Halfway down the Danube

And speaking of international aid

I don't want to turn this into a political blog. Nor either into one dedicated to bashing the current administration. This isn't that sort of blog. (And goodness knows there are plenty of places to go online if that's the itch you want scratched.)

But as long as we're on the subject of international aid, this story caught my eye. (Washington Post, use bugmenot if needed.)

Most Katrina Aid From Overseas Went Unclaimed

As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide.

Titled "Echo-Chamber Message" -- a public relations term for talking points designed to be repeated again and again -- the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated aid at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans "practical help and moral support" and "highlight the concrete benefits hurricane victims are receiving."

Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies' offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's victims.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

In addition, valuable supplies and services -- such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships -- were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them.

It gets worse.

I guess I mention this because Claudia blogged about it at the time. She was shocked that the German offer of help had been refused. As it turns out, that's not the worst thing that could have happened.

In another instance, the Department of Homeland Security accepted an offer from Greece on Sept. 3, 2005, to dispatch two cruise ships that could be used free as hotels or hospitals for displaced residents. The deal was rescinded Sept. 15 after it became clear a ship would not arrive before Oct. 10. The U.S. eventually paid $249 million to use Carnival Cruise Lines vessels.

And while television sets worldwide showed images of New Orleans residents begging to be rescued from rooftops as floodwaters rose, U.S. officials turned down countless offers of allied troops and search-and-rescue teams. The most common responses: "sent letter of thanks" and "will keep offer on hand," the new documents show...

In one exchange, State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and were destroyed. "Tell them we blew it," one disgusted official wrote. But she hedged: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."

It just makes you so weary.

Brief thoughts on the NFL draft

Virginia Tech safety Aaron Rouse was picked by Green Bay in the third round of the NFL draft yesterday.

"All those teams that looked over me, they just added more fuel to my fire. I've got a huge chip on my shoulder, man." [...] When asked if he had enough heavy clothes to bear the brutal winter climates of Green Bay, Rouse said: "I've got a cold heart and that's all I need."

Update: huh. Okay, I'll trust Edgar Bennett's eye. Another Hokie, David Clowney. As I know water flows downhill and the sun rises in the east, so too I know that horrifying jokes are being prepared, well in advance. Hall from Boise State and Harris from Rutgers? Someone is hopeful.

Brief thoughts on the Tobias resignation

So USAID director Randall Tobias resigned suddenly yesterday.

For readers who don't follow American news or politics, Tobias was a pretty important figure. Not only was he director of USAID, but he was "Director of Foreign Assistance" -- a post created especially for him. He was supposed to be in charge of all US foreign aid, which is a huge portfolio... USAID is just the single biggest piece.

Tobias resigned after being linked to a DC-area prostitution ring. He first claimed that he used the $300/hour call girls for massages only -- no sex! He added, strangely enough, that he was using mostly Central American girls. Then, a day later, he just resigned.

The local USAID community was abuzz with the news today. It would be fair to say that a consensus opinion has emerged.

I don't think I've ever seen such a unanimous combination of schadenfreude, mockery and bitterness.

A couple of things. One, USAID people tend Democrat, by about 2-1. Not too surprising if you think about what they do. So, there is that.

(I should note here that I'm not a USAID employee. But I spend a lot of time around people who are.)

Two, there's the hypocrisy aspect. Tobias took overtly conservative positions, including pushing abstinence education and opposing outreach to sex workers to fight AIDS. To add an additional wrinkle, it's not like he was a real social conservative. He was a corporate executive type, a former CEO of Eli Lilly. It was generally believed that he was just carrying out administration policy without having strong feelings about it one way or the other. Some people think this makes him a bigger hypocrite than if he'd been a devout conservative.

Three, it makes everyone look a little bad. Even if you're ompletely laissez-faire about what people do in their own time, USAID is supposed to be presenting America's best face to the world. USAID also spends a lot of time end effort fighting human trafficking, which is a huge problem in a lot of different places. And USAID is trying to reach out to the world's poorest, the people who live on $2 a day or less. So, having the head of USAID spending his spare time boinking Guatemalan girls at $300 per hour just looks so incredibly bad. You can be completely libertarian on the sex-for-hire issue and still see that.

But there's still a bit more than that. What's come out in the last day or so is that people really hated Tobias. Even after you discount the piling-on factor -- which is significant; it's human nature to deliver a kick or two to the toppled statue -- even after that, it's clear that a lot of AID folks really disliked Tobias, as a leader and as a person.

Not sure I want to go into more detail than that. But it's been interesting to see how fast and unanimous the consensus has been.

(If you have a few minutes, and find this sort of thing interesting, here's an article from the Boston Globe about some recent political wrangles over USAID. Written about six months ago, but makes interesting reading in light of recent events.)

The best revenge

This is not a political endorsement, but Croatian elf Dennis Kucinich is now my personal hero.

Back to writing short plays.

More rubble, more bubble

A bit of paleo for the enthusiasts. Nearly forty years ago, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesindo Cantarell noticed his shrimp nets kept on getting coated with sludge in Campeche Bay, off the Yucatan Peninsula. Turns out crude oil was bubbling up offshore. Today, the Cantarell oil fields are the second-largest producing in the world... and in rapid decline, but that's another story.

The fields themselves are carbonate breccia -- pieces of rubbly limestone embedded in a natural cement -- several hundred feet thick, sealed by dolomite, a tougher chemical relative of limestone. Their formation dates from the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. When the dinosaurs became extinct.

