Halfway down the Danube

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.

Perhaps pounding my head against the wall will make the pain go away.

Some of you may know that Claudia, the missing third of Halfway Down the Danube, once met British humorist Terry Pratchett at one of these convention things. (Thanks to Carrie for the link.) I couldn't believe the article -- literally, I couldn't believe in its existence. Now con-going has made the New York Times Travel section? Because really, once you've seen all the covered bridges in New England, what's left. I look forward to science fiction fandom's infiltration into the Times's Vows section, The Ethicist, and especially Modern Love. "Hi, I'm a 56-year-old fan and numismatic expert who was recently ordained in the Chaldean Orthodox church. Lately I've been experiencing an irresistible compulsion to..."

But that's not the funny part. (Well, it is funny, in a Shakes the Clown sort of way.) This is the funny part:

But on Saturday afternoon, after lecturing on deep-space colonization, Les Johnson, the manager of NASA’s science programs and projects at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., lamented what he saw as a generational shift in fans’ interests. "I see a lot of young people here gaming, but I don’t see a lot of the younger folks here for the science fiction," said Mr. Johnson, who has been attending conventions since his own adolescence in the 1970s. "That bothers me, because the dreaming is what interested me in getting into physics. If they aren’t reading the stuff, where are our next-generation physicists and NASA engineers going to come from?"

Update: two trolls in twelve hours over the weekend! now deleted. People are dumb.

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.

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)

I blame the painkillers.

After extensively analyzing recent reader response (18 replies to a post on theoretical nuclear physics, zero replies to a post on kittens), I've determined that Halfway Down the Danube's core demographic is actually Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, former guitarist for the Doobie Brothers and current defense consultant for the US government.

In his spare time, he wrote a five-page paper on a primitive Tandy computer that proposed converting the military's Aegis program, a ship-based antiplane system, into a rudimentary missile-defense system... "Skunk really blew my mind with that report," Mr. Rohrabacher says. "He was talking over my head half the time, and the fact that he was a rock star who had basically learned it all on his own was mind-boggling."

Of course, on the opposite side of the political fence, there's Grand Funk Railroad.

While GFR may be best remembered in the West as Homer Simpson's favourite band ('the bong-rattling bass of Mel Schacher,' eulogised Homer), their impact in poorer nations should not be underestimated: Cuban maestro Juan de Marcos Gonzalez told me GFR and Steely Dan were his favourite American bands in the 1970s, while Mohammed Sacirbey, Bosnian Ambassador to the UN, loved the Funk so much he inspired them to briefly reform in 1997 and play benefit concerts for a Bosnian children's charity.

Wow, Sacirbey definitely has the Yugoslav male pattern baldness thing going. Honestly, if minoxidil had been discovered before the Constitution of 1974, the Balkans would look very different.

Sweep the kitchen

Links and other miscellanea.

Armenia will have its next Parliamentary elections on May 12. Incredibly, these have been scheduled on the same day as Eurovision! I foresee much channel-surfing that night.

I am enjoying Dr. Vector. Probably because he's obviously enjoying himself.

I have seen and handled many common snapping turtles, and I can tell you that they are meanest creatures on the planet, and that legends of their ferocity usually come nowhere near the truth. I raised one from a hatchling to sexual maturity (carapace length of about 8 inches) and when it was younger it would frequently kill fish that were bigger than it was. The speed and power of the bite and the turtles' willingness to use it on anything that moves could hardly be exaggerated. They are my favorite living tetrapods.

Dr. Vector likes taking things apart. Like us, he has a small child.

Dr. Vector led me to Bad News Hughes. His latest post takes us to a Renaissance Faire:

“So is this going to be the Renaissance Faire or the Medieval Faire?” she asks.

“Is this the... Wait, what?” Man, that’s a stumper.

“Is this the Renaissance Faire or the Medieval Faire? Is there a difference?”

“Is there a... Look, Becca, the Faire combines many ostensibly disparate eras, including the Renaissance, Medieval times, the days of yore, the days of Conan, the Dark Ages, the Pirates of the Caribbean, albums by Tool and the Insane Clown Posse, the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming, World of Warcraft, Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the Legend of Zelda, shitty new age Celtic music, the bleachers at a NASCAR race and, finally, all those attention whores in your high school drama club. You can’t be all hung up on authenticity or classification. You just have to wander through the crowds, wide-eyed and innocent, enjoying the swirling, festive mélange of totally made-up cultures. And also you have to eat one of those giant turkey legs, so I can take a picture and use it to make jokes on the Internet.”

I've been posting a lot over at the Fistful. It seems to come in waves. I have no idea why. My recent posts are here.

Old-time radio! Now I want to look some of these up. It seems like someone would have a library of sound files...

Did you hear about the "forge your own boarding pass" episode last year? Here it is.

My favorite part is where he explains whey airlines like the Photo ID. I remember those ads! You used to be able to buy people's airplane tickets from them. "New York to London, March 31st, male." A whole grey market, gone with the wind.

Meta-geekery is when a geek does something geeky about geekery. Like categorizing the twelve levels of comic book fan agreement. (And, you know, there are exactly twelve.)

Note that the person committing metageekery here is female. I find that encouraging.

I like this quote a lot:

Tyranny starts as a habit; it has the tendency to, and generally finally does develop into a disease. I believe that habit may coarsen and stultify the very best of men, reducing them to the level of brutes. Blood and power make a man drunk: callous coarseness and depravity develop in him; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, and in the end pleasurable to the mind and the senses. The human being and the citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and a return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes practically impossible for him," - Dostoevsky, "Memoirs from the House of the Dead.

I've seen the beginnings of this process up close, on a very small scale. (In my past as a political attorney.) "Habit may coarsen and stultify, yes indeed.

A German does something amazing:

Paragliding 2005 World Cup winner Ewa Wisnierska, 35, was lifted to 32,612 feet by a storm that apparently killed a Chinese paraglider in eastern Australia on Wednesday. The pilots were preparing for the 10th FAI World Paragliding Championships next week, event organizer Godfrey Wenness said.

He Zhongpin, 42, died during the same weather system, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold, Wenness said. His body was found 47 miles from his launch site.

Wisnierska described Friday how she attempted to skirt the thunderstorm and when that failed, repeatedly attempted to spiral against its powerful lift.

She said she could see lightning around her and decided her chances of survival were "almost zero."

She said she radioed her team leader at 13,123 feet.

"I said, 'I can't do anything,'" she told reporters at a news conference. "'It's raining and hailing and I'm still climbing — I'm lost.'"

Officials and Wisnierska's ground team used global positioning and radio equipment to track her altitude as she soared well beyond the 29,000-foot plus height of Everest, the world's tallest peak. Wenness said she went from 2,500 feet to the maximum in about 15 minutes.

She lost consciousness for more than 30 minutes while her glider flew on uncontrolled, sinking and lifting several times, he said.

She regained consciousness at about 1,640 feet and landed safely, but had ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite on her face.

The last few hundred feet of Everest are known as the "death zone". Wisnierska was up about 3000 feet higher than that. She was not wearing special protective clothing.

More details here and here. An earlier interview with Ms. Wisnierska here. "I have fun living like a bird!"

Via James Nicoll, I see we missed a naked-eye nova. It peaked at around third magnitude (medium bright star) and has now faded to under fifth magnitude (you can barely see it). Statistically speaking, I have about one chance in three of living to see a nova, and maybe one in twenty of living to see a supernova. (There was Supernova Shelton in 1987, but I was on the wrong side of the planet for that.)

To bring this back down to earth, here's a depressing little post about Lake Sevan here in Armenia.

But since I'd hate to end on a depressing note, here's a webcomic: Questionable Content. Yes, cute twentysomethings talking endlessly about relationships: it's a guilty pleasure. But they're so cute.

Links, quotes, odds and ends. What've you got?

Guest-blogging with Leon Maurer, part one

HDTD readers may know Noel Maurer as an occasional commenter and guest poster here. Some of you may even know that he and I have been working on a project together. But most of you don't know Noel's dad Leon; and you should. The word 'raconteur' was devised to describe him. I remember sitting spellbound at a diner on Broadway, listening to the man's tales. He was a young man in World War Two:

Did I tell you the story of how I was picked on by the gumba Mafiosi tough guys when I first arrived in the company and had to beat up a punk twice my size to get my reputation as someone to contend with in the company? Besides the supply sergeant named Goldstein, I was the only other Jewish guy in outfit, but they soon forgot all about that. The rest of the outfit were Midwesterners and Southerners whom I got along with easily. The gumba guys later became my buddies too when I told them all about Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and the rest of the Brooklyn mob that were my Dad's high school buddies.

But maybe we should start at the beginning. Mr. Maurer?

Well, the story goes like this...

It was around February 1944. There I was, hanging out at the overseas staging camp in Newport News, Virginia, waiting for a bunk on the next departing ship.

I had just finished a twelve-week course of combat training at Jefferson Barracks, in St. Louis, Missouri. Besides the usual tough infantry training, with all the usual gripes familiar to any soldier today who has gone through modern infantry basic, the only highlights I remember -- besides crawling under barbed wire over a field of mud with .50 caliber machine gun bullets flying a foot or two over my head -- was learning how to do body building exercise using "Dynamic Tension" or "isometrics" as they call it today, in lieu of weights and apparatus...

It was taught to me by a farm kid from upstate New York who had a body like Schwarzenegger that he said he got by swinging an axe, throwing bales of hay on trucks, and following the teachings of Charles Atlas. He said he wanted to train me when he spotted how, after a long obstacle course, on the way back to the barracks, I paused at a high bar, and being a gymnast since I was about 14, did a front kip up and over, with a soft dismount that he said looked as smooth as a cat when I landed without losing a beat right back in my place in the column...

And lastly, there was assisting Sgt. Calhoun (who was a buddy of mine from Signal Corps School) in building an 8-foot scale model of a Japanese Zero that, along with recorded sounds and explosive ground charges, was to come zooming down over the tops of the trees on unsuspecting rookie squads supposedly on a scouting mission in enemy territory.

We did a great job, and it was very scary for the rookies; but fun for us, watching them scatter or stand gaping as the Zero swooped down from the tree tops, hanging from a pulley cable system we rigged, spitting fire from the two fake guns in the wings. The guns actually were flashlights, each with a spinning plastic toy 4-blade wind propeller with one blade: an orange filter, one yellow, one clear, and one red.

The alternate mixture of red, white, and yellow flashes were very effective as firing machine guns; and the squids in the ground which blew little puffs of dirt under the soldier's feet, along with the sounds of the plane engine, the wing guns firing, and a series of ground charges in soft dirt on the sides of the road simulating bomb drops made the whole show (which took less than a minute) so realistic that it became a standard part of the combat training, after we set up a cadre crew to handle the backstage work, before we were transferred out for shipment overseas to combat duty.

(BTW, Calhoun's son contacted me some years ago after his Dad died -- he found me through Google which led him to my online resume. I told him this story, and he was as flabbergasted by it, as he was when he found that his Dad and I were buddies, although he got assigned to D Company, and I rarely saw him after we got to Italy.)

Anyway, back at the ranch -- the waiting around for a week or so, with nothing to do and no place to go but to the commissary, since we were not allowed out of the camp or near a telephone to call home: it was the usual 'hurry up and wait' that was par for the course in the Army.

When we finally got the call to board, we found ourselves on a troop transport ship called the General Anderson. It held about 9,000 troops in bunk room holds, four cots high, with very narrow corridors between the bunks. When we got on board, there was a sign that said "volunteers wanted" pointing to a room on the bridge deck. My buddies and I decided we might look into it, since we heard the volunteers ate in the ship's crew mess, and maybe even had separate bunkrooms with the Navy crew.

When we got there, the jobs were listed on the bulletin board. The one that caught my attention was the "incinerator squad." I was curious, and dragged my friends over to the desk where a sailor was waiting for volunteers. I thought that might be a good job, since the sailor said it would take us out of the stuffy and crowded army bunkrooms below, and let six of us sleep on the top deck, in a separate bunkroom, next to the big smokestack which had the incinerator at its base. We also would have the full run of the upper bridge deck, and would get good Navy style food in the crew's mess.

Since the ship was to make the crossing without an escort, following a random zig-zag course, it was absolutely essential that all the garbage was incinerated at extremely high temperatures so as to prevent any smoke, and not leave any debris behind that could indicate a trail or that a ship had passed. Incidentally, because of this zig-zag, we were told that the normal 5 day straight line crossing would take at least 9 days. We knew then that we were on our way to North Africa, and could look forward to passing under the Rock of Gibraltar. That alone convinced us that it was good to be on the topmost deck, and we immediately volunteered.

So I went up to the incinerator with my buddies and the petty officer in charge of incineration for our basic training. And, boy, was that interesting. For one thing, the incinerator was kept at about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and when you opened the door to throw in the garbage, the draft from the 60 to 70 foot stack was so strong you felt like it would suck you in. In fact, when we opened the incinerator gate, we had to make sure that the outer hatch door was closed so the incoming air was through the built-in side slots. If we forgot and left that hatch open, the draft from behind us could easily blow us into the incinerator.

The incinerator door was almost four feet wide, so we could easily throw in two-foot square corrugated board cartons full of garbage. You can imagine how careful we were to batten down the hatches before starting work.

Anyway, besides the cheek warming we got when the gate was opened for a garbage toss, coupled with the sweat we poured out in the hot room, the gig was a cinch... since most of the day we could loll around on the bridge deck, schmooze with the Navy crew, and watch the porpoises racing the ship.

After nine days of that, we finally arrived in the Straits of Gibraltar. I had my view of the Rock and the monkeys before landing in Algiers. From there, we were transferred to a truck convoy, and whisked off to the gigantic staging area camp in Oran to await our replacement assignments for duty in Southern Europe.

More to come: Leon in Oran.

Random thoughts from an undisclosed location

Hi, back for a bit. Who knew this retreat involved so many Xeroxes? Anyway, some thoughts.

1. The press corps and the Prisoner's Dilemma

I am not the only person to have watched American news organizations over the last decade and wondered, "WTF? No, really, WTF?" Because I am crass, my first guess at an explanation was, "Money." Because I am extremely crass, my second guess was, "P&B, you know how they live."

But, since I do know how some of them live, I understood that these explanations were, at best, incomplete.

My third guess has to do with the game theory of asymmetrical information access. And, unfortunately, it's not something I know enough about to think further on. Suggestions?

2. Milman Parry.

Parry is an unrecognized keystone figure in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. And that's an interesting list in itself; I would be interested to learn what other figures HDTD's readers would add.

3. Incremental hedonic progress and the invention of mayonnaise.

The ingredients in mayonnaise have been known since before history began. But put together as a commonly used sauce? Not until the early modern era, and good luck trying to track the history down.

How many other small improvements to the human condition have been made whose provenance has been lost, and whose existence we take for granted? Enough little things can add up to a big thing. Mmm, mayonnaise.

Skip and hop!

Fedex apparently is using advanced technology that hasn't made it to the news yet. Or have you heard about the instant teleportation device they have in Sacramento? I want that for home use. Just imagine, hopping to Germany to get some good bread two minutes before lunch. Cravings for Ben&Jerry could be satisfied instantaneously. No more month-long waits for the move to arrive. Grandparents would be just a skip and a hop away. Bali, so close! Oh... It would be like living next door to everybody!

I mean, see for yourself:

Information and services provided to Fedex users.

Package Progress

06/13/2006 19:36 NEWARK , NJ
06/13/2006 16:23 NEWARK , NJ
06/13/2006 08:43 SAN JOSE , CA
06/12/2006 23:24 OAKLAND , CA
06/12/2006 20:41 SACRAMENTO , CA
06/12/2006 17:56 SACRAMENTO , CA
06/12/2006 17:56 MEMPHIS , TN
06/12/2006 17:56 SACRAMENTO , CA
06/12/2006 17:03 SACRAMENTO , CA

Tracking results provided by Fedex

Just saying.

Worthwhile Canadian initiative

So I saw this game at Snooky's: "Ten-man Trinidad and Tobago shocks Sweden".

Let's see. A blonde guy fell down and whimpered like a little boy who skinned his knee, somehow causing a black guy to leave the field permanently, at which point the blonde guy popped up and skipped away -- excelsior! -- returning to the game less than half a glass of water later. Despite this, the blonde guys were unable to do a damn thing against a goal that was open almost to goatse proportions.

No one scored any points at all. I suppose the absence of a rout is shocking, if you cared about the narrative in the first place.

UPDATE: A counterpoint from Noel -- yes, from Noel -- is below the fold.

So there we are, in Snooky’s, watching the game. I’m in a bright red polo shirt with the T&T flag emblazoned across the front; Amma is there, also cheering on her mother country -- but wearing, completely by accident, a gold shirt, blue pants, and a blue-and-gold hairpin. It would have been mildly embarrassing if anybody else on that side of Prospect Park had cared in the slightest. (The Mexican-American fellow in the bar was waiting for the Yankees-Oakland game; the Panamanian-American dude with the pencil mustache was marginally more interested in the game, but seemed really dedicated to his Guinness.) Carlos, appropriately, is wearing black.

Amma, like Kads, is a female Trinidadian novice to the world of soccer.

The first half is stupendously boring, save for the pre-game show on Univisión, which features some fellows playing the steel drums, scantily-clad surgically-enhanced cheerleaders in the studio (apparently to make up for the World Cup’s mysterious lack of cheerleaders on the field), and a female correspondent reporting from Germany in a very fetching cowboy hat. Unfortunately, the pre-game show didn’t last, and the play began. Ball up-the-field, ball down-the-field, whatever. To quote the bartender, "This is like hockey on valium."

Anyway, we’re watching on and off, talking more about the weather, cars, Afghanistan, and Johnny Damon. "First he was Jesus, then he was Brutus, but he still throws like Mary Magdalene," says the bartender.

At which point there’s that bullshit foul, the Swede doing his overacting routine, and Amma yelling, "That was nothin’, what he carryin’ on about, boy!" Carlos is reacting as you’d expect, and I’m thinking, "This is a sport? They should just let the players punch each other. Just like in that Spinrad story. Hell, MLS team staffing is already straight outta that story."

And please nobody write in telling me that the foul was actually a foul -- I don’t care about the rules, Martin; it should not have been a foul. As the bartender so pithily put it, "Bunch of p--sies." He wasn’t hurt, no way nobody was gonna get hurt, WTF? I may change my mind if it can be explained to me why allowing smash-ups like that one to happen would make the game even less eventful.

By now you’re wondering, "And this is a counterpoint to Carlos?" It is -- because once Avery John was kicked out, the game became an incredibly exciting nail-biter. One misstep, one screw-up, and it’s over. Done. The goalie -- the arquero; this was Univisión -- is there trying to cover an incredibly large space; the Swedes are there attacking and attacking and attacking, Hislop makes those two awesone saves, deflecting that shot from the drama-queen with the stupid tail and diving to stop Ibraimovic’s shot. "The whole world is tilted towards Trinidad’s feet!" yelled the announcer. I have no idea what that meant, but it sounded right. I bit my nails down to the knuckles. I bit Amma’s nails down to the wrists. Since you knew that a tie was as good as a win for T&T, since England had already beaten Paraguay, it mattered.

The Univisión guys had it right when they said, "For Sweden, a tie with the taste of defeat."

I couldn’t help but note that the Swedes cut out the stupid drama once every second started to matter.

Anyway, I enjoyed the game. Carlos couldn’t believe that I barely glanced over when Thomas hit a two-run homer off Mussina in the second. He shouldn’t worry. Baseball is still a far superior game to soccer, as is football and basketball. (I used to think hockey, too, but the impossibility of getting non-hockey fans to enjoy a hockey game has taught me otherwise.) But soccer can have its points.

So how to improve the game? Easy. Take all 22 players from both teams before a game. Shoot one of ‘em. Play. Then you’ll have something well worth watching.

Your last stop for World Cup coverage

The Guardian accidentally ran something insightful on the American disdain for soccer this past April, in a supposedly humorous guest column by the American impresario David Eggers. Since it's by Dave Eggers and in the Guardian, it is not actually funny. But, as my co-blogger says, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then:

The second and greatest, by far, obstacle to the popularity of the World Cup, and of professional soccer in general, is the element of diving. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers.

As much as I hate to say it, Eggers is right.

There are few examples of American sports where diving is part of the game, much less accepted as such. Things are too complicated and dangerous in American football to do much faking. Baseball? It's not possible, really - you can't fake getting hit by a baseball, and it's impossible to fake catching one. The only one of the big three sports that has a dive factor is basketball, where players can and do occasionally exaggerate a foul against them, but get this: the biggest diver in the NBA is not an American at all. He's Argentinian! (Manu Ginobili, a phony to end all phonies, but otherwise a very good player.)

But diving in soccer is a problem. It is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging and cheating, an unappealing mix. The theatricality of diving is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds. [...] It's disgusting, all of it, particularly because, just as all of this fakery takes a good deal of time and melodrama to put over, the next step is so fast that special cameras are needed to capture it. Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacular uninjured - excelsior! - and will kick the ball over to his team-mate and move on.

The American attitude towards football is, you play with pain, you play through your pain, and you don't leave the field unless you are so damaged you can't play. This fake Fabio-writhing-in-the-dirt-for-a-minor-tactical-advantage business... gah. Gah gah gah. It feels morally disgusting to watch, the way a PETA activist might feel at a bullfight. Jeez Louise, suck it up, Goldilocks.

(An aside: many non-Americans complain about American football's arcane infraction code, its armored uniforms, and its stop-and-start game play. They don't realize that the gridiron evolved that way for a reason: to prevent the regular maiming and violent death of its players. I won't link to the Taylor-Theisman hit, or what happened to Tim Krumrie. Strong men and women have vomited at the footage. Krumrie, at least, was able to play again, with a foot-long metal bar inserted in his leg. He's from Wisconsin.)

Which brings me to Eggers' other point. In other countries, soccer is an expression of national pride, a celebration of young manhood.

In the U.S., it's a form of day care.

There really isn't much more to say.

Shazam!

Looks like lightning zapped my USB adapter last night in Brooklyn. Hopefully that's the only damage. (Update: replaced the adapter, re-installed the driver, everything seems to work.)

The best fiction I've read on the Napoleonic wars since Patrick O'Brian has talking dragons in it. (And again, it's been praised by writers I wouldn't trust to recommend shoelaces.) Step up, people!

(C&D, all three books are in the latest box to Yerevan. Y'all should be getting a box every two, three weeks now until August.)

Latest reading: Mark Kemp's personal history of Southern rock, Dixie Lullaby, Norman Douglas's South Wind, and Huntford's biography of the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who was unaccountably not from Wisconsin.

For the mothers amongst our readers

Typhoon Max, Part II

...So I seduced him.

Two weeks after the typhoon, the whole thing was just getting totally intolerable. I mean, he just kept looking right THROUGH me. Wouldn't let me near him, wouldn't let me touch him. Wouldn't sleep with me anymore... he'd still sleep on my bed, but only during the day when I was out. Spent his nights in the guest bedroom. Spent a lot more time than usual wandering the neighborhood, too... he actually got into a fight, his first in months (probably with his archenemy, The Evil Orange Cat). And now and then, if I tried particularly hard to attract his attention, he'd shoot me these brief looks of utter contempt... you know, like "I KNOW I'm compelled to share my living space with you, but MUST you be such a loud, tacky, vulgar, uncouth... human?"

Well.

In a proper seduction, timing is everything. Timing, and patience, and careful preparation. And knowing the weak spots of the object of your seduction.

Max has three. One is obvious as soon as you look at him: good food. He didn't reach 18 pounds plus by being finicky. Max likes eating. The second is catnip.

The third is the sweet spot where his spine makes a right angle at the base of his tail. Short-circuits his brain somehow, that does -- scratch him there for ten seconds, and he trembles, his mouth hangs open, his eyes glaze over, he starts to drool uncontrollably and make strange little percolator noises, and then, more often than not, he'll just collapse on his side, feet sticking straight out, gasping for a belly rub.

But this trick would only work after a good ten seconds of scratching -- not possible while he kept running away from me.

And he had ignored catnip and open cans of Friskies Gourmet, and was still ignoring them. But then, perhaps these were too... obvious. Perhaps some subtlety was called for. And combining the various weak spots together. So...

The first thing I did was shift cat foods. Normally I feed them three or four different kinds -- cheap dry, good dry, fancy-schmansy dry, wet -- more or less at random from day to day, to add a little variety to their lives. But now I shifted to the cheap dry and stayed with it for several days. This brought complaints at first, then an increasing tendency to leave the bowl full while either coming to head-butt and beg for something better (Momo) or becoming ever frostier and more aloof (Max). After a couple of days of this, they were both becoming distinctly peckish.

Then I went and bought some ice cream.

Step two required some patience, waiting for the right moment. It came on Friday afternoon. I got home from work and both Max and Momo were in the living room -- he in his favorite spot, sprawled magnificently across the back of the couch, she on the table curled around the CPU of the Macintosh. Perfect. I went to the fridge and made myself a bowl of ice cream. Momo came in and poured herself around my legs -- ice cream? Is that *ice* cream? Have I told you lately how much I love you, Doug? How much I love, love, love you? Well, I do love you, Doug, yes I do...

Strolling into the living room, I leaned nonchalantly against the bookshelf and began scooping Dreyers Cookies and Cream into my mouth. Momo went into a frenzy of head-butting, shoulder-rubbing, and lascivious purring. Max simply sat there. But -- I know my cat. I could see the hint of tension in his posture. He wanted to step down from his perch and walk away, slowly, ponderously, belly swaying back and forth with dignity... but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it.

"Mmmm," I said. "Good ice cream. Yes, sir." Purring and rubbing. Frosty silences. "Oh -- guess I can't quite finish it. Hmm. Momo-chan, you want some? Yes?" I carefully set the bowl down on the floor. "Oh, do you like that? Yes? Oh we LIKE that, don't we. Iiiiiice creeeeeeeam. Mmmmmmm. Goooooooood."

At this point, of course, Max DID hop down from the couch and waddle, just a little stiff-legged, towards the door. He stopped at the cat door and gave me a swift glance of utter and absolute contempt -- why *ever* did God, Who is a very large cat, create creatures as crass, boorish and generally repulsive as humans, what was He thinking -- and then squeezed himself out, tail twitching with annoyance.

Step two complete, I thought. Now for step three...

Saturday I bought some Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey, and some fresh catnip. Saturday night, no opportunities. Sunday morning, busy. But Sunday afternoon... yes. There they were again, one on the couch, the other on the CPU.

"Sorry, darling," I said to Momo as I scooped her up. "Need you to go outside for a bit," tossing her out and locking the cat door behind her. Ignoring the faint confused mewl, I went back to the freezer and took the whole pint of B&J out.

I tucked myself into the sofa chair, flicked on the TV, and began to slowly scoop spoonfuls out of the carton. History Channel... CNN... VH1... "Mmm. This is good ice cream," Fox Network... ABC... "Baywatch". "Mmm... yeah..." NBC... MTV... "Oh, look, Cheryl Crow is making a video in her underwear. And everyone else in the video is really ugly. Mmm... grunt... um... smack," Discovery channel, CBS, oh heck "Baywatch" again... "Mmmm... sluuurp..."

Across the room, Max was totally engrossed in looking out the window. Ice cream? What ice cream? I'm not interested in any ice cream. I'm so far from being interested in ice cream, that the light from it will take several hours to reach me. Really. MTV? "Baywatch"? Humans are so strange. And boring. This window, now... what an interesting view.

After ten minutes or so of slow spooning and carefully calculated slurps, grunts, and moans of pleasure, there was nothing left of the pint but a golf-ball sized lump of banana ice cream, floating in about two inches of melt at the bottom of the carton. I was ready... it was time to make my move.

Reaching into my pocket, I removed the Baggie full of fresh catnip and, turning slightly away from Max, dumped it into the carton. Three quick stirs with my finger, then I set the carton down on the table, ostentatiously stretched, and said to nobody in particular, "Go pee." Then I walked out the door into the corridor to the bedroom, hands in pockets and singing softly to myself ("This is no social crisis, this is just you having fun, noooo crisis,"), proceeded down the hall to the bathroom, where I opened the door, shut it loudly without going in, stopped singing and began to count very very quietly to myself. "Thirty. Twenty-nine... twenty-eight..."

"...two... one." I had slipped out of my flip-flops, and now I went back up the hall barefoot and on tiptoe, to peer around the door into the living room.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't sneak up on a cat. Sure, their ears and noses are a hundred times better than ours. Sure, they can sense vibrations through the floor and subtle movements of the air. But it doesn't matter how good your senses are if the brain behind them is distracted. And Max had his head shoved so far into the ice cream carton that he was more or less wearing it like a helmet.

And so I was able to come right up behind him and... gently, very gently... lay my hand on his back and begin to stroke.

He twitched. No, he flinched. And he thought about running, I know. But catnip works quickly, and his little brain was already beginning to effervesce. And he was just snorkeling the Ben & Jerry's, lap lap lapping up tonguefuls of melted creamy extra-rich banana ice cream. Just a few seconds, he thought. Just let me finish this off, and then I'll just... Slowly I moved my hand down his back to the spot at the base of his tail, and began to scratch.

It was close. He knew the danger. He quickly slurped up the last of the ice cream, shook the carton off his head (leaving a very fetching crown of liquid Chunky Monkey mixed with scraps of catnip all around the top of it) and took a faltering step or two away. But the catnip had weakened his will, and then the wave from the sweet spot hit his brain.

