The Eightfold Path of Naniwa

Now it's 30 years, an airport, and a bridge to the mainland later, and he's still watching a TV made from a coconut.

2011-04-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

"Very unique." The sight of these two words makes me, and most of my set, cringe.

Should it?

Let's think about why adding qualifiers to unique is so resisted a practice. It means one-of-a-kind, apparently, and naturally it is absurd to think of something being one-of-a-kind to a greater or lesser degree. It's binary, and you can't qualify something binary.

This is logical. But I think it might be more logic than language as a practice can reasonably accommodate. We almost never fully describe situations; sentences are like small boats of data that float on seas of context. Why does context apparently not matter for "unique"?

Take the word "everyone," for example. It doesn't mean "every human being alive or dead"; its scope implicitly scales up or down depending on the situation. It might mean "everyone in this conference room," "all my family and friends," "everyone in this university," "everyone in this country," or import more complicated meanings, like "everyone who I define to be reasonable enough to take part in this conversation."

In the same way, "one of a kind," implies a universe of entities out of which the predicate is the only one - and the possible variation in that universe of entities makes it no longer a binary proposition. If you say a worker's skills are "unique," you probably mean "within this company" or "within this industry"; there are probably plenty of people out there with identical skills, but who are not available for the same job for any of a number of reasons. A historical artifact in a museum might be labeled "unique" even when it's known to be one of a series, because the others have all passed into obscure private collections, making it vanishingly unlikely that the museum-goer reading the display will ever see another like it.

In this way, "unique" is just as context-dependent as any other adjective. And all the above assumes that "unique" is completely equivalent to "one-of-a-kind," which should not be taken as given. Etymologically, Latin unicus is unus "one" plus an adjectivalizing suffix. Arguably, even back when it was coined, it didn't mean "one" - if so, why not just say "one"? - but something having the fuzzy quality of there being only one, which could be taken in many directions; and indeed, a glance through Latin dictionaries on Google Books finds it also had transferred meanings like "notable," "beloved," "singular," and even "uncommon." In this way, "unique" should be understood as a word with its own meaning, not the same as "one-of-a-kind," and there is nothing sacred about its original derivation.

Finally, some historical perspective on the word in English. According to the OED it was first used in 1609, in the sense of "sole," but (perhaps after becoming archaic) was "readopted" from French in the late 18th century in the more elaborate sense of "standing alone, unparalleled." The OED mentions "a tendency to take the wider meaning of 'uncommon, unusual, remarkable,' and that "[t]he usage in the comparative and superlative, and with advs. as absolutely, most, quite, thoroughly, totally, etc., has been objected to as tautological" - followed by a citation from 1809 qualified by "thoroughly"! It seems the "misuse" of the word is almost as venerable as the word itself, as is pedantic objection to that practice. (And that was the same generation of grammarians, I suspect, that instituted those meaningless, reactionary bans as on split infinitives, "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and prepositions at the end of sentences.)

I still find "very unique" clumsy due to my upbringing, and enough people feel the same way that I will keep editing it out when I see it. But "fairly unique," "relatively unique," and other such qualified phrases convey a real meaning, and I may be more lenient when I see them. Above all, we should strive to enjoy and participate in linguistic change, not look for opportunities to turn up our noses at it.

This post was composed in the spirit of Stephen Fry's manifesto, which I recommend to everyone, and which is embedded below.

(Final note: Truly binary adjectives do exist, like "pregnant" - but that has a clearly defined referent, an individual.)

All biomedical and archive personnel are to report to my harangue pit immediately.

2011-04-07T15:57:00.000-07:00

This post is finally putting down in a public form some observations I made some time ago, back when I read Japanese manga.

It relates to the multiple writing systems that interlock to form Japanese. Japanese does use Chinese characters (kanji), but mostly to represent core words with clear meanings - nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Many grammatical elements, on the other hand - verb suffixes, postpositions, etc. - are spelled out in syllabic script or kana. Kana is also used in texts for children who haven't learned kanji, and for writing regular words or names whose kanji is considered too obscure (depending on how highbrow the text is), writing borrowed words, etc. Kana has two types, hiragana, which is to some extent the "default", and katakana, which is mostly used for borrowed words; they both represent the same body of sounds, but with different symbols.

Youth-oriented books, including manga, often include furigana, or tiny kana printed next to the kanji, to show pronunciation. (These can also be called rubi, after a dated English term for 5.5-point type.) But there are odd wrinkles in how furigana is used.

Furigana is sometimes used for explication. You might see, say, "the laboratory" in regular text and "here" on the side as furigana. This corresponds nicely to the fact that the speakers know that perfectly well that they are in the laboratory, but the readers need reminders to keep track. But is "here" the pronunciation (by analogy with the main use of furigana), or is "laboratory" the pronunciation and "here" just a reminder? It's rather ambiguous.
Furigana can also be used for translation: foreign phrases can be translated into Japanese along the side. The oddest example I've seen was when a character who was Chinese said 我爱你 (wo ai ni, "I love you," in Chinese), with the furigana アイラブユー airabuyuu, or English "I love you" transliterated into Japanese kana. Despite using broadly the same character system, that Chinese sentence is not necessarily legible to Japanese readers, particularly children, since the pronouns for "I" and "you" are both different in Chinese and Japanese. My guess is that they chose to put it into transliterated English so that it would be understood but still retain an air of foreignness.

Noticing these furigana practices made me notice something else: as I mentioned above, kana are often substituted to write words with obscure or difficult kanji. In real life, this practice sometimes covers up that someone has forgotten the right kanji (a common cause of embarrassment in these days of word processors). In manga, that seems to have been transferred to speech: one character uses an obscure technical term unknown to the listener; the other repeats the word quizzically, implicitly asking for a definition, and in that second speaker's word balloon only, the word is in kana rather than kanji, clearly showing that they don't know what it means. (In English the same thing is often accomplished by having it misspelled in the second speech; this wouldn't work as well in Japanese as spelling in kana is much simpler and there's a smaller range of sound combinations to choose from.)

Does this mean that if kanji appears in a word balloon, the character knows that kanji? Not necessarily, but sometimes this notion seems to be carried further. When there are foreigners talking to or about a Japanese person (applying the Translation Convention), and they speak the Japanese person's name, it's commonly written phonetically in kana, apparently to show that they only know the name as a string of sounds, not as something with another identity through its kanji.

The most compelling example of this: in one otherwise forgettable early 90's comic, a boy and girl get "sucked into cyberspace" (yeah, I know) to a sword-and-sorcery world. The girl loses her memory and is captured. When the boy, Tōru, finally rescues her, she calls him トール, his name spelled phonetically in kana - just like everybody else in the (non-Japanese) fantasy world has been doing. When she regains her memory later, she delightedly calls him 通, his name in kanji, demonstrating to the reader in an instant that she now remembers and thinks in the writing system she and he share.

It's time to kick ass and repent of the murders I have committed to become king... and I'm all out of repentance.

2011-03-29T10:44:00.000-07:00

Something bugs me about Haley Barbour as a potential GOP nominee. Besides the obvious, I think part of it is that old Southern men really don't fit the image anyone has of Presidents.

Obviously, I checked Wikipedia to see if this could be borne out. And indeed, Haley Barbour would be 65 in 2012, and this is older than any serious Southern presidential candidate since 1844 - the only two older in American history are Henry Clay, who was 67 when he ran against Polk that year, and Andrew Jackson, who was 67 when he ran for reelection in 1832. LBJ always looked old, but he was 56 in 1964; and the shriveled Ross Perot was 62 in 1992.

Even knowing how the South's national political power was greatly restricted after the Civil War, it's striking, looking over the records, how thoroughly and how long Southerners were kept out of consideration for the presidency since then. It's hard to say who the first post-Civil War Southern president was, because so many technicalities come up. Woodrow Wilson was born in Georgia, but he made his academic career in the North and entered politics in New Jersey. Harry Truman was from Missouri, which is sort of half-Southern, and I'm not sure about his identity, but that certainly wasn't his image. LBJ and Carter were the first completely unambiguous Southerners, and if we can give George W. Bush that label (he might have been a transplant or fraud, but he had the accent and the identity), then he was the first conservative Southern president since the Civil War, despite the consistent conservatism of the South. One gets the impression that until recently, being Southern was an inherent minus, needing to be countered by other political assets.

Don't lend money to unreliable narrators.

2011-03-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

I couldn't shoehorn this into another installment of Long-Lost Friends, so this is an, um, Etymological Interlude.

I was thinking about the differentiation of similar words and realized that I perceive a "cane" as needing to be slender and professionally made, whereas a "walking-stick," is more generic and can include a stick you find along the trail.

As it turns out, this has a good reason: the word "cane" originally meant a reed, from Latin canna / Greek κάννα, both words apparently Semitic in origin, cognate with Biblical Hebrew qanah. It came to be applied to sugar cane and to more and more plants with solid or hollow stems as Europeans spread across the world and "discovered" them, in particular bamboo and rattan.

Rattan, being sturdy but flexible, was quickly taken up as a rod for beating people with, and apparently became the standard rod used in English and Welsh schools despite being a tropical product (hark, the globalization of past ages!). Stronger stems, also imported, were used as walking-sticks, such as "Malacca cane" and "Tobago cane," though as I can't find these outside the OED, they may no longer be current names, and may in fact now all be considered varieties of rattan. Such stems are still used in Singapore and other countries that practice judicial caning.

As I reconstruct it, wood was also used, but canes were common enough that for a wooden stick to be called a "cane," it had to be similarly slender - but the OED entry for "cane" doesn't mention wood at all, and Wikipedia describes canes made of wood as a distinctly North American practice. Something I wouldn't have guessed was a regionalism! I wonder if this was because wood was so much more plentiful in North America than in Britain.

Other traditional walking-stick materials, derived from Wikipedia's list, include ash, Aralia spinosa, bamboo (in which case it's called a whangee), American rattan vine, and medlar wood,

Wikipedia mentions, presumably because it could otherwise confuse UK speakers, that when we speak of the caning of Senator Sumner, it was not a true "cane" and in fact, the stick in question broke into pieces, suggesting the practical superiority of rattan. Some sources say Brooks's cane was of gutta-percha, others gutta-percha wood, so I'm not sure whether it was entirely made of that early natural rubber, or wood from the plant that gives it, or regular wood enhanced with gutta-percha; however, the presence of gutta-percha in that incident was a novelty widely picked up on at the time, with lots of metaphors about electricity and telegraphs.

Truth! Understanding! The end of entropy! And babes!

2011-02-27T13:43:00.000-08:00

I was pretty puzzled when David Cameron's plan came out to reform the NHS by making general practitioners responsible for all contracting for services. It was vaguely in the spirit of primary-care-centeredness that led to the current Primary Care Trust system, and possibly GPs are better respected in the UK than bureaucrats and hospital administrators, but the glaring issue was, "Why would GPs be particularly good at managing this huge administrative burden? Why would they even want to take it on?" I thought it most likely that, if it was passed as advertised, GPs would collectively delegate their new responsibilities to some body that would become yet another bureaucratic overlay on the same system as before - much like the Primary Care Trusts.

Well, the picture is becoming more clear. Polly Toynbee writing in the Guardian to interpret a new article by Cameron in the Telegraph:

Every single public service will be put out to tender. Everything. ...Forget the camouflage of localism and choice: however much local people like local services that work well, they will have no choice in the matter. ....

Democracy will scarcely get a look in. People can't choose if services are contracted out. Once contracts are signed, nothing can change. You can throw out rascally councillors or governments, but the contracts will go on regardless. Like PFIs, they will be traded as financial instruments, sliced and diced according to risk and sold on. This sets a nuclear bomb under all public services, because there can never be any going back. If you don't like the sound of this, Cameron's government can be voted out but it will be virtually impossible to return services to a public realm that no longer exists. Ownership of the contracts and companies moves on, and the public sector loses any capacity to take them back.

Apparently this is very similar to what's happened with public-private partnerships over the years. It seems all too likely that this is how it could work out in practice, and that the conscious goals are the accumulation of private profits and the sapping of public capacity.

This is one of the most creative policy innovations I've heard about in some time, and not in a good way.

I hate wasting food, so I poured what I couldn't eat through your mail slot.

2011-02-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

More Livy! Obviously, where rape and murder of women as motif is concerned, Lucretia is another canonical example. Interestingly, in this part of Livy victim-blaming isn't precisely what goes on, but it's still overwhelmingly the context - in the below passage it's clearly the cultural norm they're trying to avoid just once.

One after another they tried to comfort her. They told her she was helpless, and therefore innocent; that he alone was guilty. It was the mind, they said, that sinned, not the body: without intention there could never be guilt.

"What is due to him," Lucretia said, "is for you to decide. As for me I am innocent of fault, but I will take my punishment. Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent for unchaste women to escape what they deserve." With these words she drew a knife from under her robe, drove it into her heart, and fell forward, dead.

So Lucretia is a paragon of virtue partly because she enthusiastically participates in the oppression of women.

I can't tell you how I escaped, but if you ever hear an urban legend about a vampire stewardess and a plane full of corpses, they're exaggerating... a little.

2011-02-06T16:12:00.000-08:00

I'm currently enjoying Livy's Early History of Rome (Penguin Classics, technically books I-V of Ab urbe condita libri), translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. I especially appreciate the introduction which says in so many words that virtually everything Livy recounts is a fable, and outlines what's actually known about early Rome (or was known as of 1971) through archeology and the few reliable records. Apparently the stories in Livy are not only excessively melodramatic, but often echo or even copy Greek tales that were presumably borrowed:

The twins, Romulus and Remus, sons of a god, exposed by the river, suckled by a wolf and discovered by a shepherd, are an adaptation of an old Near Eastern myth, found in Greece in the legend of Neleus and Pelias, sons of the god Poseidon exposed on the river Enipeus and suckled by a bitch and a mare. The fatal quarrel between the twins culminating in Remus derisively vaulting Romulus's walls recalls similar Greek legends of Oeneus and Toxeus or Poimander and Leucippus. ...Two of the most notorious events of Tarquinius Superbus's reign are openly imitated from the Greek historian Herodotus - the lopping of the poppy-heads was Thrasyboulus's message to Periiander and the infiltration of Gabii by Sextus Tarquinius was suggested by Zopyrus's ruse against Babylon. Sometimes events which were chronologically close in Greek and Roman history have been assimilated. The tyrants at Athens were expelled as a result of a love-affair in 510 B.C.; it is no accident that the Tarquins are similarly expelled about 510 B.C. as a result of a love-affair also.

Livy seems to have been at least somewhat aware of this problem - he writes that some of the events before Rome's founding have "more of the charm of poetry than a sound historical record" - and this makes it all the more rich when he then explains how we should observe a trend of steady moral decline based on these fables:

I invite the reader's attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived... I would then have him trace the progress of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.

Perhaps it's too much to expect consistency between high-flown introduction and internal details, but it's worth contrasting this with his later explanation of the motives with which Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, created most of Rome's state church out of whole cloth, in the interests of social stability:

Rome had originally been founded by force of arms; the new king now prepared to give the community a second beginning, this time on the solid basis of law and religious observance... [T]here was no immediate prospect of attack from outside and the tight rein of constant military discipline was relaxed. In these novel circumstances there was an obvious danger of a general relaxation of the nation's moral fibre, so to prevent its occurrence Numa decided upon a step which he felt would prove more effective than anything else with a mob so rough and ignorant as the Romans were in those days. This was to inspire them with the fear of the gods.

...

By these means the whole population of Rome was given a great many new things to think about and attend to, with the result that everybody was diverted from military preoccupations. They now had serious matters to consider; and believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to control their lives than the fear of punishment for law-breaking.

Not that this necessarily makes Livy inconsistent in philosophy. The overall idea is that the natural tendency of humanity is to decline, especially with urbanity, and the only reason things didn't go to hell ages ago is the occasional mighty effort like the founding of a nation that turns back the tide, after which things set to declining again. This idea didn't lose dominance until the 19th century, as I understand. Livy's statements seem odd, I'd bet, only in contrast to the moralist and religious essentialism that modern-day writers always implicitly set themselves against.

Moving on, another striking note is how closely the rise of Rome seems interwoven with woman-bashing, specifically the blaming of the female victims of rape and murder (emphasis added):

[On the birth of Romulus and Remus:] The Vestal Virgin was raped and gave birth to twin boys. Mars, she declared, was their father - perhaps she believed it, perhaps she was merely hoping by the pretence to palliate her guilt.

[In the war started by the rape of the Sabine women:] This was the moment when the Sabine women, the original cause of the quarrel, played their decisive part. ..."We are mothers now," they cried; "our children are your sons - your grandsons: do not put on them the stain of parricide. If our marriage - if the relationship between you - is hateful to you, turn your anger against us. We are the cause of strife; on our account our husbands and fathers lie wounded or dead; and we would rather die ourselves than live on either widowed or orphaned.

[After Horatius kills his sister for the impertinence of grieving because he killed her fiancé, and is put on trial for murder:] In the course of the hearing the decisive factor was the statement of Horatius's father, to the effect that his daughter deserved her death.

These three examples occur within the space of 25 pages.

"Danger" is my middle initial.

2011-01-30T14:33:00.000-08:00

Let's hope the ongoing street movements in the Arab world don't divert attention from South Sudan, where the referendum results just came in overwhelmingly for independence - and Khartoum seems to be honoring the results. (Though apparently most of the oil is in the south, so who knows what will actually happen.)

My interest in this is partly a desire to see national borders peacefully realign in a way allowing for more productive politics (as is badly needed in Somalia). But I've also - since sixth grade or earlier - always loved it in the abstract when the painfully-static list of countries could be added to. I can recite the last four recognized independences in chronological order: Eritrea, Palau, East Timor, Montenegro.

Apparently it will still call itself South Sudan if it becomes independent as scheduled on July 9th.

The fate that befell your wife was very, very funny. I mean tragic.

2011-01-27T13:37:00.000-08:00

Reading The Big Sleep, I'm surprised at how non-coy it is about homosexuality for a book published in 1939. The condemnatory language implies it's treated as one of the outgrowths of the "corruption of the human spirit" (words of a critic in the preface) right alongside crime, gambling, and drugs.

"All right," I said. "You have a key. Let's go on in."

"Who said I had a key?"

"Don't kid me, son. The fag gave you one. You've got a nice clean manly little room in there. He shooed you out and locked it up when he had lady visitors. He was like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men. Think I can't figure people like him and you out?"

I still held his automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.

Some of my favorite quips from the book:

I agreed with Captain Gregory that Eddie Mars would have been very unlikely to involve himself in a double murder just because another man had gone to town with the blonde he was not even living with. It might have annoyed him, but business is business, and you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes.

"Mr. Cobb was my escort," she said. "Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten -- when Larry Cobb was sober."

Pinch me with one of your huge lobster claws, I want to know if I'm dreaming.

2011-01-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

Pitfalls of Google Ngram Viewer for etymological research:

Optical character recognition problems increase going back in time, as widely noted.
The "smoothing" function, which is on by default, can make anomalous spikes look like trends.
Google Books contains a number of magazines, and these often bear the date of the magazine's first-ever issue.
There are dates that are erroneous in other ways - the periodical Microprocessors and Microsystems is dated 1906. In another case I saw a date assigned that was actually a year mentioned in the title of the work, implying they're entered manually.

In short, the worst thing to use Ngram for (as currently implemented) is dates of first use. The word "robot," as everyone knows, entered English in 1921 with the play R.U.R., but Ngram would have us believe it enjoyed a bit of use in the 1900s. This is a combination of bad dates, mis-OCRing of "Robert," "robbery," etc. and the use of the word in other contexts, such as sociological discussions of the use of forced labor in Eastern Europe.

It's considered a faux pas to have purple hair after Groundhog Day.

2010-12-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

This is Long-Lost Friends... Currency Edition.

If you've ever looked at lists of national currencies, you might have noticed that a number of Middle Eastern countries use the "rial" or "riyal". Iran, Oman, and Yemen have a rial, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have a riyal, and Morocco and Tunisia used to have a rial. And if you're a crossword fan, you probably know that favorite Cambodian currency, the riel.

It makes sense that these might have a common ancestor, but what?

The answer is, amazingly, the Spanish real. Originating in the 14th century, and translating to "royal," after the conquest of the New World and its voluminous silver mines, it became almost the standard currency of international trade. It was even semi-standard in the US (the practice of breaking the coin into eight pieces for better change-making is why a quarter was called "two bits", one bit being the same as the Mexican peso), and in pre-Communist China (as the Mexican peso, called the "dollar Mex" by English-speakers there).

Apparently it was so respected that as the Middle East was decolonized in the mid-20th century, many of its governments adopted it as the new term for their currency. And Cambodia started issuing the currency in 1952, before decolonization even, directly replacing the French Indochinese piastre, which itself had started as a replacement for the Mexican peso.

A distant legacy, I suppose, of the great trans-Eurasian oceanic trading network that was extant as far back as Roman times.

Raise the drawbridge! Release the Mongolian Terror Trout!

2010-11-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

Those thinking about how we're going to pull our politics out of its current hole should meditate on the following, from Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

To oppose something is to maintain it.

They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

Yegey in the Hall of the Thirty-Three today: "I unalterably oppose this blockade of grain-exports to Karhide, and the spirit of competition that motivates it." Right enough, but he will not get off the Mishnory road going that way. He must offer an alternative....

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is not a word often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or belief; and they have broken the circle, and go free.

Though powerful, the vampire is burdened with a lone, subtle weakness: a good whack in the noggin with a cast-iron skillet.

2010-11-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

Following up on a reference made by a professor in lecture, I found a 1964 paper by Herbert McClosky, "Consensus and Ideology in American Politics."