You got it: the dinosaur killer meteor impact at Chicxulub made Cantarell. To quote Grajales-Nishimura et al.:

On the basis of the unique stratigraphy and distribution of impact material within the calcareous breccia, the following sequence of events and products can be visualized as having taken place within few minutes or hours after the time of the impact: (1) carbonate platform collapse due to shaking, resulting in deposition of the lower breccia; (2) arrival of ballistic impact ejecta (ejecta layers with impact minerals); and (3) reworking and mixing of the ejecta layer with coarser material by one or more passages of the impact-generated tsunamis that were reflected back and forth across the Gulf of Mexico paleogeography.

65 million BC, a real bad year to go to Cancún.

Reference: Grajales-Nishimura et al., "Chicxulub impact: The origin of reservoir and seal facies in the southeastern Mexico oil fields", Geology; April 2000; v. 28; no. 4; p. 307–310.

From Isfahan to Moscow, Part 3

Continuing the story of Persia's first great embassy to the West.

As fine weather had set in we again put to sea, in two days retraced the way already gone, and in another day, proceeding forward, reached a port where there were indeed no houses, but a settlement of folk of divers tribes. These men were all living, as is the fashion we see among the nomad Moors of Morocco, in the midst of their flocks and camels; they are of the Tartar nation, and the country goes by the name of the Land of the Great Tamerlane of Tartary; though, in fact, it is subject to the King of Persia.

The manner of life of these people is quite barbarous, and they talk little that is matter of sense; they go almost naked, wearing only fisher-breeches, or a very short shirt. They are poor and very humble folk in their ways, and welcom anybody who comes to their country. They treated us well, giving us of their flocks a liberal and sufficient entertainment during the fortnight that we were dlayed here, for by reason of the dead calm which lay upon the sea, it was impossible for the ship to set sail all this time. In this country, which otherwise is called Manqishlagh (and lies on the east coast of the Caspian) there is a native Persian Idol very greatly venerated by the folk of the land, also by strangers, and to this Idol, we, offering many gifts, forthwith made sacrifice, that the Idol might grant to us a favourable wind.

Some interesting stuff here.

First, where the hell were they? "Manquislagh" might be the modern Mangyshlak penninsula, but that's 500 miles northeast from their port of departure -- pretty good sailing for just three days. Also, it's unlikely that Mangyshlak was even nominally subject to the Persians... it's pretty far north.

On the other hand, Mangyshlak would fit his description tolerably well. You know how the Caspian Sea sort of curls over at the top, like a head with a bouffant hairdo, facing right? Mangyshlak is the bit inside the bouffe. It's the southwest corner of modern Kazakhstan, and there ain't a lot there. It's basically a Wisconsin-sized hunk of dusty steppe.

In 1850 the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko -- Ukraine's greatest literary figure -- was sent into exile there, and it was pretty much the back of beyond even then; a small fort guarding the end of a caravan trail, and nothing else. In Soviet times a closed city was built there around a nuclear reactor, and today an oil and gas boom is making the place look up a bit, but it's still pretty desolate and empty.

Second, the bit with the Idol. The eastern Caspian shore is just the sort of place you'd expect to find that kind of pagan survival, and it's really not surprising; Rebecca West saw villagers in the rural Balkans sacrificing to a fertility stone in 1937. What's interesting is how readily the Persians, presumably good Muslims, were to make an offering. Possibly Persia was going through one of its relatively cosmopolitan and mellow phases; Persian history is long, and includes episodes of both fanaticism and relaxation.

It's also possible that the Persians were desperate. This would have been August, when temperatures on the steppe go over 40 degrees Celsius (105 Fahrenheit) in the shade. No buildings, no food but dried fish and mutton, no shelter but the stinking tents of the nomads; no civilized conversation, nothing but the sun, the dry steppe, and the brackish motionless waters of the Caspian... yeah, by the second week these courtly gentlemen might be getting a little heat-dizzy. One little sacrifice, Allah, for just a tiny breeze. I know You'll understand.

I do wish the Persians had written a bit more about this stop. Like the Plains Indians that Lewis and Clark would meet two centuries later, those simple Tartar herdsmen were enjoying their last generation of peace and solitude. Russia's relentless expansion south and east was lapping around the top of the Caspian, and the Cossacks would be arriving soon.

Anyway, they got a good wind, and off they went. But:

During the next two months we were constantly set back by foul weather; so we coasted the shore, and had we but a favorable wind, in twleve days we should easily have accomplished this our journey across the Caspian.

So, maybe the business with the Idol wasn't such a good idea.

At the end of these two months we came into what is an arm of the Caspian, where the water is clearer and less salt than out at sea, and, indeed, Giovanni Botero has already remarked this matter in his book, but this gulf is a separate arm of the Caspian and it is no part of the main sea.

That's Giovanni Botero the liberal Catholic Counter-Reformation intellectual (sic), best known for his criticism of Machiavelli but also no mean geographer. The Persians might even have met him; he would be in Spain in the early 1600s.

And here it is proper to point out that the water is thus less salt here by reasons of the rivers which flow into this bay or estuary; but, as proving clearly that the water of the Caspian is truly salt, when a storm wind drives the water back through this estuary... into the river mouths, their waters then become as bitter as gall, and of this fact I satisfied myself by experiment. The people of this country call the river, which is the Volga, by the name of Idel.

The Volga Delta is big even today. 400 years ago, it must have been immense. "Idel" is a Turkish name. In 1599, the north Caspian shore was still inhabited by various sorts of Turkic peoples; the Russians had only arrived in force about forty years earlier, and were still a minority.