He trembled. His claws flexed and his eyes glazed over. His mouth dropped open and he began to make strange little percolator noises. He made one last shuddering attempt to gather himself and run away... and then, slowly, with immense dignity, he toppled to one side and collapsed: THUD.

"Awww, Maaax," I said softly, still scratching. I brought my other hand around, and up, and in for the kill, plunging it into the soft fur of his immense belly. "Belly rub, Max... bellllllly ruuuuuuuuub..."

Sunday night Max took the middle of the bed. And instead of wrestling him for it as I normally would, pulling the sheets from under him and shoving him to the edge, I just let him lie there, purring, and I curled myself around him like a comma, and slept peacefully and happily while my great fat cat just purred and purred, rumbling like a hidden engine of happiness through the long quiet tropical night.

Since you asked...

Typhoon Max

This was my first published story.

Okay: so far, this has been pretty much my *only* published story. But let that bide.

It's a true story, mostly. Happened when I lived on Saipan, in the Marianas Islands. That was from 1991 to 1998. The typhoon was in, hmm, must have been early '97. I posted the story on the Lois Bujold mailing list, and someone passed it along to a woman who edited a magazine, and I ended up getting some money for it.

The money was very nice, but the main thing is... I miss Max. Still.

Anyway. Someone just asked about it. I didn't keep a copy, but now that we have internet, I was able to find it quickly enough. So here it is.

I think I've mentioned that I have a couple of cats. Momo, the female, is small, calico, and very clever. Max, who used to be male, is fat, affectionate, lazy, cowardly, and -- there is no polite way to put this -- somewhat less than brilliant. Amiable dimwit is how I usually describe him. Feline moron if I'm feeling cranky.

When Max was a kitten, it took him a long, long time to get housebroken. He couldn't figure out litter boxes, and couldn't distinguish between indoors and out... well, I *said* he was stupid. In order to get the idea across, I eventually had to be kind of severe with him (and no, I don't like being severe with animals, especially with cats, upon whom it's usually wasted). He never did figure out litter boxes, but one day the light bulb went on over his little brain -- ping! -- that's what OUTSIDE is for. Ohhh.

When he finally did get it right, though, he became very diligent about it. He'd go outside and make a huge production of digging a DEEP hole, throwing dirt for yards in every direction. Then he'd dig a second hole, more slowly and carefully, to get dirt to fill the first one... yes, really. Not so bright, remember?

This raised some additional problems, of course. Visitors began saying things like, "Doug, what the hell happened to your lawn?" But after another year or two of mostly gentle persuasion, I was able to convince him to restrict his sanitary functions to a few select areas outside the public view -- behind the flower bed, up in the little patch of jungle north of the house, and across the street in the junk yard, where he could dig and bury to his heart's content.

Now, Max and Momo are boonie cats, distant descendants of sailor's felines brought by the Spanish galleons. For a hundred generations, their ancestors ran feral in Saipan's forests, living on rats and lizards and native birds, before people got around to re-domesticating them. So they've got the instincts of tropical animals, and they know all about typhoons.

The falling barometer affected their behavior pretty obviously. Momo, normally the most independent of creatures, began hovering ever closer to me, drifting along at my heels as I moved from room to room. Max, on the other hand, went into the laundry hamper. As the storm moved closer, he dug himself ever deeper down into the sheets and towels and dirty underwear. By the time the first big winds hit, he had been down there for twelve hours or so.

So. Fast forward to ten or so on Saturday morning. The eye of the storm was an hour away from its closest passage. Winds outside were sustained at something over a hundred miles per hour, with gusts up to one-forty or so. W ind noise so loud that conversation had to be shouted. Rain intermittent, blindingly thick one moment, clear the next. Boiling sky above, split by lightning every few seconds, and the occasional piece of random debris flying past -- branches, coconuts, pieces of corrugated tin, the hard plastic liner from the back of someone's pickup truck.

I had all the windows boarded on two sides of the house, but not on the lee side -- we knew that the winds would come mostly from the south and west, and I wanted to be able to see out. So I was standing on the east side of my living room, ankle deep in warm water (leaky house, tile floor), and looking out over the small lake that had taken over my side yard, when I heard a plaintive little yowl. A familiar plaintive little yowl. It was the sound that Max used to make before I installed the cat door, when he desperately needed to go outside.

"Max?"

"Mrrowl." I have to go outside.

"Max, you must be kidding me. We're having a typhoon."

"Mrrowl!"

"Max, we're in the MIDDLE of a typhoon. It's a hundred miles an hour out there."

"Mrrooooooowl!!" I REALLY have to go outside. I've been in that laundry basket since yesterday.

"Max... uh, oh shit."

"Mrwl." Yes, exactly.

"Oh, oh gosh. Well... let's take a look."

I probably should describe the layout of my house at this point. It's one story, long and skinny from north to south. The south end faces the road across a small front yard. On the west there's a long skinny patch of lawn and then a very overgrown and scruffly flower garden. The north end has no windows, and there's a little patch of jungle behind it, presided over by a hundred-year-old breadfruit tree. To the east there's a big, low yard, which at this point was now a small lake, maybe two hundred feet by fifty, and nearly a foot deep. The front door opens out of the kitchen onto the driveway, to the south. There's a door to the west that opens on nothing in particular.

So anyway, Max waddled over to the western door, picking his way across the wet tile floor, and looked up at me and mrowled again. I shook my head, but he just kept looking at me, so I grabbed the knob and shoved *hard* against the door. It wouldn't budge at first -- the wind was coming out of the southwest, hitting it almost square on -- but I waited until it subsided for a moment, then slammed my shoulder against it and jammed my foot in before the wind could knock it shut.

Outside, the storm had laid the grass flat. The palm trees were bent into U-shapes, heads touching the ground. The rain had almost stopped for the moment, but the few stray drops were like BB pellets. And the force of the wind was such that I, 190 pound human, had to put my head down and lean far forward and brace myself just to look out the door.

"No, Max, I really don't think --" But he was already hopping over my foot and out the open door. "Hey, what? Max!" He made a beeline for his favorite spot, the scruffy weedy little garden to the west of my house, across the little lawn.

That western strip of lawn slopes a little upwards. I had never really noticed this before, but now I could see it clearly. Because, you see, the slope meant that the lawn immediately adjacent to the house was sheltered, just a little, at least down at cat-level, a foot or so off the ground. So Max got out the door okay. But once he moved a few feet away from the house, and started to ascend that little slope, the full force of the wind caught him head on.

He slowed. He slowed to a crawl, and then to a creep. But he didn't stop. He flattened himself against the ground and, as I watched in amazement and growing awe, began to *squirm* forward across the wet grass.

The wind was solid, smooth and glassy, palpable. The farther he moved from the house, the worse it got. From the door I could see the fat on his flanks and buttocks begin to ripple, and then to flutter. When he turned his head, I could see his jowls were pushed back against his shoulders, and his lips were flared into a rictus, like the face of an astronaut in a jet-sled.

But he kept going. His claws were out and he was pulling himself forward like a mountaineer using pitons to traverse a wall of ice. Bit by bit, inch by inch, he crept forward to within a couple of feet of the far edge of the lawn.

And there he stopped. The ground rose to a little ridge there. It was only a foot or two in elevation, but it concentrated the air flowing over it, and the wind speed was at its very highest just there. And no matter how hard Max tried, pulling with his front legs, kicking with his back, he couldn't cross those last few feet. His claws just could not get enough purchase on the slick wet grass. Again and again, he stormed that little ridge in slow motion, squirming forward into the howling river of air, clawing and kicking against the invisible power of the gale. And again and again, he would just reach the top, only to lose his grip and be forced backwards by the wind, claws digging furrows in the wet dirt.

He tried tacking, zigzagging against the wind's direct path, but that was even worse: it turned his fat flanks broadside to the storm, and he lost ground even faster.

At last, in frustration, he pushed himself as close to the top as he could and then gathered his back legs under him and leaped. The result was utterly predictable: the instant he left the ground, the wind just grabbed him and threw him back across the lawn, costing him all the ground that he had so laboriously gained.

"Oh, Max!" He was back inside, wet, muddy, battered. "Max, guy, are you okay? Let me get a towel," But he was shaking himself and growling (growling? Max?) with frustration. "Max?"

He looked at me. "Mrowl! Mrrrooooooowwl!"

"Max, I know, but no way! Forget it, guy! Listen -- I'll make you a litter box, okay? Yeah, I threw the old one away years ago, but we can rig something up -- uh, I'll get a cardboard box, shred some paper towels, that Robert Jordan novel that somebody gave me -- listen, guy, you're not going to --"

He gave me a look that stopped me cold. It was a look that I had never seen before, a look that was cool and stern and righteous. It was a look that said, as clearly as words: I know what is right even if you do not. A proper cat does not go in the house. Ever.

"Yeah, but Max, it's okay, I never meant -- Max! Hey, Max!" H e was off across the room, splashing across the wet floor, and climbing up onto the back of the couch to peer out the (un-boarded) eastern window. This was a Max I had never imagined. This was a cat who was alert, intent, focused. This was a cat filled with grim resolution. This was a cat possessed. He stared out the window for a long moment, thinking (thinking? Max?) and then, in a flash, he was down on the floor again and zipping into the kitchen.

"Max!" I splashed after him, just in time to see his tail disappearing into the dryer hole.

Now, the dryer hole is set several feet off the ground, in the southern front of the house, facing the driveway. The cats can use it to get outside by climbing up on the washing machine, but normally they don't, because the drop is inconvenient. It's got a little tin shutter, which the wind had blown shut (some water got in, but that hardly mattered, water was getting in everywhere). I would have nailed it shut, but who could imagine that I would need to?

How Max managed to push it open against the force of the storm will forever remain a mystery. But he did, and squeezed himself through. The wind slammed the shutter on his tail as he dropped down, and it scraped off a big tuft of hair and some skin, but he got outside. And now he was on the driveway at the south face of the house, with the wind coming straight at him.

Opening the front door was even worse then the side door had been, because the front door opened inwards. Once unlatched, it wanted to fly open for good, letting the wind inside the house. I braced my feet, leaned my whole body against it, and cautiously poked my head out.

The rain had started again, fat drops coming at us like bullets. Max was a few feet to my left, squashed against the bottom of the outside wall, the wind shoving him flat against the concrete like a cop arresting a criminal. I could see him shuddering as the rain hit him. A few feet beyond him, at the corner of the house, the drain from the roof was coming down like a firehose.

"Oh, Max," I said. " Dumb idea. Dumb, dumb. Come on guy," I reached around the edge of the door. "Come on back inside. Come on. Psss, pss, pss --"

But now he was moving, and not towards me, but away, towards the water spout. The water was coming down with tremendous force, the rain from thousands of square feet of roof collecting into this one spot, a gallon per second or more blasting down onto the driveway in a solid mass. Pressed flat, Max slid along the wall, closer to it, closer... and then he simply disappeared into the waterfall.

"I didn't see that." I said it out loud. Max, my cowardly eunuch, walking into a firehose spray of water without an instant's hesitation? Max, who screamed like a skewered baby when I gave him his quarterly bath? Max? I put my back against the front door, braced my legs, and shoved it shut. Then I skidded through the kitchen, back into the living room, and flattened my face against the eastern window.

The rain was coming down in diagonal curtains, and for long moments I simply could not see anything. But then it paused, and I saw Max. He was crossing the eastern yard... which was under nearly a foot of water.

The east side was the lee of the house, partially sheltered, so the wind was not so bad. Still, it was whipping the miniature lake into whitecaps as it gusted around the corners of the house. Max wasn't quite swimming -- his feet could just touch the ground beneath the water -- but only his head, rump, and tail were above the surface, and the waves would go right over him.

Still, he forged steadily onwards, chugging along like a little ironclad. When waves broke over his head he simply closed his eyes and ducked and kept going. Fifty feet, a hundred. He was heading north, crossing the yard the long way, moving almost parallel to the house but slightly away from it in shallow diagonal. He took a detour at one point to circle around something -- a deeper spot, or maybe some debris beneath the water -- but he never stopped moving.

At the far northern end, the water got over his head, and he had to swim. He swam.

"I'm not seeing this," I said. "I am NOT seeing this." Swimming? Max? I could not have been more dumbfounded if he had demonstrated the ability to levitate. And where was he going? A few more yards, and he'd be out of the lee of the house, exposed to the storm again.

And then I saw it. Beyond the north end of the yard, set up on a little bank, was the patch of jungle. Most of it was exposed to the storm, and that part was a death trap, branches whipping wildly back and forth with terrible, maiming force. But there was one calm spot: the lee of the ancient breadfruit tree.

Max never hesitated. He hit the shore, scrambled up the muddy bank, clawed his way across the stretch where the wind was angling in at full strength, and then gave a single enormous leap with the wind behind him to reach the trunk of the breadfruit tree. He hit it, clung, scrambled around it like a squirrel and he was home free, in the lee, sheltered. He backed down to the ground and slowly, methodically he began to dig.

I watched with absolute fascination. Minutes passed as he dug deeper, careful, thorough. The wind got stronger, gustier, and more random, switching direction suddenly around a quarter of the compass, southwest west southeast. The lightning flashed and the thunder boomed. Max never looked up from his digging.

More minutes passed. The wind got even stronger. Somewhere around this point, my neighbor's car port abruptly parted company with his house and took off for Taipei like a big corrugated tin pterodactyl, dropping pieces of nail-studded two-by-fours all across my lawn and roof as it headed up into the cauldron of the sky. I never noticed. I was watching my cat. And then he was ready. With an unmistakable air of triumph, he turned away from his deep, deep hole, backed up, raised his tail, assumed the position --

-- and the wind shifted ten points around the compass, from southwest to north, and gusted, hard, hitting him broadside and blowing him away, ass over teakettle across the flooded lawn. He went flying over it like a stone skipped across a pond, and then the wind picked him *up*, 140 mph gale lifting him like a scrap of paper, and flung him into the plumeria tree at the front of my house, ten feet off the ground.

"MAAAAAX!!" I was out the front door without a second's thought, screaming across my lawn. Of course the wind hit me like a nose tackle me once I was out on my driveway, pow, and whoof suddenly I'm on the ground looking up at the clouds going by overhead much too fast. Pick myself up and, whoosh, suddenly the wind swings back into the southwest, and my writhing, squalling cat flies out of the tree and hits the driveway, bounces once, and throws himself on me and *clings*. I scream, grab him, let the wind push me back across the driveway, lurching like a drunken man, in through the front door, slip and skid, the wind is coming in through the open door and I fall again and the cat flies off, slides across the wet floor, and comes to a stop in the middle of the living room floor, totally drenched, flattened, with all four limbs outstretched like a cartoon character that's been hit by a steamroller.

"M-M-M-Max," I said, wiping bloody claw scratches and rain, "you, uh, you, ah huh, ah hah, ah ha ha ha ha, ahh, hahahahahaha ---" I couldn't help it. Shock, reaction, and, dammit, he did look pretty funny. Flat, wet, fat cat, floored, looking back at me with big wild eyes. "Oh, Max, I, you, ah huh, oh ha ha ha," and now he was looking at me with dawning horror, cats hate nothing worse than being laughed at, "oh hoo hoo hoo, no, Max, haha, listen, hoo hoo, no, I'm sorry," but it was too late. He gave me a look of absolute and utter outrage -- he had just very nearly died, trying to do the right and righteous thing, and I was LAUGHING at him -- and then slunk off, wet, bruised, and trembling with shock and humiliation.

He did his business behind the hot water heater in the back of the utility closet, and then he went under the bed in the spare bedroom and stayed there for the next two days. Didn't make a sound, didn't eat, didn't respond to my blandishments and apologies or to catnip or the open can of Friskies that I left there. Just stayed back by the wall, eyes wide open and gleaming back at me when I kneeled down to beg his forgiveness and ask him to come out again.

He finally came out this morning, but he's not talking to me. When I called him, he ignored me. When I tried to get near him, he gave me one of those cat looks -- you know, the ones that say, "Excuse me, sir, but I don't believe I know you. Kindly do not be so familiar." -- and then ran away without letting me touch him.

And he's right. He was so brave, and I laughed at him...

I feel horrible.

How do you apologize to a cat? Anyone?

Belle's balikbayan blogging, boo-yah!

We've started a trend! Belle Waring of the super-amazing expat family academic comic feminist philoso-blog (with recipes) John and Belle Have a Blog writes about her trip to the Philippines. Same issues, different perspective. (Warning: pig's head immediately follows the link.)

Balikbayan guest blogging 6: Manila Cha-Cha

HDTD's man in Manila, Noel Maurer, continues his ongoing series, with some impressions of two of the Philippines' "greatest generation".

I have two more planned entries in this blog, one on poverty and one on politics. (It may stretch to more. I hope y’all don’t mind.) [there better be something on Filipino food, otherwise people will claim I am making it all up. -- CY] But before I get to those cheery topics, I want to discuss my meeting with two remarkable 80-something men: Washington SyCip and Bienvenido Tan.

Let’s start with Mr. SyCip. Anyone visiting the Philippines is told to “go see Wash. Go see Wash.” In my case, it was Michael Chen. So we went to go see Wash.

Wash turns out to be the 84-year-old founder of Manila’s most prominent accounting and consulting company, SGV Associates. It’s in a remarkably nondescript building in Makati City. Unlike the palacial tower that houses Cesar Virata’s offices, the SGV building looks almost run-down from the outside. And the lobby is nothing special. Nor is the elevator to the executive suites. In fact, except for the fact that it’s continually crowded with tall Japanese businessmen in black suits and odd haircuts the thing wouldn’t have looked all that out of place in the Stanley M. Isaacs Homes back in Manhattan.

Now, Washington’s suite is, in fact, rather nice. Wood paneling, modern furniture. So it’s nice, but it’s nondescript nice. It’s not the sort of nice that you remember afterwards. The same can be said for his office. Abstract Asian art on the walls, funny Asian sculpture thingys on the table, comfortable couch, computerless desk. Nice, but nondescript nice.

And dark. The shades were drawn. This seems to be a Filipino thing. People like to hold meetings in dark, sunless rooms. The only exception to this has been Aurelio Montinola, the president of the Bank of the Philippine Islands, who walked into a darkened conference room, blurted, “What the heck is this?” and had the shades opened.

I only laugh because it's true. Both parts.

Anyway, we walked into the room and were greeted by this small, wizened, and rather formal old man. Slightly hunched, but moving spryly, he invited us in and asked us to sit down. I mentioned that he was the same age as my father, and he asked me about him. So I spent a few minutes detailing the entrepreneurial adventures of my old man, and then proceeding to start asking my questions.

Which Mr. SyCip didn’t want to answer. Rather, he wanted to answer the question that he thought I should have asked, which is: “Is democracy the right form of government for the Philippines?” To which, he believes, the answer is quite self-evidently “no.”

That threw me less than you might have thought, because it’s an opinion that I’ve been running into a lot in the Philippines. Of course, it’s not one that I share, but what do I know? Commentator after commentator has told me the same thing, sometimes expressed as skepticism that any political system will function; sometimes expressed as a call for much less democracy, but no alternative selection method specified.

It’s an interesting position, and it says something (to me, at least) about how much American modes of thought have faded. It’s certainly an interesting counterpoint to Latin America, where the same modes have become much stronger. After all, I’ve never heard anyone in Latin America speak favorably about Pinochet—well, not outside Chile, not in similar circles to ones the people I’m talking to move in, and certainly not openly.

My first contact with this came in an interview with one of President Arroyo’s former finance ministers—she’s had a lot of them—Lito Camacho. Camacho is a dapper gentlemen who is older-than-he-looks. He left public service under less-than-ideal circumstances, which seems inevitable in the Philippines. So he has many reasons to be unhappy with how politics is done here.

Well, we’re in the lobby of the Makati Shangri-La hotel, sitting under this vasty glass wall and watching the waitresses float around in these tight dresses slit up to the navels—at least I was watching them.

Been there, done that, had the buffet.

Camacho is an HBS graduate, so he asks me what we’re doing nowadays in the course I teach: “When I was there, it was all about Japan,” he says.

So I joke, “Yeah, back in the day we taught mercantilism; today we teach that authoritarianism is good.”

He perked up. “You really teach that?”

Me, somewhat taken aback, “Well, many of the students complain that we do.”

“Ah,” said Camacho, “I would agree with that.”

He went on to make a cogent argument for switching to a Westminster-style constitution, but he lost me completely when he said, “Things are good in Singapore, and the government runs the place well. So why would people want to vote for change, for democracy?”

Isn’t the above an argument that democracy won't make a well-run place any less well-run, because good government is a vote-getter? I might be missing something.

“Cha-cha” stands for “charter change,” or constitutional reform. The Cha-Cha is a popular dance popular among the political classes here, despite the fact that nobody knows the steps. The steps, of course, are just how one goes about rewriting the constitution while remaining with the constitution—nobody’s quite sure how to go about it. (See Article 17 of the Philippine constitution.) And doubly so considering that the polls show that only 43 percent of the public support the idea.

The Cha-Cha is frustratingly vague. The main drift is to switch to a parliamentary system, but few people (Mr. Camacho excepted) seem to have thought through the logic. Some have proposed that a Westminster system, where the government could be yanked at any time by a vote of no confidence, would bring the present tradition of turfing out leaders by big people power demonstrations and impeachment into the constitution. After all, the House impeached President Estrada, but it stalled in the Senate, leading to the demonstration and Estrada’s belated realization that he had resigned without knowing it.

Okay... I can see that. Sort of. Problem is, the other goal seems to be to streamline decision-making, and I just don’t see how moving from a funhouse reflection of the United States to a clear reflection of Italy is going to help. A lot of serious thought will be needed to insure that the new system really produces a government that is both clearly accountable—unlike the current system of divided powers—and sufficiently free from short-term pressure to make tough decisions. Unfortunately, I don’t see many signs of the Cha-Cha proponents putting in that kind of thought.

I mean, they let just anybody sit in what would be the Prime Minister’s office under a parliamentary system, man.

The only thing which does make clear sense is getting all these weird ancillary policies out of the constitution and into statute law. I mean, Article 16 of the 1987 Constitution is actually entitled: ”Education, Science and Technology, Arts, Culture and Sports.”

That said, the real driver here seems to be a fundamental disillusionment with democracy, only nobody—and this flabbergasts me, in the land that produced Ferdinand Marcos—seems to have thought through what a lack of democracy means for accountability. You get the impression that “parliamentary” is shorthand for Lee Kwan Yew Two.

Only how would Lee Kwan Yew have done if he’d been put in charge of the Philippines? I have my doubts. “Better than Marcos” is all I can say, and that’s about as high a bar as long-jumping over a curb cut.

Many people, of course, recognize that the Cha-Cha isn’t really about democratic reform. “We’re still looking for a king,” said another former finance minister, Cesar Purisima.

Anyway, I said little of this to Mr. SyCip. It wouldn’t have been appropriate. The situation was one of a young man seeking wisdom from someone older and wiser; when he sidestepped a question, I didn’t make much effort to follow up.

And then, suddenly, the ambience changed. I asked him, almost idly, what he’d done in the war. I’m used to hearing people switch languages, lo hago todo el tiempo. What I’m not so used to seeing someone switch body languages mid-stream, because all of sudden I was no longer learning from an older and wiser Asian man; I was chatting with an older American guy full of interesting stories.

“The war? Yeah, I was in New York, at Columbia, when one of my buddies comes running into my room yelling, ‘Hey, Wash, didja hear? They’re bombing your home!’ So I enlisted, of course, and got stuck in intelligence. Somehow, I wound up in Bombay doing cryptography.” He went on to complain about how the U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom, forced him to go all the way back to New York to be discharged, since that’s where he’d signed up. “The Army,” he said, shaking his head. “Nuts.”

It wasn’t quite backslapping, but it was unexpected, the sudden cultural shift from a stereotyped version of the deferential Far East to, uh, feeling like I was home kibitzing with my Pops back in Brooklyn. SyCip also had some rather bitter memories of the American mission that rewrote the country’s economic policies in the 1950s; although he seemed angrier that they demanded a uniform minimum wage in order to eliminate “cesspools of poverty” than that they wrecked the de facto customs union with the United States. Me, I’d have to see some evidence that minimum wages really distorted the Philippine economy during the 1950s, but it certainly gave me something to look into.

Plus, like I said, it was a lot of fun. I might not agree with him about the whole democracy thing, but Washington SyCip is a very smart man.

The evening I had a meeting with another very smart 80-something, Bienvenido Tan. The name kinda threw me at first; I kept wanting to ask, “¿Y qué?”

This meeting was fully American from the start: Mr. Tan doesn’t stand much on formality. He had already started drinking with Mike Chen when I arrived, and I suspect that my presence might have prompted a little bit of code-shifting: Mike seemed a little discombobulated for a brief moment, and I suspect that a precipitous alteration from Overseas Chinese to Expat American might have thrown him off.

The fun part, of course, was Tan’s welcome tales of trying to increase tax collection during Cory Aquino’s term. He didn’t want the job, but Cory convinced him that it was his patriotic duty. “I would say to them,” he said to us, “’C’mon, fellas, give me something here. Otherwise we’re gonna hafta shut down the whole gravy train.’ And it worked! We doubled the tax take. Of course, it cost me my job, but those are the breaks.”

More than that—his tax deals eventually got him indicted. The Supreme Court finally cleared in 2005. The wheels of justice grind slowly in high humidity, it seems. Anyway, we could have been having the exact same conversation in Schaumburg, Illinois, and be talking about Daley the First instead of “corazón sí, aquí (points to head) no.”

Of course, I asked him what he did in the war. Turned out that he was an officer cadet when the Japanese invaded. “They gave each of my men two bullets. The soldiers asked me, ‘What the hell am I going to do with two bullets?’ Well, I told them, ‘Shoot a Jap, then shoot yourself.’”

His men demobilized and spread out, some joining the guerrillas in the hills, others (like Tan) fading into occupied Manila. The entire outfit was known as the “Hunters or ROTC Guerrillas” because they couldn’t decide whether to call themselves the ROTC Guerrillas, the Free Philippine Troops, the Hunters, or... and I am not making this up... the Green Archers.

The funniest—sort of—incident from the war was the time a Japanese soldier stopped Tan while he was carrying a bunch of underground newspapers. (The ROTC Guerrillas put out a sheet called, in character, Thunderclap, but there were many others. The soldier took them, stared at them upside down, and let Tan go.

It was a good dinner, and while he wasn’t fond of Philippine-style democracy, he didn’t think anything else would work better. I can’t say whether his war experience, or his work in government, or just his outwardly cynical (but really idealistic) Americanness made the difference. Anyway, Tan brought home to me how the Philippine upper class has been un-Americanizing over the past few decades, both in little things (business card rituals, conversational styles) and big ones (that whole democracy thing).

On the other hand, Raul Relente’s friends and family do believe in democracy, even though they’re not too fond of their government, and they don’t stand much on ceremony or go through little rituals when greeting each other. The more I find out about this country, the less I know.

Balikbayan guest blogging 5: Back in Batangas

HDTD's man in the Philippines, Noel Maurer, continues guest-blogging, this time on the effects of the medical brain drain on the Philippines. (This might be of interest to our new Armenian readers. Welcome! Compare! Contrast! We're all in this together.)

On Wednesday I spoke to Dr. Maria Lorenzo, a prominent researcher at the Philippine National Institutes of Health. The PNIH is located in an old shambling colonial era building—which in the Philippines means the Depression or thereabouts: 1930, not the nineteenth century. The facilities are rather run down. The research they do there, however, is excellent.

One of the Philippines’ big worries is the loss of skilled personnel, particularly in health care. Health care workers make up only about a quarter of all skilled emigrants—but that’s the only statistic about the outflux that isn’t impressive. There are roughly 200,000 practicing doctors and 300,000 registered nurses in the Philippines. Approximately 130,000 nurses (many of whom had trained as doctors) work abroad. Britain’s National Health Service, in particular, is having a field day, now that they’ve sucked all the professionals out of the West Indies like a giant socialist vacuum cleaner.

In fact, the U.K. is particularly clever about aproveching — yes, that’s Spanglish, but it’s a good word [Lou Dobbs would prefer you use the word 'poaching' here -- CY] — the American education legacy. They recruit entire operating room teams, the whole kit-and-caboodle, something they were never able to do in their own former colonies. As a result, the number of heart operations in the country has halved in the last two years. As a result, hospitals in Davao, in Mindanao, have received no new residents for two years, and 300 of 800 government-run hospitals have, in an interesting turn of phrase, “less than one doctor.”

Even Australia has now gotten in on the act—according to Philippine officials, they’ve asked for help (which the Philippines is, in fact, providing) in recruiting twenty thousand doctors over the next few years. That’s a lot in a country that graduates only about 3,000 new doctors every year.

(Anglosphere, schmanglosphere, that’s our ex-empire you’re messing with! Go pick on East Timor, willya?)

The Philippines being an entrepreneurial place, supply has risen to meet demand. Since the year 2000, the number of nursing schools in the Philippines has doubled, to 460. Of those 460, however, only 12 had a pass rate above 90 percent (the government standard); 32 had a pass rate below 30 percent and are about to be closed. The overall pass rate is down to half, from 80% in the 1990s. The PNIH is trying to capture the bad schools before the steal their students’ hard-earned money, but it’s an uphill battle for a bureaucracy as... ah... disorganized as the Philippines.

