Halfway down the Danube

Closed Shop

This blog is closed.

Ha! Got ya!

We've moved. We had problems with the scripting (see Carlos' last post) and decided it wasn't worth all the trouble. Also, we're hitchhiking for free at bookcase.com and we've racked up a lot of pages, i.e. space. We are slowly moving everything to our new home, and eventually will completely close this blog off. For now, we're keeping it because we're paranoid and we can't imagine that having multiple copies of the same blog could possibly be confusing.

Please come visit us at: Halfway down the Danube (what, you thought we'd become creative?)

Movable Type Blog Request

Are there any MT utilities which will allow a non-primary MT user to extract their posts and comment threads and save them to one's hard disk? I've been doing it by hand, and it is the most mind-numbing tedious unpaid task I've performed in some time. Any help would be vastly appreciated.

Update: Another 500 Internal Server Error from posting this. I get those about 80% of the time now. It's kind of creeping me out.

Loving at 40

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia.

For non-Americans -- and, I don't know, Americans under thirty? -- Loving was the case in which the US Supreme Court decided that individual states could not prohibit interracial marriages.

Mildred Loving is still alive, and made a statement:

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

The Supreme Court's decision also makes for interesting reading.

Virginia is now one of 16 States which prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classifications. The present statutory scheme dates from the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924... The central features of this Act, and current Virginia law, are the absolute prohibition of a "white person" marrying other than another "white person," a prohibition against issuing marriage licenses until the issuing official is satisfied that the applicants' statements as to their race are correct [and] certificates of "racial composition" to be kept by both local and state registrars...

In upholding the constitutionality of these provisions in the decision below, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia referred to its 1955 decision in Naim v. Naim as stating the reasons supporting the validity of these laws. In Naim, the state court concluded that the State's legitimate purposes were "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride"...

Preserve integrity; prevent corruption and the obliteration of pride. Who could disagree? And "certificates of racial composition", so people could be sure.

Anyway. Before Loving, both Carlos and I would have been illegal in Virginia.

Brief googling shows that today about 7% of American marriages are interracial. That's up from less than 1% in 1970 and about 2% as recently as 1990.

Roy Loving died in a car accident in 1975. Mildred Loving doesn't give interviews (last week's statement was a rare exception); for the most part, she lives quietly, enjoying her children and grandchildren.

The Outcast Book Club

Picture five people voted off a reality TV show. That's pretty much my book club. Three women, two men. We take over a random New York City restaurant and drive out the other patrons with our conversation. (Okay, that probably wasn't Scarlett Johansson eating by herself and giving me the eye and fleeing after eavesdropping. No, who am I kidding. Of course it was.)

First book was Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight. ("Daniel Handler" is Lemony Snicket's pseudonym.) A cross between Nabokov and I Know What You Did Last Summer, You Killed Mr. Griffin!. There are brilliant High Modernist books for young people. This isn't one of them.

Second book was Julia Glass's Three Junes. This won the National Book Award? It's Mary Sue fanfic about the AIDS crisis in New York. Much of it has a supposedly Scottish narrator. I'm no expert on Britistani diction, but I know that wasn't it. Actually, that holds true for the American characters too. I won't even describe ze Frenchwoman. Every single detail I could independently verify was wrong.

Third book was Alison Bechdel's memoir in graphic novel form, Fun Home. That's short for "funeral home".

The best so far. Bechdel has a long-running comic strip called "Dykes to Watch Out For", so, yeah, she's a lesbian cartoonist. It's the story of her father, an English teacher, funeral director, and closeted gay man, who stepped in front of a truck.

For a graphic novel, this was intensely literary. Bechdel redrew typeset text on the page. A lot of direct allusions to Fitzgerald and Joyce and Proust, a lot of detail work in the art. (Her father's passion was renovating the family home.)

Next book: Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper. It's a McSweeney's metafictional magical realism novel, and no, it was not my pick, Doug.

I'm the fifth pick. I'm actually a little torn. I'd love to discuss Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, but that would be two McSweeney's in a row, and Adrian is a little intense for summer. I could choose Melville's Clarel instead! I'm seriously thinking about Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible. Here's a bit:

All superheroes have an origin. They make a big deal of it, the story of how they got their powers and their mission. Bitten by a radioactive bug, they fight crime; visited by wandering cosmic gods, they search for the lost tablets of so-and-so, and avenge their dead families. And villains? We come on the scene, costumed and leering, colorfully working out our inexplicable grudge against the world with an oversized zap gun or cosmic wormhole. But why do we rob banks rather than guard them? Why did I freeze the Supreme Court, impersonate the Pope, hold the Moon hostage?

