March 14, 2007
Roger Tory Peterson on PDA
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/03/13/palm-tungsten-based-bird-encyclopedia/
Despite writing a small tech column for a strategy magazine and reviewing tons of business plans, I only rarely get the feeling that I am at the dawn of a great new age. Palm has just given me one of those moments by integrating a bird encyclopedia into a PDA which is being sold as a standalone bird encyclopedia. This sounds really dull, right, and the product—which appears to be a large birding book, full of text and pictures, crammed into a PDA—is kinda of dull but the possibilities are completely appealing.
This year, we have a text-based bird watcher’s PDA. Next year, I’d like to have a PDA with stored and matchable bird calls. Users record a bird call and then match and time stamp it. Digital camera photos can be time stamped and appended.
This is, of course, just the beginning. A different PDA manufacturer comes out with a different guide, maybe one on seashells, or stamps, or garbage trucks. Aficionados across the states begin collecting detailed, certified records of the objects that they have viewed. Knitted doll experts rub elbows with torn paper bag experts on the subways. The world—as it always is through the eyes of collectors—becomes terribly interesting again. Computer sales go down, walking becomes more popular. Urbanites (except for the used gym mat experts) leave gyms in droves. This borders on brave new world type thinking.
Of course I look forward to the convergence point when and infinite number of affinity groups become focused on single items just as Make/ DIY crafts groups produce an infinite number of items to be observed. A bit of a geek nirvana, maybe.
Posted by jb at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2007
Fortune Cookies
I bought some fortune cookies this morning. An acrylic bag of 60 to 80 fortune cookies. I was happy to carry the fortunes of other people back from the 7-11 to my house. It made Santa Claus seem awfully pedestrian. He brings you gifts but this bag brings you fate.
It does not, of course. Fated fortune cookie fortunes cannot be extracted at a restaurant or via a takeout bag. They need to be found instead, on a sidewalk or in a hallway or a train station or bus depot. Someone else needs to open the cookie and reject the fortune. This proves that it is was received by the wrong person. The chance that it was intended for you increases. Delivery is no longer a predictable matter. You might not notice the fortune lying on the ground. In that case, it remains lying in wait, intended for someone else.
Or it could be that the landfill is the natural destination for a fortune cookie fortune. There are probably thousands of them in Fresh Kills (the Staten Island Landfill) alone. They lie there, scrunched between discarded objects, from diapers to newspaper, patiently informing car batteries and discarded tires that “You will be fortunate in the opportunities presented to you” It is all very surreal from the outside but comforting to the tires. I may be wrong. I don’t speak tire or any other inanimate object.
At any rate. I’m going to give the fortune cookies to the rest of the office and collect the fortunes afterwards. I’ll then tape the fortunes to benches and bridge underpasses around Singapore. I’m not sure why. I just feel compelled to do this. I was compelled to do this from the minute that I decided to purchase the bag. It may,again, be fate. Just last week I got a fortune cookie fortune that told me I’d be doing this. A meta fortune cookie, produced by the queen bee of fortune cookies, from a big hive in Plano, TX, where worker cookies extract fortunes from the queen cookie and implant them on small balls of warm dough.
Posted by jb at 06:54 PM | Comments (4)
December 24, 2006
Midnight Mass
Went to midnight mass this evening. First time in years. I used to go in High School, with my parents. Jill would come along as well. We had a bit of a tradition. I’d go with her to the Methodist service near her house in West Grove then she would walk with me to the Catholic church in the center of West grove. We probably only did this three or four times but it felt like a real tradition.
Anyway, midnight mass in Singapore. Totally, completely the same as midnight mass in West Grove, PA. Cultural intangibles really do translate, from the weird yearly audio visual experiment (this year, the pastor opened the service by playing a fifteen minute outtake from some tinny 1950’s nativity movie but the speakers were iffy so we got at best every third phrase) to the part where we all mumbled through the same songs. It was indescribably great. Midnight mass is one of my favorite yearly occasions. Simchat Torah is the other. Both start at night. All really great prayer services start at night, after the hectic day has ended, at a point where everything from the outside seems formless and void. My parents lived in France before I was born. In the evenings, my mom used to march up a long hill and go to nocturnes at an abbey in Paris. I’ve forgotten the name of the abbey but I’ll ask her. Some of it stayed with me, I think, since I was busy gestating while she was climbing the hill.
Anyway, Merry Christmas, y’all.
L’Hayim!
Posted by jb at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2006
Morning Notes
Ran two innovation teams from an elementary school classroom in a semi-rural factory town near Mumbai yesterday.
I’ve become just a little bit obsessed with classified ads. Each entry, each “typist wanted, fresher needed” points to a mini drama. Maybe the office is expanding or maybe someone left in a storm of acrimony. I can see an applicant waiting in the morning, creasing the edge of the folder, checking to make sure that their shirt sleeves are straight. A man might be distracted by his tie. I can see a woman looking at her hands or checking her blouse. If the interview works, eight to ten hours of each day will change for a period of two months to twenty years. “Girl secretary needed.” “Petroleum engineer sought.” Some of the ads in the Mumbai newspaper have a 1950’s feel.