Thirty leagues up this bay or estuary, sailing north we began to enter the territories which the Muscovites occupy in Asia, and the first inhabited place we came to was a town of the Christians, which is called Astrakhan.

More anon.

Random sports blogging

While I patiently wait for Brett Favre to finish his decades-long plan to humiliate Dan Marino and then collapse into a pile of dust (which will then be packaged in microgram reliquaries for the Green Bay faithful), here are some sports links.

Alyssa Milano has a baseball blog. Yes, it's really her. I'm about a Koufax One, unlike certain readers here -- you know who you are, and it's not just Noel -- but wow. She's really into baseball.

La Loca pointed me to the recent New York Times Magazine article on expertise, myelin, and Russian sports training for kids. In return, I gave her a link to a Los Angeles Times article on plyometrics and the bizarre subculture of teaching yuppies to dunk a basketball. I'm going to add another about the Polgár sisters and chess.

And since both the Psychology Today article and the NYT Magazine article mention Ericsson's research at Florida State, I'm throwing in a link to a Cambridge handbook he co-edited and to a partial CV, for my own future reference.

China's dream of EMPIRE! -- part Deux

Completing the story of the mysterious map of China.

Joseph Eros, friend of this blog and occasional houseguest, is now a law student at a large state university in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This gives him access to libraries! So, Joe did some research. All on his own time, bless him, because he cares.

So is the map real or not?

Yes. The book exists, and the map is in it. It's a textbook history of modern China, published in Beijing c. 1953. The map is just as the Indians depicted it (except for the numbers, which they added). They seem to have obtained it via an Indian student in Peking.

Here's the bibliographic information (no Chinese characters):

Title: Zhongguo jin dai jian shi.
Author: Liu, Peihua.
Published: [n.p.] 1953.
Description: 10, 253, 16 p. maps (7 fold.) 19 cm.
Call Number: DS 757.L81 C94

So, what's the significance?

Well... on one hand, not much. Even on its face, the map doesn't advance PRC claims; it just shows (inaccurately) what Manchu China is supposed to have controlled in 1840. Xinhua disowned the map; they were lying, of course, but it's still indicative.

It does suggest that the Chinese Communist Party went through a certain period of wildness in its youth. But at the time the map was published, the CCP had only been in power a few years; China had just come out of a brutal civil war, and was still fighting a war with "imperialists" in Korea. Some goofy-ass stuff gets published in wartime, even in liberal democracies.

It seems to have been a brief and passing phase. China has been pretty modest in its territorial claims for a while now; at the moment, they have only two outstanding border disputes (with India in the Himalayas and the one around the Spratly Islands).

On the other hand, the map seems to be out there. I've had three people mention it online in the last couple of years. I'm still not sure if they're talking about this map or about a later, Soviet version adapted from it. But one or more versions is definitely in circulation in Russia, where it's taken as evidence of the Yellow Peril.

And that's all.

The Milwaukee Protocol

I had 90 minutes to kill at the US Embassy yesterday. Between meetings, type of thing.

So after I grabbed some lunch -- the Embassy has a rather decent little cafeteria -- I parked myself in the little library with my laptop. The library is all reference books and magazines, and seems to be mostly used for language lessons. Still, it was a place to be.

After an hour or so, I decided to give myself a short break. Strolled over and browsed the magazine section. National Geographic, no. Time, definitely no. The Economist, would take too long. Scientific American... sure, okay.

And that's how I found out about the Milwaukee Protocol.

Rabies is really scary. You can get it from even small bites or scratches, and if you don't start treatment before symptoms appear, you die. Period, full stop. The only treatment at that point is to alleviate your symptoms, i.e. make dying easier. Decades of determined effort have made rabies rare in the US, but it's still horribly common in the rest of the world, with tens of thousands of people dying every year.

Except.

I didn't know it until yesterday, but since 2005 there has been one (1) unvaccinated survivor of full-onset rabies. She's walking around today. She's fine. She's from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Her name is Jeanna Giese.

(There have been some other rabies survivors -- wikipedia says six, another article says two -- but they all got vaccines first. And most of them seem to have ended up with lasting damage.)

So how'd she survive? Well, her doctor made some assumptions.

(1) Rabies doesn't necessarily destroy your brain and nervous system; it just messes it up for a while. In medical-speak, "Death is primarily attributable to reversible dysfunction rather than irreversible destruction of brain, spinal cord and nerves." The infected brain sends mad signals to the heart, lungs, and muscles, leading

(2) The rabies virus is eminently killable; the body's own immune response can deal with it, given time. (The key fact here was that autopsies of dead rabies victims sometimes showed quite low levels of the virus.) Also, rabies antiodies can be injected to accelerate the process.

I'm going to oversimplify some way complicated medical thinking and say, the doctor looked at these assumptions and said, let's put her into a coma. An induced one, with drugs. His thinking was, shut down the infected brain and keep it from damaging the body, thus giving the immune system time to go after the virus.

It worked. She was in a coma for over a month, and in pretty awful shape when she got out of it. But she slowly recovered, and today she's completely fine. She has a numb spot on one finger and a couple of minor neurological issues, but she's going to college.

Now, before we get too enthusiastic, let's note that nobody has been able to duplicate this success. There have been several attempts, and they've failed. The patients have died. There is reasonable and skeptical debate over whether the coma was really necessary.

So it's not yet clear whether this treatment -- the "Milwaukee Protocol" -- really works. Maybe the bat gave her an unusually weak strain of rabies. Maybe Ms. Giese had an unusually strong immune system.