I happen to know they've got practically nothing in my file. A few old aliases, newspaper clippings, testimony from a couple of old enemies. A transcript from the Peterson School, and of course the accident report. The flash was visible for miles.

I originally suggested Lynda Barry's Cruddy. It has a scene set in a meatpacking plant in the desert, and it's even worse than you think. This is why I'm fifth pick.

She's from Wisconsin, you know.

Rosy Starlings

Single parent for the next few days.

Jacob, our youngest, has been sickish for some weeks. So he's gone to Germany with Claudia. We're not sure what's up with him, but we're having it looked at.

I have a couple of posts yet in mind about Jordan, but they're a bit depressing. So let's talk about birds.

When you live in a city, you get a little starved for birds. Around here, we get sparrows, hooded crows, magpies, swifts, and doves. The hoodies are often fun to watch, the swifts are as graceful and acrobatic as swifts always are, and the doves are pretty, but it's not a lot of variety. Once in a while we'll catch a glimpse of a woodpecker or -- thrillingly -- a hoopoe. But still.

So when a new bird showed up, we were startled and delighted.

I say a new bird, but actually it was a new flock of birds. Dozens of them. Medium-sized songbirds, black with a white breast and back. They showed up suddenly, between one day and the next. And loud! They'd congregate in the big apricot tree in our back yard, and caw and squeak and flutter.

They were entertaining to watch. But... what were they?

Talking to Armenians gave nothing. No offense, but Armenians seem to be the least bird-interested people I have ever met. Part of that is surely because we're in Yerevan -- city people usually aren't that interested in birds -- and part is because birding was not a hobby that was particularly popular under Communism. There may be some stupid reason for that, like the government not wanting people running around with cameras and binoculars. Or it may just be that it's a Western thing that never caught on. Whatever the reason, people in post-Communist countries are just not likely to be interested in birds. And Armenia seems to carry this tendency to an extreme. Which is a damn shame, since it's a country that's very rich in birds... but that's a story for another time. Anyway, talking to neighbors and colleagues gave me a lot of blank looks.

Bird books and online resources, not much help either. Medium-sized black and white social passerines? In Armenia? Nothing.

It's late, so I'll cut a long story short: it turns out the birds aren't black and white. They're black and pale pink. I didn't spot this because (1) I was always seeing them against the sky, where pale colors tend to get washed out, and (2) I'm badly out of practice. (In my defense, it really is a pale pink. See here for some examples.)

They're Rosy Starlings, and they're here for the mulberry crop. The mulberries are coming in this week, and it's looking like a very good year. Apparently the starlings show up every third year or so; the mulberry crop has to be above average, or they won't bother. They gorge themselves for a week or two, then disappear.

(How did I learn this? I found a guy. But that's another story.)

The Rosy is another one of those birds that Americans and Western Europeans never see; it's native to eastern Europe and temperate Asia. Winters in India and the Middle East, summers in Central Asia and Russia -- the flocks here will probably head north over the Caucasus once the mulberries are done.

Totally useless information: in Germany this bird is called the Rosenstar, which is kind of cool. In Finland it's the Punakottarainen, which may be even cooler. And in Gaelic it's the Druid-Dhearg, which is surely the coolest of all.

And that's all.

Everyone is spawning, everyone is blogging

Wow, my old neighbor Nicki is baby blogging for the Houston Chronicle! She and her husband Andrew are getting rid of their bitchin' cars for their one-year-old, Peanut. Greater love have no parents. Also, if anyone can invent the no-calorie double-strength margarita for moms, it will be Nicki.

This book has a release date of October 30, 2007.

They do have bocce at Union Hall, and the best part is, the indoor bocce courts are presided by two portraits of Shriners. They also serve something called "Floyd's KY Beercheese". I'm down with the beer and the cheese, but I'm worried about that third ingredient.

Gumbo!

Had a refrigerator filled with dubious items: wilted celery, some senescent chicken thighs, half a pound of summer sausage (Klement's) left over from my birthday, a cup and a half of organic chicken broth in a carton.