Everyone that I’ve spoken to in Mumbai refers to Mumbai as Bombay.
I’ve met several people who either grew up or spent their high school/ college years in America. They speak with robust American accents when speaking with us only to shift over to Indian accents when talking to others. It is probably not even conscious. Accents are probably important for comprehension. It might be that our brains take accent cues to fill in words that are not heard correctly. Aural sentences are probably reconstructed after the fact, starting with stressed words which leave gaps to be filled in by the listener. Accents might help us to detect word stress. Alternately, they might provide small cues or details to the non stressed words—something that helps the listener to backfill. Listening to heavily accented English in SE Asia can be a pain until my brain shifts and adjusts to the accent. I can’t really differentiate between Indian accents yet.
Our office in Singapore is English speaking but we have, on a full day, two American accents, two Chinese/ Singapore accents, one Indonesian/ Singapore accent and one Hong Kong English accent. Both Americans mumble and remove almost all word stresses. It is almost impossible, without a fine ear for American speech, to detect where one word ends and another begins. The Indonesian, Mainland Chinese, and Hong Kong accents each structure word stresses differently.
Even though Singapore is extremely small, there are two dominant accents, one lower class and one that is University educated. The differences between the two are strong, la. The speech patterns are also different.
I leave for Singapore tomorrow morning. Catherine (Indonesia) left last night. Everyone else flies out tonight. Brad and I are meeting Hari for dinner in downtown Mumbai this evening. I hope the internet is up and running this evening.
Posted by jb at 01:36 PM | Comments (2)
November 28, 2006
Waiting in Line
Counter number five at the Indian Consulate was closed this morning. A small handwritten sign, crammed between the glass and some books told everyone to go to counter one. A queue formed at counter one and each of us took numbers which were not really necessary. There is a mania for ticketed numbers at the Indian Embassy. I ended up with two, a pink number fourteen and then a second white ticket with the same number. An attendant handed out the pink numbers to people who were waiting along the sidewalk in the morning. A second attendant replaced the pink tickets with white slips that he forced out of the vending machine by the front door. When I got to the front of the line at counter one I found out that there was an additional processing charge and I did not have enough cash and nobody was taking a credit card so I left the consulate to find an ATM. By the time I returned to the consulate, the counter one line had eased itself out beyond the glass doors and down into the staging area outside the consulate building. We were all waiting to hand over our passports, having waited in a different line five days earlier to hand over the initial application. In one sense, we were elite. There were only twenty of us out a building and staging area crammed with people waiting in one or more lines for the first step visa application processing.
Next to the glass entrance doors, I had one of the best standing spots in the house, at one of the best times of day. Minute by minute small bleak plays unraveled at the ticket dispenser near the door: dashed expectations in three parts. A visa applicant arrives at ten in the morning and approaches the glass doors glad to arrive early and hoping to miss the lunchtime rush. He falters when he sees the line extending outside of the door but the line is pretty short so he perks up. Someone at the end of the counter one line tells him that he is in the wrong line and directs him into the consulate. He then looks through the door and sees tons of people waiting and the first tremors, maybe a look of alarm or a facial twitch play out. He glances around and sees the digital counter. Without registering the number on the counter, he starts looking around for a vending machine and then sees the printer at the door. By this time, I’m watching and waiting for the third part. He pushes the button and gets the ticket. Number 122. He turns around and looks at the digital counter over the line of teller stations: 19. His entire body deflates. He is in the long line. Only 19 people have been served since the consulate opened at 9 AM. His turn should be up in six hours. Everyone in the consulate has a settled, even look. After ten minutes he too will settle in to his chair and begin the long wait. This happened time after time. It helped me pass the 1 ½ hours in the line for passport submission. I'll admit that it helped me pass time because I'm a terrible person.
I get to go back at 4:15 this afternoon. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll get to it all over again in a month when I switch to a business visa. Maybe when I've finished the second round I'll find it less edifying. Maybe counter number five will be open.
Posted by jb at 01:34 AM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2006
Because no Subject is too obscure for an internet site
A website devoted to denigrating those who bunt in kickball
Posted by jb at 11:09 PM | Comments (2)
October 24, 2006
Small Stuff
Spent the afternoon trying to figure out Google Sketchup- a 3 dimensional modeling tool that came out a while back. It's always best to do this stuff on a deadline and so I constructed some concept sketches for a medcial kiosk service, to be sent to a design team in India.
Posted by jb at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006
Question
Is it bad form to get the words "wrong leg" tattooed on your leg? Will ink parlors do this? It is a bit of a high risk tattoo. You may need surgery on that leg some day.