Still... what a story.

Full medical description of the Protocol, if you're interested (.pdf).

(Coming soon: that Chinese map again, and more on the Persian Embassy.)

Eight who died

A couple of weeks ago, Jacob and I drove out through Echmiadzin to Metsamor. No reason -- we just wanted to take a Sunday drive.

Echmiadzin is the home of the Catholikos, the patriarch of the Armenian Church. It's like a mini-Vatican in the lower Caucasus. Deserves a post of its own.

Metsamor is the home of the Soviet-era nuclear power plant plus a major archeological site, a large Bronze Age town. That deserves a separate post too.

And then there was the memorial to the Yugoslav fliers.

Background: in December 1988, Armenia got hit with a devastating earthquake. It destroyed much of Gyumri, the second largest city. Killed over 20,000 people and made around half a million homeless. (Twenty years later, there are still some earthquake refugees living in "temporary" housing.)

The disaster was so huge that the USSR broke with 70 years of tradition and allowed international assistance. Money, food, and medicine flowed in from all over the world.

One donor was Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was teetering on the edge of its own breakup, but it still had another year or two to live. So they send a plane full of medical supplies... and it crashed, just outside of Echmiadzin. All eight men on board were killed.

The Armenians built them a memorial.

First, the setting. The memorial is a couple of miles outside Echmiadzin on the main highway to Metsamor. This corner of Armenia is steppe. Or rather, God intended it to be steppe, but the Armenians use it for dryland farming. Think of a two-lane road going through one of the more run-down bits of Nebraska. Okay, Nebraska doesn't have any 15,000 foot extinct volcanoes looming over the horizon, but otherwise it's very like. There's even a shallow little creek where frogs croak and swallows dart for bugs. You could imagine Ma, Pa and Laura stepping out of a sod hut any moment. I wouldn't say it's pretty, exactly, but it's peaceful.

Second, the memorial. There is no nice way to say this. It's hideous. Awful. Soviet memorials tended to be either pompous and arrogant, or squat and graceless. But in the final years of the USSR, much was allowed that had long been forbidden, and public sculptors were allowed to experiment with abstraction.

The result, in this case, is dreadful. It's sort of a jumble of aluminum blocks -- wreckage, right, got that -- with a couple of vaguely birdlike forms plunging through them. It's a big thing, six or seven meters high. Which just makes it worse. I haven't been able to find a picture online, but, you know, that's probably a good thing.

I don't think there's a direct link between the quality of public monuments and the health of the societies that created them. Still... looking at that, you can't help but thinking /the nation that did this simply fell apart soon thereafter/.

Third, there are the flowers. There are a lot of them. Armenians are... I don't know if this is the right word, but... a memorious people. And though twenty years have passed, they're still remembering the foreigners who came to help and died trying. It's really something.

Finally, there are the flyers. There are eight names, and here's an interesting thing: they all seemed to be Serbs. You can't be 100% sure from last names, of course; Serbs and Croats and Montenegrins share a lot of last names, and they also intermarried. But all the names looked pretty Serbian. If it was a military flight, that might make sense -- the career military was always top-heavy with Serbs.

So there it is: a memorial from a nation that no longer exists, built to thank another nation that no longer exists, abstract, ugly, but still bedecked with flowers. Next time you're on the road to Metsamor, stop and check it out.

Plays by sense of smell.

Former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson is running for President! You might remember him best as the hapless Secretary of Health and Human Services who appeared drunk on CNN after the anthrax attacks. Well, who didn't feel the pull of the bottle in those trying days.

As far as I can tell, Thompson's plan for the presidency takes a play from the Feingold book. Russ Feingold famously won the Democratic primary for the US Senate in 1992 in Wisconsin by running a goofy, low-key, underdog campaign -- painting his campaign promises on his garage door, going through his house on TV looking for skeletons in his closets, the Elvis impersonator endorsement -- while his opponents engaged in a grisly circular firing squad of negative advertising. He won the primary with a freaking 70% of the vote, and then defeated the Shatneresque Republican incumbent Bob Kasten by seven points in the general election.

So I think Thompson is waiting for Romney, McCain, and Giuliani to kneecap each other:

McCain: I was in a CAGE!
Romney: Adulterers!
Giuliani: Hey, you wear magic underwear!
Romney: And you wear women's clothing! Often!
McCain: I was in a CAGE!

But he's still Tommy. Quoting from today's Ha'aretz, which does not usually cover Wisconsin politics (even though Golda Meir was from Milwaukee):

"I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that... I just want to clarify something because I didn't [by] any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things. What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You've been outstanding business people and I compliment you for that."

Yeah, we had him for four terms.

The best part is, now you know the reason why many Wisconsinites (and not just those of a certain age) keep on voting for our two Jewish senators. "Oh you know, those people are good at that sort of thing."

From Isfahan to Moscow, Part 2

Continuing the story of the Great Persian Embassy to the West.

So far, the charismatic English adventurer John Shirley has convinced the Shah to send an embassy to Christian Europe. They plan to visit eight western monarchs: the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Seignory of Venice, and the kings of Poland, England, France, Scotland and Spain. But first they have to go north, into Russia...

We took leave in audience of Shah Abbas in Isfahan, where the court was then in residence, and started on our journey, it being Thursday evening, the 9th day of July, in the year of the Incarnation 1599. Now, those who went out rom the royal palace travelling at the King's command and expense, were all grandees of his court, of high rank, and they were habited and accoutred suitably for their voyage. The Persian ambassador was called Husayn Ali Beg, and with him were four gentlemen the secretaries of embassy, and fifteen servants. Next came the two [Portuguese] friars, and then Sir Anthony with five interpreters, and fifteen other Englishmen.