For example, when the Commissioner for Higher Education ordered the failing schools to close, President Arroyo ordered them to reopen. The commissioner resigned on the spot, but the schools have remained open. Jaime Galvez Tan—who speaks Spanish, to my surprise—explained to us at lunch in a traditional Filipino restaurant in Malate that some of the failing schools were owned by a Congressional ally of the President, and facing impeachment and military coups, she needs all the help she can get.

And so, Raul took our black Camry to Batangas. We took the South Luzon Expressway—the Slex—to Calamba, where we got lost looking for the Southern Tagalog Arterial Road. The interchange isn’t quite done yet, and Philippine road signs are actually, in a surprise, worse than Mexico’s. Along the way we got a wonderful taste of both the Philippines’ healthy lack of historical memory and the decline of the American Empire—giant rising suns decorated the overpasses. Who do you think put up the money for the road? No points.

I know you know this, Noel, but the nucleus of Davao City in Mindanao -- over a million people and still booming -- crystallized around the efforts of Japanese settlers in the early 1900s.

Traffic on the rural roads was fairly heavy.

Anyway, we got to Batangas, a ramshackle town in southwestern Luzon where the Japanese have built a container port. The thing with Luzon is that houses cluster along rural roads far more than elsewhere because there are relatively so few of them, which can give you the impression that you’re continually traveling through heavily populated urban areas when you are, in fact, out in the middle of nowhere. So it’s hard to say where Batangas City begins. Anyway, we got into town—and the center is a bunch of very impressively maintained government buildings that date back to the American administration—and with some help from passers-by, we got to the Batangas regional hospital.

The hospital has about 250 beds, and usually runs over 90 percent occupancy, except during the rainy season, when it spikes to 150 as the tropical disease victims roll in. As you can imagine, it’s a low-overhead operation. 70 percent of the patients are “charity,” which truly means charity, since most of the paying patients are there courtesy of the mandatory national health insurance program—which only covers workers in the formal sector.

A very nice woman, Dr. Eleanor Gamo, showed us around the hospital. She mentioned that the hospital had been built by the Americans in 1927. She pointed out maternity tables that had been left by the Americans in 1946. But she talked about the Americans as if it had been a long-ago aid mission, not a colonial regime. She was angry that the building hadn’t been renovated until last year. (The interior looked like the set from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, only for real.) But either she was so angry that she lost control of the English language or her grasp of it is not as strong as you might expect. I don’t know if that reflected quality.

A neurosurgeon, Dr. Domingo, did speak perfect English; but he commented on how great it was for his private practice in Manila, if not-so-great for the country, that so many of the great English-speaking doctors wound up leaving the country.

I spotted a group of white-clad nurses grabbing lunch outside. (Old-fashioned white nursing outfits, too, with the funny hats that I’ve only seen in World War II movies, you know, the ones that look like they’re about to fall off the back of the head.) Since I’m here investigating the brain drain, I figured I should go over and talk to them. The female nurses seemed to speak in giggles, but there was one rather overweight male nurse, and he was willing to talk to me... sort of. He spoke English, but there was just this off-key quality to it; his replies were often non-sequiturs. [not saying anything here. -- CY] It turned out that they were students from a nursing school in Quezon Province.

Again, I can’t judge quality. The uniforms were very clean. I grew up in the Eighties, so that counts for something. Right, Mr. Crystal?

Still, the hospital was only depressing to someone less jaded than I am—while sad, it wasn’t clear to me that the “brain drain” was the cause of the poor quality of the facilities. The issue is complex. What is clear is that there is plenty of room for gains from trade.

For example, the U.K., while it raids the Philippines with the official aid of the Philippine government, it funds nursing and medical schools in South Africa. The cost of medical school in the Philippines is about $650,000 pesos for a four-year course: that’s only $13,000, much less than the cost of educated someone in the British Isles. (At a public university, a student would pay only about $900 of that cost.)

So why not in the Philippines? The problem, it seems, is that the Philippines is an English-speaking country in the wrong neighborhood. The ties with the U.S. are fading, but the other English-speaking countries aren’t interested in investing in the fine educational infrastructure that the U.S. left behind.

So the islands are on their own. For now. If we were smart, we’d spend on public health in places like Mindanao; win lots of friends here and strike an inexpensive propaganda blow in the Global War On Terror. But we’re the United States, and our sense of history (and increasingly, our politics) takes a right turn after our encounter with the Philippines.

But that’s for another post. Plus, I never did talk about Payatas. So I’ll be back.

Balikbayan guest blogging 4: Chillaxing on the volcano, or, the end of empires

Another missive from HDTD's man in the Philippines, Noel Maurer. Warning, it's a long one...

I am sitting on a cliff overlooking a volcano sticking out of a lake, and contemplating the end of empires.

I’d like to claim that the reason for that is the fact that I am being serenaded by a three-man band in mariachi suits singing an off-key rendition of “La Bamba.” Is there an image that better captures the colonial history of the Philippine Islands?

The United States, I assure you, is the only other country on the planet in which you might find an “eatería.”

Anyway, I am contemplating the end of empires, in this case America’s empire in the Philippines.

That empire did not end in 1946. In some ways, U.S. power in the Philippines grew after independence. The postwar Parity Act, for example, removed most of the restrictions on private American investment in the Philippines that Washington had imposed during the colonial era. [yes, Washington did things like that, once upon a time. -- CY]

Better yet, for those of you who might think that Philippine protectionism was a blow to Dread Empire, it turns out that it was a highly resented U.S. trade mission in 1950 that foisted the entire edifice on a Philippine government that would have greatly preferred to retain free trade. In fact, the “Special Economic and Technical Mission in the Philippines” in the 1950s had more control over Philippine economic policy than the colonial regime had since 1907.

In a more traditional imperial manner, the Armed Forces of the Philippines not only defeated Communists at home, but were capable of sending 7,000 combat troops to Korea when Uncle Sam asked. Today, of course, American troops helped the ARP neutralize Abu Sayyaf and provided aid after the recent landslides, and everyone seems to have an “uncle in the U.S. Navy.”

But the empire is fading. America seems to be withdrawing from this country. The United States seems much further away than it does in El Salvador or Panama, and I don’t mean geographically.

You first see it in little signs, things that might not be obvious to most visitors, but which stand out to anyone who has spent time in Latin America, or at least Latin America north of the Panama Canal.

It starts with the use of the word “Asian.” Everything is Asian. The commercials brag about “Asian” products. The new malls tout themselves as Asian. Stranger still, whenever somebody points out something odd or interesting about the Philippines—even the most astoundingly Latin American things—they’ll smile and say something like, “Now you know what it’s like in an Asian country” or “That’s how we do things in Asia.”

Me, I always used to agree with President Fidel Ramos—the Philippines is a Latin American country in the wrong hemisphere. And when I first got here I was strongly reminded of San Salvador, only bigger. The architecture, in fact, is if anything even more American than anywhere south of the Río Bravo. But after a week I’m clear that the Philippines are not in the same orbit as Latin America.

Noel, I’ve found Filipinos often use “Asian” as an adjective to describe things they believe aren’t derived from the West. Since Filipino culture has the very American tendency to gloss over the actual details of history — unlike some nations, whose inhabitants hold onto history like grim death — this can lead to some very WTF moments. But General Ramos went to West Point, where they do not stint on history, and I think he was very aware of the possibility he might become the Philippines’ first caudillo... and if my read on his character is correct, he didn’t like that idea at all.

Take musical tastes. Them Filipinos, they do like the hip-hop, at least in a poorer part of Mandaluyong City where Lil’Kim (Lil’Kim? Yeah, Lil’Kim) blared from a boom box. And they play 50 Cent in the hotel gym. But that’s not representative. Filipino pop music is, to an American ear, an unlistenable slop of odd melodies and slow beats. Imagine a world where pop peaked with Electric Light Orchestra.

But the really popular foreign artists come from Korea and Japan, not Brooklyn or southern California. And it shows in the way people dress. There are no baggy pants, no chains, no track suits, nada. Nor is there stringy hair and ripped jeans. Or black nail polish and combat boots. None of the typical American pop subcultures can be found, in rich neighborhoods or poor.

The contrast with, say, Zacatecas City in Mexico, is striking. Carlos knows why I picked Zacatecas, but you can say the same about almost anywhere in Latin America. There, the rock is as good, the hip-hop is much better, and the Latin music is... uh... the same Latin music. Even the schlocky pop and the embarrassing (but addictive) Euro-techno-electro-dance-whatever is recognizable in Latin America—it may not be on MTV, but you’ve heard it in a car commercial. That’s not true in the Philippines. I mean, nobody here even knows what reggaetón is. That’s just un-American.

Ahem. I’ve seen the signs for reggaetón in NYC, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard any. Be that as it may, one of the Philippines’ most noticeable human exports used to be musicians for the supper clubs of Asia. Lounge acts and saxophonists, no kidding. The point of reference you want is not ELO, but the Captain and Tennille singing “Feelings” to a background of Kenny G. Haven’t you karaoke’d there yet? I'm shocked.

Considering that I’m here on business, I also can’t help noticing the strange business card ritual. You whip out the card, hold it without both hands so that the other fellow can read it, and hand it over with a little bow. If there’s a business card ritual in the other hemisphere, I bloody well never noticed it. But it’s the norm all over Asia.

As far as I know, this is recent in the Philippines, Asia’s last holdout regarding this custom, which I believe was modified from fin-de-siecle British practice.

It’s more difficult for me to talk randomly to people than it is in Latin America. [Noel speaks Spanish fluently, and if memory serves he can get along in Brazilian Portuguese. -- CY] The reason is that the general level of English is poor. Surprisingly poor. All the newspapers are in English. Most of the signs are also in English, even in the slums. Yet I’ve overheard only two conversations between Filipinos occurring in that language; one here at this resort, the other in a bookstore in the astoundingly upscale Rockwell area of Makati City. (The bookstore had the very Filipino name of “Fully Booked.” One thing hasn’t changed, and that’s the Filipino love of a bad pun.)

Nevertheless, 'more difficult' isn’t impossible. The fellow we hired to drive us around, Raul Relente, introduced me to his friends and family. And here’s what I found: they all have relatives in the States. Most would like to move there. But most would like to move anywhere that is neither poor nor predominately Muslim. The U.S. is just another country.

Raul is particularly angry about the perceived decline of English in the Philippines, believing that it’s robbing his children of opportunity. “Tagalog will not go anywhere! Tagalog will not disappear! They are not going to forget how to speak Tagalog!”

While Raul’s command of English is excellent, he’s mostly self-taught and his accent takes some getting used to. And while English is more than just another language here, its level in the Philippines may be deteriorating. I’ve heard this complaint over and over, from journalists to academics to politicians.

English could disappear. [and why not? it happened to Spanish. -- CY] People could forget how to speak English. In fact, I’ve seen it happen on national television, where the head of the National Bureau of Investigation started to stumble for words during an interview, and the announcers switched to Filipino without realizing it.

Of course, it’s hard to say what the real trend is. Marcos strongly discouraged English, and switched the schools over to Tagalog. Cory Aquino continued the policy. Nevertheless, the 2000 census reported that 64% of all Filipinos over age 5 can speak English, up from a reported 52% in 1980. What we don’t know, however, is the quality of English.

Responding to President Arroyo’s recent decision to re-emphasize English in the public schools, the Department of Education administered an English diagnostic test to about 60,000 teachers... and has since refused to release the results.

My take on the Filipino linguistic situation is that it’s not bilingualism, but diglossia. Two languages are used, but each in its own social context. (The literature on the subject sometimes talks about “high” or “prestige” versus “low” languages. I find this terminology carries its own toxic set of assumptions.)

In the Philippines, English is not primarily used as a lingua franca, but as the language in which one discusses, um, the matters one discusses in English. It’s the technical language par excellence. It’s the language of journalism and Scrabble and international gossip. You don’t use it to converse by itself, but as a specific mode to convey certain types of information.

You can see how this might not quite correspond to what a modern language educator would consider fluency.

Also, there’s a lot of code-switching in Filipino conversation. One language will be used to convey sincerity, and then there’ll be a sudden switch to another to discuss business, and possibly even another switch to a third for other subjects. Think of the French conversations in War and Peace. It’s like that.

In the past few years, policy has changed back towards encouraging English, but the idea is not to retain ties with the United States. It’s to compete better with other Asian nations. If the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (J-PEPA, “jay-pepa”) with Japan comes through—which I tend to doubt, but more on that later—Japanese might be more relevant. (My driver Raul has three sisters who are married to Japanese men, with ten Japanese-born and Japanese-speaking children between them. They don’t speak English; they’ve all moved to Japan.)

I met the Philippines’ chief negotiator with Japan, Thomas Aquino, on Friday. He had a lot of very interesting things to say, but two things stand out. The first was during a discussion of investor protection in J-PEPA. He mentioned that the Japanese are very different than the Americans … and more attuned to the Philippines. “The USTR came down hard on is on intellectual property; they wanted to see prosecutions. But we’re more Asian: the courts are used more to get a feel for the other guy’s negotiating position before going to an out-of-court settlement.”

(He’s half-right. The Japanese are trying their best to be attuned to Philippine sentiment, but the particular use of the courts that Mr. Aquino describes is not particularly Asian—it’s common to any country where personal relationships can’t cover everything and the courts still don’t work very well.)

He went on to say, “The feeling that people have about the U.S. is that it’s just there. The U.S. expects us to be an ally like Britain, but we’re just not that close.”

And that’s true. You know what the kicker is? No anti-Americanism. The place just suffered an attempted coup, a Senator is on lam, American troops are still roaming around the far countryside, and nobody, not in the papers, not on the TV, is ranting about Washington.

That Latin American style of anti-Americanism certainly has existed in the Philippines, but I think — and I could be entirely off-base here — that it’s now viewed as rather quaint, like tie-dyed love-beaded hippie protestors are in the U.S.

Of course, all this could really be nothing more than my Latin American background. I’ve spent most of my time either in the United States or in a region where it dominates everything, from pop culture to politics. When the informal American empire cracks in that hemisphere, you see it happening. It involves tear gas, oil prices, and really long speeches on television. But here, in the Philippines, the United States just seems to be slowly fading away, to be replaced by an inchoate “Asianness.” So maybe it’s all a case of inflated expectations that I didn’t even know that I had.

There are lots of ways the fading of U.S.-Philippine links could change. Call centers and business process outsourcing could tie the economy back across the Pacific. The country could do something to really piss America off and bring the empire charging right back. Or the U.S. could start to cultivate the ties it’s allowed to fade since the first EDSA revolution. It could happen.

After all, can a country that can produce this really ever break its ties with the homeland of Orange County, California?

Balikbayan guest blogging 3: Manila, finally

Like Magellan (but not), our intrepid guest blogger Noel Maurer makes landfall in the Philippines:

Ninoy Aquino International... Bus Terminal. Actually, it’s not as bad as the build-up. [hah! -- CY] The linoleum is a little frayed, and the lighting is a little harsh, but it works. The airport’s problems go a little deeper than the décor.

You see, there are three terminals here at Ninoy Aquino. The shiny new international terminal is reserved for Philippine Air Lines. Now, Philippine Air Lines is not one of the planet’s great air carriers. The airline’s owner is Lucio Tan. I hesitate to speak badly of Lucio Tan. (I lived in Mexico during the bad old days; I know how these things work.) Let’s just say that after he bought PAL in 1992, a group of senators signed a petition demanding that the deal be undone, and the Ramos Administration spent the next six years unsuccessfully attempting to prosecute Mr. Tan for everything from tax fraud to influence peddling.

Under President Estrada—who yesterday took the witness stand for the first time in his five-year-long corruption trial—Tan got the government to go to bat for PAL in a dispute with two Taiwanese airlines. The government lost when Taiwan stopped accepting Filipino guest workers, but Tan managed to preserve PAL’s monopoly over the shiny new terminal.

There is a reason that I didn’t fly PAL, despite its non-stop service from California and comfortable arrival area.

(I would think there are several.)

The domestic terminal is also a bit run-down and in need of replacement. It too is dominated by Philippine Air Lines. But here’s the fun part: there is no legal way for a passenger to get from the old international terminal to the old domestic terminal without leaving the airport. You can see the damn building, but you can’t get there from here.

And leaving the airport is not as simple as it appears. You need to flag down a jeepney, take a ten minute ride outside the perimeter fence, get off, and flag down another jeepney. This is good for the jeepneys. This used to be good for Philippine Air Lines. This is not so good for the Philippine tourist industry.

Jeepneys, for those of you who do not know, are colorfully decorated SUVs that seem to be completely hand-made. I’m not sure of the structure of the, ah, industry... but I imagine that somebody knows somebody because Manila’s very efficient (and totally misnamed—it’s a full-fledged metro) light rail system stops right outside the airport. In fact, the train yards are right outside the perimeter fence. But it just doesn’t quite make it. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation.

And so, there is no way to transfer from an international flight to a domestic connection without a trip on a crowded jeepney, which is, I’m sure, exactly what Chinese and Japanese tourists want to do on their way to a tropical vacation.

I later asked Sonny Coloma — Corazon Aquino’s chief-of-staff — about the airport. He laughed. Then he wiped his eyes and laughed again. After which we discussed jeepney manufacturing and basketball. Apparently, March Madness doesn’t penetrate here much, but people have strong opinions about the NBA. Are the current Knicks the worst team in pro basketball, or the worst team in pro basketball ever?

The Knicks are a less depressing topic than Philippine politics, you see.

Anyway, there was a sign at the airport reminding me of just why I’m here. In addition to the special lane, there were posters congratulating “our returning heroes,” the Overseas Filipino Workers. It was just like coming back into the United States, only with no yellow ribbons, light green-gray uniforms, or wheelchairs.

Looks like I didn’t get around to the food or the garbage dump. More to come.

Oh, and thank you, Bernard and Carlos. I will avoid the fish from now on.

Dude. You'd eat seafood in Venice, right? But the Veneto (and hell, probably Tito) dumped a lot more in the Adriatic than Metro Manila ever has in the bay. (For now, anyway.)

Let me post a recipe from Alan Davidson's Seafood of South-East Asia. It's for stuffed milkfish, and Davidson was the go-to guy for international seafood cookery.

I detect in this recipe a clear echo of Mediterranean techniques for stuffing fish, of which the archetypical version may well be uskumru dolmasi, the Turkish recipe for stuffed mackerel. Turkish and Levantine influences reached round the coast of North Africa and into Spain; which make account for stuffed-fish recipes which I found in Tunisia and for the enthusiasm with which Spanish cooks prepare merluza rellena (stuffed hake, the hake being one of their favorite fish). It seems reasonable to suppose that the Filipino practice represents the same tradition applied to the most plentiful and suitable of the Filipino fish.

There are two ways of preparing the fish for being stuffed, difficult and less difficult... the less difficult is as follows. Gut the fish in the ordinary way, taking care not to perforate the abdominal wall. Then make a cut right along the back of the fish, from head to tail, open it carefully, snip the backbone at both ends and life out all flesh and bones. If you use this technique you will of course have to sew up the back or otherwise secure it in place after stuffing the fish.

1 milkfish of about 3/4 kilo
salt
cooking oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped very fine or crushed
1 onion, finely chopped
3 medium tomatoes, finely chopped
1 tablespoonful butter
2 medium potatoes, cubed and fried
2 tablespoonfuls of peas, fresh or canned
2 tablespoonfuls raisins
2 eggs, beaten (or the yolks of 3 eggs, beaten)
flour

Prepare the fish [as described above] and simmer all the meat from it in a small quantity of salted water. When it is done, finish flaking it and removing all the bones.

Meanwhile heat the cooking oil in a pan and saute the garlic, onion, and tomatoes therein for a few minutes. Add the flaked fish, with seasoning, and continue cooking for another 5 minutes or so. Transfer the cooked mixture to a bowl and add the butter, potatoes, peas, raisins, and beaten egg. Mix all well together and then stuff the fish with it.

The stuffed fish is then to be dredged with flour and fried in hot oil until it is well browned. It may be garnished with celery sticks (kinchay) and lemon wedges.

I should add that there are those who recommend that the skin of the fish, after it has been emptied and while it is waiting to be stuffed, should be marinated in a mixture of calamansi juice, soy sauce, and pepper.

The calamansi juice is good, of course, but what makes it really Filipino is the deep-frying. Maybe some banana ketchup.

Balikbayan guest blogging 2: still in Hong Kong

Noel is now in the Philippines, in lovely Makati City, after touring the lock-down garbage dumps of Payatas. We continue with his sojourn in Hong Kong:

Asian food. Isn’t. Asian. Although it seems to be food.

For dinner during my stopover in Hong Kong, Mike Chen and his lovely Malaysian wife, Joyce, took me out to dinner in Kowloon. We neither drove nor took the subway; rather, we hopped the old-fashioned ferry. And it’s seriously old-fashioned. Two decks of stomach-churning fun for the whole family. The upper deck is called “first class,” but the main difference seems to be that the seats are more comfortable downstairs.

Think the Staten Island Ferry with anorexia. Very much not like the rest of Hong Kong. Mike tells me that the ferry’s one concession to modernity is that they no longer roll down the doors and lash them to the deck. He misses the bells they used to ring. I told him that it was only a matter of time before they realize that they can charge more if they bring ‘em back.

Yes, it’s private. Hong Kong, you see, is a libertarian wet dream. Well, other than the government’s land monopoly and the tight business regulation and the strict zoning laws. And the social insurance scheme that pays single parents up to US$1100 a month should an industrial accident befall their spouse. (Yes, regardless of the spouse’s sex.) Oh, right, and the socialized medicine. So other than the monopoly and the regulation and the social insurance, it’s a libertarian paradise. I am reminded of the Monty Python bit about the Romans.

And this despite my attempts to keep HDTD a Python-free zone.

Anyhoo, the ferry got us to Kowloon across what’s left of the harbor. They’ve been filling it in the way American coastal cities used to, before we decided that it was easier to build freeways out to the horizon. Not that I’d notice, but Mike complained about it.

And so, Kowloon, with its Blade Runner ambience. Neon, crowded sidewalks, slow-moving bubble-shaped cars, kids playing handball despite the crowds, and teenage girls with brightly-colored gravity-defying hairdos and really weird patterned stockings. Actually, a lot of it really does seem like lower Manhattan, only shinier. I asked Mike if I could catch the subway uptown to see where the Puerto Ricans lived, and to his everlasting multicultural credit, he laughed. We went to a restaurant atop a mid-rise building that overlooked the skyline of Hong Kong Island across the bay. The restaurant itself was meant to evoke a traditional Chinese alleyway, but never having been in a traditional Chinese alleyway myself, it was lost on me.

Pigeon. Avoid. Especially the “drunken” pigeon. Apparently that means you should only try it if you are drunk. Which I may have become, since I quite literally had to swig my Tsingtao and swallow it whole to keep from experiencing the joys of reverse peristalsis. Of course, it was my own damn fault. I ordered the stuff. Having grown up in New York, getting my revenge on one of those sky rats seemed eminently satisfactory. It wasn’t, although whether it was the gamy taste or the fact that the eyeless cooked head seemed to be oxymoronically staring up I me, I couldn’t tell.

Snake, not so bad after the pigeon. But not to be repeated.

Meanwhile, the other dishes, while more edible, lacked that “Asian” flavor you get in Chinese and Thai restaurants back in the U.S. of A. I asked: they use MSG, so that’s not it. Everything just seemed to vaguely taste like shellfish, except the crab cakes, which tasted like meatloaf. I have no explanation.

The next day, it was off to Chep Lap Kok and Manila. Getting to the airport: smooth. (That train. Wow. US$23 round trip, but still wow.) Getting through the airport: smooth, except for the fact that I’m me. My carry-on, you see, was too large, and the very official woman at the gate would not let me take it through without checking it. “It’s for your safety, sir,” said the little luggage fascist. What was I to do? I checked it, a remarkably painless procedure … and no, the people at Cathay Pacific never asked what class I was flying before directing me to the right counter. They smiled, took it, and yes, it showed up in Manila with no problem. That said, the Latin in me ranted and raged all the way through emigration and the security check, and the American in me wondered why the AC wasn’t turned all the way up to meat-locker like at home.

Both the Latin and the American have found Manila mucho mas gemutlich, on both counts.

I killed time in the Cathay Pacific lounge talking with a German-American fellow on his way to Bangkok on an assignment with an environmental cleanup consulting firm—based, unsurprisingly, in Buffalo, New York, and perhaps that city’s last export industry.

Mañana I will discuss my impressions of Manila—and the food, and the airport, in which I did not thankfully have to sleep—but here I’d just like to leave you with a picture of the bay I snapped as we landed. Anyone know what those squares are?

Noel, I've wondered about those squares myself. Anyone?

Monday special guest balikbayan blogging!

We have a guest blogger this week! Noel Maurer is travelling to the Philippines for arcane work-related reasons, and he is sending his observations on to me, who in turn am sending them on to you, one of our thirty-seven remaining readers. Here he is in Hong Kong. Enjoy!

... Cathay Pacific is a very nice airline. Of course, I was flying first class [bastard. -- CY] — but the automatic upgrade when seats are available is part of why it’s a very nice airline. You’re greeted by these hostesses wearing spray-painted green evening gowns. Then, at your seat, a tall fellow in a shiny purple suit and a petite woman in a bright red miniskirt give you pretty much whatever you want. It sort of felt like a Prince video. (Well, whatever you want that can be mentioned on a G-rated blog, so don’t ask for **** ** * *******.)

Chep Lap Kok really isn’t the best name for an airport, but it is a very good airport. The moving sidewalks are broad. And the police wear these bitchen uniforms, the height of 21st-Century neofascist chic, black suits with a belted jacket and baggy slacks that make ‘em look cool instead of like bus drivers. And unlike Great Britain, they didn’t feel the need to carry intimidating and utterly useless automatic weapons on slings.

Of course, the poor Ethiopian couple in the immigration line ahead of me suffered from a rather intimidating interrogation by these guys; me, I just got waved through. Customs doesn’t seem to exist. There were some more extras from V for Vendetta sitting at their desks, but they didn’t stop a soul.

Past customs, the airport is also a shopping mall, but unlike Heathrow the designers seem to have thought things through and not set up the shops to deliberately gum up the airport’s function. Crowds, huge crowds, but things flowed. I bought a ticket on the MTR and headed downtown. But first, I reset my watch for Hong Kong time, which seems to be about 25 years ahead.

The train, the Silver Line it ain’t. It whizzes past modern high-rises and swooping expressways and is full of shiny modern people wearing everything from business suits to indescribable Japanese fashions. Three stops, 20 minutes, and right to a train station where the airlines will check in you in.

Unfortunately, my cabby to the hotel wasn’t very talkative. I mean, it’s a union rule that cabbies are supposed to say eminently quotable things to foreign tourists. You can’t go ten blocks in Buenos Aires without hearing either a long philosophical disquisition on the country’s sad sad decline—or the similiarly sad decline of La Boca soccer club, which is almost as tragic to your typical porteño cabbie—and the Mexico City hacks love to complain about crime, AMLO, and how unfair it is that you need to know English in order to get a good job these days. But this Hong Kong fellow? Nada. So either he only learned a few stock phrases of perfectly-pronounced British English and had no idea what I was saying, or he just plain didn’t like me.

After 25 hours on airplanes, he probably had reason not to like me.

So, Hong Kong. Neon! Buildings! Cool-assed overpasses! Bridges in the sky! Bridges in the sky! Unlike, say, Boston, Hong Kong looks the way the future is supposed to look. Which is to say, like Minneapolis, only with brighter lights and far better fashion sense.

No, let me be clearer. Hong Kong Island looks the way the future is supposed to look. Kowloon looks like downtown Brooklyn. But with far more colorful people. And lots of kids. Little girls playing what looked like rock-paper-scissors in Cantonese, little boys running around and yelling at 9:30pm.

I know, the statistics say that Hong Kong has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, the Hong Kongers apparently having decided to solve the dilemma of immigration from the mainland by going extinct. They seem to make up for it by letting the kids run around wherever they want, unlike the way us rabbit-like Americans have high fertility, but make it so you’d never guess by wrapping our 2.1 kids in a protective cocoon and never letting ‘em out without full body armor.

Now I’ve got a plane to Manila to catch, so I’ll be off. More on Hong Kong, real Chinese food, and (assuming I get there safely) the Philippines next time.

Noel, if you end up sleeping on the concrete floor in the outside alcove to the domestic wing of Manila International Airport, don't forget to tip the men's room attendants. They'll let you wash up. Also, there's Dum-Dum Airport, outside Calcutta, not to be confused with Wack Wack Golf Course, outside Manila, which you could land a plane on.

Random Monday links

This blog not only has a horrible name, but it has some guy named Carlos (not me) who has clearly overdosed on the "Mankind's destiny in SPAAAAACE" Kool-Aid. On the other hand, it has the sanest things Larry Niven has said since the 1970s. The early 1970s. We shall see.

For some real space exploration, here's the Planetary Society's weblog. (Doug suspects I have a crush on its proprietor, Emily Lakdawalla. Doug knows me far too well.) Someday this site too will join my frightening blogroll.

I know guys like this dead journalist. Man, they are hard to get along with. And yet, the world is poorer when they leave.

Now to install those Armenian fonts.