Posted by jb at 05:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2006
A work related aside
Olivier Blanchard has an editorial post at Corante, quoting Mary Schmidt’s review of the new Kraft Cheese grating concept—a bag containing a wedge of parmesan cheese and a miniature grater. He notes that Kraft can spend bundles on market research but still end up throwing darts in a dark room when it comes to innovation and wonders whether there is a target market that really needs this sort of thing.
I suspect that there isn’t, and I suspect that this was obvious to many of the people that worked on the project. Projects like these occur when (1) companies define themselves as innovative (2) a language of innovation is established and (3) department leaders are able to use this language to gain political capital within the company.
I don’t have any knowledge of Kraft’s innovation process, but the product is perfect for gaining internal alignment within a consumer packaged goods company struggling against a market that seems to demand an endless stream of new products. The product is easy to visualize and understand. The product is low cost, save for R&D involved in the cheese grater. The product saves Kraft several processing steps in powdering the cheese and making sure that the cheese powder does not stick together. Importantly, this is the sort of product that can attract participation across the company. While seeming simple, it is new enough that someone in R&D can become a team player and leap onboard, it is a sure win for someone who might otherwise be struggling in marketing. It supports a series of timelines that can be met and is situated in a familiar market where forecasts are easy to make with numbers that are large enough to attract c-level support.
All that this innovation requires now is leadership, a sponsor, someone who believes in the concept. If the concept is generated at an innovation workshop, the innovator may be placed high enough in the company hierarchy that the benefits of forming a special team become obvious. If the innovation occurs in the context of a divisional or company wide ‘incubator’ program then all the better. If innovation occurs in the context of an initiative that requires “y new product launches” by 2007 then the inventor is making a valuable contribution to an internal metric.
Once the concept has surfaced and a team has formed, there is no backing down short of a market launch. If the product fails in the market, then the team has attempted innovation and failed, learning a great deal in the process. This the product fails internally prior to launch then the team leadership has probably spent a great deal of political capital to no avail. That’s the curious thing about innovation processes: in-market failure can be acceptable, particularly if those failures generate new consumer insight, but internal failure prior to launch is often taken to demonstrate a lack of leadership.
Photo from the Accidental Hedonist website:
Posted by jb at 10:08 PM | Comments (3)
October 07, 2006
Haze
It’s been a weird week in Singapore. Smoke from the brush fires in Indonesia has drifted this way, rolling over Malaysia and swamping Kuala Lumpur on its way south to my apartment. Two nights ago, you'd not be able to see more than 700 meters in any direction. Large buildings were obscured in the haze. I’ve read that daytime visibility shrank from ten kilometers to somewhere below three. The windows, in the daytime, are covered with grit from the smoke.
Which makes me think that there is potential for a great zombie narrative. Selected, highly psychotropic plants are burned in the brush fires. Their constituents are released in the air during the burn but are unaltered by the heat. Indonesia succumbs first. Television shots show people wandering around in a daze, drifting through the streets. The great wave of zombie violence starts in Jakarta and then drifts west and south. I’d film the move from the perspective of Singapore residents who can see the haze approach but who are unable to do anything about it. People are fleeing but it is clear that the population cannot be cleared fast enough. Wait, that might be boring. I need car chases. It would be cool if the entire cast of the Miami Vice movie became zombies. Zombies with guns, and really fast cars and no acting ability. That would be cool. That would be…wait a second….
Posted by jb at 08:32 PM | Comments (1)
September 27, 2006
Tong Shui
Desserts, like clothes, come into and out of fashion. One year retailers will have trouble keeping Ben and Jerry’s on the shelf only to see freezer burned pints pile up next to the suddenly empty Quadratini shelf the next. Right now, it seems like Tong Shui—a mix of congee, beans, and sugar— is becoming the next fad dessert in Singapore, much like bubble tea was big just prior to its collapse last year. The dessert has been around for a long time as a Cantonese specialty, but it seems to be spreading.
I pick up a small bowl of Almond Tong Shui at least three times a week. I get it hot and eat it with a spoon (you drink the cold version directly from the bowl). While most Tong Shui is clear, the version that I buy at 22 Upper Cross Street (as far as I can tell, this is the name of the store) looks more like yogurt. You could make a similar dessert if you heated a small bowl of the Silk soybean-based vanilla yogurt and added a small amount of almond extract. It would not be entirely the same, but it would be close.
I like this dessert (and this particular form of the dessert) because it holds a great deal of potential for other recipes. Any cake made with this substance would be denser by degrees than a normal cake, and there is at least one yogurt-based recipe (which Flora taught me a long time ago) for Samosa dough which could be turned into a dessert recipe if I substituted Tong Shui for the yogurt. I may experiment this weekend. I’ve wanted to take Overheard in New York quotes and bake them into fortune cookies but the quotes are often too long. I could use the Tong Shui Samosa dough, though and make oversized fortune cookies.