This paper was based on a large survey comparing opinions of "political influentials" (drawn from Democratic or Republican national convention-goers in 1956) and the general electorate, mostly regarding rule of law, freedoms, and the nature of politics. I was weirded out by how many people agreed to the sometimes extremely illiberal statements.

"If congressional committees stuck strictly to the rules and gave every witness his rights, they would never succeed in exposing the many dangerous subversives they have turned up." (Agreement by 24.7% of political influentials and 47.4% of the general public.)

"The true American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it." (12.8% and 34.6%.)

"Freedom does not give anyone the right to teach foreign ideas in our schools." (45.5% and 56.7%)

"In dealing with dangerous enemies like the Communists, we can't afford to depend on the courts, the laws and their slow and unreliable methods." (7.4% and 25.5%)

A book that contains wrong political views cannot be a good book and does not deserive to be published. (17.9% and 50.3%)

So, granted, a lot of this surrounds anti-Communism; McCarthyism arguably didn't die with McCarthy, it just got quieter and wasn't re-challenged until later. And to be fair, various statements espousing free speech and opinion as values were quite broadly agreed with by the general population (though that butts up in practice with the last statement quoted above).

But how does any of that even contextualize:

The majority has the right to abolish minorities if it wants to. (6.8% and 28.4%)

The only even slightly comforting thought I can make up about this result is that maybe the agreers meant "has the right" in a descriptive rather than normative sense.

I'm also surprised by how close the "our way of life is being threatened" statement is to the modern phrasing used in stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment.

Who says we Americans are losing sight of our country's core values?

I can't say for sure who's behind this, but if I had to guess... Space Gophers!

2010-10-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

An amusing alleged quotation from FDR speaking of the difficulties of managing the federal bureaucracy:

...But the Treasury and State Department together are nothing compared to the Na-a-vy. The admirals are really something to cope with -- and I should know. To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.

(I speculate that spelling is him drawing the word "Navy" out in a faux-condescending tone, like in this comedy sketch.)

FDR was in a real position to know this, too, as he had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920. (Of course, he never saw the new system made by the National Security Act of 1947 - who knows what things are like now.)

When God closes a door, he opens a sperm bank.

2010-09-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Reading Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, I came across a very amusing section:

"Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you're as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats - men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what's really going on the way you do now."

Doesn't this seem like it could describe the strategy of the health insurance industry (though not for tax reasons), or the customer-service strategy of almost any major company?

It's also curious that at the book's time of publication (1959) we'd never in the age of mass media had a president who put on a folksy-horse-sense act complete with accent, and yet the president briefly quoted in the book fits the LBJ/RWR/GWB mold precisely. Perhaps he was basing it on other politicians of the time, though - senators and governors and so forth.

I'm standing as fast as I can!

2010-09-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

Your daily installment from the Paragraphs That Provoke Uncontrollable Wincing Dep't:

The burgeoning English textile industry solved its labor problems during the latter part of the eighteenth century by using parish children, some only four or five years old, as factory operatives. Manufacturers negotiated regular bargains with the parish authorities, ordering lots of fifty or more children from the poorhouses. (In at least one known instance, a Lancashire manufacturer agreed to the stipulation of a London parish that he take at least one idiot for every twenty sound children delivered.)

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the poor: the functions of public welfare. New York: Vintage Books, 1993, p. 27 (emphasis added).

That's not how hats work.

2010-09-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

I investigated an idiom the other day, prompted by an idle musing on Unfogged. Instead of a short, comprehensible story, I got an incestuous slurry of modification and repurposing. Here goes.

The phrase as cited was "take X apart six ways from Sunday." My memory and a couple of quick searches confirmed this was just one of many variations including changing up the number of ways, the preposition before "Sunday," and the verb used. The verb is normally on the violent side - "beat," "screw," "knock," etc.; and often still combative even when used cerebrally - "analyze," "vet," "take apart." (It can also just mean "all over," as with "leaves lying..." or "his hair went...".) The preposition can be "from," "to," or "till." The number used varied all over. Quickly falling into the research trance, and failing to find a satisfactory explanation (though there were some pretty outlandish ones), I drew up a spreadsheet based on Google Books search results, to try to figure out which came first.

Number	"From"	"To"	"Til" / "Till"
two	6	7	0
both	3	4	1
three	112	84	0
four	87	76	5
five	60	56	0
six	1260	1430	37
seven	314	218	8
eight	116	113	5
nine	178	160	15
ten	66	80	2
eleven	1	0	0
twelve	22	16	1
thirteen	1	4	4
fourteen	17	8	0
fifteen	4	6	0
sixteen	19	21	0
seventeen	24	2	2
eighteen	5	4	2
nineteen	0	0	0
twenty	8	15	17

My preliminary conclusions from this table were:

There's a lot of diversity; no one phrasing is dominant.
Neither is one phrasing chronologically dominant. Most of Google Books's earliest citations were no earlier than the early 20th century; the exceptions were "nine ways from Sunday" (1828), "seven ways to Sunday" (1893), and "fourteen ways from Sunday" (also 1893).
Alliteration seems to inform the popular choice - the predominance of "six" is inconclusive as that could be the original term, but the spikes at "sixteen" and "seventeen" (and possibly "twelve" and "twenty") probably admit of no other explanation.
Playfulness also seems to inform choices, leading to the wide variety of numbers used, probably for the novelty value. (Higher round numbers like "forty," "fifty," "hundred," and "thousand" are also used, but I left them out for a shorter table.)
"Til" is definitely the most modern; it wasn't cited before 1941.

But the early citations gave me no clue as to the actual origin of the phrase. Even in the late 19th century, people seemed to be using it much as they do now, without having to explain it.

At this point, some other resource than Google Books had to take over. I went to the university library's slang and idiom section, and after going through several dictionaries with no luck, I finally found a vital clue:

Look nine ways for Sunday[s]. To squint : nautical : from ca. 1850; ob. Ex the C. 16-18 coll. look nine ways confused with the dial. look both (later all) ways for Sunday.

-- A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Eric Partridge. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1970, p. 494.)

This used for, which I hadn't thought to look up! I appended to the table:

Number	"From"	"To"	"Til" / "Till"	"For"
two	6	7	0	261
both	3	4	1	242
three	112	84	0	66
four	87	76	5	35
five	60	56	0	18
six	1260	1430	37	198
seven	314	218	8	284
eight	116	113	5	1
nine	178	160	15	210
ten	66	80	2	1
eleven	1	0	0	2
twelve	22	16	1	1
thirteen	1	4	4	0
fourteen	17	8	0	0
fifteen	4	6	0	0
sixteen	19	21	0	5
seventeen	24	2	2	2
eighteen	5	4	2	0
nineteen	0	0	0	0
twenty	8	15	17	7

Now, I thought, we're getting somewhere. "For"'s citations are leaps and bounds earlier in time - 1770, 1858, 1824. And "both" and "two" are not only much higher relative frequency than with the other prepositions, but are the only ones with 18th century citations, making me think they're the original.

Further explanations of that phrase "look both ways" made me think that either that or "look nine ways" was the original phrase. A number of late 19th-century works cite a free translation of Erasmus's Apophthegms by Nicholas Udall from 1564, which, quoting the Iliad, book 2, lines 212-219, said "Squyntyied he was, and looked nyne waies," where the corresponding original Greek was just a single word meaning "squinting." Obviously people weren't quoting that translation, but it does point to the antiquity of the phrase. I suspect "for Sunday" was added either for the rhyme ("for Sundays" was also common), or to incorporate a popular superstition that "a child born on that day is sure to squint, because it must look both ways for Sunday." It's a weird enough idea that I could well imagine people making it up facetiously based on the phrase. (Incidentally, the verb "squint" to me just means to scrunch one's eyes up, but in the past it referred to strabismus, or being wall-eyed or lazy-eyed.)

How, then, did it lose the "look," and come into its modern usage as an emphatic phrase? The following quote seems to be the missing link:

There is nothing more wicked than trifling with the national currency, and we shall look into the Parlour ourselves, and Parlay, as Inspector Bucket says, in a way that will make the Directors look nine ways for Sunday.

--“A Rating for the Bank Raters,” in Punch, or the London Charivari, January 30, 1864, p. 43

Here's another, more analytical but looking back to the same era:

…Our English slang equivalent [of the contemporary American “to give any one fits”] would be ‘I’ll make him look nine ways for Sunday”—that is, I presume, for Sabbath rest. The literary reader will immediately recall here the introduction of this expression into a description (in the classical page of Punch nearly thirty years ago) of a fight between Tom Sayers and Bob Travers, where we were told how Tom gave Bob a straight one which

Made him look nine ways for Sunday and finally fail to perceive it.

--“Americanisms,” Richard Proctor, in Knowledge, March 1, 1887 (vol. 10, p. 114).

And one last in exactly the same sense, interestingly compiled by Yeats:

Big Frank Farrell, the miler of Ballyboulteen, got a prod backwards that brought a hullabaloo out of him you might hear at the other end of the parish. One got a slice of a scythe, another a whack of a flail, a third a rap of a spade that made him look nine ways at wanst.

--Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, William Butler Yeats, 1888.

Looking holistically at all my evidence, I propose the following evolution:

The saying "look both ways" at first described strabismus very matter-of-factly. It was elaborated on with "for Sunday," possibly because of the superstition (or who knows, the superstition could have been made in response to the phrase.)
For purposes of color, the number was varied - six, seven, and nine being the most common at first. This didn't keep people from having the original meaning in mind.
In the mid-19th century, people started nesting the phrase into "to make someone look nine ways for Sunday" meaning to knock someone silly.
The nested use took over as the original one dwindled.
It became unnecessary to say "look," because "[number] ways for Sunday" was enough colorful verbiage to communicate the concept efficiently.
Over the 20th century, people completely forgot the original meaning, so it was just an emphatic, standalone adverbial phrase. With the preposition no longer conveying anything in particular, it became more and more freely swapped out with others (from, to, till). A broader range of numbers also came to be used.

Innovation piling on innovation, to the point of unintelligibility. What a language we speak.

As a supplementary note, people seemed to start to say "squint (number) ways" for a time in the 19th century. Possibly that was a transitional measure as "squint" acquired its modern meaning. Some books of rhetoric then used this phrase to name a clause that could be attached equally well to the preceding or following clause, therefore "looking both ways," and creating ambiguity. An example was "Though some of the European rulers may be females, when spoken of altogether, they may be correctly classified under the denomination 'kings.'" The term "squinting modifier," has survived all the way to modern SAT prep books, which even retain the explanation "because they look both ways at once," though clarifying the meaning with "wall-eyed."

Oh, there must have been at least five llamas. Totally unprovoked attack by those puffins. I managed to clip their wings. This is llama turf.

2010-08-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

I just looked up "scapegoat," which seemed like it could hardly not present an interesting etymology. I was not disappointed. Its origin is in a Biblical mistranslation.

The culprit responsible for the word itself is William Tyndale, first major translator of the Bible into English. However, the actual misunderstanding was made long before him. Leviticus describes a ritual in which, of two goats, one is chosen by lot to be sacrificed to God, while the other has the sins of the community put on it and is driven into the wilderness. According to the OED, the Hebrew word used in describing this second goat was azazel; today, we believe this to mean the goat was "for Azazel" (the demon, in a parallelism with the other goat which was "for the Lord"), but it could also be interpreted as ez azal, or "the goat which escapes."

Tyndale was not the originator of this interpretation: the Septaguint had it tragos apopompaios, and the Vulgate caper emissarius. (The French for "scapegoat," bouc émissaire, comes from the Vulgate.) But if Tyndale followed another's error, he did leave his mark in how he crafted the word - I suspect the compound word "scapegoat" is intended to follow the compactness of ez azal, rather than some workaday phrase like "the goat let loose." Later, the King James Version copied him, and it is now solidly enough lodged in the culture that many modern translations carry it over.

Although the current interpretation of the passage as referring to the demon Azazel seems to be more or less accepted today -- it was incorporated into the Revised Version of the Bible in 1884 -- it is not definitive. According to Wiktionary, the Talmud says the word refers to the cliff which the goat would be driven off.

Tyndale was prominent enough to create other words and phrases that also entered the King James Version and the language, including "long-suffering," "peacemaker," "stumbling block," "the fatted calf," "filthy lucre," "Jehovah," and "Passover" (sources 1 and 2).

That's a socialist mop.

2010-08-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

I may have said this before in this space, but we Americans so strongly believe ourselves to be innovators, free spirits, iconoclasts, etc., this idea is so bound up in our self-image, that we have a hard time recognizing when we are being hidebound and traditionalist, which I think is more and more often, compared to other countries. (There might be a book in this: The Rigid American Way.). Take for example our calm acceptance of the dysfunctionality of the Senate as something impossible to change that must be worked within.

Here's a smaller but still particularly egregious one. We're confronted with record deficits; everyone, left and right, seems to agree hard choices must be made, although of course we disagree what to cut. Why, look, here's a change that would save $500 million a year that doesn't impose any hardship on anyone, just switches things up a bit -- specifically, switching out dollar bills for dollar coins.

Oh, wait. Apparently this is unrealistic. Not the matter of convincing the public to use dollar coins - that's a copout, as currency changes around all the time; all that needs to be done is to withdraw dollar bills from circulation, and people will get used to it pretty quickly. And that's "probably impossible politically," according to no less than the president of Citizens against Government Waste. Apparently we love having little green portraits of George Washington in our wallets so much (which design has been with us for no more than 90 years) that we'll rise up in revolt if he's taken away from us! But we're nonconformists, never fear.

(Incidentally, this same assumption of American rigidity is apparently what led many, including Ralph Nader, to conclude seatbelt laws were unrealistic, with the result that their introduction was delayed by perhaps 10 years, according to the New Yorker (subscription required).)

Addendum: This also makes me hate it when people say "Oh, the Japanese are so traditionalist." They've gone for energy efficiency in a big way since the 70's, and imposed a national sales tax for the first time in the 90's.

You can opt out of the death panels if you renounce Christ, convert to Islam, and have gay sex with an illegal immigrant.

2010-08-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

Well worth reading: a new look at the Henry Louis Gates incident last year, based on the official report of Sgt. Crowley. It shows pretty conclusively, with an understanding of Massachusetts law and police practice, that Gates's arrest was an abuse of power. (It's incomprehensible for a policeman to refuse to provide their name and badge number unless the person steps outside... unless you know that yelling outside can technically be grounds for arrest while yelling inside could never be.)

This keeps being said, but: incidents of abuse of police power keep being waved away as a rarity, and that's not comforting even if true. If I knew that 1% of Subway sandwiches consistently had botulism toxin, or even 0.1%, I wouldn't say "well, that's pretty rare, so I feel better about them"; I would stay the fuck away from Subway. If there are even a few police out there who are liable to taser someone for asking reasonable questions, it becomes rational to avoid all police wherever feasible, and the entire enterprise is undermined.

This is exactly what the "one bad apple spoils the whole barrel" means. Yet today, people habitually deny the salience of incidents of abuse with the phrase "it's just a few bad apples" (which was probably ironic at first, but is definitely not anymore). Although analogies are always insufficient, it's a striking linguistic microcosm: the new phrase completely ignores the meaning of the old, much as we collectively turn a blind eye at a broader social level when coercion becomes unaccountable almost to the point of sociopathy.

Please, teach me this emotion you humans call tanning.

2010-08-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

Last year, when I first read about the abuses by for-profit colleges, I was horrified beyond any knowing and jaded persona I might tediously affect at times. Regular higher education is not without its faults - it's hard to distinguish the educational effect from the credentialing and self-selection effects - but most of the for-profits, from what I've read, tend toward active fraudulence, free-riding off the good reputation regular colleges enjoy to aggressively sell absolute pabulum not even worth anything as a credential, to the uninformed or desperate. That would in itself be worth aggressive regulation, possibly even prohibition, and that it makes use of government loan money makes it even worse.

When I read in June that Congress had requested the GAO to do a major study of this industry, I was pleased, as that meant attention was gathering; the impartial findings of the report would likely be egregious enough to make Congressional action almost inevitable. But I should have guessed there was already something in the hopper: the GAO's undercover people just made their own pointed report.

Four of the colleges -- Westech, MedVance, Anthem and Westwood -- "encouraged fraudulent practices" in meetings with undercover investigators, the report says. All 15 "made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements."

Another recent GAO undercover investigation, of the consumer genetic testing industry, was criticized for tarring the entire industry based on what some less reputable players had been found to do - possibly industry shilling, but the GAO tries to make its reports airtight enough to forestall even unfair criticism. In this case, nothing like that was possible:

In a joint statement, Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Co., and Andrew S. Rosen, chairman and chief executive of Kaplan Inc., described the tactics revealed in the videotaped interviews as "sickening."

"They violate in every way the principles on which Kaplan is run," they said in a statement posted on The Washington Post Co.'s Web site. "The GAO and the Senate [Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee] have done us a favor. We will do everything in our power to eliminate such conduct from Kaplan's education institutions."

Here's to the reining-in of exploitation.

Elmo did it thirty-five minutes ago!

2010-08-07T17:37:00.000-07:00

This is why etymology is such a rewarding pursuit.

Long before the rise of the NSDAP in the 1920s, people in at least southern Germany could be called Nazi if they were named Ignatz, or came from Austria or Bohemia (where they apparently had lots of Ignatzes); it was supposedly also used as a generic name for soldiers of Austria-Hungary, like the German Fritz or Russian Ivan. It had to be used with caution between friends, though, since it could also mean "idiot" or "clumsy oaf". That's how it found it's way into politics; the fact that Adolf came from Austria (not Bohemia, though) could have made the pun even better.

So that's why they're Nazis and not Nasos (using the first syllables in National Socialist).

(Faktoider.nu, via Languagehat)

Bring it on, you non-inertial reference frame hating bigot! We'll spin you right round, baby!

2010-07-30T06:48:00.000-07:00

There's a passage from the book GAO 1966-1981: An Administrative History by Roger Sperry et al. that I think deserves to be put online.

As more and more GAO products found their way into journalistic circles, they began to be scrutinized for not only their basic message but also their presentation. Media critiques, while not always complimentary, helped to keep GAO's writers from ecoming complacent and to increase the Office's determination to improve its communications.

...

One recurrent source of feedback was the Washington Star's "Gobbledygook" column. It reprinted each day examples of obscure communication found in Government reports, periodicals, and memorandums. Several GAO products were cited. While most were legal decisions, several audit reports received this dubious distinction. For example, the following item appeared in the March 18, 1997 column:
From a report on services to Indian Head Start grantees:
We recommend that the Secretary of HEW direct the Director, Office of Child Development, to insure that the Division's review of its specialized and general training and technical assistance programs include an evaluation of the most effective method of providing assistance in implementing the specialized training and technical assistance program and that the findings of the evaluation are implemented.
While using nearly 60 words to make up one sentence is remarkable in a way, the Comptroller General was not pleased with such an "accomplishment."

For background, GAO in those days was struggling with making its reports clear, partly because it had very few employees with liberal-arts backgrounds.

2010-07-25T18:17:00.000-07:00

In listening to the continuing adventures of Philip Marlowe courtesy of rusc.com, I came across two cute segments around the edges. I transcribe them here. The first is a PSA; read it to yourself in a very chipper announcer's voice.

How about tying a mental string around your finger today to remind yourself to file your 1949 income tax return as soon as possible? The 15th of March isn't several miles down the road the way it used to be; it's almost at your front door, and you'd certainly get a scare if you came home one evening to find it sitting right smack in your living room, saying smugly, "Well, you forgot to file your income tax return, what now, little man?" So why not set aside tonight as income tax night and file your 1949 return. This is Roy Rowan speaking.

(The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, "The Big Step," CBS, February 28, 1950.)

The next is a spot for a show reminiscent of American Idol, though without the direct-democracy component.

There are songs for sale, and one of them may turn into the nation's newest hit as you listen to CBS on Friday night. This hour-long melody is called Songs for Sale, and during the hour, you hear four songwriters with unpublished music as they present their tunes to a panel of veteran top-flight songwriters. At the end, the panel picks out one song to be published and plugged, and you'll hear the reasons they give for their choice. Be listening to Songs for Sale, tonight, on most of these same CBS stations.

(The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, "The Collector's Item," CBS, August 25, 1950.)

According to this page, incidentally, Songs for Sale was part of the elevation of Rosemary Clooney and Tony Bennett to fame. Google Books generally confirmed that, and led me to both Clooney's and Bennett's memoirs. Both recalled that the songs were chosen not for quality but for having interesting or wacky writers to interview on air.

Yellow means go. Green means stop. And red means, where the fuck did you get that banana at.

2010-07-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to the Adventures of Philip Marlowe with Gerald Mohr while exercising. It was unintentionally amusing when Marlowe was looking through the scrapbook of a dead actress, showing her career going down the tubes around 1928... "no explanation why." Of course that tied into the plot, but I don't think an explanation would actually be called for - lots of actors didn't survive the advent of talkies, and that was the very year they took off.

The villain was an older washed-up actor, the only one with a mid-Atlantic accent, and described as resembling a character actor of whom "you only remembered the face, not the name." That got me thinking. Over the 30's and 40's that stopped being a high-status accent, so possibly older actors retained it disproportionately... the older are more likely to be villains... so perhaps the "British" accent became the stereotypically villainous one in Hollywood purely accidentally?

Of course, the stereotype might just have been alive and well by 1950.

...And in the blue corner, weighing in at 2000 pounds, a racist bear.

2010-06-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

So we know that even after the events of the past two years, our elites, including the majority of Democrats in power, fetishize the concept of free markets too much to accept something like the CCC to help the economy and relieve suffering. Heck, they're balking at a second stimulus or extending unemployment benefits. But maybe lemonade can be made with BP's Gulf spill.

