dyslexic schoolteacher who could barely email, a 12 year old, and a homeless guy. Real nice, guys, real nice. The RIAA and MPAA claimed in December that they have stopped putting forth lawsuits to individuals, but apparently that may also be a bucket o' lies as well: according to this Wired article, the lawsuits are alive and well. (The RIAA claims the lawsuits were "already in the pipeline," which doesn't strike me as very compelling - how many cases do they have in the pipeline?)

My objection to the RIAA's behavior isn't so much for their reaction to music pirating - it is illegal - but the ridiculously excessive nature of their claims. Whacking someone for $600,000 dollars for downloading a few movies is simply obscene - and if the RIAA really wants to stop file sharing and convincing people it's bad news, they shouldn't make themselves look absolutely ridiculous in the process. Let's hope the RIAA's claim to change the course of their anti-file sharing strategy will hold water.


Omaha Boy to Live Publicly As a Girl - KETV

An Omaha family has decided to allow their 8 year old son to live publicly as a girl - drawing the ire of his Catholic school. Although the school hasn't outwardly said that allowing a boy to live as a girl sorta squicks them out, they have claimed that "having the child attend the school for three years as a boy, and then presenting as a girl would not be a good learning environment for the child or other students." I can just see a parent suing the school because that goddamn trannie made it impossible for little Bobbie to learn long division. As for the child in question, she/he is pretty happy about the decision: she notes, "“Now I can wear nail polish, get rid of all my boy clothes and not worry about that name."

I think it's kind of a fascinating cultural sea change that parents seem to be accepting transgender kids, rather then attempting to "change" them or sweep them under the proverbial carpet. Still, parents should (and I imagine do) understand that a kid is facing a pretty difficult road ahead if they choose to present as transgender early on - although sex-change surgeries are getting more advanced and are beginning to be done earlier. I wonder how long it'll take before transsexualism is accepted to the extent homosexuality is? (Not being an identified gay kid is a safe road to travel either, but its onset does tend to happen after puberty, unlike transsexualism...)

Journalism Reimagined, Circus Freaks, And Other Fun

Ye Olde Journalist

Pay Walls Alone Won't Save Newspapers - NYTimes

The newspaper industry is once again making noises about making customers pay for content: even Grand Poobah Richard Murdoch claims free online papers are a "malfunctioning" business. That may be the case, but as Eric Pfanner points out, that doesn't mean people will pony up if pay walls are reinstated - as was found back in the day when all online papers were paysites (remember that?) most people just went elsewhere for news. Pfanner argues that newspaper might want to take a page from the music industry playbook, which is now packaging song catalogs with broadband and mobile phone services. Could newspaper content be packaged with other tasty delicious incentives and thereby make a buck or two?

I say maybe, but those incentives and those packages are going to have to be pretty bitching awesome to get people to shell out for them. If papers are able to band together with magazines and other media outlets to create cool, attractive, and valuable content that can be packaged as a whole, then more power to them - but I currently have little faith in these old media outlets ability to recognize what new media consumers actually give a rat's ass about. Special subscriber-only photos of Paul Krugman's nose-hairs aren't going to cut it.

Still, the prospect of the internet being turned into a pay-to-play service is a really distressing one. What I (and I presume most people) adore about the internet is its totally egalitarian nature -the internet handily allows anyone with a computer and a connection to access the vast majority of the species knowledge, news, and entertainment nearly instantly. This is absolutely revolutionary, a mind blowing boon in human history (indeed, I think we do not appreciate it enough,) and I believe the preservation of this freedom and openeness must be preserved at all costs.

Will this freedom come at the price of the old media outlets, who (despite their antiquity) produce good, professional content? Hard to say and difficult to answer. The optimist in me hopes we can find a solution that will preserve both. The pessimist hopes that citizen journalists will be able to fill the gap the newspapers will leave - and I don't have a hell of a lot of hope in that, either.