Normal Tong Shui—which looks like a broth soup filled with vegetables or noodles— has had trouble getting traction in the states. Apparently the only two Tong shi restaurants in Manhattan closed this year. At the same time, the 22 Upper cross street version could do very well. Why? I looks more like a traditional western dessert. The differences comes down—I think—to blended vs unblended fruits/ nuts/ vegetables. That’s it. In the traditional case, I could never get traction outside the Chinese community in the states. There would be too much confusion about the food. I use a blender and a modern looking container and suddenly I have potential a dessert sensation.
Presentation, it turns out, is at least 50% of the challenge. Take Bread Talk. There are tons of Asian bread shops in the United States. Bread Talk could succeed with a wider audience because it does a better job presenting bread, offering smaller selection with better labeling and descriptions. This is also true of Best Cellars It offer a small selection of cheap to mid priced wines in a big space but provides more information per bottle in a very non-seedy atmosphere and has succeeded in a very competitive market. I’ve been asked to look at packaging for coffee in the past and the same thing is true.
Often products remain constant but packaging comes in and out of fashion. Go into 7-11 and look at the new array of plastic bottles. Often the products inside are very standard (or a combination of two different things such as snickers bars and milk—ick) but the bottles now come in all shapes and sizes, limited only by the challenge of loading the bottles on a pallet and getting them into a truck (a tougher task than getting them to stay upright on store shelves).
Okay, now I am off subject. I think. Work is a calling.
Normal Tong Shui
New Tong Shui
Posted by jb at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2006
Somewhere
Somewhere in the United States, in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, or Indiana there is are select groups of kids who live in one time zone and go to school in a different time zone. Some of them wake up an hour later to go to school but end up going to bed an hour earlier every night. Others (in a different school district of course) need to get up an hour earlier but can stay out later. It is terrible both ways. I think of these as the summer kids (who can stay out later) and the winter kids (who can wake up an hour later). These kids do not become pen pals. There are probably numerous cross-time zone rivalries.
(8:02 AM)
Posted by jb at 08:03 PM | Comments (1)
September 10, 2006
Martin Amis: Notes
Martin Amis has written an essay (23 typed pages roughly) for the Guardian on Islamism. It is worth reading as an example of the intellectual contortions that are taking place as writers and artists—in the space of five years— develop a response to the fifty year radicalization of Islam
The essay, as expected, is a mess. It reads as if he started and stopped and started again and was forced to meet deadlines that prevented him from scrapping at least a third of the material. It is a study in indirectness that wraps popular analysis of Islam (notably Bernard Lewis’ “What Went Wrong”) with a personal narrative regarding a novella that he wrote almost to completion before abandoning. The novella is there to provide context for the small, personal Islam of a jihadi while the writings of Mr. Lewis and others are there to provide the ‘bigger picture.’ Mr. Amis adds his own material to a third part that winnows its way through the text, having no point but making sharp observations on sex, Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns,” and the war in Iraq until the end, when he presents solutions that negate—implicitly if not explicitly- many of his former points.
His points:
- Islamism has won over moderate Islam
- Islamism has an unhealthy obsession with sex and women’s roles and this has screwed the social form of the religion
- The west had no idea that Islam was in a state of convulsion until six years ago
- The west cannot— institutionally— understand suicide bombing because of its mixed elements of social training and approbation from birth, sense of personal religious submission fostered by Islam, and potential (as happens with suicide in the west) for emotional conflagration among teenagers who are wrestling with love, sexuality, and socialization
- Admiration and the search for understanding was an understandable first reaction to suicide bombing on the part of western intellectuals, first because the western mind automatically equated the extremity of the action with the presumably extreme conditions placed on a ‘people’ by colonial and neo colonial powers. I’d like to add a second point here: suicide bombing, from a distance, fit too comfortably into a modern western aesthetic most visible in the arts, where contemporary artists had spent years searching for brutal and extreme (within the confines of their safe, mutually respectful environments) ways of giving voice to visceral emotion.
- Our pragmatic attitude toward religion, our sense of multiculturalism, makes us weak and unable to respond to the driving sense of purpose that imbues those who are really practicing religion
- George W. Bush and Tony Blair made a woeful mistake in approaching this threat with a ‘bring it on’ attitude— as if they were really stepping directly into a ring and dragging America and Britain along with them
- We can win against Islam by championing women’s rights and by investing money in international programs that promote the rights of women
- We can win against Islam by fighting tooth and nail against all religion
Nine points then. This essay covers a great deal of ground. Points number one to six reflect common attitudes on the right in the United States, point seven reflects a middle of the road set of concerns while omitting the conspiracy theories of the left, and points eight and nine swing leftward. The idea that you can fund ingrained cultural behavior out of existence— as he wants to do with prevailing Islamic attitudes toward women— reflects a popular strain of academic thought. The idea that we should mount a war on all religion because it is all violent and dangerous can also be characterized as a trope of the left.