Obviously, BP has huge capital reserves to pay for the cleanup, and compensate a lot of people and businesses (more if the government has the guts to show that the liability cap doesn't apply to them). But what actually constitutes cleanup seems mostly up to them.

What if we maximized the cleanup BP is obligated to perform, as a form of economic stimulus? Get every drop of oil out of the Gulf (not just the coasts); rebuild, replant, and restock all damaged land; whatever we can think of. Wring another $200 or $300 billion out of BP. Get hundreds of thousands of people working.

There are problems with regional equity. Unemployment is low in Louisiana compared to nationally (a bit lower in Texas, similar or higher in the other Gulf states); there are probably plenty of people across the country who'd be willing to relocate for half a year or so to send money home, and that could be facilitated (set up trailers, for example). Then there's gender equity: the jobs will be disproportionately male without intervention, and so will the people who can move temporarily. But even if those aren't properly addressed, it should still be worth it.

If "monkeys" isn't the answer, something's wrong with the question.

2010-06-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

I recently got pointed to a circa-2000 LRB article on North Korea, which had a lot of good color.

A lot of Chinese tourists visit Dandong... a glimpse of North Korea is the closest they can get to a visit to their own past. In the summer, tourists take boat trips almost to the other bank. They sip Cokes and gawp at the men in old-fashioned nylon suits, their red Kim Il Sung badges flashing in the sunlight, the schoolchildren in white shirts and red neckerchiefs, walking by in formation. Or they drive out of town to an entirely reconstructed stretch of ‘Great Wall’ which starts suddenly by a ticket booth on the road, and stops equally suddenly five hundred metres later, on a knoll overlooking the border: the river, fields, a small North Korean village, a pithead and two strange concrete towers with little grey spires. All suitably exotic and oppressive.

My Chinese friends in Dandong talk with mixed feelings about this interest in North Korea: a mixture of superiority and nostalgia. They’re delighted when I tell them how poor and downtrodden everyone looks in the country, and are eager to explain how miserable life was under such a system. Yet many of the same people are loyal Party members who remember the unity, the idealism and the security of the old days with great fondness. A night’s karaoke in Dandong will mingle 1950s revolutionary songs with modern pop: CDs of both sell equally well to the over-thirties.

The strangeness of North Korea makes for a near-inexhaustible supply of magazine articles I find hard to put down. Still, they do cluster around the same points: isolation; impoverished totalitarian organization; Stockholmesque loyalty; Potemkin displays; propaganda coming over always-on TVs. With the NYT's recent compilation from refugee testimonials, that changed.

Citing aerial photos of plumeless smokestacks, economists say roughly three of every four North Korean factories are idle. The economy has been staggering badly since 2006, when Kim Jong-il pulled out of multinational talks aimed at ending his nuclear weapons program. The sinking of the Cheonan will further damage the economy: South Korea has suspended nearly all trade, depriving the North of $333 million a year from seafood sales and other exports.

...

Farmers tend their own gardens as weeds overtake collective farms. Urban workers duck state assignments to peddle everything from metal scavenged from mothballed factories to televisions smuggled from China.

...

On paper, he said, a Chongjin state construction company employs him. But the company has few supplies and no cash to pay its employees. So like more than a third of the workers, the worker said, he pays roughly $5 a month to sign in as an employee on the company’s daily log — and then toil elsewhere.

Such payments, widespread at smaller state companies, are supposed to keep companies solvent, said one 62-year-old woman who is a trader in Chongjin. Even a major enterprise like the city’s metal refinery has not paid salaries since 2007, she and others said, though workers there collect 10 days worth of food rations each month.

The usual old stories - which may have been true at the time - play into old stereotypes about fear, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Great Leader, etc. Now, though, the machinery of state enterprise has broken down and people are scrabbling around in the ruins.

It's surprisingly similar to what I've read about Bihar, India's notoriously poorest state, which has people on the payroll as mechanics for state-owned steel plants while only making a subsistence living as peasants.

Are you a bottle of delicious aspirin? No? Then stop "helping".

2010-05-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

I visited the Congressional Cemetery this morning. Some observations:

Oh, this District of ours: the greatest obelisk-per-hectare rate I've ever seen in a cemetery (including, I think, Arlington).
Their dog-walking enterprise is apparently doing well to revive the site: they now have a "cell-phone tour" where you can call in to get the story on a grave.
That includes the grave of Mary Ann Hall, one of the most exclusive madams in DC in the mid-19th century, which I learned only through the tour. The tour befuddled me a bit, because I had a hard time being sure the description wasn't just poorly phrased to sound like euphemisms -- until the words "...which was legal in DC at the time."
I saw a stone for someone named Meeta Campbell Alden, died 1944, which I know as an Indian name. I did some research on getting home; it's apparently a variation of Metta, a dead diminutive of Margaret (last in the SSA's top-1000 list in 1902).
Some school band had recently left a wreath by John Philip Sousa's grave.

Photosynthesis! The answer was photosynthesis! Pick up the pace, man, this is a 407-word phrase!

2010-04-23T14:21:00.000-07:00

My current reading is a history of the Government Accountability Office, and while it's mostly dry going, it has some gems.

It seems that in the first generation of the GAO's existence (it was established in 1921), it actually approved every single payment the government made. Receipts and vouchers were shipped from all over the country: "Often carloads of these documents stood in the freight yards as backlogs, awaiting their turns for attention by the GAO clerks." The approving clerks and their superiors had a very formal approach, with no on-the-ground expertise, so their queries and decisions were often profoundly irritating:

A few old timers may recall [the GAO's] effort to disallow the purchase of a prize mule by the Tennessee Valley Authority for its agricultural demonstration program because such an expenditure was not specifically authorized in the law. Some... recall its memorandum to the Department of the Interior questioning how a bureau of that department would use a camera it had purchased. The response was a penciled notation: "To take pictures, you damned fool." It was initialed by Harold L. Ickes.

Quotable Quotes from the Blogotwittoweb, no. 9

2010-04-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

It was the deceased Icelandic economy's last wish that the ashes would be spread over Europe. - Eggert

“State sovereignty” is one of the new core values promoted by white identity politicians.... Did I say “new” core values? I meant refurbished. I meant dug up from the cemetery, outfitted with one of Ayn Rand’s old pantsuits, and offered a teabag and a cup of hot water in the Fox News greenroom. - Hendrik Hertzberg

The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. - Margaret Atwood

Ever get the feeling that the reality we inhabit is not the truest reality? Ever forget which bottle of OJ has all the LSD in it and spend the next 8 hours pondering neoplatonism and Gnostic Christianity? Philip K. Dick says “yup” and “right after my second bowl of Honey-Nut-Methamphetamine Cheerios”, and he could be righter than he ever imagined. We could be living in a "metastable vacuum," one which could suddenly fall apart into the true vacuum state, where the most fundamental aspects of reality are suddenly redefined, and the LHC could push us over the edge, if there is an edge. Or it could push us into a new reality exactly the same as our false reality, only Ricky Martin is now gay. OH SHIT!!!!!!! - The Editors

The next time you see me, I will be eating a burger made from a cow cloned for me personally. Because that’s how feminism works. - Sady

The white straight bourgeois part of the feminist movement is mostly about waking up one day and going, "I was told I was a beautiful princess and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" What T-shirt?, sez all other women everywhere. - AWB

Victorian Science being run on the Smurfette principle of gender balance... - Sydney Padua

More adventures in waking

2010-04-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

Last night, around midnight, I suddenly woke up. I was trembling and my heart was racing, as when one awakes from a bad nightmare, but I didn't know why. I was also inexplicably paranoid: I glanced at the poster and set of books by my bed and thought they had both been replaced by malicious parties unknown. I was so upset at these imagined developments I almost shouted before I got a grip on myself in a few seconds.

My guess is I did have a nightmare, but its memory was instantly erased just before I woke up. This is especially plausible considering I had watched Mulholland Drive before bed.

(Also in that first second of wakefulness, my digital clock face registered as two coats-of-arms side by side.)

Well cut me in half and call me a munchkin, 'cause ding-dong the witch is dead.

2010-04-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

When I first heard about some of the investment banks making back a lot of their losses through futures trading - making long bets that would pay off big if the real estate markets collapsed - I didn't initially assume this to be insidious like others seemed to. I figured these are big places with a lot of trading desks, and it's possible for part of such an institution to play a long shot just in case, without necessarily believing a collapse is imminent.

Looks like I was giving them too much credit. According to the SEC, Goldman Sachs was simultaneously creating CDOs full of mortgages cherry-picked to be more likely to fail, so they could bet against the buyers, who, as we know, systematically knew virtually nothing about the quality of the mortgages. (Via Kevin Drum)

Quotable Quotes from the Blogotwittoweb, Health Care Edition

2010-03-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

For God’s sake, will you stop throwing around epitaphs and deal with the facts for once, David? - Karl Rove

Rep. Richard Neal got up this morning and said, "this is an important day. A historic day. Honey, get me my yellowest tie." - Ezra Klein

If we close the donut hole, what are we left with? A world of bialies? - SP

Now that there's freee abortions, I gotta try to get pregnant so I can get one. Abortions are super fun - M. LeBlanc

The Senate needs to get over itself. Its inane and increasingly misused traditions -- some of which are accidents created by a shoddy edit of the rulebook -- are not some lonely bulwark standing between us and tyranny. - Ezra Klein

Hie thine answer, for there are women on this train who are driven to hysterics by stasis of any description!

2010-03-13T15:44:00.000-08:00

In the last few weeks I've come to glance at my digital alarm clock immediately upon waking. It's a very interesting experience, because in my first second of wakefulness, I cannot read.

It triggers a moment of confusion, sometimes approaching panic - not worry that I've lost the ability to read, but rather a reflexive consternation at seeing something so wholly new in the familiar environment of my room. My brain tries to interpret the shapes, but if it hits on anything, it's different every time. Once it was a procession of cartoony outlines of ghosts; more often it's random shapes no more interpretable than an array of scattered pine needles.

Then I blink, and I see what time it is.

Quotable Quotes from the Blogotwittoweb, no. 8

2010-03-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

Lenin said once that capitalists would sell communists the rope to hang them with, but he was wrong. The communists are gone, so we're selling it to each other, and even a world historical economic meltdown won't convince us to stop. It's like watching a coke addict knocking over the bystanders as he barrels out of rehab to track down his old crack dealer. - Kevin Drum

(On Obama's health care summit) There should be someone paid to sit in the corner all day and just yell "Oh, SNAP!" at appropriate times. - Ezra Klein

(On Iron Man 2 trailer) Notice Whiplash-Crimson-Dynamo’s character-framing observation. “If you can make God bleed,” he says, “people will cease to believe in him.” Yes, it’s not like there are any religions out there in which the blood of God plays a central role in people’s faith. - Spencer Ackerman

"Confusing"? "Obtuse"? Does [Kent] Conrad need to stop by Politico's offices with a picture book and some finger puppets? - Jonathan Chait

I have invented a cocktail called The Pint Of Whisky that uses a pint glass, whisky, and slapping anyone asking for a cocktail. - Warren Ellis

Friedman seems to get all his metaphors and his social analysis straight from his frequent flyer account: LAX strikes him as kind of shabby these days, ergo the U.S. is failing to save and invest, unlike the thrifty and mysterious Chinese. Then we get one billionaire interviewing another billionaire about whether it would be a good idea to cut taxes on companies run by billionaires. Can you guess the answer? I knew you could... - Paul Campos

(Liveblogging Avatar) Have they even mentioned what Unobtanium is for yet? If they did, I missed it. Gonna pretend it facilitates 6-month-long orgasms. - Spike

You can hold me at gunpoint. Or you can pout at me. You cannot do both.

2010-02-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

And now your headliner, the emperor of etymology, the ne plus ultra of nerdery, LONG-LOST FRIENDS.

We start pictorially: what do the following two images have in common?

(On the left is Winston Churchill, on the right Priyanka Chopra, a Bollywood actress of some repute.)

Answer: it's all in the hand. Churchill is making the V-sign, whose V to English- and French-speakers signifies "victory," but in Dutch corresponds to vrijheid, or "freedom." And the Hindi given name Priyanka is, in fact, cognate to the pan-Germanic word "free" (German frei, Dutch vrij, Swedish fri).

Even better, this is not the kind of trans-continental cognate where the meaning has changed five times and the words would sniff at each other even after being introduced. The meaning encapsulated in the name Priyanka, Sanskrit priya "dear, beloved," has a close ally in a modern German verb.

What sparked my interest in this phenomenon was learning that the equivalent of the verb "free [someone]" in German is befreien. Why, I wondered, was it not just freien? - or perhaps I didn't, as German puts near-meaningless prefixes on many of even its simplest verbs, but I definitely wondered if there was also a verb freien, and if so, what it meant. There is such a word, though it's perhaps a bit dated, and it means "woo, court." (Its Dutch equivalent, vrijen, is decidedly rawer in meaning.)

Where could that come from?

From a highly interesting shift. The family of meanings related to affection is by far the most common across Indo-European languagaes; the "not in servitude" meaning is only found in Germanic and Celtic, and thought to be a later development. How the shift happened is not uncontroverted, but the OED suggests that an even earlier meaning, simultaneously retained up through our various predecessor languages like Old English, was "one's own." We see this persisting in the OE word frēobearn, which is the ancestor of "freeborn" but which was used to mean "of one's own blood" - a family member. It is then surmised that this word was used to draw a contrast to servants or slaves in a household, and by the 10th century had attained its modern meaning by association.

With us at least, the older meanings of the word were lost: in Old English, the verb freogan continued to mean "love" as well as "free," but lost that meaning by the time of Middle English. But the old root is still with us in other forms, such as "friend," "Friday" (after Frigg, the goddess of love), in German and Dutch as the verbs mentioned above, in Russian as приятель priyatel' "friend" and приятный priyatnyj "pleasant," and of course in the first names of women across India.

This has been LONG-LOST FRIENDS.

Quotable Quotes from the Blogotwittoweb, Emergency Release

2010-02-12T07:46:00.000-08:00

(concerning musician John Mayer, who if you didn't hear, just spouted a lot of thoroughly racist and misogynist, plus downright weird, stuff in an interview that's being analyzed all-a-net:)

"John Mayer is basically the reason that a lot of black folks have a 'don't get drunk around them motherfuckers' rule." - Ta-Nehisi Coates

California law contains some real relics.

2010-02-08T21:16:00.001-08:00

Every honorably discharged or honorably relieved soldier, sailor, or marine of the United States or Confederate States who served in the Civil War, any Indian war, the Spanish-American War, any Philippine insurrection, the Chinese Relief Expedition, the World War of 1914 and years following, or World War II, who is physically unable to obtain a livelihood by manual labor, and who is a voter of this state, may distribute circulars, and hawk, peddle, and vend any goods, wares or merchandise owned by him, except spirituous, malt, vinous, or other intoxicating liquor, without payment of any license tax or fee whatsoever, whether municipal, county or state, and the legislative body shall issue to such soldier, sailor or marine, without cost, a license therefor.

-- California Business and Professions Code 16001

If you duct-taped the evidentiary bar to your ankles, don't be shocked if people are incredulous that your day job is to teach youths how to hurdle.

2010-02-08T19:23:00.000-08:00

Language change in our lifetime!

English pronounces its u's oddly. We insert a 'y' sound before it much of the time - "cute," "uniform," "new" (in some pronunciations), and even I'm not aware of it often.

There's another phenomenon of palatalization: a dental (like 't' or 's') followed by the "yu" sound gets softened, like so "meet you" tends to come out as "meetchyu" in informal speech, and the suffix "-sion" becomes "-shon."

All that is unremarkable. It wasn't the case in Shakespeare's time, but it has been for long enough that the above is standard in dictionary pronunciation guides. However, British English seems to have made a new change, at least recently enough that it's not in the dictionaries.

This is putting the above two rules together: adding a 'y' after a dental, and then palatalizing the result. In what I've heard, British English pronounces "tutor" as "chutor," "capsule" as "capshule," and "duty" as "juty." I'm m not clear on its real phonetic rules - we do the same with "sexual," so maybe it's just that they add the 'y' sound in places we don't - but it definitely leads to pronunciations novel to American English.

(There's another interesting phenomenon I have less of an understanding of: between one word ending in a vowel and another beginning in a vowel, they seem to insert an 'r' sound, so "Martha is" becomes "Marthar is." It's possible, though, that it only happens between certain vowels - in all the examples I have at hand, the first is 'a'. More data is needed.)

Quotable Quotes from the Blogotwittoweb

2010-02-06T20:38:00.000-08:00

"Welcome, thrice welcome, to the year 2010! The year in which, realistically, it's all going to happen again." - Daniel Davies

"These days, I hear, every twenty-something in Brooklyn runs his own abattoir. Everyone knows his primal cuts. One out of every six has studied at the knee of a master butcher how to 'fabricate' a rib roast and disjoint a rabbit. One in ten has written a memoir on the subject." - redfoxtailshrub

"Palin: 'The earth is just asking for it. Its climate might say, "No, no." But its fossil fuels say, "Yes, yes."'" - rudepundit

"The media spent years calling John Edwards 'Kennedyesque.' But then it turned out that he was rich and unfaithful to his wife." - Scott Lemieux

"I think I can speak for Scott, Erik Loomis, and others in judging this recession a complete failure if it fails to drive down vodka consumption by at least 30 percent." - Dave Noon

"Monopoly is to the contemporary board gamer as garlic-infused kryptonite snakes are to Super Vampire Indiana Jones." - Lore Sjöberg

"Oh, the penguins deserve better. Spread the love... Beaky twats." - Sleep Talkin' Man (which you should follow for some great nonsense)

America does not negotiate with tourists.

2010-02-03T11:10:00.000-08:00

It's everybody's favorite packaged breakfast concept, LONG-LOST FRIENDS!

Today's long-lost friends are "Boer," "boor," "bower," and "neighbor." The first pair is pretty intuitive; the second pair, less so.

I was originally brought into this investigation by wanting to understand the German Bauer, meaning "farmer, peasant." It's interesting to the student of German since the verb on which it is based, bauen, means not "farm" but "build." (Incidentally, in chess it means "pawn.")

Going back, back into the distant past, the reconstructed original verb in Old Teutonic is found to be bǚ, meaning simply "dwell." By the time this root made its way into Old English, its verb form was bûan, also meaning "dwell, inhabit," but by extension "cultivate, till." This verb itself did not survive into modern English - but certain forms of it did. The verb had two noun forms, reflecting the vicissitudes of Old English: búr, meaning "dwelling, cottage," and ȝebúr, meaning "dweller, farmer, countryman" (that initial letter is a yogh). The first evolved into "bower," whose meaning is off because it fell out of use and was revived purely poetically. The second only survived in compound form: prefixed with neáh, meaning "near" (like "nigh"), it became neáhȝebúr "near-dweller" and the modern "neighbor.

"Boer" and "boor" are both cousins, not descendants, of bûan. The Dutch cognate of ȝebúr was boor, also meaning "farmer"; English borrowed it sometime in the 16th century, sometimes meaning a Dutch or German peasant, but quickly settling down as a derogatory general term for a peasant. In South Africa, the name "Boer" also means "farmer," merely in the more modern spelling.

In German, der Bauer has the same meaning its cognate ȝebúr did, whereas the base verb bauen (I surmise) drifted from "cultivate, till" to its modern "build," making this the most recent sense-development of them all.

This has been LONG-LOST FRIENDS.

Carter, bust out the Gatling guns. I want to be revered as a god by tea-time.

2010-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is another edition of the tantalizing, mind-opening feature... LONG-LOST FRIENDS.

The two words "tax" and "taste" would seem to have nothing in common but their first two letters. But did you know they come from identical roots?

First, they were both introduced into English from French - Old French, to be more precise. In verb form, they were taxer and taster respectively - in modern French, the later is now tâter. Old French taster apparently meant "touch" (although its modern meaning is a slightly shaded version of that) the English word changed meanings to another of the senses. Taster in turn derived from the Latin verb taxo (infinitive taxare), which is the common root. The word changed over post-classical usage; the OED reconstructs it as being extended from taxare to taxitare, then being elided to taxtare and then tastare in "late popular Latin" (whenever that was), which links it to Old French taster.

However, taxo had several meanings in Latin, and they were carried down in different ways. It meant "touch" (a close variant of the more common tango, as in noli me tangere), but other meanings included "charge, censure, reproach" and "value, calculate." Thanks to one or both of these other meanings, by medieval times it was used simply to mean "to assess a tax." And from there it was a short hop to Old French taxer and English tax.

There you have it - a Latin word housing so many meanings that it had to be subdivided.

This has been LONG-LOST FRIENDS.

Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?

2010-01-21T16:26:00.000-08:00

After a long, long sabbatical, this is LONG-LOST FRIENDS, your etymological matchmaking feature.

A handful of words achieved their current form through people confusing their indefinite articles. These are words which originally started with n, but that initial consonant got worn away by association with the n in "an". So for example, "orange" comes from Sanskrit naranga, by way of Persian, Arabic Romance, with "a norange" (or however it was spelled then) reinterpreted as "an orange". (This might have happened beforehand in French the same way with their article un; the story is a bit muddled in this case, as the word may have also been harmonized with the place-name Orange, which is not cognate.) "Adder" has the same provenance, coming from Old English nædre. "Notch" derives from Latin osca, though there the n was added rather than dropped; and "venture" is from mistakenly viewing "adventure" as "a venture".

Our candidate for today is umpire. Though transference, it lost an initial n; previously, up to the 15th century, it had been "noumpere". This was a combination of "non" and "per", meaning "without peer" or "unmatched"; somehow, that stopped being a word of praise and came to refer to arbiters.