Right away some questions are arising. There were sixteen Englishmen in Isfahan? Where'd they come from? Shirley came via the Ottoman territories, but that's because he spoke fluent Turkish and could do the Richard Burton thing. And how did the two Portuguese friars deal with travelling with a bunch of heretics? They were subjects of the Spanish crown, which was still formally at war with England. Must have ade for some interesting chats around the campfire.

There were withal thirty-two camels carrying the presents, besides the needful number of riding-horses for those who went the journey, and the usual sumpter-beasts required for carrying the baggage...

Diverse were the feelings in the hearts of those who were thus departing, and different their expression: for some set forth most joyfully, but others very dolefully. To all the King had graciously given his royal word to bestow on us at our return many favours, but such were the tears of our relatives, the sad faces shown by our friends, teh sorrow and despair expressed differently but grievously by wives, fathers, and children, that we had perforce at last hurriedly to conclude and depart, and that evening leaving the capital, we forthwith took the road to the city of Kashan, our first stage.

Okay, you want to break out your maps of early modern Persia now.

The journey from Isfahan to Kashan occupied us four days; we rested there two and then went on to the town of Qum [the Shi'ite holy city, modern Qom]; and the next morning we reached the city of Savah. From Savah we travelled during three days, coming to the city of Qazvin, formerly the capital city of Persia... Here we remained eight days, for the Shah had ordered us to procure from here certain articles for gifts [for] the kings of the Christians, these in addition to those [with which] we were already in charge...

After leaving Qazvin, we came in five days to Gilan, a territory and a province where a different language to Persian is spoken, although... it is indeed an integral part of the kingdom of Persia.

Shah Abbas had conquered Gilan just a few years earlier; at this time, it was a border province, though the Shah's armies would soon push further north and west. The mystery language is surely Gilaky. Gilan province would go on to have a complicated and interesting history.

This province lies along the coast of the Sea of Baku, also called Qulzum, which is the Caspian Sea of the ancients, and as here we had to embark aboard ship, we were delayed ten days while the necessary arrangements were being completed. Now many of our friends and relations had come out accompanying us hither on the road from Isfahan, and when we had embarked in our ship very sorrowfully we bade them good-bye, we standing on board, and finally set sail.

The Caspian Sea was not very well known by the ancients, who till after the times of Caesar Augustus believed it to be a bay of the Ocean; but the Arabs knew otherwise and called it the "Closed Sea". It is 800 miles in length, and 600 in breadth; it receives into its waters many copious rivers, and although there is no lack of those who have stated that for this cause the water of the same is neither bitter nor salt, I who sailed over it, and once or twice tried to essay its taste, can affirm that it is gross, bitter, and salt, being indeed anything but palatable. The chief rivers that flow into this sea are the Chessel, the Geicon, the Teuso, the Coro, and the Volga. This last is in those parts known as the Eder, and on this river, as will later be described, we were destined to make our journey to Russia.

[We] put out to sea, and in a day and a night reached a little island far from the land, where a number of fisher-folk are wont to live, for the fish here are abundant and of many kinds.

It's hard to say where this could be. The Caspian has a number of small islands, but mostly near the coasts.

BTW, most of the Caspian is about a third as salty as the oceans. That's still too salty to drink, of course. Also, it varies widely; the southern part is saltier, the bay on the east is supersaline, while the north -- where most of the rivers come in -- can be almost fresh.

Most especially they catch hereabout great quantities of dog-fish [sturgeon], and the same provide the fish-skins which being first dried are afterwards used as bags for holding olive oil, and these skins are sold for a great price. Here we stayed a day and the night, waiting for fine weather, and the following day, as the sea appeared calm, we set sail. Very soon, however, it was manifest how little the seamen knew of the weather, for, after sailing three or four miles, a tempest arose, and the violence of the wind split our sails, whereby [we] thought that we should all drown. But in truth we Persians are so entirely unused to sea-faring, that most of us were now unapprehensive of either danger or death; and we laughed heartily at the Portuguese Friars, who had fallen to weeping, being apparently prepared to die. The storm lasted the whole of that night, and in the morning we found ourselves back once again at that port and town, in Gilan, where we had embarked some days before.

It appeared to some who were faint-hearted that we should best now disembark and return ourselves to Isfahan, for it seemed to them as though it were not the will of Heaven that we should undertake this long journey. But in sooth we all feared too much the wrath of Shah Abbas, and as fine weather had set in we again put to sea...

Shah Abbas could be jovial and generous, but he was a hard bastard when crossed. I'd have gone back to sea too.

Next: on to Astrakhan.

Comments, thoughts?

Digression: China's dream of EMPIRE!

So there's this map of China.

The map comes in various versions, but it purports to show Chinese territorial claims. It shows China claiming all of Southeast Asia, Korea, hunks of Central Asia. It usually pops up in the hands of fervent anti-Communists and other Sinophobes, who claim that it's an "official Chinese publication".

I ran into the map back in grad school. A professor mentioned offhand that it was a piece of 1960s Soviet propaganda, classic disinformatiya from the land of the Elders of Zion.

The map popped up again on soc.history.what-if recently. Joe Eros saw it and mailed me a couple of interesting links.

Joe found an earlier provenance for the map: in the hands of India's Foreign Minister in 1963. The Minister claimed that it appeared in a Chinese textbook in 1954. The article is here and a scanned .pdf of the map is here (scroll down).