The arc makes me feel bad for George Bush. It is easy to see how his attempt to force along an intellectual process that will require ten years to sort out instead of six months will only inflame academics who have been trained since birth never to make a non-utopian bet that involves other people’s lives. In addition, he is dealing with a tendency to mask vague emotion with talking points that make no sense. In this essay, Amis states that Islamists are totally irrational by western standards. At the same time, GW has made the problem worse by using language that is—as the academics see it—inflammatory. Thirdly, we should solve this problem not by engaging in wars but by somehow going into each and every Islamist household and affecting radical change at the single most contentious pivot point between the lock on the front door and the last wall behind the master bed.
To summarize, the focus goes from major 'big picture' social problems to academic problems of sematics and language (evidence: the overwhelming focus on GW's language gaffes) and then to the interpersonal, where academics feel most comfortable and where finely wrought language practices have allowed us to feel secure with each other.
Make no mistake, even marginal progress in equality was one of the great outcomes in Afghanistan. At the same time, the idea that this can take place without at least the threat of real violence on the part of the West is a bit ridiculous. GW is right in his observation that the soccer field executions and the stoning and the beating and lynching of women who are often underage and often the victims of rape happens in the context of state and local law. He is further right that the first step in addressing this should require us to change the political structures that enable or enforce these laws. That said, even GW is not willing to suggest that we attempt to change institutionalized conservative Islam either by storming the houses and placing everyone in retraining camps or by setting up small assertiveness training schools in each town. In the same vein, even GW is not couching his solution as an attack on all religion.
Martin Amis clearly needs to try his hand at a solution again. His opening observations are a great start but his mid range notes and conclusions are weak and nonsensical. While I doubt that many at the Whitehouse read the Guardian (you can only read so much hate mail in one day), GW should take some assurance from this. I suspect that many outside the fever swamps of the left and right have less of a chip on their shoulder than he might think. Instead, he is seeing friction between two timelines: the timeline of those who are seeking means to kill us in batches and the longer timeline of those who are attempting to develop a solution that is not in conflict with longstanding academic values of open inquiry and personal freedom.
Some quotes from the article:
On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse… we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million.
Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. …Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.
Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.
This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete',… And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate - the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago…Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'
It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.
In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'
I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms.
'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation... Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right - about anything - seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".
Other sources for commentary on this essay (from Technorati):
Jeff Jarvis
Michelle Malkin
Posted by jb at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2006
What is Up with My Friends?
Well, read a blog, find something new. CP- another friend / member of the family from college (she's visited this year) announced that her surgery for ovarian cancer looks somewhat successful. All this on a blog:
To wit: "Right ovary: "beautiful" in the words of my doctor, who is a gynecologist and so must find ovaries very attractive.Left ovary: is the ugly redheaded stepchild of my right ovary, scarred and inoperable. My stepmother thinks that is the anesthesia talking, that they probably removed the tumors but not the cysts, and I just misunderstood. Possible, and I would know more if my doctor would return my phone calls now that I am coherent."
That makes three friends for the spring. NV spoke with her this evening and she is okay and recovering nicely but... sheesh.
Posted by jb at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2006
Joe Farber
Joe Farber died on Monday. I spent the first three days of the week wondering about funeral arrangements. I recieved a note from Joe’s wife yesterday. He has already been cremated but there will be a memorial service near Philadelphia next Sunday at 3 PM so I am driving back to Pennsylvania next weekend.
In the note, his wife said two things that caught my attention. The first is that Joe’s body was cremated in a favorite pair of jeans and a t-shirt commemorating the 1999 Freedom Valley Bike Ride
The second: “Joe was absolutely satisfied by the life he led and said that he would choose it all over again, even with the brain tumor.”
That sentence really gets me, first because it is the perfect thing to say to the people that you are leaving behind; second, because it highlights what a great sort of person Joe was; and third because it points to a particular and very admirable approach to life that Joe had even as far back as high school.
I've tried to describe this once, and it did not work out very well. Let's see if I can be more clear in this round of edits.
To wit: To say this to your wife and to your family is in itself admirable. It requires that- even at the very end- you are cognizant of and love & appreciate the people around you. This is not something that everyone can manage.
I'm reminded of a story that appeared a few years back in the local paper. During the middle of an abysmally hot summer afternoon, a Vietnamese flooring contractor, while sanding polyurethane floors on the upper half of a renovated condo managed to ignite the polyurethane dust, blowing most of the third floor off of the house. The Somerville journal reported that while burned over most of his body, he stayed awake in terrible pain until his wife and child were present in the hospital and did not die until his wife assured him that their son would be fine. At that point- according to the paper- he smiled, closed his eyes, and died.
Not the same incident really, but you don't learn to think of other people in this way, with this sort of dedication, overnight.