Now, the word pareil is a more modern version of what in old French was just per, coming through to us as "peer". Realize what this means! "Umpire" and that pretentious word "nonpareil" are not just related but exact cognates - the meaning of "umpire" may have changed, but its essence remains.

This has been LONG-LOST FRIENDS.

You may no longer serve tacos or taco-format savory conceits. This coprophiliac fantasy buffet ends now.

2009-12-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

I've just found the best constitutional provision ever.

In Mississippi, amendments to the state constitution can be proposed by initiative, but they have a distribution requirement: no more than 20% of signatures may be from any one congressional district. (Constitution.)

Problem? Since 2000, Mississippi has had only four congressional districts. Do the math - according to the letter of the law, it is now technically impossible for the Secretary of State to accept any initiative.

It turns out that isn't how it actually works - the Attorney General decided the requirement would continue to operate as if there were still five districts (page 6 here). But it remains extremely restrictive - you need to submit the exact same (high) number of signatures from each "district," or be rejected. The legislature basically hates initiatives, and therefore has allowed the legal absurdity to remain in place.

It may very well be jelly, as my casual inquiries into the subject suggested that - ceteris paribus - jam don't shake like that.

2009-12-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm now going through Shakespeare's first tetralogy, Henry VI / Richard III. I hadn't realized that Joan of Arc is a featured character in Henry VI, Part 1, but in line with the contemporary English conception of her, she's portrayed as a witch and a strumpet. It seems critics hated this aspect of the play as early as the 18th century, when the English were already viewing Joan in a more favorable light. In fact, for at least 100 years the standard interpretation was that 1 Henry VI was so bad a play it couldn't be Shakespeare's, largely because of Joan's treatment.

Choice tidbits:

In Act V, Scene 3, Joan literally conjures up demons and asks for their continued assistance, but they no longer help.

PUCELLE.

No hope to have redress? My body

Pay recompense, if you will grant my suit.
[They shake their heads.]

Cannot my body nor blood-sacrifice

Entreat you to your wonted furtherance?
Then take my soul, my body, soul and all,
Before that England give the French the foil.
[They depart.]

In Act V, Scene 4, Joan is about to be burned by the English; a shepherd comes up, identifying himself as her father, and starts to mourn; but she denies and curses him.

Decrepit miser! base ignoble wretch!
I am descended of a gentler blood:
Thou art no father nor no friend of mine.

Later in the same scene, when they're about to light the stake, she suddenly abandons her earlier assertions of purity:

I am with child, ye bloody homicides:
Murder not then the fruit within my womb,
Although ye hale me to a violent death.

They assume it was by the King of France, and decide to burn her anyway ("we'll have no bastards live / Especially since Charles father it"); she says no, it was the Duke of Alencon; they hate him too, and are resolute; she says it was actually Reigner, still to no avail; and finally they cut her off:

YORK.

Why, here's a girl! I think she knows not well

There were so many, whom she may accuse.

WARWICK.

It's sign she hath been liberal and free.

YORK.

And yet, forsooth, she is a virgin pure.

Strumpet, thy words condemn thy brat and thee:

Use no entreaty, for it is in vain.

And those are all from the last act, when her "true nature" is revealed. In the earlier acts, she acts saintly and heroic, but even then she can hardly deliver a line without someone demeaning her with a double entendre. All in all, extraordinarily shabby treatment from a modern perspective, something we seem to have collectively tried very hard to forget.

Well, I didn't think he was the kind of homicidal maniac who went crazy and killed people!

2009-12-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

Grant worked to do something for the blacks who followed his armies, in a way that looks basically commendable until an uncomfortable proviso at the very end (bolded):

The stock [of food gathered from the countryside around Tennessee and Mississippi] was bountiful, but still it gave me no idea of the possibility of supplying a moving column in an enemy's country from the country itself.

It was at this point, probably, where the first idea of a "Freedman's Bureau" took its origin. Orders of the government prohibited the expulsion of the Negroes from the protection of the army, when they came in voluntarily. Humanity forbade allowing them to starve. ...There was no special authority for feeding them unless they were employed as teamsters, cooks and pioneers with the army; but only able-bodied young men were suitable for such work. This labor would support but a very limited percentage of them. The plantations were all deserted; the cotton and corn were ripe: men, women and children above ten years of age could be employed in saving these crops. To do this work with contrabands, or to have it done, organization under a competent chief was necessary. On inquiring for such a man Chaplain [John] Eaton, now and for many years the very able United States Commissioner of Education, was suggested. ...I gave him all the assistants and guards he called for. We together fixed the prices to be paid for the Negro labor, whether rendered to the government or to individuals. The cotton was to be picked from abandoned plantations, the laborers to receive the stipulated price (my recollection is twelve and a half cents per pound for picking and ginning) from the quartermaster, he shipping the cotton north to be sold for the benefit of the government. ...

At once the freedmen became self-sustaining. The money was not paid to them directly, but was expended judiciously and for their benefit. They gave me no trouble afterwards.

The first paragraph makes reference to another item, on the involuntary Atkins diet his soldiers were on during the Vicksburg campaign.

Beef, mutton, poultry, and forage were found in abundance. Quite a quantity of bacon and molasses was also secured from the country, but bread and coffee could not be obtained in quantity sufficient for all the men. ...[T]he majority of the command was destined to go on without bread until a new base was established on the Yazoo above Vicksburg.

....

Most of the army had now been for three weeks with only five days' rations issued by the commissary. They had an abundance of food, however, but began to feel the want of bread. I remember that in passing around to the left of the line on the 21st, a soldier, recognizing me, said in rather a low voice, but yet so I heard him, "Hard tack." In a moment the cry was taken up all along the line, "Hard tack! Hard tack!"

....

As soon as the news of the arrival of the Union army behind Vicksburg reached the North floods of visitors began to pour in. Some came to gratify curiosity; some to see sons or brothers who had passed through the terrible ordeal; members of the Christian and Sanitary Associations came to minister to the wants of the sick and wounded. Often those coming to see a son or brother would bring a dozen or two of poultry. They did not know how little the gift would be appreciated. Many of the soldiers had lived so much on chickens, ducks, and turkeys without bread during the march that the sight of poultry, if they could get bacon, almost took away their appetite. But the intention was good.

(It should be remembered that throughout the 19th century, chicken was normally a luxury item.)

I'm so sorry you didn't fulfill your dream of becoming a divorced civil servant. Seems to me the brainwashing was a lateral career move.

2009-11-30T10:09:00.000-08:00

So much better than the usual "their attorney refused to comment":

Reached on his cell, their attorney, Paul W. Gardner, said, "Okay. No. No. No." and hung up.

The opinion of the psychological community is that there's always time for hat shopping.

2009-11-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

I just wrapped up two 5.5-hour plane rides with cable TV. I note that the passage of time is partly a matter of perception: if you relax or nap or even read on a plane, you could feel compelled to check the time after five minutes, or after a half-hour, and the intervals could feel the same. But when you watch a show, it will reliably occupy you for a set length - in other words, it pins down and standardizes the passage of time.

In an episode of a certain cops-and-lawyers show (which shall remain nameless), the cops coerce a bartender into handing over credit-card records without a warrant by threatening to card two obviously-underage customers. This isn't a new observation, but it's socially corrosive to have laws everyone's disobeying, because that makes everyone vulnerable. It's a less artful extension of Richelieu's "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

That isn't to say that legislation can't or shouldn't be used to affect habitual personal decisions. Look at seatbelts. In the 70's, everyone thought that seatbelt laws would be unenforceable, because Americans want to live free, man. Even Nader bought into that, pressing for airbags above, or even to the exclusion of, seatbelts. Then we started making and enforcing seatbelt laws in earnest in the mid-80's, and what do you know, people's habits did change over time. But if we aren't willing to do what it takes to enforce a law, especially one involving everyday conduct, we should abolish it.

You think it's safe, then some idiot picks up a magic ring and it's Balrogs all over the place!

2009-10-31T12:46:00.000-07:00

I know it's all pabulum, but I'm rather impressed in a cultural sense by how often Obama is referenced in advertising. Before the inauguration, lots of big companies were using his slogans. Now, the Internet abounds with stuff purporting to be tied to the stimulus - "Obama for Fair Insurance" titling an ad for car insurance, "Obama Wants Single Moms to Go Back to School" (possibly fronting for these frightful people), and so forth. While not denying the fakeness of it all, when was the last time a president's image was so attractive that people used it like this? All I can think of is the "Roosevelt Wants You to Join a Union" campaign back in the 30's.

It's not alive! It's a basket!

2009-10-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia find of the day: how St. Paul stayed the capital of Minnesota.

The Minnesota Territory was formalized in 1849 and Saint Paul named as capital. In 1857, the territorial legislature voted to move the capital to Saint Peter. However, Joe Rolette, a territorial legislator, stole the physical text of the approved bill and went into hiding, thus preventing the move. On May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted to the union as the thirty-second state with Saint Paul as the capital.

A 10% chance is pretty unlikely, but everyone knows that a one-in-a-million chance is a sure thing.

2009-10-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

Uncannily, just a few hours after I finished my previous post about the Portuguese banknote scandal, I met a Portuguese at a party, and got to pick his brain. Generally, he says, the story has little special salience in Portuguese memory - probably one of a number of memorable incidents in history - but there was a flurry of interest earlier this decade when a TV series was produced about Alves Reis.

He doesn't think that the incident led in any meaningful way to the fall of the Republic, but agrees that under Salazar there was a great academic incuriosity about the history of that era - in fact, incuriosity was fostered very broadly, he said, to keep people dumber and easier to rule.

Kindly vacate my pockets, Russian fiends!

2009-10-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished the book The Man Who Stole Portugal, by Murray Teigh Bloom. It's an excellent book which I recommend highly; however, in keeping with my favored aspect of book reviews, this post will extract the pertinent facts for those who don't want to read it.

The subject of the book is arguably one of history's greatest con jobs. The plotter, Artur Virgilio Alves Reis, realized he could make counterfeit Portuguese banknotes that were not just passable, but perfect. In a way it wasn't even counterfeiting at all, because his bills were made with the same plates, the same paper, the same printer as the real ones. Even experts would conclude they were perfect, because they were.

Then as now, a number of smaller countries contracted out their banknote production to foreign printers. Alves Reis was a young businessman with a penchant for trickery*, who found in 1924 that the Bank of Portugal, while obligated by law to issue no more than twice its capital in paper money, in fact had put out more like a hundred times, to satisfy government demands. He realized that in this situation of rapid (though not hyper-) inflation, he could put out a great deal of his own money without affecting their policy.

The scale of his eventual crime was tremendous, but he wasn't super-competent like Hollywood con-men. In fact, his first idea wouldn't have worked: through intermediaries, he put out feelers to a Dutch printer, with the idea that they had the expertise to duplicate an existing bill. In fact, they could have, but it wouldn't have been perfect, nor would they have been comfortable with doing so. His intermediaries were passed on to a prestigious London firm, Waterlow and Sons, which had printed Portuguese bills in the past, and still held those plates in trust.

How did his intermediaries (who quickly became business partners if not accomplices) go about this business without being identified as would-be counterfeiters? Here was the real genius of the plan, the aspect which allowed it to go on for as long as it did. Alves Reis's story was that the governor of the Bank of Portugal, supported by some of its directors, wanted to issue more banknotes specifically for investment in the failing colony of Angola. Supposedly there was strong opposition from other bank directors, and therefore the governor wanted to print the money in secret from the rest of the country, including those directors. This was certainly shady, but the governor had the legal authority, so it was plausibly not criminal.

This story had great usefulness because it prompted those involved to take the same precautions appropriate for committing a crime, without knowing it actually was a crime. Throughout, Alves Reis was the only person definitively aware that the contracts and letters empowering him to order the banknotes from the plates held by Waterlow were all forged. His main partners, the Portuguese José Bandeira, the Dutch Karel Marang, and the German-Brazilian Adolf Hennies, certainly assumed his role was thanks to hefty bribes, but that was a normal part of business for them. Sir William Waterlow, head of Waterlow and Sons, was excited at the prospect of getting Portugal back as a client, and the instructed "precautions" included communicating only via Alves Reis's people, never getting direct confirmation from the Bank of Portugal.

Alves Reis was an excellent researcher, and highly resourceful, but not necessarily meticulous. Getting perfect banknotes didn't just require the plates: he needed to work out how the Bank of Portugal calculated serial numbers, which officials' signatures were needed, etc., and here he made mistakes; for example, he didn't know at first that the two letters in the serial number were never both vowels. What helped him through slipups like this - which happened more than once - was, I think, confirmation bias becoming almost an eagerness to be fooled. Sir William was so invested in the project, and the concomitant secrecy, that he ignored evidence of foul play: for example, he happily sent them information on serial numbers and signatures previously used, even though Bank representatives ought to have had access to this information themselves; and he ignored the advice of Waterlow's agent in Lisbon (who thought it was fishy).

It worked, though: Waterlow was to manufacture money worth over a hundred million dollars (1950's dollars, when Bloom's book was written), for a payment of a mere half-million. And the four partners - Alves Reis, Bandeira, Marang, and Hennies - split most of the profits between them, making it harder but still possible to sustain the belief that their enterprise was only normally corrupt. After all, they could have observed, a good amount was indeed funneled into investments in Angola (which was Alves Reis's hobbyhorse, where he had his first business success).

At first they converted the money into private assets in conventional ways: into foreign currency through the large black market; into genuine Portuguese money by depositing at outlying bank branches and withdrawing at central branches; etc. The money was all the same denomination and design, and there was a glut on the market sufficient to spark rumors of counterfeiting. The money being almost indistinguishable from genuine money, the rumor was quickly squelched by a public Bank of Portugal statement. But they had so much money that Alves Reis then tried something much greater in scope: taking over the Bank of Portugal itself. This was theoretically possible: the bank was a private entity, though special laws and obligations applied to it, and control could be gained by buying a majority of shares - and most crucially, with control, he could retroactively legalize his currency issue. A huge amount of money was required, but they had it, or could soon get it; harder was finding the requisite quantity of shares for sale. Over 10% of the bank's stock had been bought, when things finally turned sour.

Alves Reis and his partners had done many things with their money in Portugal - making investments, buying companies, mansions, public honors, and spreading it liberally to their friends. Alves Reis had even started his own bank, dedicated to investments in Angola as well as Portugal proper. In short, they had become public figures. The economy was picking up, and many credited Alves Reis as the dynamo of recovery (he may have indeed been so, ironically by his counterfeits working as a form of Keynesian stimulus). But there was also suspicion of this arriviste, with particular worry about whether the presence of Hennies, who had spied for Germany in the Great War, meant their investments were the camel's nose of Germany angling to take over Angola, something Portugal was extremely paranoid about.

At last, the idea arose that counterfeiting might be going on. It was originally based on a misinformed tip, by a teller who was convinced they were counterfeit but had no actual evidence for this belief. After some raids, which were quite embarrassing at first since they turned up nothing, the government had enough specimens in its hands for someone to notice a duplicated serial number (another of Alves Reis's mistakes). Soon, the facts came out, and Alves Reis was arrested.

All the forgeries Alves Reis had made were enough to cast suspicion on the Bank of Portugal's governor, as well as one director. Alves Reis's nimble tongue won over the prosecutor, who became convinced that the governor was the villain, and said so publicly and vehemently. Alves Reis, for his part, had decided to drag everyone down with him, and in jail (very comfortably thanks to the prosecutor) he churned out more and more forgeries to heap up guilt. But this was doomed; the bank officials had clout. The prosecutor was forced to resign, and the new prosecutor discovered the evidence of the original forging of contracts. Alves Reis confessed, wrote a tell-all memoir in 1927, and was eventually tried in 1930 by a special tribunal and given twenty years. Possibly the scandal contributed to loss of faith in the government - mere months after the arrests, a military coup ended the First Portuguese Republic, and Salazar rose to the top six years later - but causation is hard to pin down.

This kind of con worked partly because it had never been thought of before. Waterlow and Sons never got back its good name: despite slashing prices, its business shrunk yearly, and finally it was bought by a competitor in 1961. No banknote printer will fall for the same trick again. But it makes me think there's always some chain of events nobody's thought of before.

*He got his first good job, in Angola, by forging a degree from Oxford. As a businessman in Portugal, he got business capital by bouncing checks from an American bank, which spent eight days on a boat, letting him wire money to cover the seventh day. Some of his partners were similar: "Hennies" was actually a false identity, adopted around 1914, and to escape prosecution he readopted his real name (Döring) and returned to his native Germany.

Grant's memoirs, part XXXVIII

2009-10-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

Grant's last message to General Buckner, the commander of Fort Donelson, is well-remembered, as it characterized Grant's philosophy of war and gave him his nickname:

GENERAL S. B. BUCKNER,
Confederate Army.
SIR: Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.
I am, sir, very respectfully,
Your ob't se'v't,
U. S. GRANT,
Brig. Gen.

But the response Buckner sent is also worth reading. It encapsulates the general Southern response to defeat, from 1862 to the present: a protracted, verbal whine.

TO BRIG. GEN'L U. S. GRANT,
U. S. Army.
SIR: The distribution of the forces under my command, incident to an unexpected change of commanders, and the overwhelming force under your command, compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.
I am, sir,
Your very ob't se'v't,
S.B. BUCKNER,
Brig. Gen. C. S. A.

Quotable Quotes from the Blogotwittoweb, Part First-in-a-while

2009-10-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

I’m not saying that forcing detainees to listen to that song would be a war crime, but the ACLU would probably see it that way. - Matt Yglesias

He who controls the Spice Girls controls the UNIVERSE! - Aaron Diaz

Slate magazine is part of The Washington Post-Newsweek International family, and so I love them like family. But it's hard to read this and avoid the conclusion that they should be burned to the ground. - Ezra Klein

Whoever invented the breakfast meeting should be roundly spanked. - Stephen Fry

Late-breaking appendation:

It makes a person wonder what Fox will air now that their hosts have lost their words. An hour of Glenn Beck sobbing uncontrollably while pointing at a chalkboard on which the links between ACORN and his muted mouth-hole have been arranged into a misspelled anagram? - Scott Eric Kaufman

You're alcohol, Kenny Rogers! Drunk with power, that is!

2009-10-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

Etymology exploration of the day, prompted by this strip: where does the word "damsel" come from?

It's the product of a prolonged evolutionary crunching of the Latin dominicella, "little mistress" (diminutive of domina, "mistress"), by way of French, of course. In French it ended up as demoiselle, and thence mademoiselle.

Its first vowel in English is 'a' because in Old French it was dameisele. The middle syllable vowel was eventually elided in English, which is why antiquophiles like Sir Walter Scott popularized the throwback damosel.

It originally denoted gentle birth, but over time it became a general term of respect for a girl or young woman of any class. And soon after that transformation was complete, the 17th century or so, it drifted out of common use, becoming "archaic and literary or playful", to quote the OED - much like today. So if you happen to be writing Restoration/Georgian historical fiction, be careful!

You're missing the point. That's not your bra, it's a hippopotamus.

2009-10-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

Something a professor said has stuck with me, though I'm sure it's not a new observation. We value the actual person much higher than the statistical person. For example, if you propose measures to keep children from falling down wells that would cost $500,000 per predicted life saved, people will mutter and grumble about the cost, and maybe reject it. But if a real child falls down a well, they'll be willing to call in the fire brigade, the police, the army, whatever may be necessary, no matter what the eventual cost is.

This is now the US Grant Memoirs blog.

2009-10-09T12:00:00.004-07:00

Later in the day in reconnoitring I found a church off to the south of the road, which looked to me as if the belfry would command the ground back of the garita San Cosme. ... When I knocked for admission a priest came to the door, who, while extremely polite, declined to admit us. With the little Spanish then at my command, I explained to him that he might save property by opening the door, and he certainly would save himself from becoming a prisoner, for a time at least; and besides, I intended to go in whether he consented or not. He began to see his duty in the same light that I did, and opened the door, though he did not look as if it gave him special pleasure to do so.

Weasels. At dawn.

2009-10-02T16:20:00.002-07:00

Alongside Grant, I've been going through E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series for fun lately - it's the classic model for space opera, and it's written with a brisk technocentrism and optimism that modern science fiction doesn't approach (though often mocks).

At the fourth book in (they go by fast), I've had about enough of the omnicompetent agent gallivanting about saving galactic civilization once a chapter (random example of dialog: "Hi, Harvey, old spacehound! Fancy meeting you out here! It's a small Universe, ain't it?"). I note, though, that there are very faint intimations Smith may have been thinking of Lovecraft while writing:

But kindly Worsel could do nothing about the fantastically atrocious growths which were transforming the Earthman's legs and arms into monstrosities out of nightmares.

There's another bit like that which I can't find right now.

More Grant

2009-09-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

More frankness about how the Mexican War was started, with some heavy foreshadowing:

We were sent [to Texas] to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it. It was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive could announce, "Whereas, war exists by the acts of, etc.," and prosecute the contest with vigor. Once initiated there were but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it. Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which the nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate "war, pestilence, and famine," than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun.

A poignant scene of the march of technology, early in the Mexican War:

The army lay in camp upon the sand-beach... for several weeks, awaiting the arrival of transports to carry it to its new field of operations. The transports were all sailing vessels. The passage was a tedious one, and many of the troops were on shipboard over thirty days from the embarkation at the mouth of the Rio Grande to the time of debarkation south of Vera Cruz. The trip was a comfortless one for officers and men. ...