Interlude interlude

A minor break. Some goober started a trash fire on the steps leading to the building next door's basement. [1] Because the people of New York City have now become as efficient as Wisconsinites at dealing with the slings and arrows of weather, jackassery, and random fate, the people of the building, after using up their fire extinguishers, organized a bucket brigade and put out the fire -- which could have been very bad, flames licking along the paint is not a good sign -- before our local firemen could show up. Which they did pretty quickly, but you still want to have professionals examine the work.

Still, it's not as impressive as the time a blind man fell onto the A train track in Columbus Circle and four guys immediately jumped down to pull him out. I don't even think they looked. (I looked, which means I got 911 duty.) He was rattled and a little bruised, but OK. The most amazing thing was, after everyone was satisfied that the right thing was being done, they went their separate ways on the same train.

[1] Yes, Noel and Carrie, it's the one with the cute women across the kitchen window from me.

Balikbayan interlude 2, the mystery of Filipino sports

Let me be blunt. The national sport of the Philippines is basketball. And no one knows why.

1. There is no soccer in the Philippines.

Yes, that's right. In the Philippines, while there are soccer players, soccer has no national following of any kind. You might as well be kicking a dead panda's head around.

This British blogger is completely bewildered at the lack of soccer in the Philippines. Like most soccer bigots, he blames American influence. "Yes, those Americans have a lot to answer for!" Uh-huh. The idea that soccer is not a very interesting game to someone not brought up in the sport never crosses his mind.

2. In fact, there is no football, period.

But "Nomad" also neglects to point out that the Philippines has also rejected real football, the gridiron (although other Pacific islands have adopted it with almost religious zeal), and even that occasionally worthwhile Australian kind, perhaps due to Filipinos encountering too many Australian football players over the years. But perhaps not.

3. There is no baseball in the Philippines either.

Like other east Asian countries, like other Latin American island nations, the Philippines has also flirted with baseball. I myself don't understand the passion baseball can inspire. For me, it's only a pastime: pleasant, pastoral, a relaxing way to spend an afternoon with a beer. On the other hand, it can seduce the most unlikely people. For instance, here's British historian Simon Schama:

I’m helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love, the first time you go to bed with a woman. You never forget. It’s special. It’s the first time I saw a ballpark. I’d thought nothing would ever replace cricket.

(3a. Which lets you know where cricket stands in the scheme of things.)

And yet, after a promising start under the nearly benevolent American occupation of the Philippines (and even a continuation under the almost completely malevolent Japanese occupation), baseball simply petered out. It became in the Philippines something like soccer is in the U.S. -- a kid's game, a game you watch on international TV -- and even there, it's become tainted. (In 1992, Zamboanga City in Bangbang province beat Long Beach, California in the Little League world championship... except the manager of the team had brought in ringers from down the coast. Oh well!)

Joseph Reaves, in his award-winning Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia attempts an explanation. Part of it, he theorizes, was due to an aging postwar Filipino baseball player population:

In 1949, for example, the preeminent Filipino baseball writer of the time, Filemon V. Tutay [and isn't that a wonderful name? -- CY] wrote in the Philippines Free Press that large numbers of fans "stayed away from the ball parks because they have grown tired of seeing the same faces on the local diamond." By way of underscoring his point, Tutay wrote an article four months later that amounted to a roll call of the relative geriatrics then playing in the country's top baseball leagues "despite wobbly legs."

Reaves gives Tutay's roll call, and Tutay wasn't kidding. Some were pushing Filipino life expectancy of the time -- for instance, Hugo Ramos, Sr., age 54, starting left fielder. He needed to be identified as "Senior" because his son, Hugo Ramos, Jr., was playing on the same team. (Second base.) One wonders if there was a Hugo Ramos III waiting in the wings, and if so, at what position.

But Reaves is as bewildered as our footie friend by what the Filipinos turned to:

Baseball's recovery in the postwar Philippines was hampered by the amazing popularity of basketball. At first glance, the transfer of affections seems both improbable and illogical -- improbable, becase Filipinos of the mid-twentieth century tended to be comparatively small physically, and basketball is a game that penalizes physical limitations. Filipinos might be able to compete against Filipinos, but their prospects were severely limited in international competition.

The shift to basketball was illogical, too, because for most of the first half of the twentieth century Filipinos had shown an affinity and talent for baseball. They were, arguably, the dominant force -- at the very least, a highly competitive force -- in Asian baseball for much of that time.

Clearly, basketball and baseball are both readily identifiable as American games... any attempt to link baseball's waning popularity in the Philippines with some sort of anti-American backlash seems futile. Besides, baseball remained as popular as ever in Japan during the height of World War Two.

4. In Filipino basketball, it's not about how tall you are, but what you can do with the ball.

Here's P.J. O'Rourke, back when he was funny, about 1987 or so. The setting is Davao City, one of the Philippines' many garden spots:

Nick took me to a squatter patch called Agdau. It used to be known as "Nicaragdau," partly because the NPA [New People's Army, which is exactly what you think it is -- CY] ran it and partly because Filipinos love any bad pun. [true! -- CY] Agdau was built right in the water with splintered packing-crate catwalks from one stilt shanty to the next. The Davao River -- sewer, sink, and the garbage collection service combined -- flowed by underneath.

On one bit of dry land was Agdau's only solid structure, a tin roof covering a basketball half court. I was promptly beaten in a game of H-O-R-S-E. The tall kids in these precincts of malnutrition are four feet eleven inches but do lay-ups like Air Jordan. If the NBA ever raises hoops to twenty feet, the Chicago Bulls are going to have to take up field hockey.

As it turned out, the NBA didn't have to raise the hoops for the once-great Chicago Bulls to become lowly. But O'Rourke's point still stands.

5. Finally, there is no ice hockey in the Philippines.

Yet.

Welcome! and enjoy the hockey!

I swear, everyone is having kids but me:

On Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:16 p.m. ET, the population here on this good Earth is projected to hit 6.5 billion people.

And before anyone asks, I ain't too worried about population growth. I'm worried about economic growth.

(Factoid first spotted at University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks' weblog.)

Puppy hug!

I'm really not a pet person. But for this fella, I might make an exception:

Minding the gap

Claudia's sick, Doug's in Laos, so I guess that leaves me to keep y'all amused. Anyone have a deck of cards? No? Then I suppose I'll fill the dead air with mindless chatter links.

My exgf, La Belle Dame Sans Culottes Pitié Loca, sent me this recipe for Vegan Twinkies. As many of you know, Twinkies were developed during the Cold War as a snack food that could survive a nuclear holocaust, like roaches. I have yet to try this version.

The good people at UbuWeb have put up a passel of avant-garde films, including Buñuel's Un Chien andalou and Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. In fact the whole site is filled with nuggets of good weirdness.

Finally, enjoy the saga of Terry Long. Very few things on the Internet make me "laugh out loud", since I am notorious for my humorlessness and general lack of levity. But this did.

More filler, Captain!

Usually I fill in a little when Doug and Claudia are busy and there's a lull in the blog. Swollen tendons in my shoulder, no fun. Anyway.

Jim Henley covers the gridiron playoffs so I don't have to.

Two cool books read. Dark Shamans: Kanaima and the Poetics of Violent Death, by Neil Whitehead, a University of Wisconsin professor who survived an attack of assault sorcery in Amazonia: basically, poisoning, mind games, mutilation, and ultimately, ingesting the deliquescing flesh of the victim's corpse by a serial killer type. I've elided some of the details, and there's a reason for that. You can read an interview with Whitehead here.

The other is Benedict Anderson's long-awaited book on Jose Rizal, the great Filipino poet-novelist-opthalmologist-revolutionary-martyr, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. The first flag is this banner, which does need some explanation. Oh my people.

Paging through ornithologist-and-promoter-of-urban-legends Jared Diamond's Collapse (no link). Ugh. James B., you will owe me a drink. Hint to Jared: if you're going to use something as your primary source, you might want to mention if it comes to exactly the opposite conclusion as you do. Once is happenstance. Twice is sloppiness. The third time is enemy action.

The dreidel is always rigged

This is not widely known, but back in 1976, Robert Feinerman proved the following theorem about the dreidel:

Let X_n be the payoff on the nth spin of the dreidel and let p be the number of players. Then, the expected value of X_n, E(X_n), is:

(p / 4) + ((5 / 8) ^ (n - 1)) * ((p - 2) / 8)

That is, if there are more than two people playing a game of dreidel, there is a noticeable first player advantage in gelt. (I suspect at least one regular commenter knows this through empirical study.)

However, in 1996, Felicia Moss Trachtenberg came up with a simple way to tweak dreidel to give fair payoffs: adjust the penalty to ante ratio so that it is equal to the number of players divided by 2. Thus, if there are three players, the penalty should be three chocolate coins and the ante two chocolate coins (or six and four, or thirty to twenty, et cetera). If there are four players, the penalty could be two chocolate coins to an ante of one, since 2 / 1 = 4 / 2 .

More recently, Doron Zeilberger of Rutgers University conjectured that the length of a game of dreidel was of the order of the number of nuts (chocolate coins, whatever) squared. This was proved by his Rutgers colleagues Thomas Robinson and Sujith Vijay last year.

Y'all know what to do.

Non-linked references:

Feinerman, R., The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 83, no. 8, (October 1976), pages 623-625.

Trachtenberg, F. M., The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 27, no. 4, (September 1996), pages 278-281.

Both papers are available on JSTOR, if you're lucky enough to have access.

And for the rest of us...

Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle is celebrating Festivus this year. An aluminum fixture company in Milwaukee provided the Festivus pole. No word on who has won the Feats of Strength yet.

Back in New York, I saw these cool Eid stamps for sale at the local post office. According to Snopes, some people in the US think this is part of a plot. Santa is bringing them coal this year.

And finally, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there happened a great miracle.

A Christmas poem

Been busy lately. But here's a seasonal poem that y'all might like that I found recently:

To Jesus: Moon

Since you receive light from another source

Since you rise into the high skies,
while many people watch

Since you receive light again,
even though your body dies

Since you remove the darkness of the world
by your light

Since you conceal your large form
in a round white disk

Since you carry a blemish

Since those who look at stars
sought you

Since you give light for everyone,
being appropriate for supplicants

Since the hero of my poem, the Lord who was born of a virgin girl
who conceived through the Holy Spirit
is like you,
moon of the beautiful sky,
it is right that you immediately agree
to rejoice and happily play.

With him who is united with Tamil
that flows like a waterfall,
O moon, come to play.

With the son of God seated
on the right side of gracious God,
O moon, come to play.

This poem, by Arul Chelladurai, was taken from Paula Richman's article, "Tamil songs to God as a child," in the Princeton compilation, Religions of India in practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez. While modern, it's written in an ancient Tamil form, the pillaitamil, where the poet addresses a deity as if it were a baby. Often, as in this poem, the moon is beseeched to come be its playmate.

Anyway, I thought it was cool.

Hell's iPod

So I have a new twist on insomnia: waking up in the middle of the night with songs running through my head and a headache. The top three:

Convoy, C.W. McCall

Der Kommissar, After the Fire

Peach, Plum, Pear, Joanna Newsom

You tell me.

Weekend update

Been busy lately. Some highlights:

Dinner with the ex-girlfriend. It was very nice, Mughlai food, and she only drew a knife on me once. True! She suggested her pseudonym for this blog be my "Former Future Ex-Wife". But she also wanted something literary, and I am kind of fond of "La Belle Dame sans Culottes (Réformée)".

Various subway mishaps. They actually deserve their own post, I think.

The Manhattan maple syrup manifestation. That, too, deserves its own post. Soon!

I missed Doug while he was briefly in the States, and John Holbo was in Brooklyn as well, darn it. I could have asked him to autograph my Blue and Brown Books.

Anyway. This weekend, I am making preserved lemons for tagine and removing paint from my door fixtures while fighting off a cold (and failing to fight off a headache) in between poring over Excel spreadsheets. Also catching up on my sleep: excitement galore! Alas, my home football team is tres suxxor this year. Still, here's an interesting article on the really beautiful game.

And here's a poem by Frank O'Hara that mFFEW/LBDsCR almost certainly knows by heart:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I wa trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting just like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Occupational hazard

"The steamship Bethelridge northbound through the canal on August 7, 1924, went ashore in Gatun lake, when the master, who was under the influence of liquor, took the wheel and, disregarding the advice of the pilot, steered the ship out of the channel and into shallow water. The damage to the ship was estimated as $621, including tug hire."

Busy; not interesting enough to blog about (yet). Use this opportunity as an open thread.

While we're away

Probably no posts from me or Claudia for the next few days, as we'll all be in Germany.

If you feel the need to read blog posts by me, here are my last few posts on A Fistful of Euros:

On Romania's oil industry and why it doesn't make a difference to oil prices here.

On Macedonia, gem of the Balkans. (Note: unhappy Greeks in comment thread.)

On why I was wrong about some stuff.

If that's still not enough, I spent way too much time on this comment thread over at Histologion. (But click on the link to Eric Gordy's much more reasoned and classy response.)

Finally, comics fans go now to Dave's Long Box. People with kids go to One Good Thing. D&D players go to The Order of the Stick. And someone -- I'm not sure who, but someone -- go to Achewood.

See you next week.

New content!

Since my co-bloggers are exulting in the glow of a newborn's pheromones, I guess I have to fill in the gap again. (I am sure they will do the same for me, when Drew Barrymore finally comes to her senses.)

Doug recommended Kung Fu Monkey to me, and this post, on the irreducible 27%, more than makes up the price of admission. Which is free, but there are opportunity costs to consider.

Julie Powell, of the Julie/Julia Project, has her book out! Yay! And Diablo Cody's book is coming out for Christmas! (But I'm gonna see if I can score an advance copy.)

Book of the week: America's Boy, by William Hamilton-Paterson, which perhaps could be re-titled The Ominous Parallels.

Gridiron update: Green Bay 52, New Orleans 3. I feel a little better.

Marking time

Among other things, I am deeply interested in the history of the American South. Thus I often link the words "fire" and "Sherman".

I seem to have mice. Cunning little bastards that like pancakes. I also have a cold. Advice welcomed!

In other news, no word yet.

Road still bumpy; bring on the dance band!

I've never seen the movie Titanic. But one Thanksgiving it was playing at my parents' house. My sister, who knows me far too well, called me over to watch the two parts she knew I would like: Kate Winslet naked, and Leonardo di Caprio dying.

Family is important.

Anyhoo, the new Moveable Type installation has been delayed, and y'all are stuck with me for the time being. I'd talk about the gridiron, but it's too depressing. Tales of Brooklyn dating, ditto. (I should maybe get a TV, so I'd have something in common to talk about. But then I'd be talking about TV. Hm.)

So, what's on your minds?

Still nice weather in NYC, some pie blogging

Sunny, and not humid.

Last weekend Bad Mama, Big Daddy and Peanut came to visit from the motherland, Wisconsin! (These are their pseudonyms, of course. For instance, Peanut's real name is Cashew.) For opening day of football season I took them to New York City's premiere Packer bar, Kettle of Fish at 59 Christopher Street, owned by fellow Wisconsin expatriate Patrick, who is a prince among barmen. I also made them pancakes (which they all had) and jambalaya (which Big Daddy and I ate).

I may have caught some lurg from playing with Peanut, who is utterly charming and has an intriguing variety of stuffed animals which learned to speak when I was around. (Then again, it might have been from the subway.) Peanut's favorite word is "No!", which she wields with a dexterity that rivals Vyacheslav Molotov's.

I was going to make them all bisteeya, which I have lately become obsessed with, but they left and I had to eat it myself. Bisteeya is Moroccan pigeon pie, except who wants to eat pigeons after living in New York? So I made it with chicken thighs. You boil the meat in spiced broth until it's tender. Then you curdle some eggs in the broth, maybe after adding some lemon. You strain it out and mix it with the meat; this becomes the savory filling. Also, you toast some almonds and mix them with a little sugar; this becomes the sweet filling. Then comes the demented part: you use both in the same pie.

It's a Mediterranean pie, so I used phyllo dough. A little like making strudel. Two layers of phyllo dough, brushed with butter, then a circle of the nut mixture, then a larger circle of the savory mixture -- you want this to be moist, but not wet -- then top that with some more of the sugar and almonds. I folded the edges of the phyllo sheets over until I had a sort of roundish shape, which I glued with more butter. Then I slid this onto a plate, prepared two more sheets of phyllo (more butter, mmmm!), flipped the pie onto them, and wrapped it up the other way. This was on a baking sheet already, since I had planned ahead, having had too many strudel-related mishaps in the past.

I had enough filling for two, so I made another on a plate, and slid it onto the sheet with less harm done than you might think. I baked them at 350 F / 175 C for about thirty minutes. Some of the melted sugar leaked out, caramelizing and then charring on the sheet. What can you do. You're supposed to dust them lightly with confectioner's sugar or the like, but frankly, I was starving.

Wow, that sweet and savory combination is damn good.

This was "sweep the kitchen" style bisteeya. I compared a bunch of recipes and pared them down to something a lazy, semi-skilled cook like myself could make without wrecking the basic flavor idea. Paula Wolfert I am not. So: three boneless chicken thighs simmered in water which had a chopped onion, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, a teaspoon of ground ginger, a pinch of saffron, and a tablespoon of butter. Three beaten eggs. The juice of a lemon in the broth, and I didn't even squeeze hard. Very little salt, and that was after straining the chicken and egg mixture. I dunno, 75-100 grams of almonds? And less than a third of that sugar. Eight sheets of phyllo, and because I am a vulgarian, I thought about what a completely bitchen egg roll this would make.

The leftover broth I used to make rice.

The first day of autumn

Cold and rainy today, after two weeks of beautiful weather.

Yesterday, I took Alan and David to the northern part of Herestrau Park. I've mentioned Herestrau before, yes? It's the big park north of the city, about 15 minutes' walk from our house. Turns out it's so big that, even after two years here, I haven't explored it all. The northern end of the park (the part on the other side of the lake, for you Romanians) has a whole hidden region I'd never seen before -- with sculpted hedges and gardens, long broad paths for strolling, playgrouds, and even a Ferris Wheel. Who knew?

It was a beautiful afternoon, breezy but sunny and warm, and the boys had a great time. We ate pizza, then spent an hour just wandering around. The boys picked up sticks and vigorously defended us from dangerous trees and bushes. People were flying kites, and we stopped for a moment to watch. It was nice.

But this morning dawned grey and cold. Then the rain began. It's been raining for hours now, and blowing hard too... I was downtown this morning, and my umbrella kept turning inside out. (Of course, it was a cheap one that I bought for 100,000 lei outside the subway at Piatsa Universitatii. Still.) Now the grey day is darkening into a cold, wet, blustery night. Farewell, summer.

-- Speaking of the German elections: In my copious spare time, I sometimes blog over at A Fistful of Euros. They're covering the elections there, and doing it very well. (Not me. I write posts about Albania and such.)

Mostly filler, some circus animals

Posting always seems to come in clumps. So be it! Here in NYC, Bad Mama, Big Daddy, and the wonderful pixie Peanut are visiting for the weekend. Peanut is especially adorable. (That loud ticking sound you hear as the page loads is my biological clock. Wow, I am so single. I like going to art galleries, quirky books, and cooking for two. [Update: must be gridiron-sympathetic.])

I encountered a flutist in the subway station the other day, playing at exactly the correct acoustic position. You could hear the music at the subway's entrance, a gorgeous wall of sound. The station extends for at least 100 meters -- a long tunnel that is weirdly under-utilized -- and at the top of the steps leading to the lower platform the man stood lost in his music, looking like a figure from a Greek vase. Pure improvisation, and quite beautiful. The flutist's name is Linton Pate, and while he has a CD (he shyly warned me, "it's unconventional," but hell, I listen to Harry Partch) he has no web presence at all as far as I can tell. Well, now he does.

On the same subway ride I saw a guy with his surfboard out to catch some waves.

I haven't recommended any books lately. Here are two good ones: Encounter with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird; and Nerve Cells and Insect Behavior, by Kenneth Roeder.

Floods and help

I got my Cafe du Monde coffee mug out. There's nothing like coffee and hot beignets for breakfast. Unfortunately, the Cafe du Monde is (probably) underwater at the moment.

So, let me finish off the coffee and use it as a beggar's cup. Romania has been slammed hard by flooding. Euro readers, y'all should probably contribute there. NorAm readers, hell. My friend Dana's family is homeless. Brett Favre's family is homeless. Their homes are gone. Cash to the American Red Cross would be a good idea.

Living small

I am behind on furnishing the new digs. (The dresser, the new bed, et cetera.) But I did find this shop in the East Village which has stuff suitable for New York City's micro-apartments, which mine will be should I let the books take over (again). I was especially taken by this little sewing machine. I know, I know, a serious machine isn't much bigger than a typical computer peripheral, and I suppose I'll eventually succumb to their allure. But I still admire the cleverness behind this little guy's design, you know?

Manhattan has famously tiny apartments. But check out this European 2.6 meter cube, designed by people who studied the ergonomics of airplane lavatories. This article in Detail has more information; unfortunately, the public access version of the article has an embargo strip covering the meat of the text, but if you're clever, you can puzzle out most of it.

Incidentally, in the same issue there's an article on the treehouse dwelling people of New Guinea, the Korowai, who experienced sustained contact with the outside world beginning in the 1980s. (They're mostly living in compounds now.)

The springtime of love

I thought I'd dig out some of the old family photos. These are my parents:

Whoops. No, that's not it. The fellow on the right is Filipino businessman Virgilio "Gil" Hilario, who bravely married the Finnish winner of the first Miss Universe pageant, Armi Kuusela.

These are my parents.

Spring, 1968. The year after Loving versus Virginia.

Too hot to blog

It's body temperature in Brooklyn today, and I used up all my creative energy getting a haircut. So, on to the links!

Elswhere has continued the book meme! Some very cool choices (I, too, recommend Jessica Mitford).

Ever wonder how the recent unpleasant trends in US domestic security were justified by the Constitution? Surprise: the Supreme Court has allowed these loopholes for over a century! They're called the Insular Cases. And in these troubled times, every man (and woman) is an island.

I was going to do a whole post on this article, "What the universe looks like from the inside", and call it The Markopoulou Case. If mind-expanding articles on the foundations of physics that involve some advanced math (but no calculus) are your thing, read it.

This was very cool. And so was this. And in an entirely different way, this.

And for Bernard, here's a web version of Dorothy Lewis's important 1992 review article, "From abuse to violence, psychophysiological consequences of mistreatment".

Keeping it real

A new apartment! A new high-speed Internet connection! A spare room for guests! Already filled with books!

So I brought eight bookcases via the F train to the new place. Due to the local topography of subway stops, that was two flights of stairs up to the subway -- yes, up; it's an elevated train at that part of its run -- then two flights of stairs out of the subway, and then three more flights to the fourth floor, using the American numbering.

Seven were pine, one was oak. A Brooklyn guy on one of the runs asked me what was up with the bookcase. I said I was moving. "You been doing that all day?" I nodded. He was bemused. "That's keeping it real."

(Note to self: next time, renew your driver's license before the move.)

I am thinking dinner party.

Friday non-cat blogging

Since I have no cats (and this condition seems likely to be permanent) I thought I'd mention some of the things I've been researching lately:

The political economy of the American empire in the Philippines, 1898 to 1913. If you think the current situation in Iraq makes no sense, you have to read about the Philippines to understand what "no sense" really means. (Actually, the last part of that sentence is pretty much invariant no matter what you're thinking of.) Picture an occupation composed of one part Richard Perle, one part the Peace Corps, and one part your favorite spaghetti Western. That's about right.

The rise and fall of the mail-order house industry the US. I was inspired by Carrie at Bad Mama, who discovered her new home was actually an Aladdin house, built in Michigan, and shipped via rail several hundred miles to its point of final assembly some time in the late 1910s. You'd never know it.

(By the way, Peanut, Bad Mama's miracle elf princess, just underwent painful osteotomic corrective surgery. You might want to post some wubba.)

What else. I have a lot of notes on the history of epic poetry, and lately I've been influenced by the poet Alice Notley's idea of the "female epic". I'd like to work up something on George Eliot, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Notley's own work, especially The Descent of Alette, Rebecca Borgstrom's epic in progress at Hitherby Dragons, Nina Paley's Sitayana animations, and even the work of Ayn Rand, whom I will try not to present as a bad example.

There's also the other stuff I have on epic -- Serbian, early and later Greek, the blues, and the west African griot tradition [1] -- and also the continuing series on the Code of Lek. I have some cool parallels from medieval Icelandic sagas, the work of Ismail Kadare, and a short story of Howard Waldrop's. (Guess which one!)

And there's the long-awaited piece I have on the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. I find certain elements of her biography distressing, most notably her early relationship with Louis Zukofsky, who pressured her to get an abortion of their child (the doctor later told her it was twins). This makes me think much the less of Zuk, a poet I have long admired.

Meanwhile, HDTD friend Charlie Stross has put his new novel Accelerando online. It's good transhuman fun! And there's a good discussion of the alternate history genre at the literary blog The Valve. So that takes care of the geeky stuff.

[1] Can any Romanian readers tell me about the Tiganiada? I have come across very vague references in English about it. The New York Public Library has a copy, but I'd have to cognate my way through it, and miss any of the subtleties.

Alright, already

Because I have absolutely nothing better to do right now.

"It's funny how that's what's left at the end, isn't it? All the stupid stuff. Not 'War and Peace,' not James Joyce. Just the comics, the super heroes. ... Why do people get so ashamed of things? ... I mean, I really love those comics." -- Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? (Assume you also get baseline superhero enhancements like moderately increased strength, endurance and agility.)

Most superpowers are -- let's face it -- pretty useless. Firing energy bolts from my eyes would be kinda cool, but not very relevant to my current life as husband, father, and consultant. Though I suppose my three-year-old would get a kick out of it.

The ones that aren't useless... well, Charles Xavier's mental powers would let me make a difference in the world, yes. ("And now, Mr. President, let's talk about Supreme Court nominees.") That would be tempting. But I guess I really am a Burkean conservative at heart: I don't think I could trust anyone with that kind of power, including myself.

Super-intelligence would be pretty interesting. But wouldn't I get bored? And lonely?

Immortality. Been a fantasy of mine since I was a kid. (It's why Vandal Savage was always one of my favorite villains.) I'd get to see history from the right perspective. I'd be able to travel to all the places. I'd have time to read all the books!

But, again, lonely.

Flight is very tempting. I'd love to be able to fly. But I think I'd go with teleportatation... no distance limits, no conservation of potential energy or momentum, and I can take people with me.

No more car trips with the kids. I can see all my friends any time. And when I want good sushi, fresh from the lagoon... I'm there.

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you fancy, and why?

Fancy as in like? I haven't really kept up. I was always a big Spider-Man fan. Top Ten is good story. The new Teen Titans cartoon is pretty cool.

Fancy in the British sense? Umm. Well, the question is in the present tense, so I can fairly answer "none". You didn't ask who I fanc_ied_ when I was, say, sixteen.

As often the case, Grant Morrisson has the last word. "How could you love anybody the way you loved Thundergirl?"

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you hate?

As Carlos noted, a good writer can make a wretched character good, and vice versa.

I always disliked the Image superheroes and their descendants, though. Bulging muscles, bulging breasts, stupid stories.

OK, here's the tough one. What would your superhero name be? (No prefab porn-name formulas here, you have to make up the name you think you'd be proud to mask under.)

Something clean and simple, like Mister X.

For extra credit: Is there an 'existing' superhero with whom you identify/whom you would like to be?

Identify with: Is there a married superhero with kids whose stories made any emotional sense? There's a gap between "fantasize about" and "identify with", after all.

Like to be: No. They all have horrible problems, almost by definition.

Pass it on. Three people please, and why they're the wind beneath your wings.

Nobody got Charlie Stross yet? Tag. (Did you read comics as a kid, Charlie?)

Dragan Antulov, because I'm always interested in reading his take on things.

Mimi Smartypants, because I really like her stuff, and because there are too many Y chromosomes in this sequence. I doubt she'll take a tag from a complete stranger, mind. Perhaps this amusing little webcomic will serve to persuade her.

Writer's blog

This blog has been lacking new content lately. If I had cats, I could blog about them on Fridays! But I don't.

There's a game of make-up-your-own conspiracy tag going around, but since I seem to be a chain termination step in such matters (at least with my co-bloggers, unsubtle and slightly needling hint) there's not much point. Anyway, There Is No Conspiracy.

It's been 30 to 35 degrees C in New York City lately, which I have been enjoying immensely. After pneumonia, it's like being wrapped in a nice warm blanket.

My dad tells me to e-mail him every once in a while, just to say, "I'm not dead." He's very practical that way. Think of this post as the equivalent.

Foodie stuff: Brooklyn Weiss on tap is extremely good! Claudia, I am sure you are skeptical, but this is the real deal.

Math-y stuff: Herbert Wilf has several books available for downloading online, including generatingfunctionology and A=B. (Love that first title. Sounds like an album Blue Note released in 1958.)

Family stuff: my sister the engineer/architect/theater person has an entry in the Coney Island Parachute Pavilion contest. Sadly, she didn't win, but she had fun.

Geeky stuff: None to report. Honest.

Free time, threat or menace?

So I've been tagged again, this time by James Nicoll, who in turn got it from occasional HDTD reader Martin Wisse. It's even geekier than the last one:

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? (Assume you also get baseline superhero enhancements like moderately increased strength, endurance and agility.)