But I want to go a bit farther with this. I suspect that in Joe’s case he was not just thinking of his wife, he was probably being really honest. What does it mean to be honest about this? What sort of person could look back and state that he'd do it all over again, even with brain cancer? It requires an understanding that the life you have, no matter the conditions, is a bit of a gift. More than this, it requires a specific humility about your own understanding-- the recognition that the best and most complete life that you could imagine would pale in comparison to the life you are actually given.
This is something that is easy to forget if you spend your life fixated on some personal narrative, such as a hero or victim narrative. The stories in our heads— which we use to contextualize our surroundings— are less interesting than the actual events in the world around us. To be able to state on your deathbed that you would choose this life all over again implies that Joe was able to avoid or get beyond these less interesting, synthetic narratives, which is tough because they are addictive.
Joe had an approach, which I saw in high school and did not understand, which was observational in nature. He tended to repeat things, even obvious things, and then build them out. "You broke your leg" might turn into "that seems to be a bad idea," which might cycle again somewhere else. He tended, though, to start in the concrete. It appears, from his wife's letter, that he decided that he loved the concrete things in this world-- his wife, his kids-- and that this allowed him to avoid by instinct rather than rational thought, the sort of moral relativism that plagues weaker people who don't have Joe's imagination and are left stranded, unable to get beyond stock observations.
So I'll fix that- selfishly- in my head, and I'll try to remember it the next time a personal narrative pushes me away from the world in front of me.
Posted by jb at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2006
Suggested answers to the question “What was that?” just asked by an 8 year old camping out in his own tent for the first time on a family trip in the Maine Woods
1. It is a bear
You may not know it, but the Maine woods are famous for bear training sites. These sites serve as finishing schools for Ursi that may have cut their teeth in the Yosemite Valley or up in the Wilds of Alaska. In the evenings, the bears set up test areas where practice dummies of frightened kids are placed near trees and under rocks. The bears need to retrieve these dummies and eat them within an allotted time span. Nobody knows the time span. The bears do get points, however, for nabbing a hand or a foot.
You may wonder, at this point, why your parents agreed to let you camp out in your own tent while they stayed in the camper van. True, you asked for it, but you remember a look of relief on their faces. They even set the tent up for you. It is smaller, and they called it an eight-year old tent. At the time, you thought that it meant it was your tent. You felt special. You should have read the outside of the tent. It says EIGHT YEAR OLD INSIDE. That’s so the bears will know.
2. It is that crazy person who was killing everyone in that movie you saw two nights ago
There is a crazy person in the woods near your tent and he is waiting to kill people; probably you, your parents, or both. He is in the woods because he knows that you saw his movie two nights ago. He also knows that you hid under the desk in the living room and watched it even though you were supposed to be in bed so you can’t just walk up to the camper van, knock on the door, and announce that there is a crazy person in the woods. That makes you the best first target. He probably followed your family up from your house in Connecticut, strapped to the underside of the van just like he did in the movie. Probably, he will throw your arm through the camper window in order to lure your parents out. It works every time. You already know the important question: is he the type of serial killer that will wait until you are asleep or is he making that noise outside so that you will panic and bolt from the tent? There is probably a police workup somewhere that says “Warning: serial Killer. Looks for tent plus camper van combinations. Tends to throw arms through windows. Eight year olds a specialty.” You stay awake, wondering which photo your parents will choose for the milk carton.
3. It is your older cousin Louis, who stabbed you in the leg with a hunting arrow last week
Yeah, so you yelled a lot and then cried and so Louis, who was over because your Mom’s sister was over, got in a lot of trouble and he was spanked and he was forced to say that he was sorry but you know that he wasn’t sorry and he gave you that look that said “Just wait until I get you alone and you’ll be sorry for getting me in trouble like this and even if I am forced to, let’s say, wait fifteen years and change my identity twice and train in the CIA, I will track you down and kill you for telling my mom that I put that arrow in your leg when you know and I know that we were both just fooling around that that’s what you get and, for that matter, that’s what you will get so help me...” And you know how your Mom and Dad were talking and saying that Louis was kinda crazy and that his mom had been forced to take him to therapy which is unusual because what type of fourteen year old needs therapy and you know that his craziness is just an act because he’s actually evil. Your Aunt told Louis that he couldn’t go on this trip, but that wouldn’t stop him. Right now, he is probably sitting on the edge of the campsite. That sound? He is probably sharpening his baseball bat.
4. Aliens
It is a fact that mental control tracer chips work better in kids under 12. Unfortunately for you, this particular set of Aliens is more interested in organ harvesting than tracking. You are using an A-frame tent, right? It’s not called an A-frame because of the shape, even though it is pointed at the top. “A” stands for Aliens. These tents are famously used as beacons. That’s why so many hikers disappeared in the 1970s. Right now, a team of aliens are pushing a shopping cart through the woods, singing the kidney song. If you listen, you can hear them in the distance, getting closer. They have already used their telepathic powers to put your parents to sleep. You could run, but there is also a serial killer in the woods, waiting for you to bolt from the tent (see number 2).