With the fleet there was a little steam propeller dispatch-boat -- the first vessel of the kind I had ever seen, and probably the first of its kind ever seen by any one then with the army. ... The little vessel, going through the fleet so fast, so noiselessly and with its propeller under water out of view, attracted a great deal of attention. I recollect that Lieutenant Sidney Smith... exclaimed, "Why, the thing looks as if it was propelled by the force of circumstances."

Social awkwardness:

I can call to mind only one instance when I saw [General Zachary Taylor] in uniform, and one other when I heard of his wearing it. ... The second occasion... was in order to receive a visit from the Flag Officer [David Conner] of the naval squadron off the mouth of the Rio Grande. ... General Taylor, knowing that naval officers habitually wore all the uniform the "law allowed" on all occasions of ceremony, thought it would be only civil to receive his guest in the same style. ... The Flag Officer, knowing General Taylor's aversion to the wearing of the uniform, and feeing that it would be regarded as a compliment should he meet him in civilian's dress, left off his uniform for this occasion. The meeting was said to have been embarrassing to both, and the conversation was principally apologetic.

And Moomin-Mama woke up, and the blood-sample showed 0.64 promille.

2009-09-25T20:30:00.001-07:00

In the DVD commentary for Leverage, a writer said that sometimes the obscure facts in the show are made up; their in-house term for these is "ledger," after their false-but-believable statement that banks built before 1980 have extra-big drop boxes to accommodate accounting ledgers.

I learned via Roald Dahl that in Britain, by law, dug-up gold or silver does not belong to the finder, but to the crown; and that this applied only to gold and silver, not to diamonds or platinum or anything else precious. This was interesting, but could well have been a "ledger." But hello, Joe, whaddaya know:

A court ruling this week declared the finds to be treasure, meaning that they belong to the British crown, which is expected to offer them for sale.
The crown’s practice... is that a reward equal to the value of the items — likely to be set in a bidding war among British museums — will be divided between Mr. Herbert as the finder and the farmer who owns the field where the discovery was made.

So it is in fact true - except that the crown now tries to make such situations fairer in practice.

I wonder if this is a post-Bretton Woods thing, though: back in the late 40's and 50's, the shortage of dollars for international exchange was a big economic problem, and dollars were convertible with gold internationally. As illustrated in some verses in Noël Coward's extremely political, bitter song "Don't Make Fun Of The Festival":

Clear the national decks, my lads,
Every one of us counts,
Grab the travelers' checks, my lads,
And pray that none of 'em bounce!
...

If no overseas trade appears
We'll have to work for a thousand years
To pay for the Festival of Britain!

I told you that pandas make horrible shoes.

2009-09-24T19:47:00.000-07:00

My new pleasure reading is Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs, based on an offhand reference by a professor.

He's very frank about his mediocrity as a young cadet at West Point:

A military life had no charms for me, and I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect.

And he has a great dry sense of humor:

It did seem to me, in my early army days, that too many of the older officers, when they came to command posts, made it a study to think what orders they could publish to annoy their subordinates and render them uncomfortable. I noticed, however, a few years later, when the Mexican war broke out, that most of this class of officers discovered they were possessed to disabilities which entirely incapacitated them for active field service. They had the moral courage to proclaim it, too. They were right; but they did not always give their disease the right name.

Have Gaston bring the coach about, won't you? I think the eels are rising.

2009-09-10T03:33:00.000-07:00

They say politicians are generally very insecure people, who have learned to overcome their insecurity through their public persona - basically, acting out. A re-election defeat can often be crushing personally and even physically.

One example is George Wallace, who went through a crucible of defeat before he resolved to run on the hard-segregationist platform. He was inconsolable after his big defeat, refusing to even get out of bed for two days.

After many fruitless attempts at persuasion, his aides resolved to demonstrate to him viscerally that he had plenty of funds and resources, that he could run again and win. They went to the bank, withdrew several thousand dollars from the campaign fund in cash, and literally poured the cash over Wallace in bed. It worked.

(Anecdote courtesy of Professor J.E.)

For God's sake speak English, man! We don't need any of your deutschie markies!

2009-09-02T03:10:00.000-07:00

I once knew a thing or two about Japanese politics, but after Koizumi left office, he was followed by a succession of nonentities whose main contribution was to show how little power the prime minister innately holds in Japan. The most recent mainly receives notice for being a manga reader (yes, it has a stigma in Japan too, it's just mild). But their electoral logic has been working inexorably toward a shakeup all this time.

Before reform in 1996, the multi-member-seat electoral system gave candidates good odds if they split off to run on their own, or in a smaller party. Thus, the Liberal Democratic Party got fat and lazy in its continual power, even as popular discontent grew, while its opponents split again and again, rendering them ineffective even after they achieved a brief majority in 1993. But in the new single-seat system, opposition needs to be unified for any of them to win seats. So the new Democratic Party has been gobbling up more and more small parties for strategy's sake, and moving closer and closer to a majority, notwithstanding that the party is a bit of a kludge, not a great repository of people's hopes and dreams.

Single-seat systems, when not gerrymandered like ours, facilitate big swings, and on Sunday the DPJ won 308 of 480 seats in the House of Representatives, compared to 113 last time. You could call it the first time since 1955 the country will be genuinely ruled by a non-LDP party, as opposed to being presided over by fractious coalitions.

So I was quite interested to read Yukio Hatoyama's op-ed piece on the future of Japan under him. As often happens in two-party systems, the Democratic Party has been trying on different ideologies like sets of clothes in its attempt to win elections. Last I heard, they were all about strengthening "free markets" conceived in opposition to the ossified corporate Japan (both conglomerates and bureaucracies). Now:

How can we put an end to unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation, in order to protect the finances and livelihoods of our citizens? That is the issue we are now facing.

They've gone Polanyi on us! Specifically, his theme seems to be "The Welfare State Strikes Back" – talk of non-economic values, quality of life, community, morals, tradition, all needing to be better cherished by government intervention.

He also spends some time on the benefit of an East Asian community, possibly the first time a PM has paid so much (rhetorical) attention to the subject.

I believe that the East Asian region, which is showing increasing vitality, must be recognized as Japan’s basic sphere of being. So we must continue to build frameworks for stable economic cooperation and security across the region.

It'll be interesting for me to see what develops. Presumably if all of Asia wanted to start an Asian Monetary Fund right now, the US could not put the kibosh on it like in 1997. That's not on the agenda (it's just my hobbyhorse), but currency integration is, which is just as important. Still, who knows how amenable China's going to be if Hatoyama keeps saying things like this:

Establishing a common Asian currency will likely take more than 10 years. For such a single currency to bring about political integration will surely take longer still.

Jesu Christo! Now, regional integration is probably a good thing; nobody wants a great-power war in Asia, and integration could help there. But China roars at the smallest slight. If you're going to go down that road, you don't want to even loosely hint at the possibility that they might at some distant point give up some sovereignty, even by treaty, even for great mutual benefit.

And I really hope the op-ed in the original Japanese didn't use the equivalent of the word "sphere".

Inspired! Well-argued! And wrong! The cow was also named Dave!

2009-09-01T01:38:00.000-07:00

These kinds of sentences get my goat:

Government regulation can be traced back to the 1100s when the English monarchy began to contract with private parties for the provision of services.

Why, when grasping for the origin of X, do we accept as an answer "the first time anything was written down about X in something resembling English"? This sentence carefully hedges ("can be traced to") but in the end it's barely an improvement on "since the beginning of time".

Hey, look on the bright side! You can stop worrying about your career.

2009-08-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

I'm watching Ted Kennedy's 1980 convention speech (text). Obama should really take a cue from him on health care: his remarks are compelling while simultaneously confronting the hard issues.

Finally, we cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society. So I will continue to stand for a national health insurance. ...We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level. Let us insist on real controls over what doctors and hospitals can charge, and let us resolve that the state of a family's health shall never depend on the size of a family's wealth.

Next you'll be questioning the Van de Graff generator in the middle of the room - and where will that leave us?

2009-08-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

My current favorite show: Leverage. Confidence schemes are good material. A shining moment:

Nate: Besides, we're going with a much bigger scam. One of the classics.
Parker: The London Spank?
Hardison: The Genevan Paso Doble?
Eliot: The Apple Pie.
(stares)
Eliot: It's like the Cherry Pie but with lifeguards.
Sophie: Ooooh.

I find this line of questioning obscene. What manner of mad scientist neglects his flasks of colored liquid?

2009-08-14T01:41:00.000-07:00

QOTD:

Yes, yes, ideally we would buy all of our produce from farmers markets, and it would be local and fresh, and then we’d strap our reusable canvas bag to our unicorn and ride home on the city streets via the dedicated unicorn lane.

From Emily Thorson at the Internet Food Association.

(Making my start in Berkeley, and having a lot of fun so far.)

Note: Sound does not travel in a vacuum. All sound effects in this comic are produced by the cartoonist while drawing.

2009-08-10T07:35:00.001-07:00

Ah, Austin. (Click for a clear view.)

Cumulonimbus? On a Thursday? Seriously?

2009-08-04T21:44:00.002-07:00

NY Times piece yesterday:

New York City cabbies have been banned from using cellphones for a decade — even the hands-free type, putting the city a step ahead of state law. But the stringent rules remain almost entirely unenforced, even amid research that shows drivers who talk on cellphones are four times as likely to cause a crash.

Amazingly, this seems to be an area where Chennai outperforms NYC in legal compliance! In three months of twice-daily autorickshaw rides, my drivers rarely used cell phones in traffic. Most of the time, when their phones rang, they would actually pull over to talk briefly - once, someone continued inching along, apparently possessed by his primal professional urge to keep moving, but still by the side of the road.

Not to say that Chennai autowallahs are better than NYC cabbies - they drive much more dangerously and violate plenty of basic traffic laws. But perhaps in this one area enforcement is more frequent than for other laws, and the penalty is crippling enough to make drivers wary of violating it.

Working on the rest of my vacation posts.

Where sweet words and flowers could not sway my heart, this robotic exoskeleton succeeds.

2009-07-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

I think I'm going to enjoy graduate school. An excerpt from a course description:

When you’re on the job, you’ll know enough to talk back to a lawyer who says, with the confidence common to the species, that “the opinion clearly states,” as well as to participate in drafting legislation and administrative regulations (a skill to which many law students are never exposed).

By way of update: I concluded in Delhi that this frenetic pace was taking a toll on me, and that I needed to change the focus of my traveling from tourism to relaxation. Therefore, instead of going to 4 Rajasthan cities before Bombay, I'm only going to 2: Jaipur (last Sunday) and Udaipur, one of the most beautiful, for 3 nights starting yesterday. My train to Bombay leaves Thursday evening.

When Father papered the parlor you couldn't see far for paste

2009-07-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

So I haven't been able to blog in detail lately (check Twitter), but there has been a clamoring from my public for eclipse news.

I had low hopes for seeing the sun as it went out, ever since I got into Bhopal the day before and was confronted with heavy rains filling up even the main street. But I still got up early on Wednesday and went to the Shamla Hills Science Centre, which was hosting a viewing event. Everyone proceeded to the roof (after security stopped oddly barring us); most of the time, it wasn't raining. One thing about being completely overcast is there's no fear of eye damage: we simply surveyed the sky to the east and waited for nightfall an hour after sunrise.

It came slowly. I've heard that usually, it doesn't get really dark until the sun is fully or almost fully covered, since the sun's so bright even when reduced. But not here. Perhaps when there's complete cloud cover, when the light is already filtered, a little less of it makes more of a difference.

Here's the process, from light to pitch-dark. Note the applause at the end.

So I missed out on the actual disc-occlusion, but that's really OK - it's still something I might otherwise never have experienced.

There are some interesting ideas about the eclipse circulating in India. I got a few copies of the following spam text:

Believe it or Not, The Day of Sun Eclipse (Surya Grahanam) will definitely have an effect on our lives. To know send SUN (Ur name) to 53131 Eg.SUN SNEHA. Rs. 3/ sms

That's just astrology, of course. Some of the ideas are more panicky and unscientific, like that the eclipse will cause a gigantic tsunami. I heard that one thirdhand; it was supposed to have a scientific basis in the sun's and moon's gravitational forces combining (which does cause stronger tides), and I think was propelled by a hoax email. There were also suggestions of violence erupting worldwide, just on general "astral event equals apocalypse" principles. And apparently there's some national superstition about eclipses being unlucky, with pregnant women supposed to stay indoors and Hindu temples needing to close for purifying.

But I should point out I experienced none of this: the crowd took it in just like a Western one, with staring, photos, and cheering upon totality.

Here are the other miscellaneous photos from that trip.

Notes on the trip so far

2009-07-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

My datacard doesn't get broadband in Jhansi, so no photosets, so no despatches yet - maybe in Bhopal. But in brief: Bangalore was very cool and pleasant (plateau plus monsoon, much like Mysore), its charm belying its size. Hyderabad was more characterized by infinite, insufficiently distinguishable built-up areas, though it may have been the parts I saw; unfortunately a lot of the museums etc. were closed due to it being Friday, but I did see the Charminar, an excruciatingly iconic edifice, rather like the Arc de Triomphe.

Jhansi is mostly visually characterless, but there's a great fort, which is supposed to be small compared to its peers, but still quite affecting. At a bookstore in Hyderabad I coincidentally found a book on the person Jhansi is best known for, Rani Lakshmibai, a warrior queen who played a dramatic part in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and died in battle. I'll summarize the story once I've finished it; in the meantime, don't believe what's in the Wikipedia entry, which needs to be judiciously edited with a sledgehammer. Accounts of Lakshmibai have apparently been rather contorted over the years to shoehorn her as an early nationalist, further complicated by a very popular historical novel which closely follows events but took a number of liberties.

I did take the requisite couple of hours to upload the following video taken at the fort. I think you'll agree the conception is superior to the execution, but hopefully it gives an idea of the place.

Despatch 15: Attachment is suffering

2009-07-16T23:57:00.000-07:00

I don't mind saying when I realized I had mislaid my laptop I took it very hard. Not only was it a valuable machine, but like a lackwit, I hadn't been backing up the work for my internship - which had just over a week remaining. But it was also an excellent illustration of the Second Noble Truth. The laptop had been so useful to me over the last few months I had developed an attachment to it - such roots had been laid down that I actually started shaking.

Why had such a stupid oversight even have been possible? I had a whole compartment together with my companions on the train; theft from under my nose was quite unlikely. I ran through the laptop's Twitter updates in my head. On the train, there's a pouch next to each bed for people to keep miscellania like reading matter and valuables (safer since it's between you and the wall while you're sleeping). The laptop had been there, in the upper berth's pouch; in preference to descending the ladder with it in my arms, I had taken it out and put it on the side of the bed, where it would be easily reachable once I had climbed back down...

Ah.

While I was thinking all this, everyone was jumping into action. A left-behind laptop would be in significant danger in the US; in India, its recovery could practically be discounted. But the amiable and solicitous people at my workplace still saw I had to make the effort, and helped me infinitely. Two people with motorcycles were enlisted, as that's the quickest means of transportation in central Chennai for someone in a hurry. One of them, D., was a coworker of mine (he recently transferred from my outfit to another on the same floor); the other, R., I didn't know from Adam, but he spoke Tamil and apparently had a bit of experience with this. I clambered onto the back of R.'s bike and we got to Central Station fast.

As it turned out, R. did most of the talking, as was natural. (This is why I referred to myself earlier as playing the "damsel in distress" role.) We started at the railway police station in an outlying building, and were directed to the police office in the station itself. We verified on the way there that my train was no longer at the platform where we disembarked; an hour had already passed. From there, to the platform inspector... the stationmaster... the police office once more... R. was talking Tamil a mile a minute, and though we seemed to get a low-level runaround at first, before too long I was sat down in a back room and writing a letter on carbon paper addressed to a number of minor officials, describing what was lost, where, when, etc., in detail. This turned out to be part of the official process for getting the organization to acknowledge that the item, if found, was mine and was to be handed over to me. Once I had, with assistance, written out the letter (including the Indianism "kindly do the needful" at the end), we got it signed by a couple of people, including someone with an office sized and decorated for an executive.

As it turned out, R. did most of the talking, as was natural. (This is why I referred to myself earlier as playing the "damsel in distress" role.) We started at the railway police station in an outlying building, and were directed to the police office in the station itself. We verified on the way there that my train was no longer at the platform where we disembarked; an hour had already passed. From there, to the platform inspector... the stationmaster... the police office once more... R. was talking Tamil a mile a minute, and though we seemed to get a low-level runaround at first, before too long I was sat down in a back room and writing a letter on carbon paper addressed to a number of minor officials, describing what was lost, where, when, etc., in detail. This turned out to be part of the official process for getting the organization to acknowledge that the item, if found, was mine and was to be handed over to me. Once I had, with assistance, written out the letter (including the Indianism "kindly do the needful" at the end), we got it signed by a couple of people, including someone with an office sized and decorated for an executive.

Not a lot was being explained to me - R. was too busy having to reiterate to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the office - so it was with wide eyes that not long afterwards, the platform inspector unlocked a locker in his office and produced the laptop.* Someone had found and returned it! Granted, in retrospect it had been safer than usual because on the upper berth, it was above eye level for the passerby, and waited to be found by an actual rail employee. Nevertheless, it was agreed by all - including those who had arranged my escort in the first place - to be completely astounding that the proper procedure had been followed for something so valuable, especially in a city like Chennai. And I got it back without so much as having to pay a bribe beforehand, or even waiting more than an hour. I think we can certainly chalk this up to improving Indian professional standards, if also to incredible good fortune I had no right to expect.

Since I bought the laptop specifically for this trip, I had originally named it Venkatadri, after the local chieftain from whom Madras's original territory was negotiated. It would have been perversely appropriate had it, in that very same territory (where Central Station is located), ensconced itself away from me forever. But it's a darn good thing for me it didn't.

Of course, now I just have to work on those pesky suffering-causing attachments.

* At this point I wrote out a new letter affirming that I had reclaimed the lost item, and walked various offices profusely thanking everybody tangentially involved.

Despatch 14: Kerala

2009-07-14T08:57:00.023-07:00

"God's Own Country," they call it, and sometimes it feels right.

We took a sleeper train on Friday night to Cochin, now renamed Kochi, one of the biggest cities in the state of Kerala, which nevertheless feels like a small town much of the time, with low, simple buildings, and greenery even denser than Chennai's (narrower streets?). It's usually overrun with tourists, including cruise-ship amblers, but it's the off-season now in the monsoon. Kerala gets the monsoon sooner than anywhere else in India, though, and it rained no more than a few hours out of each day while we were there. Of course, Cochin's quaintness is probably a bit artificially maintained, rather like New Orleans - just over the water is Ernakulam, as modern and built-up as anywhere, and where we stayed.

(By the way, "Kerala" is pronounced with only the first syllable stressed - back when I rhymed it with "masala," I was often not understood.)

Cochin made its name as a thriving port; a Venetian merchant mentioned it as where people went to spend the money they made in Canton. The Kingdom of Cochin became Portuguese- and then Dutch-controlled in tune with those nations' status as dominant sea powers. The "Dutch Palace" is so-named not because the Dutch occupied it, but because they built it for the Maharajas as apology for sacking one of their temples during a bout of high spirits. It's now a museum with some huge, detailed murals and various royal memorabilia.

From 4 July 2009

The Kingdom of Cochin passed into British tributary status without much fuss, and its rulers had a lot of leisure to promote culture in the 19th century; they also deliberately attracted a Jewish community. They have almost all left for Israel now, but their neighborhood retains its name, "Jew Town."

From 4 July 2009

(A synagogue also remains, but due to a slightly poorly-planned tour, we were in Cochin on Saturday, when it was not open to the public.)

We went out on the bay, which was quite picturesque despite being gray:

From 4 July 2009

Another similarity between Cochin and New Orleans: aboveground graves.

From 4 July 2009

Cochin feels like a small town not just in its layout and architecture, which could be Potemkin, but in seeming very slow-paced compared to Chennai - or even to Mysore. That's supposed to be related to the Keralan economic structure: you have among the best, most comprehensive education systems in India, but not enough of an economy to absorb its talent. So large numbers of people migrate - working as professionals elsewhere in India, or the Middle East, or the US. The first generation like this provided most of India's typists; now they have more varied niches (if you meet an Indian nurse in the US, there's a good change they're Keralan). And they remit much of their pay to their families back in Kerala - who can coast on that without working too hard.

From 4 July 2009

I wonder if this characterization is a bit stereotypical; but posters about studying abroad, working abroad, or learning English are certainly omnipresent there. And according to my traveling companions (the delightful family of a manager at my work(/intern)place, complete with 3-year-old), more Keralans than Tamils know Hindi.

Incidentally, this education system is partly the work of a locally powerful Communist movement. They don't do so well in promoting economic growth, but the success of their social programs in improving lives is legendary in the development community.

We had come when we did come to see the Champakulam boat races in the backwater region - a big complex of rivers, canals, and lagoons mostly south of Cochin. After a detour to the big pilgrimage site Guruvayur, we drove down to Alleppey (now "Alappuzha"), a backwater center which was to be our base. This is even quieter and milder than Cochin; its tourist monicker "Venice of the East" (for its canal network) misleadingly implies there's any significant patch of ground lacking rampant vegetation.

From 6 July 2009

First, we did a "backwater tour" that proceeded through the waterways in and around town. It was quite a picture, chugging through the still waters surrounded by, first, the spread-out town --

From 6 July 2009

-- next, the flooded rice paddies --

From 6 July 2009

-- and eventually, a great lake:

From 6 July 2009

The waterways are well-used for transportation, though their greatest economic benefit these days is probably the houseboats, which everyone tells you to go stay in. I and my companions felt that sleeping in a bed ought not to greatly enhance the basic experience of being out on the water - especially when said bed costs in the area of $150 US a night.