Seriously? I think I'd choose something non-flashy, like the power to heal (and explain how) or the power to translate perfectly (and explain how).

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you fancy, and why?

Are we talking 'fancy' as in 'think are neat'? I always liked the second tier of DC's Silver Age lineup.

Or are we talking 'fancy' as in 'have a thing for'? Well, there's Issues Girl, High Maintenance Woman, Unattainable Lass, and the Slackerette. As Imelda Marcos used to say, hubba hubba!

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you hate?

I don't think there's a superhero so wretched that the hands of a skilled writer could not make interesting. Or vice versa.

OK, here's the tough one. What would your superhero name be? (No prefab porn-name formulas here, you have to make up the name you think you'd be proud to mask under.)

Like James Nicoll, I would follow Ralph "Elongated Man" Dibny's lead. As with the Internet, I don't need sock-puppet identities.

(Was 'mask' just used as a verb, meaning 'to act as a superhero'? OMG, it was. And I understood it. I feel dirty.)

For extra credit: Is there an 'existing' superhero with whom you identify/whom you would like to be?

Gah. No. Really, no.

Pass it on. Three people please, and why they're the wind beneath your wings.

Ah, the payoff! John Holbo, Jim Henley, and my co-blogger Doug; because I can, and because they've all thought more deeply about this superhero thing than I ever have.

PS book tag reminder! You know who you are.

Organizing the sock drawer

Or rather, Xeroxed papers I have unpacked. This is more of an aide-mémoire in blog form than anything else, but hey, if you got any questions about these, ask 'em. Or suggestions for follow-up reading, either. Extra points if you can divine a theme!

8 by 11 papers

Agrawal et al., "Transposition mediated by RAG1 and RAG2 and its implications for the evolution of the immune system", 1998
Balfour, "Antiviral drugs", 1999
Barber, "On the antiquity of east European bridal clothing"
Barber, "On the origins of the vily/rusalki"
Barber, "The curious tale of the ultra-long sleeve (a Eurasian epic)"
Berg, "The rotary motor of bacterial flagella", 2003
Benz et al., "The origin of the Moon and the single-impact hypothesis I", 1986
Birch, "Terraforming Venus quickly", 1991
Bordo and Jonung, "The future of EMU: what does the history of monetary unions tell us?", 1999 [I don't have this in .pdf form?]
Bossy, Recollections of a Romanian diplomat, foreword, excerpts from the Berlin years, 1941 and 1942
Brown & Kornberg, "Inorganic polyphosphate in the origin and survival of species", 2004
Burnett, Magic and divination in the Middle Ages, excerpts on the Experimentarius of Bernardus Silvestris
Burt et al., "The dynamics of chromosome evolution in birds and mammals", 1999
Cederström et al., "Focusing hard X-rays with old LPs", 2000
Clark et al., "Inferring nonneutral evolution from human-chimp=mouse orthologous gene trios", 2003
Coatsworth, "Indispensable railroads in a backwards economy: the case of Mexico", 1979 [I don't have this in .pdf form?]
Ehret, "Derivational morphology in Afroasiatic (Afrasian) reconstruction"
Eichengreen and Sachs, "Exchange rates and the economic recovery in the 1930s", 1984 [I don't have this in .pdf form either? *very* odd]
Freedman, "The topology of four-dimensional manifolds", 1982
Galatin, "The long and short of Viagra: featured molecule of the week"
Gheorghe, "Origin of Roma's slavery in the Rumanian Principalities"
Greene, "Technological innovation and economic progress in the ancient world: M.I. Finley reconsidered", 2000
Heideman et al., "Gauss and the history of the Fast Fourier Transform", 1985
Kayser, "Classics and technology: a reevaluation of Heron's first century AD steam engine"
Kayser, "The purpose of the Parthian galvanic cells: a first-century AD electric battery used for analgesia", 1993
Kennedy, "Strategy fads and competitive convergence: an empirical test for herd behavior in prime-time television programming", 2002
Kirkpatrick and Baez, "Formation of optical images by X-rays", 1948
Hansch and Fujita, "Rho-sigma-pi analysis, a method for the correlation of biological activity and structure", 1963
Horsfall and Tamm, "Chemotherapy of viral and rickettsial diseases", 1957
Land, "A new one-step photographic process", 1947
Lampe, "Varieties of unsucesssful industrialization: the Balkan states before 1914"
Mathews, "David Bowie reinvents self, this time as a bond issue", 1997
Needham, excerpt from Science and Civilisation in China, "The enchymoma in the test-tube: medieval preparations of urinary steroid and protein hormones"
Nicholson, "Ibuprofen", from Chronicles of Drug Discovery, volume 1
Ó Grada, Ireland: a new economic history, chapter 1, "Chronology"
Palairet, "Merchant enterprise and the development of the plum-based trades in Serbia, 1847-1911"
Penrose, "Angular momentum: an approach to combinatorial space-time"
Pritchett, "A toy collection, a socialist star, and a democratic dud? Growth theory, Vietnam, and the Philippines"
Rens et al., "Resolution and evolution of the duck-billed platypus karyotype with an X1Y1 X2Y2 X3Y3 X4Y4 X5Y5 male sex chromosome constitution", 2004
Rockoff, "The 'Wizard of Oz' as a monetary allegory", 1990
Roe, "The ghost in the machine: symmetry and representation in ancient Antillean art"
Salton, "The automatic transcription of machine shorthand", 1959
Sausverde, "Seewörter and substratum in Germanic, Baltic and Baltic Finno-Ugric languages"
Schrijver, "Animal, vegetable and mineral: some Western European substratum words"
Snigerev et al., "A compound refractive lens for focusing high-energy X-rays", 1996
Steiner, "Monopoly and competition in television: some policy issues", 1961
Stone, "Bernardus Silvestris, Mathematicus", 1996
Taylor, "Elements of technical creativity", 1984
Todd, "Karyotypic fissioning and canid phylogeny", 1970
Trask, "Some important Basque words (and a bit of culture)"
Von Neumann & Richtmyer, "A method for the numerical calculation of hydrodynamic shocks", 1950
Wayland, "Apache playing cards", 1961
Whitmire and Wright, "Nuclear waste spectrum as evidence of technological extraterrestrial civilizations", 1980
Wilczak, "The pre-Germanic substrata and Germanic maritime vocabulary"
Witten, "Supersymmetry and Morse theory", 1982
Wolffe and Matzke, "Epigenetics: regulation through repression", 1999
Yang & Bielawski, "Statistical methods for detecting molecular adaptation", 2000
Zapol et al., "Artificial placenta: two days of total extrauterine support of the isolated premature lamb fetus", 1969

[thought I had more on artifical wombs? must be a different box, sigh]

assorted Christmas carols with bass part indicated
uncited bibliography on the international arms trade
various formulas for equations of state
various printouts on 1970s US television comedy history

8 by 11 books

Andaya, The world of Maluku: eastern Indonesia in the early modern period, chapters 1 through 4
Archibald, Information, incentives, and the economics of control, 1992
Cipolla, Money, prices, and civilization in the Mediterranean world: fifth through seventeenth century
DeVoto, translation of Heron of Alexandria's Belopoeica (the Artillery Manual) with facing Greek text, notes
Elman, A cultural history of civil examinations in late imperial China, chapter 1
Friedrich, Proto-Indo-European trees: the arboreal system of a prehistoric people, 1970
Guisso, Wu Tse-T‘ien and the politics of legitimation in T‘ang China, chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7
Mirrlees, The Counterplot, chapters 1 through 3
Pearton, Oil and the Romanian state, 1971
Young, Women who become men: Albanian sworn virgins, 2000

The Kanun of Lek Dukagjini, foreword, introduction, excerpts, appendices

8 by 14 papers

Bielenstein, "The Chinese colonization of Fukien until the end of T'ang"
Blust, Austronesian root theory, chapters 1 through 7
Blust, "Historical morphology and the spirit world: the *qali/kali- prefixes in Austronesian languages"
Clark, "Evolution, migration, and extinction of Oceanic bird names"
Dummer, "A history of electronic passive components: a personal view", 1996
Gale, "The rolling of iron"
Heaney, "Biogeography of mammals in SE Asia: estimates of rates of colonization, extinction and speciation", 1986
McNeil, "George Constantinesco, 1881-1965 and the development of sonic power transmission"
Palairet, "Primary production in a market for luxury: the rose-oil trade of Bulgaria, 1771-1941"
Polomé, "The non-Indo-European component of the Germanic lexicon"
Roe, "At play in the fields of symmetry: design structure and shamanic therapy in the upper Amazon"
Schrijver, "Lost languages in northern Europe"
Schanuel, "What is the length of a potato?"
Siebert, "The original home of the proto-Algonquian people"
"Some aspects of technological change -- 1900 to 1939: a symposium", 1983

Allen, "Welding"
Brock-Nannestad, "Mechano-acoustic sound recording and reproduction -- refinement and rejection, 1900-1929"
Darling, "Metallurgical developments between 1900 and 1939"
Ellam, "Developments in aircraft landing gear, 1900-1939"
Semmens, "Chemical process engineering at I.C.I. Billingham"
Duffy, "Power, materials and processes"
Earl, "The development of the thermionic valve between 1900 and 1939"

Stevanovic, "The age of clay: the social dynamics of house destruction", 1997
Stokes, "Hydrogen peroxide for power and propulsion", 1998

A minor departure

I have some annoying trash to take out over the next few days, so the Vrancea and Vinogradov blogging will have to wait. In the meantime, enjoy this Unitarian hymn, courtesy of Ereshkigal of Oklahoma:

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee,
Praise the strength of coffee.
Early in the morn we rise with thoughts of only thee.
Served fresh or reheated,
Dark by thee defeated,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

Though all else we scoff we
Come to church for coffee;
If we're late to congregate, we come in time for thee.
Coffee our one ritual,
Drinking it habitual,
Brewed black by perk or drip instantly.

Coffee the communion
Of our Uni-Union,
Symbol of our sacred ground, our one necessity.
Feel the holy power
At our coffee hour,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

More odd theology (of my own devising) can be found with the coffee hymn here:

It has been conjectured that further symmetry breaking will lead to a God in Six Persons, which have tentatively been named Bereshith, Tetragrammaton, Incarnatus, Agape, Pentecost, and Paracletus.

Alas, They do not assemble to form a larger, robot Godhead; on the other hand, one might consider Them/Him a justice league.

Then there's the Lucky Charms unified theory... but that can wait.

I know where I get my ideas from, and it ain't Poughkeepsie

(Hm. Looks like my co-bloggers are busy this Mother's Day. Best fill the gap with weird blather.)

So I get these migraines sometimes.

Because I am me, I classify my headaches. Stress, sinus, and migraines, which might (or might not) be triggered by the first two. I don't get the aura, dammit -- which would be neat -- but I do get the classical hemicrania, the pain on half the skull which Galen named, as well as the urge to vomit and the sensitivity to light. It's a little like being badly hungover, but without having the good time beforehand.

One upside of these migraines is that I can use them to track how I associate concepts. When I am not contemplating my own death, or wondering where the bucket is, I can drift into a dreamlike state, and 'watch' however it is concepts form connections in my head. (This might be a hallucination, with no reference to how the brain works at all, which makes it even cooler, in my opinion.) It's a little like the old TRACE commands in slow, interpreted computer languages.

Anyway. A few days before, I had been reading God's Long Summer, about the various strains of theology that went into the civil rights and anti-civil rights movements in the US, not so very long ago. I'd also been reading R. Sean Borgstrom's amazing short fiction at Hitherby Dragons. It turns out that she wrote some supplements for the In Nomine role-playing game -- which Doug has played, I know -- as well as a very interesting sounding game called Nobilis, where one plays the personification of an aspect of reality, like Night, or Flowers. I'm not sure how that works. There's a live action version of it as well, and I am even less sure how that works.

I also was sent a picture of Bad Mama's Peanut, sitting in her crib amidst a pile of books she had pulled down. I recognized one of the books on the top of the pile as Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. It's bright green and hard to mistake. It's about the odd pop culture legacy the old Confederacy has in the US, Civil War re-enactors and the like. Not something the Balkans has much of, I imagine. Peanut herself is half Yankee, half Rebel, so it was an appropriate choice, even though I think she still views books as 40% delicious teething toy, 60% word repository.

So all these things were sifting through my migraine-blurred mind yesterday. I sensed them attempt to find connections of meaning. They felt as if they were turning and rotating, although there was no visual impression. Then they 'clicked' -- no auditory impression either. And suddenly I had a new idea:

The civil rights re-enactment live action role-playing game!

Now, what can I do with it?

The admirative and the optative

So the Albanian language has these moods.

No, I'm serious. "Mood" is a grammatical term describing the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. And Albanian has some moods that English lacks.

-- Not clear? Okay, think about a common English verb... say, "eat". I eat, you eat, they eat. Now add modal verbs: I could eat, you should eat, they would have eaten. Those modal auxiliary verbs -- could, would, should, ought -- help set the mood of the verb.

Still not clear? Okay, some examples.

Indicative mood. Used for factual statements:

You eat.
We go.

Imperative mood: used for commands, direct requests, prohibitions.

Eat!
Let's go!

Subjunctive mood: several uses, including discussing hypothetical or unlikely events, expressing opinions or emotions, and making polite requests.

I suggest (that) you eat.
Perhaps we should go.

Conditional mood: used to express uncertainty or an "if" situation.

You would eat (if you could).
We might go (if we want to).

BTW, those modal verbs? That's an English thing. Okay, a Germanic thing. Romance languages -- like French and Spanish and Romanian -- don't use them so much. Instead, they change the form of the verb, usually by messing with the ending. So, "eat" in Spanish is comer; "you should eat" is comerias.

Okay, still with me? Well, Albanian has two moods that English doesn't: the optative and the admirative.

The optative (it's also called the desiderative sometimes) expresses hopes or wishes. Think of it as the "if only" or "would that" mood. Only a few languages have an optative as a distinct mood. Among Indo-European languages, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit are examples; elsewhere, Japanese and Finnish.

An ancient Greek speaker might say "Would that you would eat!" with the words "would that" expressed by putting the verb "read" in the optative mood.

Here is an example of the optative mood in ancient Greek:

ei gar genoime teknon anti sou nekros

oh that become-I [OPTATIVE] son instead-of thou corpse
‘O that I might be a corpse, my child, instead of you!’

(Euripides, Hippolytos 1410. Sorry, I can't do the diacritical markings.)

In Japanese the verb inflection -tai expresses the speaker's desire, e.g. watashi wa asoko ni ikitai "I want to go there". Remove the "-tai" at the end, and it becomes "I go there". Neat, neh? Oddly, Japanese uses a completely different method to indicate the desire of a person other than the speaker. (They use the auxilliary verb garu. I know you wanted to know that.)

Google tells me that a contrast to this example is contemporary spoken Finnish, where the optative suffixes -koon and -koot express annoyed dismissal:

Korjatkoon sen itse!
has the he can fix in optative third-person singular
"He can fix it himself!"

Personally, I don't see that as an optative mood, but okay.

Anyway, in Albanian, the optative mood takes the form of an inflection of the verb. So the phrase

If only you would eat!

is, in Albanian, a single word. (If this seems strange, consider the English imperative mood. "Eat!")

And "Oh, how I wish I could see an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker!" would be "I can see (optative) an Ivory-Bill."

Now: waaaay back when the first chariot-riding, beer-drinking, proto-Indo-Europeans came swarming out of Central Asia (or wherever), they spoke a language with four moods: indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative.

Three thousand years later, some Indo-European languages have added new moods, such as the English conditional. But almost all of them have lost the optative. Only a few older or conservative languages -- Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Tocharian, Lithuanian, Albanian -- have kept it. (This leads to the interesting question of whether proto-Indo-European might have shared the optative with proto-Finno-Ugric, the distant ancestor of Finnish and Hungarian. But let that bide.)

Okay, so much for the optative. What of the admirative?

Well, the admirative is a mood that expresses surprise. In English, this is usually represented by an exclamation point. In Albanian, it's done by inflecting the verb. (They have exclamation points too, of course.)

A couple of examples. (These are from the work of Dr. Victor Friedman, of whom more anon.)

A man walks into a barber shop expecting to find the owner, a master barber, but instead no one is there but the owner’s apprentice. The potential customer has two choices in inquiring after the man he is looking for:

(2a) Ku ‘sht‘ mjeshtri?

(2b) Ku qenka mjeshtri?

‘Where is the boss?’

Question (2a) contains a neutral request for information, whereas, in the context given above, version (2b) could only convey surprise at not finding the boss in the shop and could not be dubitative or nonguarantive. An admirative question in this context is thus simultaneously a request for information (attempt to have the addressee take responsibility for an assertion) and an implicit assertion that the speaker had expected to find the boss in his shop

Clear, no? And then this:

If the barber comes out from behind a curtain at the back of the shop, and the customer realizes that the barber was in the building all along and simultaneously receives an answer to his question by seeing the barber, he has the following possibilities of response:

(3a) Ah, k‘tu je.

(3b) Ah, k‘tu pask‘sh qen‘!

‘Ah, here you are’

Response (3a) is a simple acknowledgment that the barber’s act of coming out from behind a curtain in the back of his shop is a sign (index or token) of his presence. Response (3b) however, contains a grammatically expressed tone of the speaker’s surprise that is absent from (3a)... with nuances of ‘as it turns out, you have been here all along and I was unaware of it’.

To use our earlier examples, the admirative would express something like

Wow, you're eating!

Hey, we're going!

But there are a couple of twists.

One, nobody knows where the Albanian admirative comes from. The optative is ancient Indo-European; the admirative seems to have appeared out of nowhere. They didn't get it from the Turks, either. It's unique to the Balkans, where it appears in several languages whose bases are geographically close to each other: Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian. There's reason to believe that the Albanians invented it and the neighbor languages borrowed it, but that just raises the obvious question: why did the Albanians, alone in Europe, develop this unique verb mood?

But wait: there's more. I said that it looked like the neighbors had borrowed this mood from the Albanians. Well, at least one group of neighbors not only borrowed it, but improved on it.

There's a group in the Balkans called the Arumanians. Arumanians are people who speak a language that's very, very close to Romanian... so close that some call it a dialect of Romanian, rather than a separate language. (Apparently an Arumanian and a Romanian can understand each other, if they both speak very slowly and wave their hands a lot.) Arumanians live all over the place, thinly scattered across Albania, Romania, Macedonia and Greece.

Now, there's a dialect of Arumanian -- the Frasheriote dialect, to be precise -- that has taken the Albanian admirative and run with it. That is, they use the admirative, but they use it ironically -- to express not just surprise, but disbelief, uncertainty, or the fact that the information is based on a report. It carries the nuance "to my surprise" or "supposedly, but I don't believe it," or "allegedly, but I won't vouch for it" or "so they say," depending on the context.

So, the Frasheriote Arumanian admirative would go something like

You're eating! (I didn't believe it until I saw you eat.)

We're going! (Someone said so, but I don't think it's true.)

What's interesting is that this wasn't discovered until 1992 -- again by the redoubtable Dr. Friedman:

In the summer of 1992, I was in Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia, conducting field research on Macedonian. There, I had the opportunity to meet Marjan Markovik, who was then working on his M.A. thesis on the verb systems of the Arumanian and Macedonian dialects of Ohrid. At the time, Mr. Markovik was doing fieldwork for the Arumanian part of his thesis with his mother's relatives and their friends (see note 1), who now live in Ohrid and Struga but who come from the village of Beala de Sus (Macedonian: Gorna Belica). We arranged to visit some of them together, and I decided to compose a little story in Macedonian and ask them to translate it into Arumanian. I composed the story so that it would contain many expressions of surprise, doubt, uncertainty, and reported information. Despite the established view that Arumanian had no special verb forms for these nuances, I was curious to see for myself.

Mr. Markovik and I spent a pleasant afternoon and evening with his relatives and their friends, enjoying traditional Arumanian hospitality and discussing with them questions of the Arumanian language over glasses of their delicious homemade arâchie. At one point, I brought out my story, and we taped a line by line translation into Arumanian. The next day Mr. Markovik and I met at my room to transcribe the story. As we sat listening to the tape and writing, we were suddenly amazed to encounter a sentence with a verb form that neither of us had ever seen or heard in Arumanian.

It's not quite up to seeing a live Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, but it still must have been quite a thrill.

What's really interesting about this is that the Arumanians use of the admirative comes very close to being an evidential marker.

Evidential markers are grammatical forms used by a speaker to show where information is coming from. For instance, a language might have a suffix that could be added to a verb to indicate whether "I am told this is true" or "I believe this is true" or "I, personally saw this". Evidential markers are found in a lot of American Indian languages but they're totally absent from the Indo-European language family. Except in Frasheriote Arumanian, kind of.

(Well, to be strictly correct, there's also some ironic/nonconfirmative use of the admirative in Macedonian. But let's not complicate this any more.)

So, I end by putting these sentences in the straight admirative:

An evidential marker in an Indo-European language. And not discovered until 1992.

The Balkans are interesting.

Really for geeks only

The Alitalia flight was cancelled, so I'm stuck in Tirana for another day.

Stuck is maybe too strong. Tirana isn't horrible. (Well, if you're a foreigner, and have some money.) Still, I would rather be home with my family.

But anyhow. Since we're doing Albania, and also doing geek stuff, let me bring the two together.

I bought this month's Analog at a bookstore here in Tirana.

I have no idea what it was doing there. I've never seen an issue of Analog in Eastern Europe before. No, I take that back: I saw old ones, back issues from the 1980s, on sale at the second-hand book stalls along Knez Mihailova in Belgrade. But new ones? Hell, Analog isn't that well circulated in the United States any more. (I'm sure James Nicoll could give us the details.)

To make it even odder, that same magazine rack also included two American comic books: a recent issue of Bendis' Daredevil (which I'm told is very good, but have never read), and a recent issue of one of the X-Men books. (Couldn't tell you which one; what are there now, six of them? Milligan was the author.)

One issue apiece. No more.

Stranger still: the Analog cost only 300 Albanian lek, or about $3.25. That's less than its $3.99 US newstand price.

I haven't read much of it yet, but I did read the book reviews (not bad), the short story bashing NASA, and a Jeffrey Kooistra Alternate View column reviewing the book "Kicking the Sacred Cows", by James P. Hogan.

"Cows" is a book which debunks -- let me take a deep breath now -- evolution through natural selection, the Big Bang theory of cosmology, global warming, the idea that HIV causes AIDS, and, of course, the critics of Immanuel Velikovsky. Oh, and he also shows why Einstein's theory of relativity is "unnecessarily complicated".

Reviewer Kooistra thinks this is absolutely fantastic.

My other purchase: The Six Months' Kingdom, the memoirs of the private secretary of Prince William of Wied. William was a minor German prince who was King of Albania from March to September, 1914. I had no idea any of his staff had survived to write about his brief eventful reign, but there it was on the shelf.

It's not very well written, and not edited at all, but it's still darn interesting.

-- Though a bit sad, in parts. The author several times mentions the King's two small children, a girl of four years and a boy of one. The boy would eventually became a lawyer and died in New York in 1973 -- without issue, thus ending the House of Wied and any possible claim to an Albanian throne.

The little girl grew up to marry a German, who was killed in WWII; then she married a Romanian; then Ghirghiu-Dej threw her in a prison camp and she died there in 1948, aged 40.

So when the author mentions in passing that the little princess was restless because she was usually confined to a single rather small garden, and couldn't get outside to play... well.

Sometimes it's the little things.

5 am flight tomorrow, so off to bed with me.

A bit more about that bird

So, why should we care about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker?

Well, I could say that it's because it was a priceless part of the natural heritage of America, and indeed of the world. Because every extinct species diminishes us a little. Because now my sons will have a chance to see an Ivory-Bill, something I never imagined they could have.

But let's try another reason: because it's SO FREAKING COOL, MAN!!!

Early white settlers gave the Ivory-Bill the nickname of “the Lord God Bird”. Apparently, upon seeing it for the first time — this huge bird, stark black and white with an enormous red plume, golden eyes, and the beak like a power drill — everyone’s first reaction was, “Lord /God/! What the hell is that thing?”

The Ivory-Bill was the world's largest woodpecker. This isn't ditsy little Woody. Try this: bend your arm at the elbow, maybe 45 degrees, while holding your wrist straight. Now extend your index finger at a slight angle, as if pointing. Got it? Now think of a bird as long as your forearm, with a beak like your index finger.

The Ivory-Bill had few predators, because one peck from that beak would see off anything smaller than an eagle. It was loud, fierce and fearless, and with good reason. In the 1890s, one wildlife artist discovered this the hard way, when he netted an Ivory-Bill, took it back to his hotel room, and then tried to put it in a cage so he could paint it at his leisure. The bird smashed the cage to pieces, gave him several deep puncture wounds, and blasted its way out the window in a shower of glass.

(Recent reports have been emphasizing how shy the bird is. If so, this is a learned behavior. 19th century reports of Ivory-Bills don't describe them as shy. Quite the opposite, if anything.)

All woodpeckers are living drills, but the Ivory-Bill was in a class by itself. It was basically a small chainsaw with wings. Even before it was seriously endangered, birders would travel for days to see it in action. You have to imagine this big bird just blasting into a rotten tree, BRRRRAAAAACCCK, chips and sawdust flying everywhere; then pausing to slurp up a grub or two with its six inch long, barbed and spiked tongue; and then BRRRAAAACCCK returning to the attack again, while the hole in the tree got visibly bigger.

It was huge. It was hardcore. It was quintessentially American. If this bird had been around in the '70s, someone would have put it on a heavy metal album cover.

So. Now what?

"Is the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker really, truly extinct" was always one of those questions that could get any three randomly selected bird enthusiasts in a hissing, shrieking, squawking dispute within a minute or two. But the International Ornithological Union said yes, and I was inclined to agree. It's a big damn bird, loud, and conspicuous -- black and white with a brilliant red crown. And while there are some pretty wild places in Louisiana and Arkansas, we're not talking about the jungles of the Congo here. If we could discover the last colony of Bulmer's Fruit Bat in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, you'd think we would have found the Ivory-Bill here in the US after 50 years of looking hard.

But it looks like we missed it. Maybe. I hope.

I'm sure those woods are about to be disturbed by dozens if not hundreds of birders. If it's really there, we should have something better than a blurry video soon.

Cross fingers.

Mutants and monsters

Male prostitute turned favored White House reporter James Guckert (aka Jeff Gannon) complained to the New York Post that he wasn't invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner. "Probably many who would want to extend such an invitation already assume I will be in attendance." Yes, that's it. Meanwhile, Halfway Down the Danube has learned that HDTD friend John Krewson will be in attendance, as will the comic stylings of Cedric the Entertainer. Remember, John, if things go south, who to take out first.

Meanwhile, Star Trek is rapidly sliding down the dark abyss whence no subculture returns. First there was the Trek-cannibalism connection in Germany. Now there's this horrifying story in the Los Angeles Times:

On one wall is a "Star Trek" poster with investigators' faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.

Det. Constable Warren Bulmer slips on a Klingon sash and shield they confiscated in a recent raid. "It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don't apply," Bulmer reflects. "But beyond that, I can't really explain it."

A gallant researcher at BoingBoing did a bit more digging:

I have now spoken to Detective Ian Lamond of the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit and he claims they were misquoted, or if that figure was given it was done so jokingly. Nevertheless, he does claim that a majority of those arrested show "at least a passing interest in Star Trek, if not a strong interest."

They've arrested well over one hundred people over the past four years. Det. Lamond claims they can gauge this interest in Star Trek by the arrestees' "paraphenalia, books, videotapes and DVDs." I asked if this wasn't simply a general interest in science fiction and fantasy, such as Star Wars or Harry Potter or similar. He said, while there was sometimes other science fiction and fantasy paraphenalia, Star Trek was the most consistent and when he referred to a majority of the arrestees being Star Trek fans, it was Star Trek specific.

Still tres creepy.

Are you ready for some springtime?

Because it wouldn't be Halfway Down the Danube without the occasional incomprehensible post about American football (gridiron) from the guy with the coffee cup icon, now, would it?

It's spring in the US! which also means it's draft season for professional American football! Some explanation might be required for non-US sports enthusiasts.

Unlike professional soccer (futbol, calcio, whatever) US professional gridiron doesn't relegate or promote teams based on rank. In fact, there's an involved structure to keep the level of play between teams as even as possible. Part of this is done monetarily: the National Football League has instituted rules to limit the amount of money each team can spend on players (which the San Francisco 49ers shamefully abused during their years of glory, but I digress). And it works. It turns out that in a cross-country comparison of sports leagues, the NFL has the lowest correlation between money spent and performance, while professional Italian soccer has the highest.

US gridiron also balances team competition via the draft. Based on reverse standings, the worst team in the NFL has first pick of hot eligible players from (usually) university teams. The second worst, the next pick. And so on. (The US uses its university gridiron teams as a 'farm' system for its professional league. The upshot of this has been to democratize the universities, rather than to make gridiron more elite. It's a little peculiar.)

My own home team, the Green Bay Packers, made it to the playoffs last year, and so had a late pick in the draft for the first round. Weirdly enough, one of this year's hottest quarterbacks (roughly analogous to team captain; for two sports with the same roots, gridiron and soccer positions have diverged wildly) hadn't yet been chosen. While Green Bay already has a legendary quarterback named Brett Favre, truly one of the greatest in the game -- [far] better than Beckham is to soccer, in my opinion -- he's slightly older than I am, and will probably retire after this season. And so the Packers snapped up Aaron Rodgers as pick number 24. Not anyone's expected outcome.