It's interesting reading. The map itself looks bogus on its face. It has 19th century China claiming regions that were never Chinese (Sakhalin) or that were briefly tributary to China centuries earlier (Thailand). On the other hand, god knows some weird stuff appeared in Communist textbooks back in the day. I found one site that claims "When they took over China, the Communists had ready maps showing large parts of Korea, Indochina, Inner Mongolia, Burma, Malaysia, Eastern Turkestan, India, Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan as part of China." On ther other hand, it's friendsoftibet.org, which I can't think is entirely objective on this point.

Xinhua -- the official Chinese news agency -- promptly denied the map, and certainly China has shown no interest in advancing major territorial claims. (They do have border disputes, most notably with Japan and India, but that's something else again.) So the map is pretty useless as a guide to modern Chinese thinking.

Still, the question remains: real Chinese map, from a textbook? Or an Indian or Soviet invention? Back in the 1960s, both India and the USSR had horrible relations with China; the Indians fought one war with them (1962) and had several border incidents, while the Sino-Soviet split led to a mini-Cold War within the Communist bloc.

So, real Chinese, Indian or Soviet? All seem about equally plausible to this casual reader.

I guess it's an obscure bit of historical trivia. Except that I have the feeling this map might pop up again one day...

I'd be interested if anyone has anything to add. Meanwhile, back to being sick.

Sick, sick, sick

Claudia and I are both sick, and the baby too.

It's a cough, although it seems to take the three of us differently. Jacob has a perpetually runny nose and is cranky and miserable, very different from his usual sweet self. Claudia has a shallow cough and is very tired. I have a nasty convulsive hacking thing, with strange night sweats. Eh, you don't want to know. We're just sick.

I have posts in mind about election violence in Armenia (three dead so far, two bombings, one shootout at high noon in the holy city on Easter Sunday), about Lake Sevan, maybe about MRIs (they are, you should not be surprised to hear, Armenian).

But first I think something for Carlos and Luke:

"At about this time [1599] there appeared at the Court of the Shah... that Englishman... called Sir Anthony Sherley. He gave himself out as a cousin of the Scottish King James, saying that all the Kings of Christendom had recognized him as such and had now empowered him as their ambassador to treat with the King of Persia, who should make a confederacy with them in order to wage war against the Turk, who was indeed the common enemy of them all."

[None of the foregoing was true, BTW. Sherley aka Shirley was one of those wild man adventurers that the Elizabethan period just threw up in droves. He had travelled to Persia on a whim when a job in Italy didn't pan out.]

"Now this Christian gentleman had by chance arrived in the very nick of time, for the King of Persia was then himself preparing to send an ambassador with many gifts to the King of Spain, by way of the Portuguese Indies. Sir Anthony, however, brought it to the knowledge of the Shah that there were, besides his Catholic Majesty of Spain, many other Christian kings in Europe and the West, who being most powerful monarchs would willingly join him against the Turk: hence it would now be proper to send with his ambassador letters and presents to each of these other kings. Sir Anthony succeeded so well in setting forth this matter that the Shah was satisfied to do as he advised, and gave orders forthwith that arrangements for these embassies should be set on foot, proposing that Sir Anthony should accompany his envoy the Persian ambassador...

"Now in coming to Persia Sir Anthony had made his voyage through Greece (and the Ottoman Empire) in the dress of a Turk, being cognizant of the Turkish language, but it was not possible or advisable for him to seek a return home by that route. On the other hand, the way by India would demand too long a sea journey, and it was in consequence determined that the voyage of the present embassy should be taken through Tartary and Muscovy."

Yah, that's right -- they decided to travel from Isfahan to Seville via the Arctic Ocean.

I can post more, but I wonder if the folks who'd be most interested are the ones who know this story already. Also, I have an excerpt from the 1926 translation, which takes them only as far as Moscow. If anyone has access to the complete account...?

Okay, to bed with me.

Halfway down again

Came across Carlo Porta's translations of Dante's Inferno into Milanese dialect, made around 1801-1805. Wow, they're fun!

A mitaa strada de quell gran viacc
che femm a vun la voeulta al mond da la
me sont trovaa in d'on bosch scur scur affacc,
senza on sentee da pode seguita:
doma a pensagh me senti a vegni scacc,
ne l'e on bosch insci fazzel de retra,
negher, vecc, pien de spin, sass, ingarbij
pesc che ne quell del barillott di strij.

At the halfway point of that great journey
that we each take in turn to the world beyond
I found myself in a dark, dark woods
without a path to follow,
the mere thought of it makes me shiver,
nor is this wood so easy to describe,
old, filled with thorns, rocks, and tangles,
more eerie than a witch dance.

No witches dancing in the original (and am I the only person who pictures a rave here? probably).

Fashionable Milan goes back at least two centuries:

Sul fa di donn che innanz d'anda in tiatter
consulten specc, sart, serva e perucchee
ne se moeuven de ca fin che sti quatter
no han dezis de conzert ch'hin bej assee,
insci anca mi par no ris'cia on scarpiatter
preghi el Poetta a squadramm da capp a pee
par dezid se da sgiunsg sont assee franch
fina alla prima ventalina almanch.

Like women who before going to the theater
consult mirror, tailor, servant and hairdresser
and don't set foot outside the house until these four
have agreed that they are beautiful enough,
so I, to avoid any mistake,
beg the Poet to look me over from head to foot
and decide if I am steady enough to arrive
at least to the nearest tavern.