From 6 July 2009

If you dig through the pictures from that day, you'll find artifacts of that usage by the canal sides: a "No Parking" sign; an ice cream shop; a mile-marker; even something reminiscent of a bus stop. It was all remarkably peaceful and relaxing, despite our use of a motorboat, as this video will hopefully show:

The snake boat races later that day were in Champakulam (or Chambakulam), a village not far from Alleppey. It's not the best-known of the races -- that honor falls to the Nehru Trophy in August -- but there aren't that many of them to begin with. This race was held along a few-kilometer stretch of river; lots of people crowded along the sides of the river, not so many we couldn't get a vantage point as they approached.

From 6 July 2009

I recall hearing there were 8 boats, all representing different villages in the area. Some actually seemed to have corporate sponsorship, like the following with the Vodafone logo:

From 6 July 2009

The boats themselves are amazing affairs, especially as works of traditional construction. Like dragon boats, but much, much longer, each holding at least 90 people (by my rough count), all but 10 of them rowing at once in quick, shallow scoops. I didn't get a good view other than from the side, but I think they're constructed catamaran-style, with rowers down each side. And they go fast:

That one wasn't even in racing mode. Cadence seemed to be the key to keeping up in the race: the function of those not rowing was to pound on the decks in time to keep the oarsmen moving, just like how galley slaves had drummers (as Asterix tells us). Also, a few people up on the elevated stern had double-long oars, and at times would swing them vertically through all 360 degrees before each stroke. It was apparently to put on a burst of speed, as here:

The ad hoc cheerleaders (we think guys who hadn't made it onto their village's boat) provided some extra entertainment:

It was all great to watch. It would have been even better had we understood Malayalam, and been able to follow the out-of-sight action as narrated breathlessly over loudspeakers. But nevertheless, a lot of action was necessarily out of sight, given the length of the course. So before an hour had passed, it started palling, as one boat after another passed us by, sometimes racing, sometimes not. So we wrapped it up, though not before seeing St. Mary's, a local Christian church of some pedigree - part of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, a local grouping in the Eastern Rite, supposedly one of those founded by St. Thomas.

From 6 July 2009

And we drove back to the train station in Cochin, speeding through the backwaters at dusk:

From 6 July 2009

On Tuesday morning, the train deposited me back in Chennai. I went straight to the office and opened my backpack to find that my laptop was missing.

To be continued...

(Full photosets: Saturday, Sunday, Monday.)

Dolly to the dollhouse. The mole has left the mountain. There are seven pieces of rice. Oh me oh my. Do you copy.

2009-07-01T23:32:00.001-07:00

I hadn't expected this so soon.

Despite there being an LGBT movement in India, gay rights have been at a pretty low level for some time. One of the first hurdles to overcome is Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, dating to 1860, criminalizing gay sex (in the broad umbrella of "carnal intercourse against the order of nature"). It rarely obtained convictions, but it still had a chilling effect, and the police could still use it to hassle people.

Over the last couple of weeks, there were brief comments from the Law Minister about maybe repealing that law, or amending it to exempt consensual acts. This in itself was a step forward (the government had recently defended the law); but conservative views toward homosexuality are still strong in India, and there was a lot of blowback, with the idea being criticized by Hindu, Muslim, and Christian groups. The government quickly retreated, saying the issue would only move forward based on consensus.

I had assumed based on this soft-pedaling that repeal could only come through Parliament, and that this could take many years to achieve. As it turns out, there was a case pending before the Delhi High Court (which has jurisdiction on constitutional issues) that Section 377 violated Article 21 of the Indian constitution, which specifies equal rights to life and liberty.

Half an hour ago, the court agreed with that argument. Gay sex is now legal, apparently across India. I'm think this might be vulnerable to a Supreme Court appeal, but don't know whether the government will in fact appeal. (It makes me wonder: did the government foresee the court's decision, and float the trial balloon so it wouldn't take everyone by surprise?)

But it's a great achievement, and everyone here in the office is jubilant. It's especially sweet considering that the Pride marches were just last weekend. (See Gabrielle's post and photos.)

I thought you might be worried about the security... of your shit.

2009-06-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

QOTD from Robert Farley:

If you like Tom Friedman, but think that his concepts are too concrete, that he doesn't illustrate his points with enough random conversations with locals, that his conclusions aren't sufficiently sweeping, that he spends way too much time defining key terms, that he doesn't contradict himself enough, that he does too much research, that he could substitute stereotype for analysis a bit more often, that he doesn't have enough contempt for existing work in the field, and that he's not arrogant enough, then you'll absolutely frakking love Parag Khanna. Second World is almost certainly the worst book that I've ever read on international politics.

Despatch 13: Mysore

2009-06-24T08:30:00.002-07:00

Despite some predictions of rain, the weather in Mysore last weekend was delightful: mostly cool, occasionally warm, with cool breezes throughout. And yet this morning, when I stepped out into the furnaces of Chennai at 9AM, I said to myself, "Ah... I'm back." It must be the Texan in me - plus Stockholm syndrome, of course.

Mysore, in Karnataka state, is only a second-tier city of about 800,000, but it has an interesting history. Here's the short version. From the 16th to 18th centuries, as the Vijayanagara Empire fell, boundaries in this part of India (the Deccan) were always changing; at some points the kingdom of Mysore controlled little outside its own capital, at others it grew to be the major power in South India. Its Hindu ruling dynasty, the Wodeyars, declined in the early 18th century, and a Muslim general, Haider Ali, seized power in 1760. He and his son, Tipu Sultan, expanded the kingdom and made it Britain's foremost adversary in southern - or perhaps all - India, with modernization of the army and administration. There was also an element of European politics, since, although France lost most of its Indian territory and influence in the Seven Years War, it later sent Mysore advisors and aid. However, the British (with their ally-becoming-vassal Hyderabad) prevailed: in a series of four Anglo-Mysore Wars, Mysore lost the third and fourth, and the fourth in 1799 was a complete a victory as anyone tended to get in the eighteenth century. Tipu Sultan was killed, Mysore overrun, large swaths of territory ceded, and the Wodeyars restored to the throne with the understanding of their obedience (in fact, their new Maharaja was just five years old).

Over the 19th century, there were a few famines and rumblings - in fact, the British took over even domestic affairs for 50 years - but the city, at least, was at peace, the Wodeyars patronizing the arts, especially music, and developing a grandeur appropriate to their power (nominal though it was) in an Anglo-Indian-hybrid style, until being stripped of that power with independence in 1947 and of their titles and pensions by Indira Gandhi in 1971. The supercity of the state is Bangalore, only 150 km away, but Mysore is doing well for itself too now, joining in the IT/BPO boom.

My weekend trip with two new companions was divided largely on historical lines: Saturday we saw the sights associated with Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan (gallery) in the nearby town of Srirangapatna, Sunday those associated with the Wodeyars (gallery) in Mysore proper.

On arriving Saturday morning, we walked down a wide avenue lined with trees, a recreation ground, and some very long Indo-Saracenic buildings, which turned out to be the local hospital and medical college. Even coming to one of the main roads leading to the center of downtown, though, almost everything was closed, as it was only 8AM. So after having a South Indian breakfast, we quickly went to the bus depot and proceeded out to Srirangapatna, where we overpaid an auto-wallah to show us the sights.

The patterns of what has survived in Srirangapatna for tourism today are meaningful; it was the military hub for Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, housing their great fort on an island formed by a forking river; but in 1799 the British razed it, leaving little but the surrounding walls.

Within the walls they did at least let a temple survive, possibly for political reasons, as they were overthrowing a Muslim ruler for a Hindu one; there are also two sites whose selection subtly commemorates the British victory, a former dungeon containing British officers and the site where Tipu Sultan's body was found.

Much more was left on the island outside the walls, including the Daria Daulat, or summer residence (a bit small to be called a palace, really) of Tipu Sultan, with a long path leading up to a large house full of art and relics, including some gigantic murals depicting in loving detail the British/Hyderabadi and Mysore armies marching to and then engaging in one of their great battles. Another mural hinted at an emerging cosmopolitan sensibility, small panels showing dozens of kings, princes, and other rulers across India with attention to their individual styles and practices.

From 20 June 2009

Besides the other historic sites outside the walls in Srirangapatna, including a mosque, mausoleum, and more temples, there were some very nice spots by the river.

From 20 June 2009

We got back to Mysore that afternoon, found our hotel after a bit of doing, rested a bit, and in the evening on a recommendation went to see the Mysore Palace (or Maharaja Palace). Not that it was open that late, but they apparently light it up festively every night from 7 to 7:30.

From 20 June 2009

And there it was, looking to all the world like something on 37th Street in Austin. And those are just the gates! Inside:

From 20 June 2009

There are some decent restaurants in Mysore, made nicer by the frequency of rooftop seating: we availed ourselves of this at both lunch and dinner on Saturday.

From 20 June 2009

We also attempted to do some shopping - Mysore is known for sandalwood and silk - but found nothing worthwhile except the odd trinket. Incidentally, the auto-wallahs in Mysore are better than those in Tamil Nadu, less extortionate and more likely to use the meter, but it's still not advisable as a tourist to name an arts and crafts emporium you want to visit, as they may take you somewhere they get a commission and claim it's the same.

The next day, we set off at about 8AM for Chamundi, a hill south of town with a temple at the top, and a thousand steps leading up to it for pilgrims to gain experience points. Highly athletic things that we are, we chose to climb as well.

From 21 June 2009

A thousand is a lot of steps, you know? I was huffing and puffing; but we did make it in less than an hour, going by the timestamps. And there were some excellent views of the city and environs:

From 21 June 2009

It was also rather good that we took the climb because the actual temple at the top was another of the pyramid-decked South Indian affairs I've become so familiar with; if we'd just taken the bus there, like so many do, we wouldn't have gotten nearly as much out of the trip.

Also in our guidebooks was the "Godly Temple," which turned out to be a room filled with displays advocating Hindu-esque morals and cosmology in rather idiosyncratic language. I noticed one (heretical?) affirmation that souls could not be reincarnated into animal bodies, and presently saw this was the work of a specific sect, known as the Brahma Kumari.

A view another direction from the hill, as we took the bus back down:

From 21 June 2009

Our last main stops were the two palaces in Mysore proper. Neither allowed photography inside, so my photos here turn sparse.

From 21 June 2009

The first, Jaganmohan Palace, has been turned into an art museum. It had a good number of portraits of Wodeyar Maharajas at various ages, plus some of their associated memorabilia like elaborate cuckoo clocks, Japanese paintings, furniture, etc. - one that stuck with me was a display case containing every musical instrument Krishnaraja Wodeyar III had ever played. Perhaps they bunged them all in a box in case he happened to feel like using the same one twice? Some floors also had other, more contemporary artwork from Mysore and other artists, which was mildly interesting.

Then, the big kahuna, Mysore Palace, the same one we had seen lit up the night before.

From 21 June 2009

The interior was as grand as can be; the height of Imperial "we're rich and powerful but not decadent nosiree"-style ostentation. (Built by a British architect, but again in the Indo-Saracenic style, consciously taking on Indian elements.) Marble and stone floors, huge columned rooms of red and brown and yellow, murals and thrones and chandeliers and chowdahs - it's not overwhelming per se, but very impressive, and on the whole not too tacky.

Most impressive was the durbar, where the Maharaja and his court would sit in public on official occasions. It's a great columned expanse, hundreds of feet across, with stepped layers for the presumably hundreds of members of his court to sit with him at progressively lower levels but all open to and visible from the front, and balconies on both sides for guests to view from. This could really make you feel like a big shot.

All the tramping around, especially up the hill first thing in the morning, had tired us out quite; we looked around a bit at the markets, but by 5PM we were done. Fortunately, we had the pleasant restaurants: on the same rooftop as the day before, we sat, drank beer, snacked, and talked until it was time for our train.

From 21 June 2009

A very pleasant, livable place is Mysore.

I get all my online music via ASCII .sig files.

2009-06-24T02:57:00.000-07:00

My Mysore despatch is forthcoming. In the meantime, here are the photo galleries for Saturday and Sunday.

A little tidbit in the meantime, courtesy of Wikipedia: I knew Alexander the Great, in his egomania, gave a number of cities his own name; but I didn't realize how many of those names live on to this day.

Cities named after Alexander whose names survive in some form:

Alexandria, Egypt: This city is still called "al-Iskandariyya" in Arabic, unlike "Egypt," which is a holdover from Greek not natively used.
Iskandariya, Iraq: Now an outlying slum of Baghdad.
Kandahar, Afghanistan: A contraction of "Iskanderiya" > "Iskandahar," apparently.
Iskenderun, Turkey: Classically "Alexandretta"; the only one on this list actually founded by Alexander, rather than just renamed.

There are several more that either took their old names back, or died out, only vaguely identified with nearby modern cities. You can find them here.

Some false positives: Alessandria, Italy was named after a Pope; Alexandroupoli, Greece after a more recent Greek King; and the erstwhile Aleksandropol, Armenia (now Gyumri) after a Russian Empress.

Despatch 12: Theosophical Society

2009-06-18T21:30:00.003-07:00

Last weekend we went to the world headquarters of the Theosophical Society, which is right in the Adyar area, less than 2km from my guesthouse. "We" here is me, the two new interns in my guesthouse Chiai and Gabrielle, and my roommate Zarasp who's been here a few weeks.

When we arrived at the gate, which is in a cozy street in a little-trafficked part of town, we weren't let in; it was before visiting hours, but as Zarasp had been let in regardless in the past, probably the guard was fishing for a bribe. So we went over to Elliot's Beach, which is quite close by, to kill some time.

Elliot's Beach is the second major beach in Chennai, but here the heat of the day makes even beaches unbearable until late afternoon. At about 12:30 then, it was a desolate field of sand; but the serried ranks of refreshment stands indicated the crowds to come.

From 13 June 2009

After having lunch, we made our way back to the Society grounds at 2:00, when they officially opened for the afternoon. Although technically the place is in the middle of the city, it's a huge expanse of 168 acres, as I recall, and few main roads are near it (partly because of its hegemony, I imagine), so it feels like a park.

From 13 June 2009

For whatever reasons, they had a number of places of worship of different religions there. Perhaps they're the kind of group that sees itself as above religion (like Auroville) but also compatible with members' personal faiths. It was an odd assortment of religions, though - Parsi, Jain, and "Liberal Catholic" - all Indian minorities, so perhaps reflecting the kind of people who became members around the turn of the last century. Or perhaps it would have been comprehensive but for schisms and arguments relating to the more major religions. There was also a "Temple of Light," which felt Hindu but wasn't identified as such. None of them seemed to see much use, especially the Temple of Light.

From 13 June 2009

They have a Great Hall, but we had a misunderstanding as to its location and got a very tedious runaround trying to get in, after clearing up which it was too late. But we did get to see its other attraction, the banyan.

From 13 June 2009

This fig-bearing tree drops vines which harden and grow into roots, and can if allowed - as here - become a huge grove consisting entirely of the same plant.

Finally, there's a villa for Madame Blavatsky, built posthumously in her honor. It wasn't all that much to look at, but it looked like a very comfortable construction, cooled by very deep porches (which some people would swoon over).

From 13 June 2009

There are residences, offices, and other buildings lightly dotting the grounds - as well as a mango-selling operation - but not really part of the attractions, despite being rather old. Our final stop was the library, which apparently has a substantial collection of old books and resources. We only got to see the reading room and display room; the latter had scrolls in various languages, including Indian palm-leaf scrolls as well as some East Asian. They also had some relics not acquired but received as part of their history, such as a book inscribed by H.G. Wells.

The Theosophical Society is still a going organization, as seen from the various internal journals in the reading room. I imagine they have a large fund they work off, though, as they keep a low profile. The headquarters in Adyar is not the entire Society historically, as it split soon after Blavatsky's death; but it is still substantial. Reading Wikipdia, its beliefs seem to resemble other religions in grounding, persuasiveness, etc., differing only in their drive toward conceptual unification of all human endeavor. It also is said to have foreran or inspired the New Age movement, and I suspect other religious movements over the 20th century.

At any rate, it's always interesting to see a present-day expression of something you only knew about from literature set in 19th-century Russia.

You know the drill: the picture-set is here.

Next: Tonight (Friday) I go to Mysore, a great destination full of palaces and gardens. I have high expectations, except to the extent that rain threatens this weekend.

Moral of the story: Never gesticulate wildly while you are teleoperating a robot gardener via force-feedback gloves.

2009-06-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

There's nothing sadder than a half-assed swindle attempt.

Last night when I was making to pay the auto-wallah, he muttered something about "very long" and asked for 10 rupees over what was agreed. I only had to refuse once - the words are immaterial, as he didn't understand them; they were merely a medium to express my firmness - before he backed down. He actually had an advantage, as I didn't have the exact sum, but nevertheless he gave me correct change without another word.

On another note, I am embarrassed to note that my normal payment of 60 rupees for the daily commute was not as good a price as I thought - my new roommate, who very enthusiastically pushes the envelope in negotiating, now gets 40 on a regular basis.

That would violate Mars's treaty with the Solar Parliament... and it would look absolutely vulgar.

2009-06-04T22:19:00.000-07:00

I heard a presentation today from a charity called The Banyan. Their mission is the rescue and rehabilitation of the homeless mentally ill in India - originally just women, now also some men. These are people who are wandering the street, abused, without options, and (when they're migrants) often not even knowing where their hometown is or how to get there.

Rather than just doing good work on a very limited scale, like some charities, The Banyan is spreading its model by working together with other interested organizations, doing government advocacy, and so on. The task of raising the profile of mental health is not in its infancy in India - various organizations have done a lot of groundwork - so they have support at high levels of government. In some places, they even have linkages with the police so that relevant emergency calls are handed off to them.

It seems like a very good cause, and possibly integral to India's movement away from institutionalization as a response to mental illness.

Note on trans-Asian honorifics

2009-06-03T23:36:00.003-07:00

In Japanese, the polite way to ask someone's name is お名前は何ですか？ O-namae wa nan desu ka? - over-literally, "what is [your] honorable-name?" In that sentence, o-namae is namae ("name")* plus the honorific prefix o-.** Clipped, it's お名前は？ O-namae wa?

In Chinese, they do it a bit differently, since the basic morpheme for "surname" is used as a verb meaning "to have the surname of". So there, the basic phrase you learn in classes (though in practice it seems to be over-formal) is 您贵姓? Nin gui xing? - "you (formal pronoun) honorably are-surnamed [what]?"

In India, obviously English doesn't have any of these unfamiliar grammatical features - but they still have a way to grammatically glorify the name: "May I know your good name?"***

I'm curious if this is an Indian-origin phrase or something that used to exist in British English; also interesting would be whether Hindi or other Indian languages have comparable phrases.

* That the word looks so much like English "name" is merely a linguistic improbability. There's no connection; it's a compound of two other words, and was used long before Japanese had even heard of English.

** The prefix is overused today - you find it in front of words like "water," "money," and even "toilet." The latter, I've found, cracks Chinese up when they see the prefix written with its original Chinese character, or 御手洗い - but Japanese usually substitute phonetic kana for the Chinese character in this case, reflecting how the prefix's original meaning is slowly eroding away.

*** Googling this phrase, it seems to be something call-center workers have to be trained out of saying.

Despatch 11: Kodaikanal

2009-05-31T23:00:00.004-07:00

First, I have finally uploaded the photos from my trip. They are grouped as follows: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

However, a new consideration exists. Kodaikanal made me a shutterbug, and these photos number nearly 400 in total. This is really too much for the casual consumer. So I've also put together a compilation, Best of Kodaikanal. This contains only (ha!) about 100 photos, skipping all the middling shots, duplicates, individual elements of panoramas, etc., and still covering almost my entire trip, and all the photos I added explanatory notes to.

The only caveat, whichever album you choose to use, is that I couldn't add basic captions to every single photo noting where it was taken, the way I did before. Where there is no caption, look instead at the tags.

Now!

Here's a basic overview of my trip. I took a sleeper train there Friday night; the first day, we went on a wonderful 8-km hike from town to the Pillar Rocks, the hike not at all tiresome because of the cool air and wonderful scenery along the way; the second day, we hired a cab so we could cover several sights. Due to delays in getting tickets, we had to take two buses back, the first going even farther south to the city of Madurai, where we changed to a semi-sleeper that got me back to my guesthouse just before my Monday morning alarm went off.

I think a description of my trip in any more detail would be otiose. Recounting the details of travel would make it seem more commonplace and wearing than it actually was. In fact, during the trip, I was overwhelmed, in a near-permanent state of delight, over the beauty all around me, and the utterly pleasant climate to enjoy it in (such a change from everywhere else I've been). I have decided that the pictures I took are a better reteller of this story than anything I could write, so I'll let this despatch stand with my album links.

Miscellaneous observations about the places I went, by the way, can be found in sufficiency in the captions to my photos. If you're in a real hurry, you might choose to just look at the panoramas (for which there is a tag).

Their name makes them sound like a firm of up-market cat-burglars. Or maybe venture capitalists.

2009-05-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

My apologies for not yet posting any account of Kodaikanal. I'm still in the process of tagging, labeling, and (on occasion) stitching into panoramas the many photos I took. I may also make a "Best Of" gallery, as their sheer number (in the hundreds) will try the patience of even those near and dear to me.

In the meantime, here are a few links.