Anyway, during the draft, potential players are subjected to all sorts of tests. Some of them are more rigorous than others. Carrie of Bad Mama sent me this link on testing player intelligence. (And you can try the test yourself!) This was my favorite part:

Some teams consider the test results critical. Others say they dismiss the results, except for players who score at the extremes. What's an extreme? Well, former Bengals punter and Harvard grad Pat McInally scored a perfect 50 -- the only NFL player known to do so -- while at least one player, it is rumored, scored a 1.

(Internal link mine.)

Before anyone begins to post about how American football is so incredibly boring (and I retaliate about the whiny, tedious nature of socker, which is an alien, imperialist transplant to most of the world anyway), let us agree that they fill different niches and satisfy different itches. In my opinion, basketball and baseball fill the roles in the US as soccer does elsewhere, while the gridiron is more of a cyborg sport, like NASCAR, Formula One, the Tour de France, mountaineering, weightlifting, and the Russian space program. I mean, what other sport looks for a fast 175-kg man, who will assuredly need corrective surgeries throughout his career?

(In related news, it looks like Monday Night Football is to be no more. And so passes an American TV tradition. Dennis Miller was probably the lethal wound, but then John Madden sat on it. Ah well.)

A humble blogger asks for recommendations

I've been a little burned out the last few days -- nothing like living on coffee and aspirin while apartment hunting -- and so I turn to you, the readership of Halfway Down the Danube, for recommendations regarding various items. You decide so I don't have to!

a) a cheap good quality all-area DVD player

b) a collection of Romanian poetry, single or multiple authors, in a good translation or bilingual edition (preferably both)

c) new luggage advice. All of mine has deteriorated markedly over the past few days.

d) interesting new music. I am suffering from mp3 withdrawal. Astonish me!

Thanks in advance,
Carlos

When it rains, it pours

Hi all. Apologies for not posting more (and especially to Doug and Claudia, who expected a Carlos-content-rich week in their absence), but my landlord made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I have spent the past holiday weekend moving stuff into storage. Those in the know know this is several K of books, so I am a little tired.

My goodness, my somatotype has changed. I used to look like a kind of pissed off, sort of Asian burgher. Now my Euro genes have really expressed themselves, and I look more like a brunette Rutger Hauer. I still resemble a Jack Kirby cariacture of myself, though. It's the head like a cinder block thing. And I have bruises all freaking over.

And the food cravings. For this first post-move breakfast I want: scrambled eggs, Mindanao tapas (red candied pork), a wedge of sharp Cheddar, some corned beef hash with four sorts of peppers, and a cup of coffee that could bring Ulysses S. Grant back from the dead. I'm eating a corn muffin. Ah well.

Sláinte is táinte!

But liquor is quicker. And quickest of all, apparently, was ether. From Perrine's Chemistry of Mind-Altering Drugs:

Toward the end of the 19th century, the British authorities attempted to reform the Irish drinking habits by heavy taxation of hard liquor. The wily Irish responded by smuggling ether from hospitals. They found that if you drank a shot of ether it gave a quick 15 to 30-minute high much like alcohol, followed by a return to hangover-free sobriety -- and the production of elephantine flatus, in this case highly combustible, which made the simultaneous use of another psychoactive substance, tobacco, very dangerous. The British authorities realized they had a prohibition-created drug epidemic -- and a major fire hazard -- on their hands: "etheromania" was sweeping Ulster! The common sense that made them so successful as an imperial power soon reasserted itself [sic -- CY], and the Irish were allowed their alcohol again.

Éire go brách indeed. Have a happy and healthy St. Patrick's day!

I got your subculture right here 2

From a recent instant message conversation:

Me: Boing Boing: Obsessive gamer Storm Troopers get a Vader-visit
Me: wonder if that happens in wwii games.
Bad Mama: and to think, israel doesn't want these kind of people
Me: and our thoughts converge on the same idea from two different directions
Bad Mama: amazing

Disclaimer: correlation does not equal causation. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. The map is not the territory. Oh my God! It's a gelatinous cube!!!

...so little time.

Oh, there are so many things I should blog about.

The weird, freaky, can't-make-up-its-darn-mind weather of the last week. Sun! Snow! Sun comes out and melts the snow! More snow! Snow while the sun is shining! 10 cm of snow! Sun!

The recent elections in Moldova. In two years here, I haven't blogged one word about Moldova. That's just wrong.

The indictment of Prime Minister Haradinaj of Kosovo for war crimes, and his subsequent departure for the Hague.

The rumbles of labor unrest here in Romania, including possible strikes by postal and railroad workers, caused by labor unions protesting proposed changes to the labor code. (Claudia got caught in one of these the other day, down by Gara de Nord.)

The sudden sharp scuffle between President Basescu and Prime Minister Tariceanu, and its significance for (possible) early elections here.

Some stuff about Romania's economy, including the recent sharp drop in interest rates here; the introduction of the "heavy" leu, which will knock four zeroes off the old leu, so that a dollar will be about 3 lei instead of 30,000; last year's astounding economic growth; and maybe an update on the Dacia Logan.

And some more about Romania in the First World War, because who isn't interested in that?

But it's almost midnight on Friday here, and it's been a really long day. The boys are sleeping in the next room. In a few minutes it will be Alan's third birthday. Claudia spent hours making a birthday cake for him, with a rather amazing picture of Woody (the cowboy character from "Toy Story") on it. I will go in now and kiss him in his sleep and wish him a happy birthday.

Meanwhile... oh, we've never had an open thread. So maybe this can be our first?

What would you like to say to us?

Two subcultures walk into a bar...

Yes! My takeover of this blog is now complete!

For those of you left bewildered by the recent discussion on Poul Anderson, here is some illuminative gasoline I'll throw on the fire. Elizabeth Weil, a freelance journalist, recently wrote a book on the rise and fall of the Rotary Rocket Company, a group of spaceflight enthusiasts with an ingenious design for a civilian spaceship, They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus. She is not unsympathetic to their cause, but she does have what my friend Noel would call a different set of 'ideological priors'. Here she is at the Space Access Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona in April of 1998:

At the far end of the hotel, in an outbuilding, a slope-shouldered woman with hip-length hair hunched behind the convention registration desk. She eyed me warily, as a local might a tourist, certain I was in the wrong place.

"Can I help you?"

My name was on her list.

"Oh -- we must really be branching out. You just..." She drummed her fingers on her clipboard. "You just look like such a mundane."

Mundane is science fiction vernacular for those humans so tedious as to be interested only in the extant, no-imagination-required world. SF, not sci fi is the proper abbreviation, and the slope-shouldered woman shared her house with fifty-one cats and six golden retrievers. She and her equally fanatical husband spent nearly every weekend at SF cons (as opposed to space cons, like this one), and they claimed they could spot their fellow fen (the SF plural of fan, a derivative of men) in third-world markets and airport baggage claims with 99 percent accuracy. Reluctantly, she handed me a Space Access packet and badge. A few young men in thin ponytails and black T-shirts walked past without hassle. The woman smiled tightly. "Maybe we'll have you looking like a convert by the time you get out."

Gary, like almost everybody else who worked at Rotary, had grown up in the science fiction world among the fen. His favorite books were Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and Poul Anderson's The Earth Book of Stormgate, and he believed that science fiction taught its readers that "there is no end to accomplishments" and "the future is yours to create." He believed that adults who had not read science fiction as children had "far more self-doubt" and were "far more skeptical" about what an individual or a society could do. Jaws dropped in Mojave when I first admitted that I hadn't read Heinlein or Bradbury. Or Asimov either. On came an avalanche of well-thumbed paperbacks, people explaining, with generous hearts, that I could not understand them unless I read this one or that. Embarrassingly, I tried to return the favor, extending copies of my own dog-eared favorites -- James Salter's Light Years, Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem -- which people politely accepted and completely ignored.

(Okay, Doug, you can stop chuckling now.)

Oddly enough, the New York City Math Teacher and I recently had a similar experience getting home brewing supplies. A tall bearded fellow with glasses and pulled-back hair was looking through the wort selection and observed us talking. I looked mundane. NYCMT somehow still looked fannish. The man looked at me -- and you could see the wheels turning in his head -- passed me by, and started talking to NYCMT instead.

Anyway. Recently, on Making Light, a commenter called my last post "a not so benevolent analysis of Poul Anderson's writing". That surprised me. I should have thought it was obvious that I've read Anderson deeply and with great affection.

But, you know, I'm not a fan. Science fiction is simply a genre I am deeply interested in, one that I've read for a long time. (And there goes Gary Hudson's negative correlation between reading SF, skepticism and self-doubt.) But the same goes for, say, modernist poetry. And the Internet is a forum where science fiction comes up much more often than modernist poetry. Get me in a circle of comp-lit professors (and some bourbon), and I'll happily chat about Pound, Auden, and Zukofsky.

Man, that comment on Making Light really made my bile rise. People, read more Joan Didion or something.

The serpent eats its own tail

I am fighting off a cold, and so decided to watch the full line-up of cartoons this Saturday morning. Usually I only watch Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is your average Japanese-card-game-dropped-into-the-world-of-a-Tim-Powers-novel anime. (Last Call or The Anubis Gates, either.) It's like the old Steven Wright joke: "I stayed up all night playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died." Weird, occult subplots about Atlantis and deranged geniuses who build their own amusement parks filled with killer traps! And the voice actors manage to be both campy and earnest at the same time, which is rather hard to do. (The US voice actors on the WB network are different from the ones I've heard used for English language, American dialect dubbing on Yu-gi-oh elsewhere, and in my opinion much more professional.)

But today, I decided to watch the earlier shows. The DC properties, the new Batman animated series -- yes, there's another one -- and the Teen Titans, were amusing but not striking. (No, Doug, Speedy does not deal with his heroin problem in this version.) Pokemon continued to prove that the Japanese are at least a generation ahead of the rest of the world at the cutting edge of cute. And I didn't realize that cartoon Standards and Practices had shifted enough for the bathroom humor of Mucha Lucha Gigante.

The really weird one, however, was Xiaolin Showdown. First off, its theme song. If I'm not mistaken, it's a direct riff on the old Captain Beefheart song, Electricity. Do we really have a cartoon on American television with a Captain Beefheart theme song? I'm still not sure I believe it, and I've played both versions a half-dozen times now.

Secondly, its villain is an evil boy genius named Jack Spicer. That's an unusual name, no? It was also the name of a leading figure in the San Francisco poetry scene. I feel this is unlikely to be a coincidence.

So I am wondering: has some superannuated beatnik turned his or her hand to the production of an entertaining half-hour of cartoon choppy-sock with a subversive subtext? Or what?

Slush

The first half of January, we had weirdly warm weather.

Then we had three weeks of snow and bitter cold.

Then, for the last week, it's been weirdly warm again. Almost all of the snow has melted. (Dropping a month's worth of frozen dog crap on the sidewalk all at once. And filling all the potholes with dirty slush that cars can splash on you. As Tina Romano pointed out the other day, late winter is not the time to fall in love with Bucharest.)

Today was grey and foggy, but well above freezing. This morning we say the first pale green shoots poking tentatively out of the soil of the garden out front.

The blue Aegean: just 250 miles that way. Look in the other direction, around the corner of the Carpathians, and it's steppe all the way to Siberia.

There are some obvious metaphors, which are left as an exercise for the reader.

Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You're beautiful!

Happy Valentine's Day from, um, me (Carlos) at Halfway Down the Danube. In the immortal words of former US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, may you all have good sex, comfortable shoes, and a warm place to go to the bathroom.

PS Death to trackback spammers.

Cold

It's cold outside.

Snow and cold all this past week: a few degrees below zero during the days, down to -10 or -15 at night. That's Celsius. Fahrenheit, say high 20s day, single digits to low teens at night.

And before someone from Finland or Wisconsin jumps in and tells me that's not cold: it's the coldest we've been here yet, okay? And I think it's quite respectably chilly for a place that's just 250 miles from the Mediterranean.

The streets are very icy. Yesterday I dragged the boys around the block on their little green plastic sled. There's still lots of powdery snow on the ground, too. Wow, does Alan love to shovel snow. No, really. Claudia bought him a child-sized snow shovel, and he just charges to the attack. He likes snow.

No, I have no idea either. Recessive genes? Cosmic rays?

Expat living, the final installment

Dragana in Cuba, expat mother of two, wrote and reminded me of the promised book list on expat life and TCK's. If you're only interested in that, just scroll to the bottom of this post and you'll find a number of links there. (Dragana - why my site doesn't allow Cuban ISP's, I have not the faintest clue. Sorry about that.)

Anyhow. There are two more points I would like to make about living the expat life before I wrap this up.

One of the more annoying facts of expat life is that there is no such thing as a class-less society. You might think that all expats are equal but nothing could be further from the truth. Expats are divided neatly into three groups.

The first group and highest class consists of diplomats and high-level CEO's -- they quite intentionally keep to themselves. When I first encountered this, I thought it was a quirk. Alas, no. Especially the American and the German diplomatic corps doesn't like to mingle with us mere mortals. This could be due to the fact that they have privileges which are envied and wished for by corporate people -- the Americans in particular have the commissary where they can buy American products, they get Butterball turkeys flown in for Thanksgiving, they have a medical officer on post.

I strongly suppose that one reason for this closed corps business is that they simply don't want to hear one more desperate plea for cranberry sauce or Cheerios. This is the favorable explanation. One could also reach the conclusion that they are utter snobs. I'm sure that's unfair in many cases -- we have friends in the Foreign Service, after all. (Although they have been friends before they joined the Service, so they don't really count.)

It also very much depends on the country of origin. The Swedes and the Australians are quite casual and we have friends among them. The Germans are friendly but stiff. The Americans are friendly and stand-offish.

The other members of this group are the high-level CEO's. I can't say much about them but we know they exist. I am friends with the wife of one, albeit not with Mr. CEO himself. We know the Italian manager of a Fortune 500 company who lives down the street, nod and greet him and his family whenever we walk past -- and they are smile-and-wave-friendly in return. There is no social life between the four of us, though.

The second group, the middle class, is made up by the likes of us. Managers and consultants, teachers and aid workers -- corporate people. We get paid well - some more, some less. Our moves are paid for, we live in nice houses/apartments, and we have health insurance. We mingle quite freely, and nationality is not an issue. This part I really, really like. My sons get to be friends with litte Israelis, Belgians, Brits, Swedes, Turks and others. No Dünkel, as we would say in German.

The third group consists of all those who don't fit into the other two groups. Free-lancers, washed-up backpackers, missionaries, people who come here to work in orphanages. I know quite a few of them but somehow, we don't really mingle. It's not about condescencion or resentment. It's not about money, although most of these people do make pitiful wages. It seems there is a difference in intentions -- most of the third group are here for the long term whereas we "true" expats keep moving around and often don't interact to a higher degree with the locals. So while they try to fit into the local social life, we mostly keep out of that. They send their kids to Romanian kindergartens while we send ours to the International Nursery School.

Doug and I belonged to both the "low" and the middle class in our expat life. I have to say, I quite like the middle class better, if only because we're paid on time and we have a good international health insurance. Cigna rocks, people.

So much about the class system. You're free to draw your own conclusions.

The other point I wanted to make about the expat life is that some people are born for it. Maybe they are made to fit during their childhood years. Maybe there is some itchy-feet gene. I don't know.

Here's how I found out that I'm definitely an expat-moving-around person: In the last two weeks, we had faint, very faint possibilities for jobs in a. Atlanta, GA and b. Rabat, Morocco. Never mind that both didn't even live past the larva stage, but here's the thing: I was quite dismayed by the Georgia prospect and really excited about Morocco. Yes, I know. I'm German, so technically moving to the US would be expat living again, at least for me. That wasn't it. The idea of settling down and not moving again for umpteen years simply scared the living daylights out of me. I'm such a thrill seaker.

OK. Books.

The first expat living book I read was Culture Shock! by Monica Rabe. I found this book useful and highly annoying at the same time. She's a member of the corporate class and definitely does not offer much advice for people who are not affiliated to a (big) company or the Foreign Service. However, some of the points she makes, I find very valid. The culture shock of not fitting in anymore - not in the new culture but not in the old one anymore, either. The disturbing feeling when your friends just don't want to hear all your stories or view all your pictures. The stressful home visits. If you can get past the corporate leanings, it's a good book.

Third Culture Kids by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken. An eye-opener for parents who have never lived the expat life, and for those who have not grown up as TCK's themselves. I found it full of facts I already knew first hand but I know that the Moms of my baby group really liked it.

Expert Expatriate by Melissa Brayer Hess and Patricia Linderman is a recommended book. It covers everything from information gathering to pet moving and reentry back home. It's sometimes a bit unrealistic -- the appended moving plan assumes you have six months advance warning. Hah. Last time, we had one week. However, it gives you a good idea what to do when and I'm a sucker for lists, so there. It also got raving reviews on Amazon.com.

Moving Your Family Overseas by Rosalind Kalb. I have had no time to read this book yet, so I can't say much about it, other than that my friends liked it.

Those two latter books have a seperate chapter on home leave which I find very sensible. That alone makes them worth their money.

You can find recommended reading on the TCK subject at Talesmag.com. Talesmag is recommended reading for expats and expats-to-be in general, although it is heavily geared towards Foreign Service types.

Some other websites you may want to check out:

K 12 Teach Overseas is not only interesting for teachers. It's packed full with useful information and is for free. Heh. Again, I really like the checklist.

TCK World is mainly aimed at military brats. Now's the time to confess that I left out the military entirely on purpose. I have no great insight into their lives, so I ignore them. Sue me.

An entire book online is According to My Passport, I’m Coming Home[PDF] by Kay Eakin. Recommended.

A list of websites for expats can be found here.

All right. Thanks for reading and if you have any questions I might be able to help with, please let me know.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken (3)

Raising kids abroad.

Personally, I think that we're doing our kids a great service by raising them abroad. Huh, you say. Of course you would think that, having been raised abroad yourself.[1] Yeah, I say, you're right. However, others agree with me.

In general, third culture kids (TCK)[2] tend to be more flexible and tolerant than their peers and often exhibit strong observation skills. Having lived in foreign cultures, they have a multi-dimensional world view and feel a stronger connection to other people on this planet. Often, this kind of tolerance and openness comes along with a greater spiritual perspective, as well as a higher maturity level. Finally, add in the fact that most expat kids are raised bi- or multilingually, which makes for great linguistic abilities for the rest of their lives.

It does sound a little like they're only lacking the ability to fly, then they'd be superheroes.

Alas, not all is so rosy in the lives of expat kids.

Rootlessness, restlessness, trouble with intimacy, loneliness, isolation, and unresolved grief are only some of the problems that TCK's are battling with. Subsequently, their parents are dealing with vast amounts of guilt about inflicting all those feelings on their precious children.

Where do you come from? (That one has multiple answers.)

When are we leaving this posting, where will we be the next? (That one is difficult to answer. Our last move was announced one week ahead.)

You're my best friend now, but soon I'll be gone. (...)

I hate this (new) place and I want to go back (to the last place). (...)

It's not easy to be raised an expat kid. I remember all those feelings well -- I hated Istanbul and everybody there when we moved to Turkey. I hated Germany and everything about it when we moved back. For a year or more, I absolutely refused to mingle with my classmates in Germany. Still today, I don't know quite what to answer when people ask me where I'm from. And that was just one country that I lived in, other than my passport country (the other countries came later, in adulthood).

My boys will have a much harder time of it. Not only do they have the additional burden of a bi-cultural home with parents coming from two different continents. They also have not spend much time in the country of their birth (Germany) and even less time in the other country they hold passports of (US). (Let's just skip entirely over the Irish passports and the fact that they've never even been anywhere close to Ireland.)

When Alan was six months old, he made his first move from Germany to Serbia. At this point, he'd already accumulated frequent flyer miles in the tens of thousands[3], and had visited no less than seven countries. At the ripe age of sixteen months, he was moved from Serbia to Romania. He had just started to babble his first words and the shock of relocation (and the well-timed arrival of his brother) rendered him speechless for about half a year. He caught up, though, and another year later he's fluent (whatever counts for fluent at the age of two) in three languages, one of which he'll forget entirely before the age of five.

He's had two nannies, both of which he loved dearly and which he won't remember at all as an adult. His current classmates come from Israel, Turkey, Sweden, US, Belgium, and Romania, but he will very likely graduate from a High School where the most exotic specimen might be the guy from Tennesee. Or he himself.

But I hope that the advantages will outweigh all of those drawbacks. I turned out okay (if I may say so), and I think that some strategies and some applied lessons from my childhood will help raising healthy kids.

We are moving with plenty of stuff -- which is annoying and cloying sometimes but it gives the children a sense of belonging. Sort of, this is my bed, has been my bed since I was born, so I feel safe to sleep even if the bed is in a strange room. I have no idea whether that actually works.

We also enforce a strict daily routine that doesn't change wherever we are. We have a bedtime ritual that is set in stone. The boys are sleeping sacks at night and each has a favorite plush toy that travels with them, always. We have a sit-down dinner every single day. We go outside and to the park every single day, never mind it's freezing cold/raining bullfrogs/blistering hot. We cook ourselves, so the food is familiar too.

[We've only broken once with this routine and that was recently when we spent Christmas in Germany. It didn't pay off. The kids were squirly and uncontrollable without regular bedtimes and daily outings. It was stressful for us, them, and the grandparents. Never again, we swore.]

It's definitely a challenge to move kids around. I'm already dreading to tear Alan away from his friends at school and at the park. I'm not even thinking about the nanny. That will be awful.

However, they are healthy normal kids (thus, only moderately screwed up). They will suffer, as will we, and then life will go on. They will explore new surroundings, they will find new friends, and I think they will be fine wherever we go next. After a while, at least.

This is not the case for all parents. One of the definite downsides of expat living and frequent moves is that there is no such thing as a continuous care for kids with special needs. Speech therapy? Physical therapy? Hard to provide when you change locations every 18 months. If one of the boys needed any kind of long-term therpy, I think we'd break this venture off and return to either the US or Germany permanently. In fact, I know only one family who has a special needs child, and that child has a very mild case of Trisomy 21. I don't know of any blind, deaf, autistic or other children in this expat community.

One contributing factor to this might be that expat schools don't usually provide for special needs kids. They are often stretched to the limits anyhow, and depend on lots of volunteer work by the parents. They can ill afford specialized teachers and expensive equipment for some rare cases. I'm not sure whether this is a vicious circle - no special provisions, no special needs kids, no special provisions... or whether parents with special needs kids just always choose to do the sensible thing and stay put.

Guilt is definitely a feeling all expat parents know well. But we're also very proud of our children, of the way they travel well and speak multiple languages, adapt to new situations and people. We all hope that one day, our kids will look back and think - it's great I got to see all those things and meet all those people. It's made me who I am.

I certainly am grateful to my parents that they opened our eyes for the world. The downside is, of course, that my brothers and I turned out to be vagabonds in our own right. There was a time when we all lived in different countries -- Serbia, USA, and Turkey. It's not easy for my parents to have children and grandchildren so inaccessible but then, it makes for nice vacation destinations.

[1] My family moved to Istanbul/Turkey when I was nine.
[2] The term TCK was first used 40 years ago by Ruth Hill Useem in her research on North American children living in India. TCK refers to someone who has spent a significant period of time in one or more
culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture. (Kay Branaman Eakin, According to my passport, I'm going home, page 18)
[3] But since he was a baby without a seat, he didn't get to cash all those miles in. More's the pity.

Deep roots are not reached by the frost (2)

Home visits. Almost every expat looks forward to home visits, and almost every expat fears them, even more so when they have kids. Travelling with jetlagged children and living out of suitcases for weeks do not generally rate high anybody's list of favorite things to do. Home visits add an extra twist, though.

I asked my expat friends what they hate most about home visits. Everyone of them answered that they found most annoying how all the relatives and friends claim a piece of you. Since you're the one "on vacation", everyone expects you to visit them, spend time with them, and pay attention to them. You end up with an agenda that would make the busiest executive faint.

And who has all their relatives conveniently in one place? Ours are scattered among two continents, and in the US in five or so states. So we're spending a lot of time in transit, on trains going to New York and Connecticut, or on planes going to Florida. Hauling your tired, jet-lagged, cranky kids from a train onto a platform where you're waiting until a redcap shows up to help you with your mountain of luggage drains a lot of energy. I'm snapping at my kids and husband a lot more during these trips -- which adds an additional layer of guilt, and more stress.

Since flying across time zones to visit your passport country takes a lot of ressources (energy, money, and vacation days), and all of those are precious, you are tempted to limit your spending. So you end up cramping visits to all possible relatives and friends into 10 days or less in order to save vacation days, plus sleeping over at relatives' and friends' houses to save money. Bad idea.

You don't know how noisy your jetlagged kid is at two o'clock in the morning until you try to keep him quiet in order not to raise the rest of the house. We've done all sorts of desperate things, like driving around for hours in the night, waiting for some damn breakfast place to open, or pushing strollers in below freezing temperatures while mumbling the age-old mantra "just sleep, damn it, just sleep!"

You are trying to be a good guest while maintaining your own plans and adjusting to the third or fourth set of house rules and daily routines on this particular trip.

Did you know that no two people on this planet load their dishwasher the same way? It's true, believe me. Some rinse, some don't. Some put pots and pans in, some don't. Some run two cycles, one for delicates and one for sturdy stuff, some pack everything together. Some put chopping knives into the machine, some don't. Chopping boards - yes or no? We've scorched baby bottles and nipples because we didn't know the cycle was too hot for plastics.

People will have the strangest hang-ups. Some don't like you to use their phone for long-distance calls, even if you offer to pay the bill when it arrives. Some are really peculiar about receiving packages for you at their homes. A friend of mine ended up shlepping her laundry to the laundromat every second day because her mother-in-law objected to her mass of laundry. With two kids and a limited amount of clothes, laundry is a daily essential. We don't ever stay at places where we can't wash our clothes.

Then there are the meal rules. Some regard a sit-down lunch as essential, others don't talk to you anymore when you don't appear in time for the five o'clock dinner. Some will leave you leftovers, some won't include you in the meals at all. Some people have coffee, some don't. Some have only soy milk, so you better go shopping for your own supplies. I hate soy ice cream, I really do. When I'm in the States, give me Ben & Jerry's, and lots of it.

This all costs a lot of energy. You want to please everyone but in the end, you're just exhausted. You feel stressed, tired, worn out. Then you have to explain why you were late for dinner and didn't call ahead.

My friend A. has solved this problem perfectly. She and her husband bought a house in a fancy vacation resort. This is where they spend their home visits. Every family member and friend is invited to come and visit them, and since it's on the sea shore and a nice place, everybody loves to come. No hassle with all the travelling, you're in your own place with your own rules, and you can enjoy your guests and your visit. I asked Doug whether we could do the same. He said I would need to win the lottery first. I'm working on it. (In the meantime I prefer to stay at my friend Natalie's house who is the most uncomplicated host I've ever encountered.)

Anyway. At the end of the trip comes another challenge: you have to pack up your shopping and all the presents in a deceiving way. Those carry-ons? Nothing essential in there, just all the heavy books -- this makes the suitcases a little lighter. A little. The cheerios are in sturdy boxes, the maple syrup in plastic canisters, the electronics hidden away in ingenious ways. You make really begging eyes at the check-in counter and place your sweetly smiling toddler on the counter. You hope that the booster seat will be allowed as additional luggage but not count towards your six pieces. And that she'll block the seat next to you for your under-two-year-old without a seat. And then, on the long flight back to your country of residence, after weeks of stress and little sleep, your kids decide to get sick. right. now.

So why do we do these home visits, you may ask yourself?

Well, because we miss our home countries. Because we miss our relatives and friends (and since they don't come to visit, we have to go). Because some of our relatives are getting older and older, and more frail, and we want them to see the kids as much as possible. Because we want to buy cheerios and eat good Thai food and hang out in book shops for hours. Because we want to walk our feet hot and stinky in Dupont Circle and look at our old place on New Hampshire Avenue, reminiscing about good old times. (Because I have to for green card reasons.) Because it's where our roots are. We will always return.

But, when we finally get out of that taxi from the airport, and open up our front door, when we step into our house and dump the luggage, when the kids immediately recover and pull out all their toys, we breathe a deep sigh of relief. We look at each other, and we realize - we're finally back home.

And we desperately need a vacation.

Not all those who wander are lost (1)

Yesterday, my "Mommy group" had a good-bye dinner for one of our friends -- she is moving to South Africa with her family next week. We had excellent Indian food, quietly brushed some tears away, and gossiped about our kids. We all promised to visit M. in Johannesburg one day -- and I think we all were aware that it was unlikely anyone of us would actually live up to that promise, as honestly meant as it was. Expats say good-bye all the time, and we know that friendships often taper off with a move, despite best intentions.

Being an expat is mostly a chosen way of life. The people who live abroad are as diverse as any random group of people -- they are missionaries, high ranking CEO's, diplomats, impoverished language teachers, engineers, aid workers, military personnel. Some have a vision, some don't. Most are curious about the country they live in but many live in bubbles, barely touching the outside world. A large percentage is moving from country to country, while others just venture outside their homeland for a year or two as some sort of family sabbatical.