The Human Marvels

Have you ever found yourself wondering, secretly and perversely, what it would be like to attend one of those circus-freak shows of long ago? What it might be like to tweak the curling mustache of the Bearded Lady and compare your own height to that of Tom Thumb, to pretend to be aghast beyond belief at the Elephant Man (rendition 300) and ply the Fat Lady with salami? Was that only me?

I am exceedingly embarassed. In any case, if you do share that particular affection, you must visit the Human Marvels website, which provides interesting, skillfully writing, and fascinatingly human profiles of the circus freaks that populate our history. Many of the so-called freaks lived rather epic lives: Mademoiselle Gabrielle, the "half woman" married three men and led on many others with her shapely half-a-body, while the one foot tall plus change Pauline Musters became an acrobat, accomplished performer, and fashionista toast of New York for a glittering (if brief) period.

Perhaps most impressive of all was the career of the midget Lord Minimus, member of the court of King Charles - a tough as nails little bastard whose exploits included capture by pirates, killing a man who impugned his honor in a duel, and commanding cavalry in raids orchestrated by Prince Rupert.

Check out this video of the magnificient Viking Giant, once the world's tallest man (and a dude with a more robust constitution then poor Mr. Robert Ladlow).

Also: Most Spiders on a Human Body.
Industrious Aussie child Thomas Buchanan lies in a box and has 125 golden orb spiders put upon his bare chest. I am, admittedly, more impressed that such a record category as Most Spiders on a Human Body exactly exists, but props Tom, all the same. I kind of would like to break the record myself however since I happen to really quite like spiders, even the huge ones that eat birds and wayward toddlers.

pot pies from hades and the Butt Tree

Food Companies Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers - NYTimes

Afraid of contracting deadly pathogens from your convenient frozen pot pie? Sucks to be you: food producers are deciding that they'd rather place the responsibility for food safety on the consumers then on themselves. As companies scramble to keep down food costs and exploit global resources, the food supply chain is becoming convoluted: meaning many food producers find it essentially impossible to pinpoint where, exactly, their ingredients are coming from. (Almaty? Azer-baijan? A Szechuan whorehouse? Mercury? It could be anywhere.) Food makers such as Con Agra and General Mills are now advising consumers to cook their frozen pizzas and pot pies in a conventional oven rather then in their microwave: terrible news for microwave sellers and cubicle slaves everywhere.

Experts aren't convinced consumers are ready to take on responsibility for frozen food safety: according to Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, “I do not believe that it is fair to put this responsibility on the back of the consumer, when there is substantial confusion about what it means to prepare that product."

In simpler terms: consumers are dumb as spit and will no doubt continue to kill themselves with zap-able pot pies unless the corporations step up. I agree, Mr. Osterholm, I agree.



Did They Have Obese People A Zillion Years Ago? - Slate.com


Computer says, "Eh, probably not". In an era where getting food involved searching for hard to obtain berries or spearing bad-tempered mammoths to death, getting enough calories to develop Orson Welle's-like bodily dimensions was in essence impossible. The recently discovered Venus figurine may look obese to our eyes, but it's suspected she simply had Steatopygia - a large deposit of fat in the heiney regions. This was considered dead sexy in the calorie deprived, pre-Kate Moss millennia, and that's probably why the sculptor created the figure.

When did the miracle of obesity begin? Probably around 12,000 B.C when humanity started settling down and developing farms, complex society, writing, and hissy-fits in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. Greatly increased food production and a sedentary life style, along with a huge uptick in carbohydrate intake, probably produced history's first obese people.

Speaking of Hottentot Venus's and Steatopygia, I present to you the Butt Tree.

Yes, I am 12 and a half years old and I like potato chips and dogs and television and boys are icky.

But not butts. Butts are endlessly hysterical. Butts are funny today and will be funny tomorrow. I am convinced people began making butt jokes around the same time that we gained command of language. In 10 million years people will be making butt jokes, unless we lose our butts in the process of evolution. And a great and marvelous thing will be forever lost.