The story of Bilbo - no, the one without furry feet. A fascinating story of how racist language that didn't raise an eyebrow in 1938 constituted a public scandal by 1946. Wikipedia refers to him as "a synonym for white supremacy" - I wonder how familiar with him my prior generation is, even though they were mostly born after he died.
An amazing study in contrasts in how people characterize toughness in women vs. men. Sotomayor is "temperamental, excitable, out of control"; Scalia is a "tough, persistent jouster." Sotomayor "asks questions to see you squirm," whereas "ever the law professor, Scalia will sometimes ask questions with no clear relevance, just to see if you are on your toes."
I had no idea that a 19-year-old West German landed his plane in Red Square in 1987. Apparently a harbinger of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Ezra Klein mournfully breaks up with Cook's Illustrated. Money quote: "A whole article about tomato sauce with all sorts of twists and turns and you finally let me know that the secret was adding a bit of onion before cooking the sauce? .... That’s like saying the “secret” to good sex is a partner. Or genitals."
Never thought I'd see the day: the IMF recommends that African countries run deficits to improve infrastructure and social safety nets.
Absolute facepalm moment: a major public hospital in Chennai accidentally distributes the names of its HBV-positive employees to the press.

English doesn't just borrow words, it pursues other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

2009-05-21T03:57:00.004-07:00

I've compiled words in English that are derived in some substantial way from Tamil. The etymologies are from the Oxford English Dictionary with some editing for length, and I've limited the list to words that have currency outside India.

Cash: ad. (ultimately) Tamil kasu, name of a small coin, or weight of money:– Skr. karsha ‘a weight of silver or gold equal to 1/400 of a tulā’ (Williams); Singhalese kāsi coin. The early Portuguese writers represented the native word by cas, casse, caxa, the Fr. by cas, the Eng. by cass: the existing Pg. caixa and Eng. cash are due to a natural confusion with cash n.¹ From an early date the Portuguese applied caixa (probably on the same analogy) to the small money of other foreign nations, such as that of the Malay Islands, and especially the Chinese, which was also naturally made into cash in English. (Yule.)
Catamaran: ad. Tamil katta-maram tied tree or wood (katta tie, bond; maram wood).
Cheroot: ad. F. cheroute, representing the Tamil name shuruttu roll (sc. of tobacco). An Eng. phonetic form sharoot was frequent c 1800.
Curry: ad. Tamil kari sauce, relish for rice, Canarese karil, whence Pg. caril, and earlier Eng. and Fr. forms; mod.F. is cari.
Mulligatawny: milaku-tannīr, milaku-tanni < milaku black pepper + tannīr, tanni water.
Pagoda: < Portuguese pagode, of uncertain and disputed origin. It was once thought to be < Persian but-kada idol temple < but idol + kada habitation, but now seems more likely to be either pākavata devotee of Vishnu (bhāgavata pertaining to the Lord (Vishnu), worshipper of Vishnu or the goddess Bhagavati: see below), or pakavati (name of a) goddess (< bhagavatā goddess, alternative name of the goddess Kali).
Pariah: < paraiyan (plural paraiyar), Malayalam parayan, lit. ‘(hereditary) drummer’ < parai, Malayalam para drum. [Originally a] member of a scheduled tribe of South India concentrated in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu, originally functioning notably as sorcerers and ceremonial drummers and also as labourers and servants, but later increasingly as ‘untouchables’ in insanitary occupations.
Vetiver: ad. F. vétyver, ad. Tamil vettivēpru (f. vēr root).

There are also a few words that are not certainly from Tamil, but could well be:

Orange: < orenge, Middle French, French orange, ultimately (probably, in spite of the chronology, via Italian arancio, arancia; also as narancia; Italian regional (Venice) naranza, Italian regional (Reggio Emilia) naranz, Italian regional (Milan) narans < Arabic nāranj < Persian nārang < nāranga < nāram, Tulu nārengi. The loss of initial n- in French and Italian probably results from absorption of the n- when preceded by the indefinite article, although in some cases such forms may reflect loss of n- already in Arabic.
Patchouli: < French patchouli (1826), apparently pacolī; the first part of the word is probably ultimately < paccai fragrant plant, fragrance), but the origin of the terminal element is unknown.
Pilaf: < pulaw (16th cent. in form palāv, pilāv, or pulāv (vowel of first syllable uncertain)), and its etymon Hindi pulāv dish of rice and meat < pulāka ball of rice, probably < pulukku (adjective) simmered, (noun) boiled or parboiled food, pulukkal cooked rice).

Ooh, look! An okapi! Pass me the syringe!

2009-05-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

Some links:

One of the greatest laughs I've had in a while: Lovelace and Babbage. This comic has the feel of something that may be abandoned after the creator's current burst of energy, but what's up so far is wonderful on its own. Since there's no proper archive, just standard new-to-old blog format, I recommend reading in the following order: Origin, Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Economy (pt. 1), Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Economy (pt. 2), and then back to the main page for extras.
My housemate has a blog. Visit for more insight into Indian politics.
Am I going to come back to the USA only to find the CSA revived?
The facepalm-inducing revelations on the Bush administration are, predictably, starting to trickle out. I think the term that fits Rumsfeld to a T is "power asshole."

Update for the concerned

2009-05-19T23:11:00.002-07:00

The morning papers say that eight Lankan refugees in Chennai broke some bus windshields and set one bus on fire. It was orderly as unrest goes: they had the passengers get off the buses first, and they were all arrested.

That's the only thing reported for Chennai (it was almost 40 kilometers from me, near a refugee camp on the outskirts). There were other incidents in other parts of the state, but never exceeding property damage, and one attempt at self-immolation.

Notes on Chennai politics; and addendum to Despatch 10

2009-05-18T09:04:00.001-07:00

This morning's newspapers declared that the LTTE (Tamil Tiger) leadership had been hemmed into a tiny area by the Sri Lankan army, and that it was "silencing its guns" to prevent further bloodshed.

In the afternoon, I was told that the LTTE leader Prabhakaran was announced dead by Sri Lanka. This news was given not as information, but as warning, because it was a development likely to further inflame the pro-Tamil political forces in Chennai; I read that the police were putting up bandobasts (cordons) for possible clashes, especially guarding the Sri Lankan consulate here.

In the Bandh last month, we were all instructed to stay home for fear of roving gangs. We stayed home on election day, too, not just because it's a national holiday but also because there can be violence surrounding the vote. And today, we started leaving early once the news of Prabhakaran's death came out, not because violence was assured but because it was extremely uncertain how the city would react. Nothing at all might happen; by the same token, anything might.

It's interesting how much of a tinderbox this city feels like sometimes - and at the same time, how lacking in substance this feeling really is for me. Through all of these alerts, I've never seen or heard any violence or near-violence at all, but for what I read in the news and what I hear from friends and colleagues. (Some of my housemates were once refused service at a store because they're from other parts of India; that's the worst event in my sphere of experience, and even it is second-hand.)

My co-workers take it all in stride, while still taking care for their own persons. My impression is that in the vast majority of these scares, nothing will happen, except some thugs already predisposed to violence taking the opportunity to go after each other; but once in a blue moon, it gets bad. And so you have to think about your situation, and make sure you're reasonably safe, every time, even though by most standards India is a quite peaceful country.

This uncertainty weighs partly because it's so unfamiliar: to me, taking responsibility for my personal safety means issues of traffic, health, and occasionally avoiding certain neighborhoods. It doesn't mean thinking about broad swathes of an entire city simmering with
anger or resentment and looking to take it out on someone.

Let's clear the palate a bit. Here are the two, by far, most important photos I took in Thanjavur, but disgracefully forgot to include in the attendant post.

From 8 May 2009

Goat and Crow are friends

From 8 May 2009

No bacon on mine, thanks.

Despatch 10: Thanjavur

2009-05-17T09:32:00.004-07:00

Thanjavur is 350 km from Chennai, a trip of several hours by train or car. Low-lying in a major delta, and known as the rice bowl of Tamil Nadu, the district seems somehow more dominated by the color green than other parts of India. The green in Chennai is from trees; the green in Thanjavur is from vegetation and crops above, below, and in between.

From 9 May 2009

Being a small city (200,000 people, or 2.2 million in the district as a whole) with an abundance of land, it's quite spread out. The rented house where we stayed felt like a mansion compared to what I've experienced so far in India, and it was only a few minutes' drive from the city center.

Of course, this is hardly a uniform experience. Like most of rural India, there is a significant class divide in Thanjavur: landlords on top (with houses like ours) and various smallholders, renters, and laborers down below. However, the district is fertile, and there's a good deal of economic opportunity in the state, so the countryside is now seeing outward migration and even some labor shortages, part of that economic restructuring commonly experienced across the world and in the end beneficial.

This trip was for work, not for pleasure, although my duties as an intern were almost nonexistent - I was essentially an observer. On the two days we had there, Friday and Saturday, both were centered around focus groups in the villages of future program implementation. Despite their being held entirely in Tamil (I await the promised translated transcript with interest), some interesting dynamics were evident: in one, a local politician dominated the conversation; in another, the politician was less dominating but was still deferred to; in both, our people seemed to have some trouble getting across exactly what they were trying to achieve with the upcoming pilot program, with polite repetitions and restatements. Of course, who knows what clever development schemes routinely get paraded past these villagers that they have to keep up with? I have the comfort, at least, that our organization's project is not a "let's distribute some food / treat some illnesses for a while to assuage our consciences" affair, but is explicitly designed to demonstrate to the government and other important actors what they can be doing better on a national scale, and on a practical, economical basis.

In one spell of boredom, when I had little to observe, I decided to record for posterity the facial hair attendant to the (male) focus-group participants. Tallying up my notes, I find:

Basic type, covering the entire upper lip and extending slightly down by the sides of the mouth: 7
Clean-shaven: 5 (including me and two people who had come from Chennai)
Basic type, hanging down slightly more on both sides: 1
Mustache and limited beard: 1
Veerappan mustache: 1

What is the Veerappan mustache, you ask? It is one copying that of Veerappan, a notorious bandit / Robin Hood figure from South India, and cannot be described, only shown.

On Friday evening, we went to the Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur, its greatest of many tourist attractions, and well worth the hype.

From 8 May 2009

It dates to the 11th century (though non-central parts are newer), and is in astonishingly good condition, with intricate stone decoration intact outside and inside. Like Stonehenge, it's built with materials transported a long distance. It's overwhelming in its scale, too, with an outer courtyard, inner courtyard, and in the main structure, a long columned gallery leading up to the inner sanctum under the stepped pyramid. Even the columns inside the gallery had every square centimeter crammed with detailed linework.

Sadly, although this main structure is not off-limits to non-Hindus, no photography is allowed there. I heartily recommend it to any visitors to South India, and may well re-visit it if I have the chance.

From 8 May 2009

Unlike Mahabalipuram, whose temples are treated as predominantly archeological attractions, Brihadeeswarar Temple is still an active site of Hindu worship: the main structure is filled with people lined up to make offerings and lighting candles. And by a great stroke of luck, we were there on the full-moon night of a local festival, which meant even more to see, like a playful religious dance:

From 8 May 2009

This was the only tourist activity I did during the trip, but it was time very well spent. There are plenty of other things to see in Thanjavur - a well-reputed museum of art from the same dynasty that created the above temple, a royal palace from a more recent dynasty - and I may go back at some point for them; but the temple dominates them all.

(I'm experimenting with a less chronological narrative style for this post, as my previous style was starting to feel bogged down. Feel free to opine on which you prefer.)

Again, here are the full Friday and Saturday photo galleries.

Next: A short trip to old Madras.

"Know it? I wrote it!"

2009-05-12T03:50:00.009-07:00

When preparing for India, I saw the general elections were soon, and decided to bone up on politics here so I could properly enjoy them. Mission accomplished! My following observations will be commonplace to Indian readers but hopefully not to the rest of my audience.

The basic structure of national politics in India is that you have two large parties - Congress (mostly centrist with a dash of leftism) and the BJP (rightist). Neither of them have a prayer of winning a majority of the legislature on their own, so after each election they always have to look to the other smaller parties as coalition partners. In recent years, they both turned to giving brand names to their coalitions - Congress's is the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), and the BJP's is the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). (The alliances are also necessary as part of campaigning, but I don't want to complicate this synopsis.)

What parties can be brought into their coalitions? I like to divide them into two general categories. First, the Left are mostly Communists and other related parties, with their strength concentrated in a few states where they've been dominant for decades. Second, the "regionals" mostly rose to power over the 90's in poorer Hindi-belt states with various combinations of lower-caste and Muslim support in revolt against the long do-nothing domination of the Congress there. These tend to be "populist" or otherwise ideologically amorphous, and in practice to be for sale to the highest-bidding alliance. The Left's support is also for sale, more or less, but never to the BJP, and they have certain scruples: they withdrew from the UPA last year in protest over the Indo-US nuclear deal. The DMK and AIADMK in Tamil Nadu have different origins from the Hindi-belt regionals, but they behave in much the same way.

So everyone assumed that once the elections were over, there would be a mad scramble by both parties trying to get enough partners to cross the 272-seat threshold for a majority. There was worry yesterday that the task might be not just difficult but impossible, and various print and broadcast commentators started explaining by way of preparation how a government can be constitutionally formed without a majority.

(Side note: this scramble, characteristic of Indian politics since the 90's, helps explain in part why small parties can thrive, compared to the British system which is the same in constitutional structure: if a new party gets just a few seats, they are suddenly in high demand and can get portfolios and other favors for their support, ensuring their survival.)

What seems at this stage to have happened, despite nearly everyone's predictions, is that the UPA greatly improved its showing over 2004. As I write, it is projected to win as many as 260 seats, quite close to the threshold; and that is only counting the parties that are close to it, none of the regionals (except the DMK in Tamil Nadu) whose support is not that hard to come by.

Upshot: the UPA will be able to form a government with perhaps only one of the regionals' support, freeing Congress's hands to enact more policy without the thorn of the Left in its side. More political stability may be a welcome result; it certainly will be to investors.

So why did the UPA do so well? It may have something to do with general satisfaction, or lack of dissatisfaction, with the national government of the last five years. But that can be no more than a single part, since all politics is local: in most states where there was a big swing, there were diverse state-level reasons for it.

Some of the notable states:

Here in Tamil Nadu, as I previously wrote, there seemed to be an anti-incumbency wave in motion, and the essentially unaffiliated AIADMK was thought likely to sweep most of the seats over the UPA-affiliated DMK. If this had happened, Congress might have thrown over the DMK for the AIADMK, possibly even arranging for an early state assembly election so that the AIADMK could repeat its success and take over the state government. This prediction was fully in line with previous local experience: for decades, when one alliance triumphed, that meant it swept the seats. However, it seems the anti-incumbency wave was exaggerated: the UPA went from holding 39 of 39 seats to 25 of 39, hardly a rout. So the AIADMK will stay out of power for the time being at both the national and the state; Congress has no motivation to woo it when it still has this many seats in combination with DMK.
In two states, the triumph of Congress was clearly related to excesses by their rivals. In West Bengal (which contains Kolkata), the Left (mostly the CPI(M)) held power continuously since 1977, constituting the "Red Fortress"; but last year there was a Kent State incident, prompting widespread opprobrium. It was expected the Left would lose at least a little; in fact, they were split wide open, and unexpectedly, the beneficiary was Trinamool Congress, an old breakaway from Congress seen as a "spent force." By a happy chance, Trinamool had been brought from the NDA back to the UPA since the last election, so the UPA gets their 19 votes (stunning considering they only won 2 seats in 2004), plus the 6 that Congress won itself.
The other of these two states is Rajasthan. There, the excesses were the BJP's rather than the Left's, and they were not quite as egregious, but they were enough for Congress to turn out the state government in elections last year, and as expected, Congress won the majority of the state's 25 seats, whereas in 2004 they won only 4.
In Kerala, the main competition is between the Left and Congress, both of which have their own broad coalitions. As in Tamil Nadu, one side gaining an advantage usually means most of the seats switching control, and that seems to be what happened, with Congress and allies winning 16 of 20 seats where before they had only 1 (and that held by an ally). This was partly due to a falling-out between the Chief Minister and Communist party leader, who fielded different candidates in many districts, splitting the vote and ensuring Congress's victory.
In the populous, impoverished state of Bihar, the trend was counter to the nation's: most seats were won by the JD(U), a regional party in the NDA, whereas in 2004 the majority had gone to the RJD, another regional party that had long since been exposed for extreme corruption and lost credibility, but clung to power tenaciously until finally losing state power in 2005. This result is almost entirely a reward for good governance locally: current Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the JD(U) is perhaps the first leader of Bihar in decades to actually fulfill promises and attempt to develop the desperately poor state. (Although the JD(U) is putatively with the NDA, the morning papers on counting day had Kumar offering his support to anyone who would grant Bihar certain special privileges, showing he was hoping to be fought over; hopefully now he can do good things for Bihar without getting too wrapped up in national politics (which helped doom his predecessor).)
Uttar Pradesh, India's single biggest state with 190 million people and 80 seats, is the most fertile ground for the most iconic regional parties, the BSP and the SP (written about previously in this space). Here, there was no huge rout; the various parties hold "vote banks" of castes and other groupings which are less shakable than usual. Although the SP was supporting the UPA government, they squabbled over electoral cooperation and Congress decided to go it alone. Such a strategy often leads to division and disaster; however, this time, Congress gained while the SP fell. It went from SP 35, BSP 19, BJP 10, and Congress 9 to SP 21, BSP 22, BJP 10, and Congress 21.
In most of the other large states, the results were less interesting on their own: control stayed where it had already been, with some movement to the UPA. In Madhya Pradesh, which is similar to Uttar Pradesh without regional parties or many Muslims, the BJP's majority remained but shrunk. In Gujarat, the BJP is wildly popular, in late 2007 soundly winning the state assembly elections again; but this year it gained only 1 seat, going from 14 to 15 of the total 26. In these places, national issues may possibly be more prominent.

The diminution of the Left and regional parties, and the UPA's consequent lowered reliance on them, my interlocutors and some TV commentators take as a good sign. They see the Left and regional parties as a negative force for Indian politics as a whole, and the more the two national parties gain against them, the healthier politics can be. I feel the Left parties could be a positive force, but I definitely see what they mean about the regionals, and about the problems of large coalitions in India.

What political figures have gained and lost?

Winners:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. According to the news, he will have the distinction of being the first PM to serve out a full 5-year term and then be re-elected since Nehru.
Rahul Gandhi, son of Sonia. Ever since Sonia Gandhi withdrew from consideration as Prime Minister, Rahul has been groomed as the eventual heir of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. He's only 38 years old and has declared himself too young currently to be PM, but he still served as one of the primary spokespersons of Congress during the election cycle. This victory has, by association, given him some repute on his own; they're already saying he's going to be appointed somewhere in the new Cabinet.

Losers:

Narendra Modi of the BJP. He's the Chief Minister of Gujarat and enjoys a lot of popularity for his good governance and development of the state, but possible connections with Hindu-on-Muslim violence continue to dog him. It was widely bandied about during the race that after LK Advani (the current BJP candidate), he was next in line for leadership in an NDA government; now they're saying that this talk might have hurt the BJP in some constituencies.
Possibly LK Advani too, for the obvious reasons - he apparently tried to resign very soon after the BJP's concession, not sure how that's going to pan out.
Lalu Prasad Yadav, disgraced but chutzpah-rich former Chief Minister of Bihar and head of the RJD as described above. Now that his coterie's representation has gone down from 22 to 3 (he might have lost his own seat but for a ridiculous machination in which he stood in two constituencies simultaneously), nobody has to pretend they like him anymore.

A few extra observations:

The byword on CNN-IBN today is "Singh is King," which is the title of a Bollywood movie from last year; amusingly, they have taken the title song from that movie (performed by Snoop Dogg) and mixed it with footage of Manmohan Singh for a new meaning. I'll post a link if I find their version on YouTube later.
One of the silliest things I saw on TV was yesterday, when they said (translated into an equivalent American idiom): "As Andhra Pradesh goes, so goes the nation." Although Congress swept this state, it did last elections too; and with an extremely popular Congress Chief Minister in place, there was no practical way it could have been a bellwether. To be fair, this is more often said about Tamil Nadu, and there it is true, at least over the past 15 years or so.
The 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai turned out to be a non-issue, as demonstrated by the fact that turnout in Maharashtra state was much lower than anywhere else. It was suggested to me that terrorism is a middle- and upper-class preoccupation and thus has less relevance to the Indian voting masses; I wonder if it also has something to do with there being little differentiation between the two major parties in their practical policies toward terrorism.
If Advani retires, the BJP will have a shakeup on who is to be the next leader of the opposition - not including Modi as a candidate. They seem to be nostalgic for Vajpayee, who led the BJP in government for a full five years, but who is now 83 and retired. Supposedly nobody retires from Indian politics, but Vajpayee made an exception after experiencing a bad memory lapse.

My Thanjavur writeup is coming, I promise. In the meantime, here are my photo albums from the trip - Friday, then Saturday.

Despatch 9b: Auroville and Pondicherry

2009-05-10T05:05:00.000-07:00

Once I felt better in Mahabalipuram, we strolled back to the bus stop at the center of town. Here a problem showed itself. Mahabalipuram is about two hours from Chennai down the Eastern Coastal Route (ECR); Pondicherry is another 2 hours along the same road. There are heaps and heaps of buses, public and private, going express between Chennai and M'puram or Chennai and Pondi. We assumed based on this that it should be easy to find a bus stopping in M'puram and proceeding to Pondi. Wrong. In fact, these buses didn't even come to the central bus stop. We had to take an autorickshaw to the edge of town (a 3-minute drive) to the ECR turnoff:

From 2 May 2009

There was a serious deficiency of shade around here, with the sun high in the sky and few large objects nearby. There was a bit of shade from a bank of autorickshaws, but their wallahs were availing themselves of it.