However, expats also have a lot in common. One of the elements less talked about is the loneliness.

It's you and your family alone in a way that not even those who coined the term "nuclear family" could envision. Consider for a moment a typical nuclear family: wife, husband, child. Consider now the context within which that family system functions when it has lived in one place for an extended period of time. Ongoing relationships have been cultivated: friends, colleagues, neighbours, doctors, teachers, religious leaders, shopkeepers... These extended relationships surround and enfold the nuclear family. In most societies, and often even in the United States, you can add relatives to that web of relationship: parents and grandparents, siblings, nephews and nieces, aunts, uncles and cousins live nearby. The geographically-stable nuclear family is part of a larger relationship system that nurtures and supports the family as a whole and is available to help its individual members.

Consider now a typical internationally-mobile family: wife, husband, child. No relatives nearby. No web of ongoing relationships -- except those renewed on home-leave, those cultivated at a distance via annual holiday greetings, or, for the multi-mover, those expatriate friends from prior postings encountered again in the new location. The larger support system available to the internationally-mobile family consists of the wage-earner's employing organization, the school(s) the children attend, and the expatriate community itself. This support system, however, has some fundamental limitations.

[..]

Thus, given these realities, the internationally-mobile family is the ultimate of nuclear families. Members must rely foremost on one another: spouse on spouse, sibling on sibling, child on parent and even parent on child. In the final analysis, an internationally-mobile family must sink or swim on its own.
www.worldweave.com

Visitors often complain about the expat community. It's so tight, they say. Why don't you interact more with the locals? Why do you keep to yourselves so much?

Well, it's because other expats understand. They understand the stress of home visits. They understand that if you don't keep in touch with relatives and friends, connections will break. They understand the guilt about ripping the kids out of school, planting them into yet a new country, a new language, a new culture. They understand the importance of maple syrup and cheerios. They understand $600 phone bills. They understand the frustration of seeing eyes glazing over when you start a story with "when we...".

Let me explain this a little.

Keeping in touch. It's a rule of life -- the one who goes away has to keep in touch. The simple truth is, life goes on without you. You're just one person missing from a big social net, that's barely noticeable. So you, as the expat, are the one to make those phone calls home -- that's why we have $600 phone bills. Asking relatives and friends why they don't call us sometimes, we often get the answer it's so expensive, we didn't have a calling card, we didn't even know they have phones in Romania (I really did hear that once). Hm. Most of them don't even read our blog, although it has started out as a source of information for the family (the focus has shifted since, partly also because the family isn't reading it anyway).

In our life, there are only three exceptions to this general rule -- and those are my family, my mother-in-law, and our cybernet friends. My family lived as expats themselves (strictly speaking of parents and brothers here), so they know the feeling and especially my Mom is very good about keeping in touch -- we talk once a week, at least. My family also regularly visits our blog to see what's up. My mother-in-law writes emails on a regular basis. The cybernet friends, who often became friends in Real Life (TM), are an exception because our friendships started off with emails and chats, so it's not awkward to continue staying in touch that way. They also read our blog and even comment (my family usually comments to me on the phone). I really appreciate this interest in our lives. It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

However frustrating it is to be the ones doing the relationship maintenance, we are keeping it up. Sometimes, we get annoyed. After years of sending out 80+ Christmas cards, and getting five or six back, we finally decided to send fewer cards in 2004. Invariably, we received three "firsts", felt guilty about it, and will probably resume to send out mass mailings again this year. We're calling relatives and friends for their birthdays, we send presents and cards, we call when we haven't heard from someone in a while. $600 mean a lot of time on the phone, even with international rates.

But even so, often friendships don't survive an international move. They just... cease to exist. Or they take on a different dynamic. I have a friend who I talk to once or twice a year, but then we talk for hours. We still are friends and I value those rare talks. It's very different, though, from our daily phone calls when we still lived in the same city -- and saw each other almost daily.

(I also have to add that although we try, we are by no means perfect at this relationship upkeeping. We do forget to answer emails, we do drift out of touch with people not out of malice but out of sheer laziness. But overall, the points made above do apply.)

[Tomorrow: the stress of home visits, eyes glazing over, and how to get excess luggage on board without excess fees.]

They are out to get me

My allergies used to be the stuff of legend. Sneezing fits like the tarantella, my head changing shape, the works. But I would take this nifty prescription drug named Seldane, wash it down with some grapefruit juice, and be able to participate in NYC's smoky nightlife on a semi-regular basis.

Turns out Seldane can do bad things to one's heart, and so the US's Food and Drug Administration decided to pull it (but not until there was a substitute on the market). I don't take antihistamines any more, and oddly enough, my allergies are much better.

More recently, I developed a minor but rather painful achy-breaky thing, for which the cute doctor prescribed happy little pills of Vioxx. Hurrah!

Turns out Vioxx can do bad things to one's heart, and so the US's Food and Drug Administration decided to pull it (and there was already a substitute on the market). Flush! down went the Vioxx, to join the Seldane in providing the organisms of NYC's sewer system with interesting metabolites.

So I am currently fighting off a cold, which from long experience feels like it will turn into a painful sinus infection. You know, the kind that seem like a ninja is gently pushing his thumbs into your eyes all day, where your body only seems capable of producing pints of festive orange micrococcal mucus.

Since I have no intention of staying in bed this week, wondering what hospital technology will be like when I die, I decided to make some decongestant herbal tea.

Guess what?

You got it. Turns out that innocent herbal tea contained ephedra, which can do bad things to one's heart et cetera.

Sigh. So I made this instead.

Take an onion, chop it fine, and heat it in some oil. Add a bunch of chopped scallions, and a few stalks of chopped celery. Cook until the onions get clearish.

Add the mixture to a pot of canned chicken broth. Squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Let it simmer. (Here, I also added some 'pumpkin spice' mixture that an exgf left me. It's ground cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice.) Serve in a sipping bowl, soup mug, or (ahem) coffee cup.

There's also a winter cordial that is good in these situations. You take equal amounts of frozen raspberries, white sugar, and gin, mash them together, and let it sit in your freezer for a few weeks. Then you strain out the liqueur.

Not wanting to wait a few weeks, I listened to Snoop Dogg and mixed some gin and raspberry juice instead. I don't know whether this is helping my cold or doing bad things to my heart, but you know what? I don't care.

A Mestrovic in Bucharest

That was unexpected.

See, Bucharest is a good-sized city. So even after a year and a half, there are still some corners I haven't turned. On Friday I turned one, on the corner of Bulevardul Dacia and Strada Henri Coanda.

There's a little museum there, the Museum of Romanian Literature. I've always wondered what would be in a museum of literature -- old books? Statues of authors? -- but I've never found the time to go in. I crossed the street, and turned right instead of left...

...and there it was: the Mestrovic.

Okay: if you're not a fan of 20th century sculpture, you might not know Ivan Mestrovic. I wasn't myself, until I moved to the Balkans. Short version: he was certainly one of the greatest sculptors of the last 100 years, and there are some people who will argue that he was the greatest. Certainly he's the greatest sculptor ever to come out of the Balkans.

Mestrovic left pieces of his work all over the former Yugoslavia. I first had the delight of discovering them in Belgrade, and then found several more when we visited Zagreb. Even the mediocre ones are good, and the good ones are fantastic.

But I'd had no idea there was a Mestrovic piece here in Bucharest. And a big one, too.

It was a sculpture of Bratianu the Younger. Who he was... that's a whole post in its own right. In brief, he was the most influential politician in early 20th century Romania. Up until the First World War he was the country's great liberal leader. After that, well, the disaster of Romania's defeat in 1916 seems to have unhinged him a little. Long story.

But there was this little park, on the south side of Bulevardul Dacia, just a hundred meters or so from Strada Victorei. (Okay, if you're not from Bucharest, this is right in the center of the city. The American Embassy, the Hilton Hotel and the Goethe Institute are all within a few minutes walk.) And this little park, maybe thirty or forty meters on a side, had obviously been designed as a setting for the Mestrovic. In the center, set just a little back from the street, Bratianu sat on his stone seat, head tilted a little, watching the world go by.

It was a good Mestrovic. He'd caught the man's intelligence and energy, but also his neurotic sensitivity and vanity. The limbs were twisted in a way that subtly suggested the contortions of a mind perpetually at war with itself. The tilt of the head looked statesmanlike from one angle, but walk a step or two and you saw a great ego looking down its nose at you. The brow was furrowed, the eyes were looking within. A good Mestrovic, maybe a great Mestrovic...

...and it was trashed. The stone chair was covered with graffiti, as were the great stone legs. Several fingers had been chipped off. The little park had no benches, no flower gardens, no fountains; it was surrounded by crumbling, ugly houses, defaced by graffitti and garbage. There were no mothers with toddlers, no chess-playing old people, no teenagers with skateboards. The park had become a place for dogs to crap in. And nobody, it was clear, gave a damn about the Mestrovic.

Okay, there are much worse things going on in Bucharest than a neglected statue, however fine. Poverty, human misery, lives bent and broken by misgovernment in a hundred different ways. (See Claudia's last post, for instance.)

Still... it's like spitting on a Rembrandt. Just not something you expect to see in a civilized place.

A Fistful of Euros

Claudia and I have joined the team at A Fistful of Euros. This is a group blog about, well, things European.

I'm already signed up to be a guest blogger on tacitus.org (where I post very occasionally) and The Head Heeb (where I haven't managed to post once yet), and then of course there's this blog. Which (you've noticed if you've been reading regularly) sometimes goes for a week without a post, because work is intense or the kids or sick or, well, something. So I make no promises as to frequency or quality of posting.

But it's a good blog, run by some good people, and we'll try to keep our end up.

'tis the season

Oh, yes, and and if you think that you will be busy, imagine our situation. We're US and German living in Romania, and this is our holiday plan for the next three months:

October 31: Halloween (US)
November 2: Election Day (US)
November 11: St. Martin's Day (GER, kids parade outside with paper laterns)
November 25: Thanksgiving (US)
December 1: National Day (RO)
December 6: St. Nikolaus Day (GER, kids get their boots filled with goodies)
December 24: Christmas Eve (GER, presents for the kids)
December 25: Christmas (US, presents for the kids)
December 31: New Year's Eve (US, GER, RO)
January 6: Epiphany (GER, end of Christmas season)

Oh, and my birthday is somewhere in there, too.

Now, many of those holidays are very much kid-oriented. They also often requires certain equipment and decoration, like pumpkins, paper laterns, turkeys, cranberry sauce, advent wreath, etc.
Some of these can be quite a challenge here in Romania. I placed a huge order of craft supplies with a German craft store some days ago. My Mom will send the package on to us and then we can make paper laterns for St. Martin's. Romania is not very well stocked with craft supplies (which makes sense when you think about it but that is maybe a topic for another post some day.)
I'm also trying to get my hands on one of the original US turkeys that the US Embassy imports for their staff. Now, we're not on the list of the lucky ones who are eligible, but... well, let's just say I have negotiations going on.

We also bought a pumpkin and carved it. Now, that was quite a task. First, there were no suitable pumpkins to be had on the market. We went out to the countryside and ended up buying a huge but green pumpkin. At least it was orange inside and made a nice jack'o'lantern. The kids loved it.

Unfortunately, the fact that it was easy to carve also meant that it decayed within three days. But, wait! Yesterday, all of a sudden the market was flooded with huge orange pumpkins. I bought two and we carved them yesterday evening. They were incredibly tough and difficult to cut but we hope this means they will last at least until Sunday.

Halloween never really did it for me. I guess because I didn't grow up with it. However, this year, it is a lot of fun -- because Alan and David are getting such a kick out of it. We cut spiders out of paper and hung them up over the dinner table and Alan made little tissue ghosts at his school. Every morning, David thoughtfully looks at the chandelier and then blows to make the spiders dance. They cheer over the jack'o'lantern. Alan runs around in this batman costume all day long. It's great fun.

Since Alan's school's out this week, we had an early Halloween last Friday. The school is situated in the French Village complex, and seven local parents volunteered to open their houses to trick'n'treaters.

So we met in the afternoon, with the kids all dressed up, and started trick or treating. There were about fifty kids, divided into six or so groups. I have to say that Alan got the hang of knocking on doors and getting candy for it pretty quickly. He was dressed up as Batman (he was very proud and kept saying "I'm a bad man!"), and David was a gorilla. My little pudgy gorilla, he was incredibly cute.

Next stop: St. Martin's.

Earthquake

A little one. Just a couple of minutes ago.

There was a low rumbling, sort of like a subway train going underneath the house, but... rhythmic. Pulsing, with a frequency of about half a second. The desk lamp by the computer -- it's one of those with the jointed arm and the cone around the bulb -- began to sway back and forth. I felt my chair going up and down, like it was going on rollers down a bumpy road, and then the whole house began to sway.

We ran to the kids' room. I picked up Alan, Claudia grabbed David, and we stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs. That's what they tell you: stand in a doorway, if you don't have time to get outside.

And then it stopped.

Dogs were barking up and down the street, and a minute later a confused flock of birds went cawing and creaking overhead in the darkness. But then everything got quiet again. It's very quiet now. We don't hear any sirens or anything. Like I said: a little one.

Much of Bucharest was flattened by an earthquake in 1977; the whole middle and lower Balkan region is tectonically unstable. Earthquakes are a fact of life here, and there's nothing to be done about it.

We're going to go back to bed now. Eventually we'll sleep.

Walking down Strada Roma

Sunday evening I took the boys for a walk down Strada Roma.

We live in a residential neighborhood where all the streets are named after capitals: Strada Paris, Strada Londra, Strada Roma and Stockholm and Brasilia. I like walking down Strada Roma because it's lined with lovely old houses with little yards full of overgrown flowers and cats. It's nice to walk there by myself; it's even nicer with the boys, because there's always something happening. A woman sweeping the sidewalk; a man too drunk to walk straight. Birds bathing in a sidewalk puddle. Two teenagers working on a car (with power tools!). Children on bicycles, a friendly dog, interesting bugs. Something.

At the end of Strada Roma, just south of Piatsa Dorobant' (that's the one with the bust of Brancusi), is a high school. The high school is shaped like three sides of a rectangle, with the street going past it making the fourth. Inside the rectangle is the school yard: a concrete playground with a couple of basketball courts and an open area where boys play soccer. The playground is separated from the street by a high wall with a couple of gates in it.

So we're walking along, David in the stroller and Alan holding my hand, and we've just reached the schoolyard gate. We pause to look inside. Alan likes to go inside and watch the boys playing ball. A car is going slowly down the street behind us. I tell Alan we won't go inside, we have to go home, but we can watch the ball players for a minute or two. One of the boys kicks the ball high. Alan turns to say something to me --

and BANG! There's a crash from the street, just a few meters behind us. I whirl around, and there are little bits of shiny silver glass /everywhere/. It takes a moment to figure out what's happened: the soccer ball has gone high over the wall and, by unlucky chance, has hit the side mirror of the one car that was going down the street. Hit it dead on, and hard: the mirror has shattered explosively.

The car stopped dead. The ball came down from high in the air, bounced off the curb, dribbled slowly into the middle of the street. There was silence for perhaps a count of three.

Then a young woman got out of the car and stared at the place where her mirror had been. The ball was dribbling slowly to a halt in the middle of the street. Some boys had climbed up on the wall between playground and sidewalk; they started to point and yell, in that peculiar hooting way that is unique to teenage boys worldwide.

The young woman suddenly grabbed the ball, threw it into her car, and got back inside. Then -- to cries of despair from the ball players -- she drove off. Everyone stared after the car until it disappeared around the corner into the piatsa with the bust of Brancusi.

And that was that.

I'm amused

Very amusing.

Goodbye to Romance, the Alex Skolnick Trio

I first heard the Alex Skolnick Trio playing in the background of a Brooklyn cafe. Jazz electric guitar was being played with talent and intelligence, the melody at the knife-edge of familiarity. And I listened to it with pleasure, because there is so much bad extruded jazz product out there, playing in the background of too many places, when I had a small mental jolt as I realized what song the arrangement was based on. It was "No One Like You", by the Scorpions, the 80s German metal band. I can't wait for the nights with you. You know the one.

The guitarist was Alex Skolnick, and yes, the album Goodbye to Romance: Standards for a New Generation is mainly jazz arrangements of hard rock and metal classics. I am going to guess that most readers of this blog have not heard of Testament, so I won't bring up Skolnick's past career in metal. But, as a rule, an ironic cross-genre cover is artistically rather easy. It's much harder to get deep into the soul of a song and rework it from the inside out. And it takes a special sort of sympathy to do that to Kiss's "Detroit Rock City".

The Alex Skolnick Trio has that sympathy. Goodbye to Romance is a very winning album. Certainly it won me over.

(Coincidentally enough, they have a new CD coming out this week, called Transformation, with more original compositions, and you know, Judas Priest. Can't wait.)

Ah! Internet!

After two days of very intermittent internet access and unsuccessful protestations I finally threatened Astral with refunds for those days. They really don't like refunds. I think it's because their accounting system isn't equipped for that or so.

Anyhow, they showed up five men strong around noon and lo and behold, it turned out that the outside cable, the one that is strung from the main line to our house, needed to be replaced. Quick and efficient, that's what I like. The new cable works like a charm (knock on wood!) and we've been online for almost ten consecutive minutes now. Yay!

Astral is a weird company. They only have two modes: super-competent and dreadful. I like the super-competent part very much.

Pop Quiz Friday: That Shakespeherian Rag

Two bits of Shakespeare pastiche with Communist transition themes. Can you identify their authors?

Here's the first:

BREZHNEV: What of the brotherlands, of Comecon?

ANDROPOV: The sledded Polacks grumble in their yards.
They hearken to, on shortwave radio
that turbulent priest, Pope Wojtyla,
and bide their time. The Bulgars hard
oppress their Turks. The Czechs
bounce currency abroad and Semtex too
and do protest too much their fealty.
The Magyars boast themselves
the happiest barrack in the People's camp.
Our Germans seethe
with discontent at that dividing Wall.
As to our brother Serbs, what can I say?
Their house of cards may topple any day.

(Uproar.)

and the second:

SIHANOUK: I know perfectly well the United States is immense, but I do not think an ambassador does honor to his country by characterizing the country that receives him as "rinky-dink"!

GENERAL TABER: We didn't say that!

SIHANOUK: Mr. McClintock doesn't stand on ceremony in front of servants, journalists, and even diplomats. Can't you accord us the same treatment as countries much smaller than ours yet which you respect? Do you say "Little Belgium"? "Tiny Israel"? You reserve contempt for Cambodia alone and foreordain its appearance. You're systematically shrinking us. Why, just look at the newspapers. First Cambodia is small, then it's very small, the next day I read that it's extremely small, now it's miniscule, a pocket kingdom, a useless remnant, an eleventh toe, it's a speck of dust on your eye, a scab, it's nothing! Just where is it? It's going to disappear. It has disappeared!

(Lon Nol signals behind his back that Sihanouk is crazy and should not be paid attention to.)

Hint: they're not the same person.

Wiggly toes

My god-daughter Catie had her casts removed yesterday! She's had them on since she was six weeks old, to help correct the development of her feet and hips. Yes, she is wiggling her toes again. Yay!

Well, anyway. To someone who grew up on tales of heroic surgeries (i.e., me), it was surprising to learn that the casting method used with Catie is not only as good as corrective surgery on a clubbed foot, but in fact is significantly superior.

The man who developed this method, Doctor Ignacio Ponseti, celebrated his 90th birthday earlier this month. He was recently profiled in the alumni magazine of the University of Iowa, where he has been affiliated for over sixty years:

Dr. Ignacio Ponseti walks briskly down the hospital hallway, stopping briefly to ask a clinic nurse, "Is the baby here yet?"

"No," she says. "Not yet."

"I have an album at home of my babies," Ponseti tells his companion. "These are all very important babies."

I'm going to give you Ponseti's own words on his method, its development, and its importance, because I found them fascinating (and who knows, you might too), and I think my own paraphrasing would diminish them. They're taken from a pamphlet put out by Global-HELP -- Health Education Low-cost Publications -- on the Ponseti method in use around the world, Clubfoot: Ponseti Management, with an emphasis on a recent successful program in Uganda. (Warning, it's a 1584K PDF file, with medical photography that might be distressing to some readers.) All ellipses are mine, mainly parts that would require prior knowledge of foot anatomy and development.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 babies are born worldwide each year with congenital clubfoot. Eighty percent of the cases occur in developing nations. Most are untreated or poorly treated. Neglected clubfoot causes crushing physical, social, psychological, and financial burdens on the patients, their families, and the society. Globally, neglected clubfoot is the most serious cause of physical disability among congenital musculoskeletal defects.

In developed countries, many children with clubfoot undergo extensive corrective surgery, often with disturbing failures and complications. The need for one or more revision surgeries is common. Although the foot looks better after surgery, it is stiff, weak, and often painful. After adolescence, pain increases and often becomes crippling.

Clubfoot in an otherwise normal child can be corrected in 2 months or less with our method of manipulations and plaster cast applications, with minimal or no surgery. This was proven by the results of our 35-year follow-up study and confirmed in many clinics around the world.

This method is particularly suited for developing countries where there are few orthopaedic surgeons. The technique is easy to learn by allied health professionals, such as therapists and orthopaedic assistants. A well-organized health system is needed to ensure that parents follow the instructions for use of the foot abduction brace to prevent relapses.

The treatment is economical and easy on the babies. If well implemented, it will greatly decrease the number of clubfoot cripples.

In the mid 1940s, I examined 22 patients with clubfoot that had been surgically treated in the 1920s by Arthur Steindler, a good surgeon. The feet had become rigid, weak, and painful... When operating on relapses, I noticed severe scarring in the foot and stiffness in the misshapen joints... After a few years of this experience, I was convinced that surgery was the wrong approach for treatment of clubfoot.

A study of histological sections of ligaments from virgin clubfeet, obtained in the operating room and from fetuses and stillborns, revealed that the abundant young collagen in the ligaments was wavy, was very cellular, and could be easily stretched. I conceived, therefore, that the displaced navicular, cuboid, and calcaneus could be gradually abducted under the talus without cutting any of the tarsal ligaments. I discovered that this was so based on cineradiography of clubfeet I had partially or fully reduced without surgery...

My casting technique was learned from Böhler and applied during the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939 when treating more than 2,000 war-wound fractures with unpadded plaster casts. Precise, gentle molding of the plaster over the reduced subluxations of the tarsal bones of a clubfoot is just as basic as the molding of a plaster cast on a well-reduced fracture...

It was disappointing that my first article on congenital clubfoot, published in the The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery in March 1963, was disregarded. It was not carefully read and, therefore, not understood. My article on congenital metatarsus adductus, published in the same journal in June 1966, was easily understood, perhaps because the deformity occurs in one plane. The approach was immediately accepted, and the illustrations were copied in most textbooks.

A few orthopaedic surgeons studied my technique and began to apply it only after the publication of our long-term follow-up article in 1995, the publication of my book a year later, and the posting of Internet support group web sites by parents of babies whose clubfoot I had treated. I have been reprimanded for not pushing the method more forcefully from the beginning...

I. Ponseti, 2003

Alas, it seems Doctor Ponseti still feels troubled over not advocating his method more strongly in the 1960s. But it's difficult to know what more he could have done, since his method sometimes meets resistance even today. I wish him an easy heart. He's done more than most.

Pop quiz Friday!

An odd one: what do Pisistratus, Vuk Karadzic, and John A. Lomax have in common?

Answer or confirmation when I get back from the Shore.

The outside view

I'm married to an American and my kids are half Americans (OK, a quarter, really -- they have more passports than some small countries issue). Needless to say that I love them dearly. My in-laws are Americans, my best friend is American... one cannot say that my sentiments are anti-American. Right? Still, some of the things that are going on in the US these days scare the living daylights out of me.

Some numbers.

When Bush was made President in 2000, despite having fewer votes than Al Gore, the budget of the Pentagon amounted to 280.8 billion dollars. In 2001, the budget was raised by 8.8% to 305.4 billion, in 2002 by 12.4% to 343.2 billion and in 2003 by 15.4% to 396.1 billion US dollars.

The raise from 2002 to 2003 was 53 billion dollars. This raise alone is more than any other country in the world spends on its military (with the possible exception of Russia).

The budget in 2003 of 396.1 billion dollars is more then 26 times as much as of all the axis of evil nations taken together -- Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Lybia, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

If we move to the States in a couple of years, will there be any schools left? Roads? Public transportation? Libraries?

Just wondering.

Name that author!

Pop Quiz Friday continues with the following paragraph from the bad old days.

Traian handed Gigi into the china-closet elevator, aligned the swinging doors, pressed the button. Squeezed into a corner, Corde lifted up his coat collar, tied the muffler over it tightly, bracing himself for the street. Minna looked sternly absentminded; gracefuly dissociated as well. By the small light, her white face was dark under the eyes. The outward curve of her upper lip, the pressure marks of her severe chin, almost made a stranger of her. Corde was carrying the plastic bag with the Kents in it. Minna got into the front seat of the Dacia while Traian was hooking up the windshield wipers -- they would be stolen here if you didn't lock them in the glove compartment. "Albert, give me the cigarettes," she said. When Traian sat behind the wheel, Minna spoke to him, handed him one of the cartons. He opened it and filled the door pocket with Kents. No surprise, no problem; he was on. He drove to the hospital. Gigi, sitting beside Corde in the back seat, seemed incapable of speaking.

A chilly passage from a wintry novel. It ain't on Google -- I checked -- but it can be found in other places. But that would be wrong.

Imponderables

You know, when Doug and Claudia asked me to guest on this blog, I was kind of bemused. I really had no idea what I should write about. I mean, it's Halfway down the Danube. It has a theme. Its readers expect erudite articles on Romanian monetary policy, not some guy in Brooklyn rambling about the punk rock episode of Quincy, or wondering when the Kool-Aid guy started wearing pants.

But finally, here's a question that's topical for this blog: female pop stars from the former Yugoslavia... why haven't they taken over the world? I mean, Ceca. Severina. Well, that's two, but do you really need more? Okay, I'll throw in the back-up dancers from Bosnia-Hercegovina's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest.

I swear, if Laibach was a girl band, we'd all be speaking German today.

Just plain dumb

EU immigration policy, that is.

Eastern Europe is full of smart, ambitious, hard-working young people who would jump at the chance to move to Germany or France or Britain. In the last three years, we've met engineers, doctors, nurses, software designers, journalists, economists, entrepreneurs of every sort imaginable.

Most of these people are under 35. Over that age, people are usually too settled to seriously consider emigrating (though there are exceptions). Below it, though... well, the younger an educated person is, in this part of the world, the more likely it is that they're at least thinking about leaving. And the converse seems to be true, too: the more educated a young person is, the stronger the pull of the West.

(This makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If you're young but unskilled... well, being a bricklayer in Spain or Germany is not that much better than being a bricklayer in Serbia or Romania. A software engineer in the West, on the other hand, can make quite a lot more money. Even adjusting for the higher cost of living, it's a very rational decision.)

Serbia and Romania are not unusual. There are thousands and thousands of people like this, all over Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, most of the EU countries are facing a looming demographic crisis. In the next couple of decades, they're not going to have enough people of working age to support the ever-growing ranks of the nonworking elderly. From Italy to Belgium, western Europe desperately needs more hard-working young people.

And now all these new countries -- full of smart, ambitious young people who would very much like to move West -- have just joined the EU. Hungarian electricians, Polish computer programmers, Slovakian mechanical engineers, Latvian health care workers: they're all available now for recruitment to the west.

So, of course, the EU member's response to this is....

...to slam the door shut. Of the 15 old EU member states, every one but Ireland chose to place sharp restrictions on the free movement of people from the 10 new members. The Germans, the Italians, the Swedes and Dutch and French: they're all closing their doors. And in most cases, it looks like they plan to keep them closed for the maximum time allowable -- seven years. So they're not going to take advantage of this opportunity until 2011.

Now, there are some reasons for this. In roughly decreasing order of respectability, they are:

1) High unemployment in most EU countries. (Why would we want thousands of Lithuanians and Poles coming here, when we don't have enough jobs for our own people?)

2) Fear that the newcomers will go on welfare or otherwise place a burden on the state.

3) Fear that the immigrants will not integrate well. (We already have enough of a problem with the Turks/West Indians/Pakistanis/'beurres'. Why should we bring in a bunch of Slavs too?) This includes fear that the immigrants will bring bad habits or undesirable connections from their home countries.

4) Confusion of the issues; most commonly, a lumping together of legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and refugees/asylum seekers.

5) Gypsies. I hate to say it, but there it is. It's hard to avoid the impression that "Eas

Halfway down the East River

Hi all. This is Carlos, the mysterious fellow who has occasionally been mentioned on the pages of this blog. This is something of a test post, but I'd still like to thank Claudia and Doug for letting me post whatever crosses my mind here. (They may yet regret this.) I'm a first time blogger, but a long time commenter. As you can see from the title of this post, I'm not actually anywhere near the Balkans (or even the Carpathians) at the moment, being in sunny Brooklyn, New York. I have a bunch of terribly obscure hobbies, unkempt hair, no tattoos, I'm an Aries, and my favorite color is blue. And yes, I do drink an awful lot of coffee. Soon I will have a real post.