"Specc, sart, serva e perucchee." Love it love it love it. Then Porta compares the tortures of the damned to local drivers:

Gh'e manch picch in Milan per Santa Cros
de quell che no gh'e chi di anem dannaa:
e se incontren fors manca furios
i nost carrocc de sira par i straa,
de quell che sbragaland a tutta vos
se incontren lor mitaa contra mitaa,
borland coj oss del stomegh zerti prej,
robba de spuva sangu doma a vedej.

There are fewer peasants in Milan for the feast of Santa Croce
than there are damned souls here:
and maybe carriages collide less
furiously in the evening in our streets
than do these souls who, bawling loudly,
collide one half against the other while
rolling stones with ribcages,
stuff whose very sight makes you spit up blood.

Of course, Milan had an Austrian problem:

Gent de millia strazion, millia pajes,
d'on parla che stremiss pesc ch'el todesch,
sclamazion de dolor e sfogh de guaj:
infin el pareva el ver marcaa dell'aj.

People of a thousand extractions, a thousand countries
speaking a language that frightens more than German,
exclamations of grief and the venting of troubles:
in the end it really sounded like the garlic market.

I have to conclude with Porta's version of the famous scene of Francesca reading that romance novel with Paolo:

Ma quand semm vegnuu al punt che el Paladin
el segilla a Zenevra el rid in bocca
cont el pu cald e s'ciasser di basin,
tutt tremant el me Pavol me ne imbocca
vun compagn che 'l ne fa de zoffreghin.
Ah liber porch, fioeul d'ona baltrocca!
Tira gio galiott che te see bravo:
per tutt quell di gh'emm miss el segn, e s'ciavo!

But when we got to the point in which the Paladin
seals Guinevere's laugh in her mouth
with the hottest and most airtight of kisses,
Paolo, trembling, feeds me
a similar one, which acts as a match.
Oh you dirty book, son of a whore!
Go ahead Galeotto, you sure are good:
for that whole day we put our seal on it, and good-bye!

E s'ciavo!

(English translations taken from Bernadette Luciano, "A Milanese Hell: Porta's parodistic "translations" from the Inferno", Italica, vol. 69, no. 1. (1992), pp. 45-60.)

Home again

We're back.

A week and a bit in Germany, which was nice; Ostheim was full of green grass and flowers. The boys love spending time with their grandparents.

The trip back is challenging. We leave Ostheim around 4 pm, drive two hours to the airport, catch an 8 pm flight to Vienna, change planes and catch the 10:30 flight to Yerevan. It arrives around 5 am Yerevan time (2 am German time) and we get home around 6. Three small kids, threee airports, eleven hours. Also, both of us have colds.

On the plus side, the house is in good condition, the kids are well, and everyone is happy to be home.

More anon.

Random filler while Doug is away

Question 1: Sometimes I lose the urge to communicate with humanity. (Yes/No)

There's a question?

Reading about the artist Foujita. It takes a lot of charisma to pull off a bowl cut, Coke-bottle glasses, a Hitler mustache, and an earring, even in the Paris of the 1920s. The pics from the early 1940s are even better. You really don't think of anyone dressed like Andy Warhol living in wartime Japan. I do wish the book had color reproductions of Last Stand on Attu and Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Loyal to the End. I am not making this up.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner wrote the early corporate history of the Arab-American Oil Company (better known then as ARAMCO). Again, I am not making this up. Better yet, the abridged magazine version is available online. Read about the Italian bombing of Dhahran here. "There it lay, lighted up like a California supermarket opening."

Question 6: Sometimes I suffer from cartoonist envy. (Yes/No)

In the belly of the beast

Doug's away for a bit, leaving me with keys to the Yugo. Whee!

This is some sort of holy week -- but what week isn't? -- so let me continue with my occasional posts about the joy of sects. This time, the Baptists.

The first World Baptist Congress was held in London in 1905, leading to the formation of the World Baptist Alliance. Doctrinally, Baptists have traditionally been against hierarchy -- the current Southern Baptist Convention would be like a steel rasp on Roger Williams' teeth -- and so the Congress met in a spirit of egalitarian fellowship. The next convention was held in 1911, in Philadelphia; the third, in Stockholm in 1923; the fourth, in Toronto in 1928.

The fifth was held in Berlin. August 4th through August 10th, 1934. A vintage season. Two days after the death of President Hindenberg, two weeks after the assassination of Austrian chancellor Dollfuss, and a little over a month after the bloody purge of the SA, the Night of the Long Knives.

Needless to say, reactions to the new Germany were mixed among the American attendees. Former Southern Baptist Convention president George W. Truett, who conducted camp meetings for cowboys in west Texas every summer for nearly forty years, "introduced a hotly debated peace resolution which urged governments to surrender whatever national sovereignty necessary to establish an international authority for peace in the world." On the other hand, the Southern Baptist Convention's then-current president, pioneer radio preacher Monroe Elmon Dodd of Louisiana, had a different take:

Since the war some 200,000 Jews from Russia and other Eastern places had come into Germany. Most of these were Communist agitators against the government... [While Jews] were not to be blamed for the intelligence and strength, so characteristic of their race, which put them forward, [they used their abilities] for self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people.

And a Boston Baptist was pleased:

It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold; where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown. The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries.

(Quotes taken from William Loyd Allen's fascinating 1982 article, "How Baptists Assessed Hitler", found here.)