The only buses scheduled to stop, too, turned out to be the old, hot locals we had hoped to avoid. (Granted, we had taken such a one to M'puram, but it's different when you board at the beginning and can get seats.) A few expresses were stopping on an unscheduled, informal basis, but either they were full up or they asked for insultingly extortionate amounts like 300 rupees for not even a seat, just a place to stand. After over half an hour of this, in which I occasionally sought respite from the sun by bending forward 135 degrees, we finally boarded one of the locals.

I'm no stranger to crowded buses in the US, and this - a fairly normal level of crowding in India - rivalled or beat the worst I've seen. Then, too, back home one doesn't see mothers with babies sitting on the floor for lack of seats, or people clinging precipitously to the edge of the doorless entry stairs, one seizure away from messy death. (On the other hand, I still have yet to see roof-riders, though the buses are thoughtfully equipped with outside ladders.) And having to stand, as I did, blocks much of the outside breeze that would otherwise make the lack of AC bearable.

In short, over this 2-hour-plus drive, I was hot, sticky, contorted, and getting more miserable by the minute. I myself am obviously worse-equipped for this kind of experience than the others around me, both physically and mentally. Looking back, I take it as a reminder that without the advantages held by the majority of Americans or a small minority of humans, modern life is full of not just deprivation - the mere absence of needed food, shelter, security, fulfillment - but horrendous inconvenience and discomfort on a constant low level, like the people on my block who lounge around Sundays on the sidewalk because they don't have any air-conditioned room to retreat to. But I resist the temptation to boast that this experience served me well as a toughener; mostly what it toughened was my resolve to avoid such experiences in the future.

Fortunately, Amit grokked my problem. After about an hour, when new boarders prompted a fresh squeeze that robbed me of even the ability to stand up straight, he talked a sitter into very kindly giving up his seat for me. (Yeah, yeah, special treatment, but I'm not about to be ungrateful.) Soon after that, it got a little less crowded, and he found a seat too.

We had intended to go to Pondicherry and from there visit what Amit called the French Colony; I had at first taken this to mean the old French core of the place, but it turned out to be Auroville, a utopian community founded by a follower of Sri Aurobindo. We were able to save some time by discovering the bus stopped there - at least, as close as it got to the ECR. Superficially where we got off looked like any other Indian suburban expanse, but for the random white people passing on scooters every few minutes. Auroville is actually several kilometers from the road, far enough for the area to be largely undeveloped. Once we made it, there was a visitor's center with giftshops, refreshment stands, and a lot of Indian tourists. My guidebook explained that the community members are not entirely happy about the tourists stomping through when most of the place is off-limits to them anyway; presumably the visitor's center was created as a secluded venue to turn them upside-down and shake briskly by the ankles.

What we were after, the only genuine attraction for visitors, was Matrimandir, the spiritual heart of the community, meant to be a perfect meditation space or some such. The crowd first watched a short video on its significance (which we came in at the tail end of), and then got free tickets and was directed to a footpath: a 10-minute walk, fortunately mostly shaded.

The path led to a viewing point a few hundred feet from the great structure, where we could get a good, if limited, look at it:

From 2 May 2009

Magnificent, to be sure, both the structure and the landscaping around it, but on a continuum approaching goofy. (I was initially put in mind of those old suction-cup balls.) Well, the place is after all a paid-up member of the New Age movement.

The guidebook had said visitors were led all the way up to the doors, and were begrudged a brief glimpse of the Matrimandir's interior, but in fact this was as close as we got. This discrepancy counterintuitively bolsters the guidebook's earlier assertion, that there is not much love locally for tourists - the guidebook was printed in 2007, so presumably that part was abolished in the last two years.

Incidentally, Amit says that the majority of Auroville residents are French; I haven't confirmed this independently, but the fashion senses of the many scooter-riders we passed were not inconsistent with this proposition.

That was all there was to see, so we proceeded back to the ECR and got on another bus. This was just as crowded, but with a less than 30-minute ride in store, it was much more bearable. I did have one new experience: the conductor, pushing his way through to sell everyone their tickets, snatched my backpack out of my arms and placed it in the laps of a sitter, where there was room for an object but not a person - all in the interests of creating more space for the standees. (I had no trouble getting it back, with Amit's help.)

At some chokepoint I found a seat, and was able to start taking pictures:

From 2 May 2009

An important point about Pondicherry is that on the whole, it really isn't a creature distinct from the rest of India, French heritage notwithstanding. If not for the addresses written on shop signs, it would be hard to tell the above apart from Chennai - the main language is still Tamil, and the secondary language is English, not French.

I saw not a word of French, in fact, until we were quite near the center - a school called St Louis de Gonzague. But the center looks quite different, in a most observable way:

From 2 May 2009

The streets are wide and quiet, more heavily treed, and bear French names, with the occasional French architecture (or what looks like it):

From 2 May 2009

For the sake of the experience, we also found a patisserie, where I seized on the chance to have a croissant, and later a French restaurant called "Le Club." There's also a very nice, long seaside promenade, Rue de Goubert:

From 2 May 2009

Pondicherry, like Tamil Nadu, has had a Tamil regionalist movement of its own - that's why its official name is now Puducherry. But it seems to be milder than in TN. Rue de Goubert, for example, has been renamed, but only to Goubert Salai; that is, they Tamilized the part meaning "road," but continue to honor Edouard Goubert, who was apparently a key figure in making Pondicherry part of India.

We also came around to Government Place, a very cozy green square surrounded by government buildings. In the middle is a decorative arch rather like the Arc de Triomphe, housing a fountain and surrounded by cannons facing outward. Sadly, at the end of the day I was having battery issues, and I don't have a good picture; you can find a very dim picture in the full album for Saturday.

There's not a lot to do in Pondicherry: it's a city of ambience, where you stroll, go to cafes, and so forth. So that's what we did; the restaurant was a wonderful respite, with good basic food on the "start with good ingredients" model - their dressing actually made iceberg lettuce tasty.

What with the small size and touristy nature of French Pondicherry, it's actually comparable to the pre-hurricane French Quarter of New Orleans: yes, it's kind of fake, but at the same time tasteful and pleasant.

After eating, we hailed an autorickshaw to the bus station, where we were to finally get a comfortable ride back to Chennai. But first we had to suffer Pondicherry's auto-wallahs, who (I am now in a position to report) are just as extortionate and difficult as are those in Chennai. I had perhaps my most unpleasant experience to date with an auto-wallah: we lacked the right change to pay for the trip, so Amit went off to make some change at a store while I stayed behind. He took a few minutes, and the auto-wallah was quite ticked off. He started talking to me demandingly, almost all in Tamil, and when I replied "Tamizh peesa ille" (no speak Tamil!) it only seemed to make him angrier. (He was using at least one English word in response, but it was unhelpful with no context; he might have been demanding more money for his time.) This pattern kept repeating, until he was really fuming; I honestly wondered if he was going to throw a punch at me. I would certainly have been willing to give him an extra 10 rupees if that settled things. But then Amit came back, handed him the originally-agreed amount, and he drove away without a word. Verdict: bark > bite.

The express bus back to Chennai, leaving at about 8:30 PM, was much more comfortable than the earlier trips: no AC, but plenty of seats and breeze from outside. But there were still factors aggravating my preexisting difficulty sleeping in moving vehicles. The ECR is an undivided two-lane highway with lots of passers dodging oncoming traffic; I wasn't in a position to see, but from the lane-changes I felt, the bus seemed to do its share of passing. As a result, the driver had to honk constantly, and a mickle, penetrating horn it was. Even worse, the driver had a stereo up front playing Tamil songs at full blast - loud to me in the middle of the bus, presumably earsplitting to those at the front. This was apparently to keep him from falling asleep himself, so forgivable on a narrow basis, but it still meant no sleep for me. (Most of the people on the bus did not have a problem with it.)

We managed to get off the bus before the final terminus, by IIT Madras and near my guesthouse. Sadly, my pleasant experience of that morning was not repeated: the available auto-wallahs gouged as usual. I think in the future I need to make sure I do the negotiating myself: Amit kindly did it for me, but this seemed to make the wallah assume I was a pushover, as after I made my goodbyes to Amit and we started driving, he promptly tried to jack up the price. I was at the end of my rope at this point and put my foot down - literally. That is to say, I demanded he return to the original price or let me out at once, and actually stuck my foot out the door to scrape the asphalt as proof of my determination.

I got back at about 12:30 in the morning, and slept till noon the next day (and more that afternoon). Overall: we went to some great places, and Amit was an excellent traveling companion, but we probably stuffed too many places together in one day. And not to say that the miserable bits of it were per se good for me, but they did provide a taste of India I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Next: My Thursday-Saturday work trip to Thanjavur! Highlights will include cross-animal-kingdom friendship and a Jewish elephant.

Interlude: Laws

2009-05-06T05:11:00.003-07:00

Before the next installment of my trip report, I'm reprinting an intriguing news item:

Techie prefers lock-up to wedlock

(Express News Service)
CHENNAI: A 29-year-old man refused to marry a girl who claimed to have been dating him for the last two years. Instead, he said, he preferred going to jail in a case of alleged cheating she had filed against him. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was working as an assistant manager in ISVO, a BPO company in Teynampet where he met Aruna Kumar (24) who worked in the personnel department.

According to Aruna’s complaint, Ali had cheated her after having an affair for over two years and was now refusing to marry her. She alleged that Ali refused to marry her and claimed that they had only been friends. During an interrogation, he maintained that he was never in love with Aruna and he would not marry her. The duo had also reportedly purchased some land in Arakkonam together and acted as guarantor for each other. Aruna, it was stated, was willing to convert to Islam to get married to Ali but he maintained that he would prefer going to jail to marrying her. The police finally gave up on a patch up between the two and booked Ali under 417 and 506 of IPC and remanded him to judicial custody.

Does this mean - I thought upon reading - that cheating on your significant other is illegal in India? If this were a matter of adultery, I wouldn't have been as surprised - there's a lot of social conservatism in India and sodomy, too, is still a crime on the books - but cheating seems a bit much.

Fortunately the article referenced the Indian Penal Code (a British creation still in effect), so I could ascertain the truth. In fact, where they say "cheating," they mean not adultery but a general crime akin to fraud. The actual definition of the crime is in IPC 415, not 417:

Whoever, by deceiving any person, fraudulently or dishonestly induces the person so deceived to deliver any property to any person, or to consent that any person shall retain any property, or intentionally induces the person so deceived to do or omit to do anything which he would not do omit if he were not so deceived, and which act or omission causes or is likely to cause damage or harm to that person in body, mind, reputation or property, is said to "cheat". (emphasis added)

So although nothing in the article says he got any money or property from her (fraud), I gather that a deceptive engagement is thought of as having harmed her "reputation," and thus prosecutable. A broad definition, to be sure, but a little less draconian than I'd feared.

Then we have IPC 506, even more a piece of work:

Whoever commits, the offence of criminal intimidation shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both;

If threat be to cause death or grievous hurt, etc.: -And if the threat be to cause death or grievous hurt, or to cause the destruction of any property by fire, or to cause an offence punishable with death or imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years, or to impute, unchastity to a woman, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years, or with fine, or with both. (emphasis added)

I assume the "criminal intimidation" part comes from some facts of the matter not in the article; but clearly the logic is that by the nature of their relationship, everyone would naturally assume the woman was no longer "chaste" - and that's a kind of criminal damage. Wonderful.

Two lighter points:

In 506 above, "imprisonment for life" is a 1956 substitution for "transportation for life." So exile to Australia (or wherever) was so entrenched and basic a punishment that the laws referenced it routinely in the mid-19th century when the Code was written.
The IPC seems to often reference situations I associate with plot-moving cliches in 19th and early 20th-century novels: "Cohabitation caused by a man deceitfully inducing a belief of lawful marriage," "Marriage ceremony fraudulently gone through without lawful marriage," etc.

And let the following, IPC 508, stand on its own:

Act caused by inducing person to believe that he will be rendered an object of the Divine displeasure

Whoever voluntarily causes or attempts to cause any person to do anything which that person is not legally bound to do, or to omit to do anything which he is legally entitled to do, by inducing or attempting to induce that person to believe that he or any person in whom he is interested will become or will be rendered by some act of the offender an object of Divine displeasure if he does not do the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to do, or if he does the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to omit, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a tem which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both.

Illustrations
(a) A sits dharna at Z's door with the intention of causing it to be believed that, by so sitting, he renders Z an object of Divine displeasure. A has committed the offence defined in this section.
(b) A threatens Z that, unless Z performs a certain act, A will kill one of A's own children, under such circumstances that the killing would be believed to render Z an object of Divine displeasure. A has committed the offence defined in this section.

Despatch 9a: Attack of the 50-Foot Saturday!

2009-05-05T07:05:00.004-07:00

The plan was to start out for Mahabalipuram early, make the rounds there, and then proceed to Pondicherry in the early afternoon. Both of these are popular destinations, but neither has a great number of sights one must cover, so it seemed quite doable. My traveling companion was Amit, who missed making this trip with his cohort early in his stay here; it came out that he, like me, might otherwise have gone alone.

I left the guesthouse at 5:30 in the morning, and quite fortuitously ran into that rara avis, the Honest Auto-Wallah. I named my meetup destination, 3 kilometers away, and he asked for 25 rupees right off the bat - when I had been hoping 30 and fearing 40.

I met Amit at the gates of IIT Madras, where he's staying during his summer internship. We went from there to the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus (pictures), a huge new thing with 270 bus bays all spread out at ground level. Once we were in the right area it was making the rounds of the drivers to see who was the next bus (there were 5 bays marked "Mahabalipuram" alone). Amit is an outsider like me, with no Tamil, so it was the same exchange of place-names, numbers, gestures, and basic English that I use with locals.

Once we had figured out the bus, I noticed someone walking past - an East Asian with a fannypack and a look as bewildered as mine had probably been. I pegged him as certainly a tourist and likely Japanese (I'm not good at telling the latter), so I asked if we could help him. His English was rudimentary, so I asked 日本の方ですか？ ("Are you [an honorable] Japanese?") - and he quite literally jumped back two feet. I was right! We were chatting quickly. His name was Hiroyoshi, and he was on a 2-week vacation. He actually spoke Hindi, having learned it in college; this was to be his third trip to Mahabalipuram and India, the first being about 12 years ago and the second a few years after that. With the same immediate destination, we joined up: he spoke with me in Japanese, and with Amit in Hindi, the effect being a bit like a game of tennis.

From 2 May 2009

The bus took us out of town, traffic slow as the town woke up, once out quickly south down the long, straight, 2-lane Coastal Route. Although it was supposed to be an express bus, there were several stops; at the first one, near the bus terminus exit, half-a-dozen people loaded up perhaps twenty sacks of assorted dry foodstuffs, piling them into the front of the bus - an area without seats, apparently designated for this purpose. The route was alternately scenic and drab; a large part of it was quintessentially tropical, full of palm trees and other deep greens. We pulled into Mahabalipuram after about 2 hours, in mid-morning.

Mahabalipuram is very small; likely 90% or more of its economy is from tourism. Its sights are also exceedingly close together, mostly walkable. Although everything is technically Hindu, it's more valued archeologically than as an active site of pilgrimage; there are no INNER SANCTUM HINDUS ONLY signs. The blow-by-blow photos with descriptions can be viewed in order starting here; but the two most important, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites, are the Shore Temple:

From 2 May 2009

-and the Five Rathas, or carved "chariots":

From 2 May 2009

The latter, I understand, was built not as a place of worship, but as its era's equivalent of an art installation.

Both of these are significantly eroded, but the Shore Temple more so, due to its location. I picked out a haunting image there:

From 2 May 2009

The farthest-afield sight is the Five Rathas, and Hiroyoshi wanted to rent bicycles to get there. I resisted at first, but relented after discovering it was a kilometer away. In retrospect, it was a good decision - it was already quite hot, and the walk would have been worse than the ride - but I was still worn out by the time we made it back to the center of town (such as it is). It was quite hot, probably almost 100 degrees by late morning, and only getting hotter; we had been on the move constantly. We found an air-conditioned restaurant, cooled off, and ate.

Hiroyoshi was staying here for the day; he's a fan of South Indian food and the local seafood, and he apparently had all sorts of shopkeepers from his earlier visits to reunite with. The first one he looked for, an older gentleman, had sadly died, but there were others; and he, of course, was in less of a hurry than we. So Amit and I proceeded to the bus stand to pick up where we left off.

Next post: To Pondicherry... eventually!

Interim note

2009-05-04T20:34:00.002-07:00

I left at 5:30 Saturday morning and returned at 12:45 that night. Three stops, lots of bus travel; a great experience, with lots of gripes making it what it was. A big blog post is forthcoming; in the meantime, here's the gallery of photos:

2 May 2009

Pre-despatch: Out of town, at last

2009-05-01T02:22:00.002-07:00

There have been a number of weekend travel plans made and fallen through. (Air-conditioned buses to cool scenic towns during holiday weekends? Fill up fast.) But the current plans, which seem less likely to fall through, are one day trip tomorrow (Saturday) to Pondicherry and Mahabalipuram, and another on Sunday to Yelagiri. Pictures to come. (NYT article on the French ambience of Pondicherry - which is all anyone seems to have to say about the place. In a queer legacy from old colonial scattering, while Pondicherry (or now Puducherry) is the city's name, it's also the name of a Union Territory consisting of the city plus three "enclave" towns in unconnected miscellaneous spots up and down the Indian coast - it's what the French held at the very end, in 1956.

The Indian elections are held in five "phases" in different parts of the country, since they're a logistical nightmare. Phase III just finished yesterday; it included the districts of Mumbai, which should make certain people I know very relieved. At any rate, it leads to an interesting media situation, where people want to do post-election commentary, but no results are released until it's all over - except turnout data. So you get some lamentation about the low turnout rate here or there, and some hand-wavy prognostication. (I assume the turnout data isn't that fine; otherwise, people could look at districts and estimate based on what party needed higher turnout to win.)

Sometimes, de gustibus really est disputandum.

2009-04-30T09:08:00.001-07:00

Emily Thorson of the Internet Food Association says what needed to be said:

[W]hen it comes to chicken, you cannot legitimately like white meat better than dark meat. White meat simply does not taste as good. It is not an opinion, it is a fact. Claiming that white meat “just tastes better” than dark meat is the food equivalent of claiming that a Coors Lite “just tastes better” than a Victory Prima Pils.

Preach it!

People are bad with numbers? No shit, Sherlock!

2009-04-28T22:49:00.003-07:00

The following figures frankly baffle me, enough for me to blog it. They come from a JAMA article, Relationship Between Regional Per Capita Medicare Expenditures and Patient Perceptions of Quality of Care, though my issue doesn't have anything to do with regional spending variation. They surveyed 2,476 Medicare beneficiaries, and among the questions were the following:

Overall Care (Respondent Rating)

[Respondents who said] My health care better than average: 766 (30.1%)
Community's care better than average: 676 (27.3%)
Overall rating of care is 9 or 10: 1,398 (56.5%)

Who are these people, these as-many-as-632 people, who think their health care is average or worse, but still give it a rating of 9 or 10? Is it a tendency to minimize past dissatisfaction, lest one feel burned? How did they conceive the third question as so substantially unrelated to the first? I welcome suggestions.

(The general thrust of the article is to reinforce the existing consensus that higher health spending leads to more care, but not better care. If you're wondering, the first two responses had no correlation with regional spending levels, while the third actually decreased with higher spending: from 63.3% giving a 9 or 10 in the lowest quintile of spending, to 55.4% in the highest, p-value 0.008.)

Dude, this is English, not German.

2009-04-28T03:06:00.002-07:00

I hope government doesn't make me start writing like this:

Shortly after taking office, President Clinton committed to the Nation’s governors that his Administration would work closely with States to test innovative concepts and programs within existing health and welfare demonstration authorities.

Despatch 8: The beach, and Indian television

2009-04-26T17:30:00.002-07:00

The trip to old Madras didn't work out, but we did visit the beach in the late afternoon. It's about the most comfortable walk possible during daylight hours, since a cool sea breeze blows in most of the 1.5 kilometers. The bigger trip maybe next week.

I also had coconut water for the first time, straight from the source: a street vendor with a board decked with young (green) coconuts, who on your request hacks off enough of it to stick a straw in and drink; when you're done, you give it back, they chop it in half and reveal some thin slices of moist, edible meat around where the water was. I'll take pictures some other time.

There is a lot of coverage of the question of the whereabouts of Prabhakaran, Tamil Tiger head, and whether the Sri Lankan government will capture him. (A couple of weeks ago he was prematurely reported dead.) I assume this is because India wants him for the death of Rajiv Gandhi. I idly wondered whether there's an automatic extradition treaty between India and Sri Lanka; however, the first page of results for "india sri lanka extradition" is entirely composed of news about Prabhakaran, showing the issue's salience.

An amusing recurring advertisement on TV here. Oh, Indian justice system.

Finally, Indian activists really seem to be taking the shoe-throwing tactic to heart. It's been attempted on high-ups at least a few times so far (and today the PM), some of whom are now putting up nets between themselves and audiences.

Note on commerce

2009-04-26T03:38:00.003-07:00

I recall a point when I expressed an interest in haggling as a price-determination process that brought together reason, emotion, and socioverbal facility. I didn't actually say the words "folkway," "quaint," and "delightful," but they were implied.

Fuck a bunch of haggling. Haggling is ritualized attempted theft wherein the seller announces an intention to cheat the buyer blind, and the buyer retaliates by demonstrating (a) knowledge of the correct price and (b) willingness to suffer through a silly conversation in order to get it. Fixed prices are a triumph of modernity with no downside.

(The Japanese, to their credit, started catching on to this in the seventeenth century.)