Things the EU really needs (in addition to love)

I'm shamelessly lifting this from a recent post at Idle Words, because it's so good. (And a tip of the hat to Dragos' ever-informative Argumente for bringing it to my attention.)

So: Things the European Union Really Needs...

A common foreign policy
Consensus about the proper scope of federal rule
A credible army
Mandatory musical re-education camps
A meaningful role for the European parliament
Decent Mexican food
Reductions in bureaucracy
Agricultural reform
Some degree of sovereign power
A constitution
24 hour convenience stores
Jobs
An increase in the birth rate
A sane immigration policy
Deportation of all Eurovision contestants to karaoke bars in Central Asia
Lower taxes
Aircraft carriers
Air conditioning

Just a couple of notes...

1) What is it with Europeans and Mexican food? Y'all love Mexican food. We know you can cook. Why, in a continent of 450 million people, are there only three decent Mexican restaurants?

2) *A* constitution, but not *that* constitution.

3) I know it's all about antiquated labor laws and all that. But you know you want to go to 7-11 half an hour after midnight to score some Ben & Jerry's.

Ooh, ooh, there's my addition to the list. Really excellent mass-market ice cream. Not pretty good -- you have that -- but incredibly excellent. Ben & Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs. The stuff that makes you eat a pint (or 0.45 liters) at a sitting and then sit numbed, realizing you've just snarfed down something like 1500 calories, but unable to in any way regret it.

You want it. You know you want it. And you want it now... not from 8 to 8 Monday-Friday, 8 to 2 Saturday, and never on Sunday ever. Now.

Read the whole post, BTW. "In the future, every major historical event will have a crap soundtrack." One to watch.

Superman's Birthday

Today is February 29th. That is, as everyone knows, it is Superman's birthday.

Here in Bucharest, it's been a warm and sunny day. Very warm and very sunny. In fact... I don't dare use the S-word. But I'll live dangerously, and say that it was very spring-like.

This comes after several days of warm and damp weather, which has washed away the last of the snow and brought tiny green buds to the tips of the trees. This morning we walked past a street vendor who was selling flowers, and we noticed bees buzzing around his blooms. The last couple of nights have been foggy, and in the evening we've heard the doves calling to each other. It's been sun and cloud, sun and cloud; in the street outside our house, Alan has been jumping into puddles with his yellow rubber boots, SPLASH.

It's almost like... an extended period of warm weather.

We're crawly amphibians!

After weeks and weeks of Flippery Fish, we're Crawly Amphibians, yay!

And if this means nothing to you, you must spend lots of hours not logged on to the internet. Good for you. And, you know what, I might just as well log off and take a bite of that real life myself now. Off I go.

Halfway down the Tigris?

Not.

But I have an awful lot of friends who are/go to Baghdad and I just found out that my ex-boyfriend is there also.

Doug's company is now starting to bid on contracts there.

[Sigh] In a year or two, who knows?

Me, I like Bucharest just fine, thank you very much.

ADDENDUM (two hours later): OK, the ex is actually safely back in Florida since January 30. Good. One less to worry about. (I worry about exes because I'm a nice person. Just in case you wondered.)

Late at the Office

Nothing particularly Balkan about this post, either. It's 11:30 at night, I'm still in the office. Doesn't happen that often, but then sometimes it does. I had a three-hour meeting that stretched to five hours, I got handed an extra assignment on short notice (Bechtel is coming to town. Make them happy), my deputy is working at half power because her son is sick, I got into a train crash situation with a couple of reports coming due one day apart. (Okay, that last one is my own fault.)

Here's something that has changed from my single days: I used to sort of like working late. I mean, not like like, but it was kinda cool having the whole office to myself. I could wander around in shorts and t-shirt, talk to myself, make pots of coffee just the way I liked them, noodle around online...

No more. Now I just want to finish up and go home. I miss my wife and kids. Also, "late" is a lot earlier than it used to be.

Okay, one Balkan thing. The office has a maid-cook-factotum: Carmen. Every morning, Carmen comes to the office early, an hour or more before the rest of us. She tidies up, empties the wastebaskets, and brews that crucial first pot. When I get in (much later), she's usually got a cup of hot coffee on my desk before I've read my first e-mail.

This is a subset of the general charming Balkan tradition of having either coffee or tea or mineral water served, rather formally, at every single meeting. I like this quite a bit, actually. (But it does require either a strong will or strong kidneys.)

Anyway. Carmen's coffee is -- whisper it -- not that great (Claudia's is better, of course), but there is something very nice and ceremonial about getting a cup of coffee handed to you right at the beginning of your work day.

Which, in this case, will be about nine hours from right now.

Off I go.

Gaston Julia

Today is the 111th birthday of Gaston Julia, the great mathematician and creator of the famous Julia fractals. Google is celebrating this with a neat little decoration on their logo.

Why is this worth mentioning?

Well, I remember my brother writing his High School graduation paper in physics on the iteration of a rational function f in 1987. Back then, the whole craze about what in German we called "Apfelmännchen" -- apple manikins -- was just about to start. My brother told me that I could impress anybody by calling them "Julia fractals" or "Mandelbrot fractals" instead, Mandelbrot being the mathematician who re-discovered Julia's work and put the function into a computer in the 1970s.

I also remember him calculating fractals on his Commodore-64 computer, then printing them out on the needle printer at school. Boy, those calculations took days! How things have changed in over 15 years. Today, you can download the pictures from the internet in seconds.

Courtesy of www.nd.edu/~jmoody/fract/

Apropos of nothing whatsoever connected with the Balkans.

Romanian 101

So we're all learning Romaneste. Knowing that Romanian is a close relative to Italian and Spanish, you'd think it's easy, eh? Not so.

OK, it's not as hard as Serbian. But it's definitely not as easy as Italian or Spanish. That's because Romanian is a Romance language with a twist. Let's hear it from the experts:

Romanian is a Romance language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European family.

[...]

Romanian is an inflected language comparable to other Romance languages. However, unlike other Romance languages, Romanian has retained a case system. It uses two nominal cases: the nominative/accusative and genitive/dative. A third and rarely used case, the vocative, is a Slavic influence and is in the process of disappearing. Three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, and irregular (masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural) are distinguished. Word order is Subject-Verb-Object, although OVS also occurs.

Romanian has seven vowels and three diphthongs. Consonant clusters occur at the beginning of syllables, which is unusual among Romance languages. Stress can occur on any syllable. Varying the stressed syllable can change meaning.

Romanian has borrowed vocabulary from the surrounding Slavic languages, most noticeably in the religious sphere. Turkish and Greek words entered the language during the period that the Greeks rules Romania on behalf of the Turks, from 1711-1821.

The UCLA Language Materials Project

You got that? Cases. Stresses that shift meaning. Slavic loan words. Irregular genders. Diphtongs.

If that's not enough, there is also the confusing reform of the Communist orthographic reform: nowadays, you can choose whether you want to spell the word for "bread" pîine or pâine.

Which brings us to pronunciation. The mysterious "î" and "â" are pronounced the same way. Just purse your lips to say 'ee' but say 'oo' instead. (The Eastern Europe Phrasebook by Lonely Planet). Yay, right. The letter "ã" which is really not an 'a' with a tilde but an 'a' with an upside down circumflex, is pronounced like a mixture between "a" and "e". (I couldn't find that one on an ISO chart.) "i" isn't pronounced at the end of the word. At least, that's how it sounds to us. No, say the Romanians, it is pronounced but only very slightly. If I listen very closely, I hear some sort of very aspirated nothing.

Indefinite articles are in front of the noun, definite articles and plurals are added to the noun as suffixes:

- un taxi: a taxi
- taxiul: the taxi
- taxiurile: the taxis

The suffix changes to indicate whether the noun is singular or plural, masculine, feminine or neuter. So, instead of "la" and "le" and "un" and "une", one painstakingly has to learn the plurals of every single word. There are rules but there are also exceptions to the rules, so it's really much easier to learn all the variants of the noun you're just trying to memorize. Or forget about the plurals and articles and stick with your indefinite singular -- people will understand you anyway.

I have to say that Romanians are very charmed by a stranger trying to speak their language and react enthusiastically. Now, if that stranger happens to be a not-quite-2-year-old with blonde hair, green eyes, and a big smile, he'll get free pastries for saying "buna!" (hi!) in the bakery, while his mother struggles with "pâine". There is no justice.

Playing with numbers

"Don't trust any statistic you haven't faked yourself."

Even though, I like stats and graphs because sometimes, they can throw your own prejudices back into your face. Or haven't you heard that there are more car thefts in Romania than in Germany? Huh? Everybody knows that, right?

At NationMaster.com one can generate graphs about all sorts of odd things. They get their numbers from the UNO, UNESCO, CIA, WHO and so forth and put them into neat little graphs.

I've played around some, comparing Romania to OECD countries unless otherwise indicated. Here are some of the -- sometimes rather surprising -- results:

1. Maternal mortality per 100,000 births: Romania 42, USA and Germany 8. Romania is ranked no. 3 after Turkey (130) and Mexico (55).

2. Infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births: 1. Turkey (45.77), 2. Mexico (24.52) and 3. Romania (18.88). USA is ranked no. 8 (6.69) and Germany is no. 21 (4.65). The average mortality rate worldwide is 37.08. On this worldwide scale, Romania ranks on place 129, the US 184 and Germany 210.

3. Pupil-teacher ratio, primary level (average number of pupils per teacher in primary education): 1. Turkey (27.7), 5. Romania (19.2), 12. USA (15.4), 14. Germany (14.8).

4. Pesticide use (1996) in kg/hectare cropland: 21. Germany (2085.00), 22. Romania (1617.00), 23. United States (1599.00), and, because it's ranked up front so many times, 25. Turkey (1145.00). No. 1 is Italy with 19288.00 kg.

5. Car thefts per 1,000 people: 1. Australia (7.12), 9. USA (4.09), 22. Germany (1) and Romania, surprise!, comes in last this time: 26. Romania (0.2).

6. Birth rate per 1,000 (2002 estimates): 1. Mexico (22.36 births), 2. Turkey (17.95 births), 3. Ireland (14.62), 7. United States (14.1 births), 17. Romania (10.81 births). Last ones are 30. Germany (8.99 births) and 31. Italy (8.93 births).

I like the car theft one best. Of course, maybe it's so low here because everybody has a car alarm? Go figure.

Stupid Mozilla

Something about Mozilla interacts with Claudia's laptop in a way that, now and then, causes slowdowns and freezes.

A few minutes ago, it started again, just as I was finishing a long post. Alarmed, I hit 'Save'... and the whole damn thing froze solid. I gave it about fifteen minutes before I finally gave up hope and hit Ctrl-Alt-De. Whoosh, gone.

I thought it was a pretty good post, too. It was about Ivo Ardelean, the investigative journalist who was beaten in Timisoara last month; my indirect connection to him; and the international attention that his case (and others like it) has attracted.

But I just can't bring myself to do it over again.

Well, here's a link, and here's another. No arrests have been made, nor are any expected. I'll write about it again sometime, maybe.

Stupid mozilla.

Bah.

The Train Station, Again

Sunday morning Alan and I went to the Gara de Nord again.

It's about 3 km (a bit less than two miles) from the apartment. Usually that's about half an hour's walk, but with the snow it was closer to an hour. We bundled him up in multiple many layers of clothing, plus blanket and little footwarmer, and put him in the big three-wheel stroller.

He couldn't really move, but he rolled his eyes around a lot.

It was fairly quiet at the train station -- Sunday morning, I suppose. I bought this week's Economist, then I took Alan out of the stroller and put him up on my shoulders, and we went and looked at trains. Alan watched the loading and unloading with interest, and then waved to the trains going away -- bye bye!

After half an hour of this, we went to the McDonalds in the station, and had a cup of coffee (for me) and a large fries (for both of us). Alan is still rather thin after his illness, so I encouraged him to eat; he wasn't terribly interested, but took a dozen or so fries in a spirit of companionship. Then we went and looked at trains again.

Two changes at the Gara de Nord. One, there were a couple of security guards at the entrance to the coffee shop, charging the 4000 lei "station entrance" fee. I guess they finally realized that the coffee shop was a loophole in, uh, station security.

Second, there was an interesting new train. It's called the Blue Arrow, and it's the "snow train" to take skiers up to to the mountains. It's a small train -- just two cars -- but it looks very modern, all streamlined white plastic. And when it left the station, it left fast. And apparently it gets up to Brasov in less than three hours. Maybe we should give it a try.

Alan fell asleep in the stroller on the way back. I put stroller, Alan and all in the quiet spot under the staircase, and he slept for a couple of hours there.

And that was Sunday morning.

Merry Christmas

Writing this from the small internet cafe at the Otopeni Airport in Bucharest. We've had some 15 cm of snow last night - enough to disable almost all traffic and dress Bucharest in a nice, Christmas-y coat of white. Our driver showed up by foot - he had to leave the car on the main road since Strada Bruxelles wasn't cleared and there was no getting through. We shlepped our bags and kids to the intersection and off we went. Slowly.

We reached the airport without major problems and so far, our flight to Frankfurt is announced as "on time" -- but remember that we are in Romania where being late is fashionable, and the plane was supposed to leave, like, now. So this is another experience in patience. Or something.

Anyway. We just wanted to wish you all Merry Christmas, since it's unlikely that we'll be able to post later today. Wherever you are, enjoy those days and let's hope they are peaceful and restful (the latter being a wish especially for all those parents out there).

Happy Holidays!!

At The Expense Of Others

I am in Budapest tonight, posting from a little basement cafe. In a few minutes I'll finish here and then go for a walk along the river and then to bed.

I came here for a conference, which was very interesting; perhaps I'll post about it sometime. But tonight I want to post briefly about the people who made it possible for me to be in this beautiful city tonight.

Because I'm here at the expense of others. The American taxpayer is paying for my plane ticket, and my hotel, plus a few dollars extra to feed me while I'm here. So I have an obligation to make something out of it. The benefits that might come back to the American taxpayer from my activities will be very, very indirect; but indirect benefits are benefits nonetheless, and I will try to make sure that there are some.

Less abstract and much more concrete, I'm here at the expense of my wife. While I have two days in beautiful Budapest -- and two nights of uninterrupted sleep in my nice hotel -- Claudia is alone with a baby and a toddler. For two days she has to feed, change, bathe, burp, amuse and take care of these two very demanding little creatures, while I talk about secured transactions and stroll down the Danube esplanade.

I hope to make it up to her, though the when and the how are unclear. (I'd take the kids for a weekend myself, but the baby is still nursing.)

But I guess that's part of what marriage is: a lot of borrowing, hoping that you can pay it back some day.

Right, off I go.

Ouch!

Root canal treatment today, so I don't feel like posting. Here's a picture, though. As a fond mother, I naturally assume that everybody loves to look at pictures of my kids. Call me biased, I plead guilty.

Tell me why

The other day, a friend of mine asked me why Doug and I are keeping this blog. She finds personal information on the net at least questionable and blogs in general an odd fad of the early 21st century that will hopefully die the quick death of all fads.

I was at a loss to explain to her our reasons and I'm still not quite sure about what compels us to post.

I could say it's sort of a diary of our experiences in Eastern Europe - but that doesn't quite cover it. After all, we are trying not to put too much TMI out there. If you grumble publically about your spouse/kids/neighbors/friends, you have to keep in mind that it's not only recorded for eternity but also that it's being read by people who don't know you at all and can't tell whether you're just being bitchy, off your meds, or entirely justified. Additionally, they might not be all that interested in the fact that your writing this post was interrupted by a poop explosion...

Thinking back, it was Carlos who first pointed me to the world of blogs of which I had been blissfully unaware. He sent me the link to a blog (I forget which one) and I was intrigued by the concept.
I thought we could have a blog to keep our scattered families up to date on our current living/moving/working/family situation(s). Sharon Casteel referred me to Movable Type, my brother helped me setting the whole thing up - and voila! we were online and publically writing. As these things go, my mother is the only family member who regularly reads this blog. Go figure.

Since then, the content has changed somewhat and the stress is now on reports about the country we live in at the moment, plus some kid stories to lighten things up a bit. (The title of the blog used to be accurate back when we lived in Belgrade; we decided not to change it despite the fact that the Danube is an hour's drive away now and quite close to its final destination.)

I've always been writing and this format gives me two things: an incentive to write regularly (after a fashion) and a forum to practice writing in English. I've been trying to write in English for some time now and as with so many things, I found that practice is everything. I won't say that it is helping me to write fiction because I'm not writing much fiction these days -- but maybe one day, it'll pay off. Until then, I get to torture you guys with my struggles with style, vocabulary and punctuation.

Last, not least, there is also the idea to supply the world with interesting, amusing or plainly weird facts about living in the Balkans - eh, sorry, I meant to say Southeastern Europe. Since writing a blog is a lonely occupation and feedback from the readers is sparse, we are just asuming that people are interested in reading what we write. Amazingly enough, there are some who seem to have taken a genuine liking to our blog.

At which point a loud Thank you! is in order - thanks to our readers and especially to those who also comment. We are very happy about each and every comment, even if we don't write back much (kids! we have kids! that means very little time!).
Anca & Misha, Carlos, Pouncer, Ellen, Cat, Marna... You are the guys we think of when we're writing. Keep those comments coming - or just read and enjoy.

Thank you all.

[Bowing to all sides and stepping off my soapbox. Phew.]

National Day

December 1 was Romania's National Day. National Day celebrates the union of Transylvania (which had a Romanian majority, but was part of Hungary for about 400 years) with the rest of Romania. That happened in 1918, right after the First World War. Maybe sometime I'll do a post on the weird story of what happened to Romania in that war... but anyhow, Monday was National Day, celebrated with all sorts of festivities and parades.

Unfortunately, we completely missed all of it. Both kids had a restless night -- David woke up again and again, while Alan got up at 5:30 -- so we ended up taking turns sleeping throughout the day. Also, the day was grey and rainy, which didn't really encourage us to go out and explore.

I did manage to walk up to the Arcul Triumf, the big war memorial, with David. (No, that's not the French Arc de Triumph. It just looks like it. Built in 1935, and I think it's a bit bigger than the French one.)

But we didn't get up there until after 3:00 in the afternoon, and everything was finished by then. The only thing left of the parade was a single lonely mariachi band... and no, I have no idea why a mariachi band; but there they were, big hats and all, playing their brass by the Arcul in the rain.

We did see one other thing of interest: a couple of Romanian flags with big holes cut in their centers. This was the symbol of the 1989 Revolution against Ceausescu. The flag of Communist Romania was the old Romanian tricolor with Communist symbols added in the middle; the revolutionaries simply cut out the symbols.

I had seen these flags in films and videos from the Revolution, but on Monday I saw some hanging from houses. Whether they were original flags from 1989 I have no idea, but it was interesting.

After a while it started raining harder, so we went home. And that was our Romanian National Day.

Hollywood meets Bucharest

So the new Chucky movie Seed of Chucky will be filmed here in Romania next year, starting in March. Why's that important? Well, the fact that Romania is attracting more and more international film projects deserves some mentioning. But besides that, Chucky writer Don Mancini is a friend.

The really good part is that Don will also be the director for this movie, so he'll be here in Bucharest for almost six months next year, yay!! I'm not much into horror movies but Don is an absolute sweetheart (you wouldn't think that from the movies, no). He won't have much time to frolic but I hope we can feed him some curry now and then. Lucky us!

Comparatives

Our preparations for Turkey Day are well under way. We'll have a minimum of eight guests, maybe as many as 11. That means a big turkey. I discussed that with my friend Natalie from DC on the phone yesterday. I told her that I wasn't able to find a turkey that was more than 4 kilos (about 9 pounds). She marveled that turkeys even came that small.

I have this silly little joke about the States that I use on Doug all the time. Since everything in the States is bigger, faster, louder than anywhere else, I call the US "The Land of Er".

It's a problem that turkeys are smaller here in Europe. So we are going to have two. That's the European solution, I guess.

Frequency

Heh. We're posting a lot lately. Guess it shows that David's colics went away. Teething is not nice, either, but can be treated at night with paracetamol. Better living through chemistry, as Doug would say.

Here's a picture of the cutie - again, thumbnail. You wanna see it big, you gotta click.

(Carlos - this is mainly for you. :-) Oh, and the baptism is on Nov. 2 at the usual place - you're invited, of course! Please do come!)

60 jars of spices

Living in a transition country where human labor is cheap comes both with luxuries and responsibilites. The luxury part is that you can afford a fulltime nanny and a maid. The responsibility part is that you hire a fulltime nanny and a maid. Doing this creates jobs, jobs that are well-paid in comparison to other jobs in this country, and that's a good thing. You get help and work off your hands which is also good.

So suddenly you find yourself in the position of an employer and to some people, like me, that feels very awkward.

I'm not very good at telling people how I want things to be done (besides with my poor husband who subsequently suffers badly). But if you don't, then it becomes difficult.

Our maid is very conscientious and tidy. Both Doug and I are less so, Alan is not at all. So she picks up lots of things and puts them away. Which is fine. But she also re-arranges things according to her sense of, hm, order. Which differs enormously from my sense of order. I don't mind stuff being around when it's stuff that I need on a regular basis. Like spices.

I have sixty jars of spices and herbs. It was a welcome and thoughtful wedding present of our dear friend and fellow cook James Bryant. Many of the spices I use very frequently (like Herbes de Provence, cumin, coriander, chili, cinnamon, pepper, etc.), others, less so (asafoetida comes to mind). Now, here's the question: why would anybody make little artful towers with these jars? Every week, again and again? With no apparent system to it other than sorting them according to size? Even though I gently pointed out that building towers is not so good because it means putting the most frequently used and therefore biggest jars in the first row with dozens of smaller jars on top?

Beats me.

Admin notice

We decided to make our entries more distinguishable - for those who like one better than the other it makes it easier to skip their less favorite's entries. So from now on, my entries will be marked with this symbol:

And Doug's entries are indicated by this image:

I'm likely to change those icons every once in a while, though.

And yes, I stole those pictures. From DrGreene.com - Caring for the Next Generation. Which is hereby acknowledged and hopefully won't cause any problems. Nice website for parents, btw.

Things in the gutter

Just another rainy day in Bucharest and the things you'll find in the gutters.

(Click on the picture to view a larger version!)

Climate and Weather

The interior of the Balkans -- Bucharest, Belgrade -- has a continental climate. Yes, we're close to the sea, but the winds blow in the wrong direction, or there are mountains in the way, and the gentle mellow breezes of the Aegean and the Adriatic stay in the Aegean and the Adriatic. Belgrade's climate resembles Chicago more than Athens. Bucharest gets hot dry summers and cold snowy winters too.

This is distinct from western Europe, which tends to have milder climates. Sure, there are snowy winters in Bavaria and hot summers in the south of France, but on average the seasonal variations are not so great.

That's why the last couple of weeks have been so strange.

From London to Warsaw, Western and Central Europe have been suffering through the worst heat wave in a century. In London it went over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) for the first time ever. In Claudia's home town of Ostheim, crops are dying and people are sweltering under a relentless sun. It's very bizarre...

...and it hasn't touched Romania. The heat wave stops in Hungary, a few hundred miles northwest of here. The last week has been absolutely beautiful: temperatures in the low 80s (25-30 Celsius), light breezes, low humidity. Perfect Frisbee weather.

This is also very unusual; normally August in Bucharest is impossible, desperately hot and sticky.

It's probably a completely random thing. So rather than drawing any great conclusions, I'll just try to enjoy the nice weather. And hope it lasts until Claudia and the boys get down here next week.

Follow up to the move

The move arrived on Tuesday, a day before I left for Germany. I had enough time to unpack those things that I needed urgently (i.e. my bathing suit) and leave Doug with 50+ unpacked boxes. He's doing his best and he's got about two months or so to do it. The toaster is already in the kitchen. :-)

Moving in, Part 2

Of course the move did not arrive. Who were we kidding?

And no, the stuff has not been here in Bucharest as we had been told. The truck, which was packed and sent off a day late, for no apparent reason, got hold up at the border. Not that anybody bothered to tell us. The truck will arrive in Bucharest tonight - MAYBE - and then go through customs tomorrow - MAYBE. And here the Romanians insist that they do not belong to the Balkans. Hah. I have a very different take on that.

I'm also very dubious about this "it will come tomorrow". Very.

The toaster goes into the kitchen, btw.

Moving in, Part 1

So we're getting ready to move into the new place.

Oh, we're already in it. But our stuff hasn't arrived yet, so we're sort of camping out here.

When will our stuff arrive? Ah hah, well. Our stuff has actually already arrived, in the sense that it's already here in Bucharest... somewhere. But it has to clear Romanian Customs before it can be delivered to our new place.

When will it clear Romanian Customs? Well... maybe tomorrow. And then again, maybe not. It's going to be sort of a paper race. If we have all the necessary documentation by noon tomorrow, it will go. Probably. If not, not.

This is not entirely within our control. One of the key documents comes out of USAID; it's the one that says, in essence, "Treat these people nicely, please, because they're working for the US government. Thank you." It's a potent charm and talisman. Unfortunately, it has to be signed by several different people at USAID, and as of 6 pm Friday not everyone had signed yet. So you can guess where I'll be calling at about 9:02 tomorrow (Monday) morning.

Other than that, things are going OK. The new place is gradually revealing itself to us, as new places do once you start living in them a bit...

There are pleasant surprises: it is indeed wonderfully cool and airy, even in the middle of the bestial and slobbering heat wave that has squatted over the city for the last few days. The wooden floors don't creak. The water pressure is very good. The neighborhood seems good for walking. (And of course, there's that German restaurant just a short stroll away.)

Then there are some less good surprises. The upstairs study has five power outlets. But the baby's bedroom, right next to it, has none. Hah?

There's a mysterious little puddle of water always present in the upstairs bathroom. Source unknown, but it doesn't go away because -- we have found -- the drain in that bathroom isn't at the low point in the tile floor, or indeed very close to it. The downstairs aircon is still wrapped in plastic, and we can't reach it to unwrap it without a ladder. And then there are the mysterious sticky patches on the parquet floor in the living room...

Oh, the ladder issue. Turns out we will really need a ladder to live here. All those high ceilings: they certainly do give the place a wonderful feeling of airiness and grace, but they also mean that certain key components of the household -- like the aforementioned air conditioner -- are out of reach without a ladder. And then there are cobwebs. Well, actually, there aren't any cobwebs yet, but one day presumably there will be, and we'll need a ladder to go after them.

Here Claudia and I ran into one of those basic differences in, mm, call it philosophy of life. I thought, well, we can have the movers bring a ladder and tear the plastic off the aircon when they come tomorrow. And then, well, eventually we'll get a ladder. Claudia thought, well, let's get a ladder now, and then we'll have a ladder.

So tomorrow we shall get a ladder.

Just to be clear: we still like the place. If we expected perfection in our living quarters, we would be living in some other part of the world. These are the sorts of things one expects and, as it were, factors into the equation beforehand. And it's still a very nice apartment. (Villa. Half-house. Whatever.)

N.B., Claudia flies to Germany on Wednesday morning. Will our stuff arrive before then? Will we have time to unpack? Or will I be left standing in a wasteland of boxes and wrapping paper, brow furrowing as I try to remember which room the toaster goes in? Watch this space.

Car owners, the second

So we are car owners again. After our coup with the VW transporter which we bought for 4,000 Euros, packed full of stuff, drove it down to Belgrade and sold it for 5,400 Euros afterwards, we now own a 1,800 Euro Mitsubishi station wagon. And no, we don't intend to pull another deal like the first one. This car we plan to drive until we move out of Europe one day. It has become very expensive to rent a car every time we're in Germany and it's almost impossible to stay in Ostheim without a car. Since we're also going to be in Romania for 18 months, we decided to go for it and look for an old, beat-up car which would serve our needs.

Once again, we were very lucky. Our "new" car is sort of a hand-me-down which has made it from the parents of Michael's best friend to his brother and now to us.

It's a very sensible car for a growing family: it has seven seats; five regular ones and two emergency seats in the back which fold out if needed. It has cupholders galore (which made Doug very happy), a good stereo (for baby music) with a detachable front - good for Balkan states -, a sun roof, enough space to accommodate two babies and their gear plus their parents and it is a nice shade of darkish red. Ah, I hear the grumble. It also has 120 PS and goes 160 km/h if need be, takes super gas (not so nice but not too much of a problem since gas is cheaper in Romania) and is used to driving a lot. Never had much problems with repairs and seems like one of those old reliable horses. We hope to own it for a while!

Moving on

It seems quite certain now that we'll be moving to another Balkan country soon. Doug has been offered a job in Bucharest, Romania which would keep us there for 18 months. He doesn't have a contract yet but this seems (knock on wood) a formality.

I'll miss Natsa. She is the best babysitter and Alan absolutely adores her. I'll miss our friends, Mira and Gaga above all others. I'll miss our house with the skylights that brought us through a Balkan winter without too much damage to our psyches. I'll miss lots of things.

But there is lots to look forward too. More on this as details unfold.

Thanks!

A big THANK YOU to my brother Hajo who set this web log up for me. I had no clue whatsoever and asked him for help. The result is this nice log!

I'm going to play around a bit with styles and settings but soon I'll have this up and running and will keep you all informed about our exciting life in Belgrade, halfway down the Danube.

Bild

Hier ein Eintrag mit Foto !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YEAH !

First message

Hello Claudi,
erster Eintrag hier, ich weiss noch nicht so genau was das soll ....