First, I made a roux. Melted a third a stick of butter in a pan, added about the same amount of flour. Browned it until it looked like cafe au lait, and then a little darker. The bubbles as it browned looked like camera flashes in a stadium, quick little pulses. Turned off the burner, stirred in some paprika that was going stale, until it became the color known to early Crayola users as "Indian red".

I chopped up two small-mediumish onions, added them to the roux, stirred it until the onion bits were all coated, covered the pan and let them sweat. Did the same for the wilting celery.

In a different pan, I browned up the chicken thighs, cut into small pieces, then sauteed them with two diced peppers. Added the chicken broth, just covering the mixture. When that began to boil down, I added some tomato juice. The summer sausage, cut into pie slices, went in there as well.

I let both pans cook for a while, checking in now and then like a nosy neighbor. The roux mixture was turning into a pan full of brown goop, the liquid from the onions and celery fusing with the roux. The peppers were cooking tender in the other pan. I added a dose of hot sauce and Worchestershire sauce to that pan, producing the happy aroma of a Bloody Mary.

Then, the moment of truth. I poured the hot brown roux mixture into the bubbling peppers and meats. Yeah, it's a big skillet, cast iron and deep. The tomato and chicken broth blended with the roux perfectly, becoming thicker and richer, the roux adding a silky "mouth feel" to the broth.

I let it cook for about twenty more minutes, and had a small bowl. Very good. There are about six more bowls to go, more if I serve it with rice.

The best part about gumbo is, it's even better the next day.

Crusaders

So after Jerash we went to Ajloun.

Ajloun is a Crusader castle, except not built by Crusaders. It was built by Saladin as a counter to the Crusaders. It let him control the upper Jordan valley and keep an overland route from Egypt up to Damascus.

If you walk around the castle, you can sort of see that it's an Arab copy of a standard medieval European castle. Oh, it's got all the standard castle stuff -- moat, gatehouse, arrowslits, murder holes for pouring boiling oil. But the proportions are subtly off. The stonework doesn't seem quite as fine. It's a knockoff.

But then, fine stonework isn't what counts. Ajloun got the job done. It closed the region to European incursions, and gave Saladin a screen to move his armies around. Indirectly, it was key to his victory over the Crusaders a few years later, and the recapture of Jerusalem.

See, up until then, the Crusader kingdoms had withstood Arab counterattacks... in part because the Arabs were divided, in part because the Westerners had this annoying habit of building huge damn castles. The Arabs knew all about castles, of course, but they weren't obsessed with them the way the Europeans were. The Crusaders had erected western-style castles all over the Holy Land. These were damnably hard to take; the last of them wouldn't be winkled out until the 1270s, nearly a century after Saladin's time. (That was Krak des Chevaliers, in Syria. Which is about six times the size of Ajloun. It was only taken by a ruse.)

Anyway, something that only just occurred to me at Ajloun: the Arab world has a habit of referring back to the Crusades -- "Bush is a Crusader", and such. Westerners tend to roll their eyes a bit at this; the Crusades were a long time ago! Find another metaphor!

But, you know, there are still half a dozen big damn Crusader castles scattered across Jordan and Syria. And most of them sit on hilltops and can be seen a long, long way off.

Anyway. Ajloun overlooks the East Bank, which is mostly inhabited by Palestinians relocated after 1948. The East Bank gets much less press than the West Bank, because nobody is blowing anything up there. The 1948 Palestinians have integrated pretty well into Jordan -- they're full citizens -- and the region gives the impression that, if it's not exactly prosperous, at least most people are getting by. Lots of little farms growing vegetables.

From the towers of Ajloun you can see the West Bank -- it's maybe ten or twelve miles off, low brown hills across the Jordan valley -- but it might as well be on another planet.

But that's a story for some other blog. As for Ajloun, I wouldn't call it a must-visit; it's only a medium-big castle, pretty ordinary in its construction. If you've spent much time in Europe, you've visited half a dozen just like it. The only extraoardinary thing about Ajloun is its location. So unless you really like castles...

Still, it was a nice day trip. And that was my tourist weekend in Jordan.

Jerash

Did the tourist thing a little this weekend: went to Jerash.

Jerash was once Gerasa, a minor Roman city. It survived into Byzantine and early Ummayad times, then gradually dwindled away. By the 1800s there was not even a village there.