5. You parents are actually werewolves, and they have taken you out into the woods in order to kill you.
When you turned seven, you realized that you were not related to your parents. You’ve kept this secret for a long time because you don’t want to hurt their feelings. Now, you realize that this was a mistake. What are they doing in that camper van and why did they put you out here? Did they have sympathy for you? Did they want to give you a chance to get away before bursting through the door, slavering and eating everything in sight? Maybe they go out into the woods in order to avoid killing their neighbors. They suggested leaving you with a sitter just yesterday but you yelled and promised to stop putting turkey, mustard, and bread on the dog and calling it “Sandwich” and they gave in. Now, you are out here alone. You wonder how many miles to the nearest highway. Werewolves are fast, though. You’ll never make it through the woods by running. Why didn’t you put sticks and leaves around the tent to conceal it? That’s what you get for not planning ahead. Your Cub Scout leader keeps waxing on about “being prepared” but he never had to deal with werewolves. The more that you think about it, the more it makes sense. You were never their child. You are a snack.
6. It is nothing.
This is incorrect. If it is quiet outside, if you hear nothing but the hum of cicadas, then something really dangerous is sneaking up on you. How do I know that it is dangerous? Ask yourself this question: What else could be that silent?
Posted by jb at 08:53 AM | Comments (2)
March 11, 2006
Jyllands-Posten
Today is March 11th. It has been six days since the last reported protest over the Muhammad cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten. The cartoons were first published on 30 September, 2005. The first calls (casting calls, natch) for the death of the cartoonists were launched in early December (Dec 3,4) and demonstrations swelled then subsided around the world through Dec, Jan, and Feb. The AP reported “tens of thousands” marching in Karachi on the 5th of March. That estimate is meaningless but there was probably a medium sized protest.
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Posted by jb at 08:54 AM | Comments (1)
March 06, 2006
Placeholder #3
This is a poem from Lucille Clifton, a writer in residence at St. Mary's College. The campus sits at the tip of the St. Mary's River, which slides into the tail end of the Potomac River in southern Maryland. I was not part of the poets and writers cult at the college and so I didn’t follow her obsessively but her poems remain nostalgic for reasons of context as well as content.
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
Posted by jb at 05:24 AM | Comments (1)
February 20, 2006
Focal Plane Cafe Brasil
I’ve arrived home and I’m reading James Lileks and he notes that today is President’s Day. I’d forgotten about this during the drive from Astoria to Boston.
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Posted by jb at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2006
Short Entry
I’m in New York this morning, staying in a small walkdown in Long Island City, midway along a street that runs directly into the Hudson River. I can see the fringes of the Manhattan skyline from the top of the front steps.
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Posted by jb at 08:49 AM | Comments (2)
February 05, 2006
Fells Point
11:29 PM. I’m listening to an old Morcheeba album, which reminds me of Baltimore. Specifically, it reminds me of Fells point and of getting coffee with J after waking up in her bed, arm across her hips, soaked because of the 90 degree night and the busted air conditioning system.
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February 01, 2006
Kinaret
Sometimes I dredge up old files on my computer. This is one of those files. I wrote it in October 2004. It concerns the image of Peter stumbling about on the surface of the Kinaret. I’ve done some editing but I’ve changed very little. I’m pulling it back up because (1) it reminds me of a time when my own religious practice amounted to more than convenient dinner table conversation and (2) I’m still pretty lazy and it makes for a quick and easy weblog entry
Posted by jb at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2006
Valentines Day
It’s a quiet morning in Boston. 40 degrees out maybe, overcast. I’m supposed to be working but the iTunes player on my computer is conspiring against me. I set the playlist to ‘random’ and iTunes responded by churning out every vaguely romantic song that I own. I have friends that see the iTunes random playlist as a sort of personal horoscope but I don’t take it this way. Instead, I’m sure that somewhere in the silicon, embedded in the million miniature semiconductor bilayers, a set of gap potentials have conspired to send me straightforward messages about my relationship with the universe. Today, for example, it’ clear that the universe wants to annoy me.
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Posted by jb at 02:36 PM | Comments (1)
January 16, 2006
Week 1 Comments
I’m bad at responding to comments. I like this method better than adding to comment chains. All the same, it’s a bit of a long entry so I apologize.
Funke is right. Happy meals are a gateway drug to gambling. I see kids exchanging those toys in back-alleys. It’s almost as bad as those Yu Gi Oh cards.
Donovan also had comment:
ED: I find it particularly interesting that Isaac in that interpretation is treated as a positive figure, whereas Christian commentaries I've seen usually stress his lack of discernment in giving the blessing to Esau rather than Jacob, contrary to the divine will (though it's debatable, of course, whether he was in fact aware of the prophecy). Other than that, is Isaac seen doing much in the Genesis account?