And in the category of Trees With Deeply Uncomfortable Anatomical Assocations, I present to you what may only be termed the Dong Tree:


It was commonly believed during Ye Olden Days that witches would steal men's penises and put them in trees, where, presumably, the scorned eunuchs could not climb up and retrieve them. This 13th century Tuscan mural portrays 25 penises complete with testicles, wafting gently in the breeze among an attractive spray of leaves. The mural is thought to be an early political ad: the Guelph faction, campaigning against the Ghibellines, wanted to infer that witches would take over and put penises up trees (metaphorically) if allowed power. I am still mildly shocked that this particular gambit was not used by Sarah Palin in our most recent election.

kind of bloop, zhao ziyang tells all hot hot, cricket ruins sex

In Secret Memoir, a Rare Look Inside China's Politics - NYTimes

This is pretty amazing: Zhao Ziyang, the now deceased chief of the Chinese Communist party, has had his memoirs released to the world. The secret memoir expresses Ziyang's refusal to crack down on students in the 1989 Tiananmen tragedy, ensuring his expulsion from the Party and the house arrest he was forced to live under until his 2005 death. Ziyang also claims that he pushed the opening of China's economy hard without the support of his party cohorts, including Deng Xiaoping, who generally gets much of the credit for allowing China to go out and play on the free market. The book, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang,” will be released in the USA on May 19th. Think this will be a must read.

Score In Your Sex Life During IPL - Times of India

Yes, cricket can force Indian women into tragic lives bereft of sex and companionship. Have no fear - the Times of India is here to explain the unfortunate phenomenon and offer solutions. (Develop your own goddamn hobbies). Perhaps the inherent and vast boringness of cricket should be used as a handy contraceptive.

(I still retain scarring memories of having to feign interest in cricket during Bangalore social gatherings. "Oh, you're a bowler? Um, you bowl things? To wickets? That is amazing, that is so fabulously cool." I understand you, women of India, I do.


Google to Reshoot Street Views of Japanese Cities - SFGate (via AP)

The backlash against Google Map's occasionally creep-tacular surveillance efforts continues: the Japanese are complaining that Google's photos look right into many folks backyards. Regardless of what mysterious and exciting thing they're doing back there, Google got the message: they're reshooting em' all.

Kind of Bloop - Kickstarter

Marvelous gentlemen attempting to recreate Mile's Davis's Kind of Blue in 8-bit. For God's sake, please donate. I can't wait to hear jazz music rendered into chiptune.

i hate talking about music with people my age

Speaking of cool people, these neon sunglasses fill me with an almost unspeakable rage.


Nothing makes people my age, cool people of a certain age, more douchy, more unsupportable and odious, then music. Music is the nexus of pretension and wankery among people my age, we of generation Y, we who survived the faux-punk era of the early 2000’s, we who derive great and perverse pleasure from bludgeoning one another with our knowledge of music arcane. I will do pretty much anything to avoid talking about music with other People My Age. I will crawl through trenches of broken glass and bury my head in flower pots and run jibbering into the night. I will avoid Discussing Music at all costs.

Human worth is assessed for people of a certain age and a certain social echelon by the music they listen to and are familiar with. Coping to a fondness for stuff that is mainstream, uninteresting, or simply uncool by some complex and incomprehensible metric can lead to social ruin and dissolution. Further, one’s opinion of Acceptable and Non Acceptable music must remain a fluid and transient thing as life goes on and one ages and becomes (presumably) more sophisticated and awesome. A 15 year olds fondness for garage psychedelic music becomes embarrassing when the advanced age of 21 is achieved, a 16 year old’s new found admiration for Django Reindhart becomes embarrassingly provincial as they enter university and the more exclusive social circles.

No, a young person who aspires to any semblance of currentness must continually advance their knowledge of obscurity, their willingness to listen to noise metal that sounds like recorded and guttural vomit, their ability to memorize facts about bassist’s assistants nose hairs. So much hangs in the balance.

It is because of Music that I despise talking to people in clubs. First: no one should talk to each other in clubs, at least in good ones. In a good club the music should be excellent and the booze should be, if not excellent, at least cheap and easy to obtain. If these two elements are in place then no one should be talking to each other as nothing good can come of discussion, except for poorly advised sex. Further, when someone talks to me in a club, I am forced to engage in the mighty hipster Social Dance, wherein my opponent/new best friend attempts to ferret out my music preferences to assess if I am worthy of their time and attention. This usually occurs in the guise of a few pointed questions about What I Listen To.