Most Roman ruins got destroyed by people coming to find cheap stone already cut. That didn't happen to Gerasa. Part of the reason is that stone is cheap around here -- it's a whole plateau of soft limestone. Another seems to be that the region around Gerasa got largely depopulated... not sure why.

But anyway, the result was that the ruins of a good-sized Roman town survived into modern times. Gerasa isn't as well preserved as Pompeii, but it's bigger -- around 100 hectares. You could walk around it all day.

(Except that you'd die from heat stroke, of course. I scrambled over rocks and peered at columns for an hour, and I got pretty toasted.)

Some random notes.

-- No walls. Well, to the east there was nothing but desert, inhabited by a few ragged nomads... and they weren't going to make any trouble while there was a Roman legion just a day's march west in Jerusalem.

-- All off-white limestone, the same stuff modern Amman is made of. Except: one column of granite, which was imported from Egypt. Why? Nobody knows.

-- Man, there were some serious lizards there.

-- The Christians didn't take over the temples of Zeus or Artemis; they turned them into living spaces or markets and built a new cathedral. Later the Arabs turned that into a mosque.

-- We're not sure how big Gerasa was, but the local Hippodrome seated 15,000. So, double that might be about right. Pretty big for a city in an arid region on the very edge of Roman rule.

-- It's not clear to me how Gerasa's economy worked. It was a net importer of food; what was it producing in return? Or was it surviving off caravan trade? I suspect the latter, because trade routes shifted after the first century of Arab rule, and that's when Gerasa began to shrivel.

I suppose I should post photographs and links and such but, really, that's not my thing. Jerash is pretty neat; if you're in Jordan, go see it.

The Controller of Companies

Further to the discussion of companies in Jordan.

One reason Jordan doesn't have Eastern Europe-style corporate governance problems -- with massive fraud, looting of assets, runaway management, and all that -- is because they have a Controller of Companies. That's not a typo; it's not a Comptroller, but a Controller.

The Controller exercises more control over companies than we might expect from a government agency. For instance, at every meeting of a publicly held corporation -- whether annual, general, or extraordinary -- a representative of the Controller must be present. Without the representative, the meeting is invalid.

The representative doesn't intervene in substantive decisions of the meeting. But he does make sure it's properly held. For instance, he confirms that a quorum is present; checks proxy certificates; watches over voting; and in general, makes sure that the meeting is held right, in accord with Jordanian law and the company's own by-laws. If the representative sees a problem, he can require that it be corrected. If it isn't, he can cancel the meeting.

The representative has one other duty: he brings along a copy of the corporation's financial statement as filed with the Controller. If the discussion at the meeting suggests that reality diverges widely from the numbers, then the representative can inquire as to why.

Jordan only has 260 publicly held corporations. The Controller has about 15 qualified representatives; each of these guys attends about 15 or 20 corporate meetings per year. Limited Liability Companies and partnerships don't need a rep at their meetings, but they can choose to invite one, if there's a legal question or a dispute or if they just want an official witness present. This happens maybe a dozen times a year.

Five years ago, my reaction to this would have been, "Phooey! Another relic of socialist-era central planning, and an unneccessary burden on the Jordanian businessman and taxpayer."

Today... I'm not so sure.

See, I've spent most of the last five years in Eastern Europe. And Eastern Europe has horrific problems with the corporate form. These go back to the end of Communism, when state-owned businesses were privatized, incorporated, and then raped nine ways from Sunday. Corporate governance continues to be a serious issue across most of the region, and it's a significant drag on the economy. To give just one example, foreign investors are very cautious about being minority shareholders in places like Romania or Russia, because the laws don't really protect them very well. (Some foreign investors become minority shareholders anyway, but that's because they've found other ways to protect themselves.) It's a big problem.

But in Jordan, it's not. Jordan has plenty of problems, but not that one. And I think the Controller of Companies, and the whole representative thing, is part of the reason. Certain sorts of fraud are a lot harder if there's an interested witness. A company could of course bribe the representative, but I have the impression this doesn't happen too much. Whether that's because the reps are too professional, or because the companies are used to doing business right, or what, I'm not sure.

My very tentative take is that the representative system, at least, has done more good than bad. There may come a time when Jordan outgrows the need for it. Indeed, that time may already have come. But in the meantime, I think it's helped the Jordanians dodge a bullet.