One man in particular at the Congress seems to have been transformed by his experiences in Germany. It might be possible to catch a glimpse of him filtered through that week's Time magazine:

Treasuring a written promise of freedom of speech from Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Baptists talked about nationalism, war & peace, separation of Church & State. A U. S. Negro heading a delegation of 30 black Baptists was all primed to present a resolution on racial equality.

In attendance was the Reverend Michael King of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia... known after his return as Martin Luther King, Sr.

The Mountain of Moses (2)

Musa Dagh is an interesting story.

Short version: During the Armenian Genocide, several Armenian villages in southeastern Turkey retired up a mountain and dug in for a siege. The Turks sent a large force after them; the Armenians held them off. The siege lasted for 53 days. Then Allied warships evacuated most of the Armenians except for a rear guard.

In the face of the complete decimation of the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire, Musa Dagh became a symbol of the Armenian will to survive. Of the three other sites where Armenians defied the deportation orders, Shabin Karahissar, Urfa, and Van, only the Armenians of Van were rescued when the siege of their city was lifted by an advancing Russian army. The Armenians of Urfa and Shabin Karahissar were either massacred or deported. Musa Dagh stood as the sole instance where the Western Allies at war with the Ottomans averted the death of a community during the Armenian Genocide.

Eighteen years later, an Austrian author named Franz Werfel wrote a book about it: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. The book was a bestseller, and has been in print ever since.

It's a hell of a story, and the Armenians are understandably proud of it. But it does raise some questions...

There are two museums in Musa Ler village. One is inside the monument itself, and it's a museum of the siege. The other is in a small building about a hundred meters away, and it's a museum of the villages... how they lived and worked in the years before 1915. Tools, furniture, old letters and photographs. Both museums are small, but both are well worth a visit.

Jacob and I had been walking around for some minutes when the three women approached us. "Muzei?" said the oldest one. Even I know that means "museum". So I followed her as she unlocked first one and then the other. I assume she was the keeper, curator, what have you. I don't know what the other two women were. (They didn't have any English, and my Armenian still hasn't reached the hundred-word mark.) I guess they live in the village but keep an eye on the monument, and stroll up the hill when someone shows up. Which, I must add, doesn't seem to happen too often -- the museums didn't look like they were getting a lot of custom.

But it was interesting. The museums were small, a couple of rooms each, but they'd obviously been set up with a lot of care even if they didn't get many visitors. The three ladies quickly relieved me of Jacob, and cooed and fussed over him while I peered at hundred-year-old sewing machines and inkwells in one room, rifles and maps and telegrams in the other. By the time we were done he had fallen asleep in their arms. (Jacob is a very trusting little boy.)

The survivors of Musa Dagh ended up in various places, and their descendants live all over the world. The two biggest groups are in Lebanon -- there's an all-Armenian village in the Bekaa valley -- and in the village under the monument: Musa Ler, just a few miles outside Yerevan. They can all stay in touch online, of course.

...questions. Okay, this touches a delicate topic. The Armenian Genocide is a big deal here. Well, the Turks wiped out roughly a third of all the world's Armenians. It's understandable that the Armenians are still upset.

But the presentation of it tends to be pretty one-sided, and it raises some questions.

For instance: how were the Armenians able to hold off several times their number of Turks, well supplied and equipped with artillery, for nearly two months? Mountain fortress, okay; fight-to-the-death desperation, sure. Still... one is left with the feeling of something missing.

Similarly, the rescue of the Armenians makes you go "hm". A French cruiser just happened to be passing by, near to shore, and saw the red cross and the sign they'd put up (in English!). That's not impossible, sure, but again...

Here's the thing. The Turks claim that the Armenians were rebels, guerrillas and saboteurs, rising up in concert with the advancing Allied armies in an attempt to kneecap the Ottoman war effort. The Armenians vehemently deny this. The Armenians were peaceful villagers; most were massacred outright, a few rose up in desperate self-defense.

I have the impression that the truth is closer to the Armenian version. (Though I'm still learning about this.) But it seems possible that the Armenians of Musa Dagh might have made preparations in advance. It also seems possible that the Allies might have been aware of the situation, and that the French ship's arrival might not have been an accident. I don't think either of these things, if true, would detract from the heroism of the defenders.

I've googled briefly for more about Musa Dagh, but the only scholarly article I found was this one from 2005. (Not available for free, alas.) That seems odd, and probably reflects my weak google-fu.

Anyway. It was a very interesting place to spend an hour on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

-- I took sleepy Jacob down the stone stairs to the car. After much nodding and "thank yous" in three or four languages, the three women sat on the top of the stairs and watched us go down the hill. I put Jacob in his car seat, then started to get in the driver's seat. Then I heard shouting. Looked up the hill: the three women were waving wildly at me! It took me a moment to figure out why -- Jacob had kicked a shoe off.

I picked it up, put it on him, then turned and bowed deeply to them. They laughed and waved. I got in the car and we continued on our way.

Review, Grand Fifth Sequel (gamma)

One of my Creepy New York Friends (TM) knows the people at what I will call for plausible deniability purposes Stockcar Games. CNYF heard that I've been basically lung-bruised and hallucinating for the past month, and brought by the mock-up demo that Stockcar put together to attract investor interest to cheer me up.

Oh my God. It's a flight simulator. And not Amelia Earhart's, either. I'm not sure how they're going to finesse the change in player point-of-view. Speaking utterly dispassionately, the architectural damage algorithm is amazingly realistic, and CNYF tells me that they're going to include the entire Northeast U.S. out to Detroit or so.

Also, one option is to land the plane. Motherfather.

This is the only day I can post this. Like I said, plausible deniability.