There was a time when I was foolish and frightened, and reader, I played the game. I told them what I liked, exactly that and no more. When I said What I Liked, the other party’s reaction was invariable controlled, slow burning disdain, a shifting of weight,an arching of the eyebrow. I said something wrong, even I could figure that one out, but the maddening element of it was that I did not know what, exactly, was wrong. I did develop a few survival strategies. The first was to immediately rattle off the most incredibly obscure artists and bands I knew of, in the hope of stupefying the other person long enough for me to escape to the ladies room.

Unfortunately, this did not always work for I do not know nearly enough obscure bands. Often, I would (to my horror) register a band that was Cool. This meant the other person would flip their black-dyed hair and sip their drink and say, “Oh, aren’t they amazing? Aren’t they cool? I saw them about twelve times in Brooklyn in the Young Donkey’s Underground Club and we used to get wasted together, real cool guys. What did you think of their third LP, I mean, really think? Too much reverb?”

I hated this. I had no idea the band in question even had a third LP. I’m still not really sure what the hell an LP is, and I would have to fire up Google and lurk in a corner for a bit to figure out what, pray tell, reverb might be. When someone asked me their opinion on these things I had two bad options: try to bullshit my way through the conversation until I reasonably could run for the bathroom, or simply admit I didn’t know a damn thing about their third LP and be regarded as if I were the Queen of Lame, the Lame Mistress, the Lamest Human on Earth.

Another potential minefield was the Band Currently Playing, when one is at a show in a nightclub where cool people converge and spawn. I can usually find something at least tolerable in most music (this too precludes me from coolness) – which leads always to terrible conversations. I will meet someone at a club and they will ask me about the band as I am getting my drink. I will smile in an ingratiating way and say, “I think they’re very good.” The other person, who has a stud in the middle of their chin how do you even do that, will sigh theatrically, regard me hard, and say, “Really? I think they’re terrible.” And I will be forced to backpedal, or burrow into the bar-area, or (dream of) smashing my drink over my head. For saying that you actually like something is the greatest social suicide. No one is allowed to actually like things anymore.

I used to try to bullshit – it’s not very hard. You just repeat everything they say to you. Perhaps the hipster boy who accosted me in the corner might say, “I really liked the use of polyphonic tambourine on the fifth track. The one about Sumeria.”

Wherein I would think swiftly back to my expensive liberal education and parry. “Oh,, I thought their interpretation of the Gilgamesh myth was real cool, the whole humping-Enkidu bit, the noble savage motif. With the recorders. And all.”

“Enkidu, huh? Maybe the recorder symbolized the fall of man, I guess. A primitive instrument, Yeah, you really got it, you really made me think!”

And I would be safe. I would watch as my skinny-jean wearing opponent walked away, a cheap but culturally acceptable beer in their hand, and I would breathe a sigh of relief.

I don’t care anymore. I like to listen to Lady GaGa, Cat Stevens, and Bob Seger. I think people who produce noise metal should really turn down their amps and get a real job. I find Of Montreal repellant (I believe the lead singer is not nearly self-loathing enough for an indie band member, self confidence merely demeans and dilutes them). Once I was nearly moved to tears by a Celtic folk song about Irish immigrants and I am not even Irish. I recently made up a dance routine once to Justin Timberlake’s immortal “Sexy Back” and performed it in mixed company. I will never in a million years be cool. I give it up and abscond with it.

I am not ashamed, I am not ashamed, and I am not ashamed, no longer.


PS: Is douchey a word???
PPS: If it isn’t it should become one really soon. I call people a douche all the time. It might be my calling card.
PPPS: Is that another obnoxious sub-hipster conceit? Should I knock that off? Is that another repulsive aspect of my personality?
PPSS: Why, I am very neurotic. I should join an indie band myself and spend my time looking mad at people in clubs.