I’ll take a crack at an answer but I’ll start with a preface. I don’t have the benefit of Jewish schooling or even of regular synagogue attendance so everything that I write should be taken with the idea that, well... there is every chance that I don’t know what I am talking about.
So who is Isaac and how does Jewish Tradition handle Esau?
First, Isaac.
He stays in the land specified by G-d and he digs wells. Prior to this, he differentiates himself from his brother Ishmael in a single moment when he allows himself to be given over as a sacrifice at his father’s hand. At this point he is 37 years old.
The sacrifice is interesting. I’d always thought that he was much younger, an infant or a kid. That’s how he was pictured in the Catholic school books. The struggle was supposed to be Abraham’s alone. This does not seem to be the case and, while the event takes place early in his life (he lives to 180), it takes place at an age where he is conscious of the sacrifice that he is asked to make. Tradition further asserts that Isaac becomes aware of the situation after he asks Abraham about the sacrifice and Abraham responds "G-d will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." This is taken from the following line “and they both went together.”
From Rashi:
…will provide for Himself the lamb. i.e., He will see and choose for Himself the lamb (Targum Jonathan), and if there will be no lamb, my son will be for a burnt offering. And although Isaac understood that he was going to be slaughtered,“ they both went together,” with one accord (lit. with the same heart). - [from Gen. Rabbah 56:4]
He also digs wells. We have the birth of Jacob and Esau and a section where Isaac repeats Abraham’s stunt of passing his wife off as his sister but it is the well digging that is interesting. He digs wells and the Philistines stop them up. He decamps to a nearby valley and digs the wells again. This is backbreaking labor but essential (water is more essential than food or shelter) to establishing a community. I think of the wells as anchor points for the Jewish people. They are also notable because they represent a boring, long term struggle, possibly useful as a metaphor for the boring, tedious aspects of religious practice essential for maintaining and promoting Jewish traditions in the face of diaspora.
So what about Esau? I have a great deal of sympathy for him. His anguish at being denied his father’s blessing is palpable. Jacob comes off as conniving. This is no way for a major religious figure to behave.
Jewish tradition seems hard on Esau. He often gets positioned as a second sort of Cain, which is both unlikely and uninteresting. The best explanation I've recieved for the loss of birthright is that, if the Jewish people were going to survive they were going to require leadership that possessed a certain amount of ruthlessness. Esau was happy out in the field, a hunter-gatherer. He gives away his birthright and does not pursue Jacob after Jacob steals his blessing. Jacob is more suited to the travails of leadership.
From the Lubavitchers:
The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains that the fact that Esau was naturally inclined toward idolatry was not, in and of itself, a negative thing. It meant that his ordained mission in life was the conquest of evil rather than the cultivation of good.
and
Jacob and Esau are the prototypes for two types of souls, each with a distinct role to play in the fulfillment of the Divine purpose in creation. Maimonides calls these two spiritual types "the perfectly pious" and "the one who conquers his inclinations"; Rabbi Schneur Zalman refers to them as the "Tzaddik" and the "Beinoni." Humanity is divided into these two types, writes Rabbi Schneur Zalman in his Tanya, because "there are two kinds of gratification before G-d. The first is generated by the good achieved by the perfectly righteous. But G-d also delights in the conquest of evil which is still at its strongest and most powerful in the heart, through the efforts of the ordinary, unperfected individual."
It is also worth noting that the events in this section of Genesis are specifically human. After all, it would have been easier to allow Jacob to be born first. Instead he comes out after Esau, holding on to his heel.
Isaac’s words to Esau are also interesting:
“And you shall live by your sword, and you shall serve your brother, and it will be, when you grieve, that you will break his yoke off your neck."
In the Catholic tradition, this is considered a reference to the first Christian community, which would break Jacob’s yoke as its members gathered together and decided to follow Jesus, at great personal risk and at a time of doubt and grief ( and also buttressing the positive “I will follow you” with the negative “I won’t follow the rules of the Jewish community”), in the hours after his death.
As someone who favors well digging I like to think of Isaac’s message as a very personal warning to Esau about the costs of religion. I can see him years later, pausing in his labor, bent double in grief for the life of a hunter that he lost, separated for a second from the community that defines the borders of the possible, alone again. He has been led into well digging instead of hunting. Jacob is “Tzaddik” and is led by G-d to establish the Jewish people. We can assume that he lacks some of Esau’s perspective. He is less aware of the hunting, of the open fields, of the span of his loss. In establishing himself, Jacob has followed G-d’s will and walked away from Eden. Esau stops and looks back and grieves at the view, breaking for a second a yoke fashioned at the time of the fall, which pulls him like a mule from the primitive to the modern.
Posted by jb at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)