Accidental Blogger

Olympian Openings (Sujatha)

There was a song dedicated to the victims of the 7/7 attack in London, cut out of the NBC's footage that was shown yesterday, instead replaced with a vapid interview of Michael Phelps.

Click here to read the article and view the footage (sorry, no embedded link is available)

Might the cut have been in retaliation for this?

The IOC declined a request to have a moment of silence in memory of the Munich 11, the Israeli athletes killed in 1972.

The IOC defend themselves against the charges.

In other news, Queen Elizabeth II became a Bond girl, Mr.Bean played ostinato in his inimitable style with the London Symphony Orchestra, Danny Boyle presented a fantastic spectacle of the transformation of Bucolic to Belligerent Industrial Britain, and highlighted the NHS that every Brit  loves to complain about, but no one wants to lose.

Too bad, there are no official online replays of the whole Olympics opening ceremony to be found, it would have been nice to have a BBC version to compare against the dreadful and inane commentary of Bob Costas, Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera that US viewers were forced to endure, and pointless ad breaks.

(For those who missed it, here at least is a playful liveblog play-by-play of the event, with additional Brit-wit to delight the reader. I missed the bucolic baaing of the sheep, and started to watch only as the smokestacks went up.)

 

 

The Return of the Mommy Wars- Mother's Day 2012 (Sujatha)

It's the time of the year for the return of the Mommy wars in the media, with Time magazine's choice of shock-jocking cover leading the fray. What could be more motherly than a mother with her nursing child, after all ? But no, Time's editors chose the worst shot possible out of those that were so carefully taken at the photo session - the one that clobbers you on the head with 'I'm better, prettier, sexier, more shocking than you"  and a headline to match: "Are you Mom enough? ", rather than the one with more realism to it,(second one in the photoshoot set ), matching more closely the realities of the mother-child pair who only very rarely, in current culture, continue nursing into and beyond toddlerhood.

Would Elisabeth Badinter think that the Time cover symbolizes all that is the worst about the image of motherhood that she decries in her book 'The Conflict' '? Isn't it a challenge to her assertion that women ought to maintain economic independence even after motherhood and not be so attached to their children as promoted by 'attachment parenting' advocates? 

It was not always so easy to maintain a safe distance from the physicality of the mother-child bond, as Badinter would prefer now, Before the invention of easily digestible formulas, babies who lost mothers or had mothers/wetnurses who did not succeed in breastfeeding, died in infancy. The extremely high neonatal mortality rate isn't a 'good old days' number that we would like to see come back :

"(Powdered milk, jars of baby food, and disposable diapers were created for a reason, says Badinter.) But the less modern women use them, the longer they stay at home, bending over backward for their children, losing a sense of independence—and economic edge—in the process. “We used to talk constantly about ways to reconcile a woman’s maternal responsibilities with her need to retain financial independence,” Badinter tells The Daily Beast by email. “Now we talk exclusively about a mother’s duties and the ‘rights’ of the young child, which increase substantially year after."

Like Ann Romney, whose main claim to fame rests on her definition of the working mother (and yes, all mothers work, it never is paid in money and therefore cannot be quantified by the rules for determining economic worth), Badinter invokes her own credentials as the mother of three, but neglects to mention her own not-so-minor conflict of interest - her company Publicis' links to Nestle, Mead & Johnson and Abbott Laboratories, among the largest infant formula manufacturers in the world.

"Yet, whether Badinter is out of touch as an author likely goes back to whether she’s out of touch as a mother. And while she’s portrayed herself as an ordinary mom—she had three children within three and a half years, all while a full-time student—she also had an au pair to help out. Her family wealth is estimated at $920 million. Her husband, Robert Badinter, is a former French justice minister and a prominent lawyer.

Still, Badinter contends, no mother is perfect, least of all she. “The more time passes, the more I’m convinced that the perfect mother is a myth,” she says. “What woman can boast of having always had the right reactions, made the right decisions? … As for me, I’ll say that it’s for my children to judge.”

Amen to the last line. No mother is perfect. Or rather, every (or most) mothers are perfect to their kids, no matter how they choose to parent, whether  'attached' as Jamie Grumet or 'detached' as Badinter, with all their faults and failings. But perfect or not, there is one thing that all mothers excel at- Being judgmental about other women's mothering abilities.

Apropos of the occasion, here is Ruchira's blast from the past- the intriguing and mysterious 'Unaboober' Gypsy Woman, whose expression reminds me of the 'Judge me if you dare' eyes of Ma Durga .

She sees all, knows all, and protects all.

 

 Happy Mother's Day!

Time to Change the Blog Picture's Motto? (Sujatha)

The motto below the cat picture,  "He who dislikes the cat, was in his former life, a rat." seems no longer apt. We have been seriously maligning rats, who apparently show empathetic behavior and even a degree of altruism that was hitherto unsuspected. Or maybe just unnoticed and unstudied.

"The first evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rodents has been observed in laboratory rats that repeatedly free companions from a restraint, according to a new study by University of Chicago neuroscientists."

Empathy has been observed and studied in higher primates and large mammals, but while we use lab rats to test out a variety of medical, biological, even cognitive theories, it hadn't been definitively proved that rats would show any further degree of willingness to assist the helpless. At best, a concept called 'emotional contagion', in which individuals mirror the emotional state of others in the vicinity, had been explored.

This NPR interview, with Peggy Mason, one of the lead authors on the new paper, discusses in layman's terms the design of the experiment and what exactly the results imply. One of the most interesting implications  is that this sense of empathy not only extended to the rats freeing trapped companions, but also sharing a special food (chocolate chips) with them.

The interviewer, hoping perhaps to end the segment on a light note threw this out.

"PALCA: Well, all I can say is I wouldn't try that experiment on humans because I'm sure they'd leave me trapped. Most of my colleagues would leave me trapped and go for the chocolate and then let me out...."

So rats, have been getting a bad rap, just because of cultural perceptions that see them as 'fleeing a sinking ship' (where else could they flee when the water enters the area that they are in) and hence cowardly. It has just evolved into a popular meme and mindless pejorative, just as we categorize pigs as dirty (they love baths much like other mammals and avians and wouldn't wallow in the mud if they had access to clean water baths.).

But that might be too much to hope for, that just like the word 'gay' is finally losing its pejorative connotations, the terms ' ___ is a rat' or 'a pig' will make their way into history as quaint archaisms. We could be losing the shorthand associations of those usages in an entire body of literature that would no longer invoke a visceral reaction. Imagine x years in the future, when somebody reading 20th century literature stumbles across "He who dislikes the cat, was in his former life, a rat." and now has to puzzle out a meaning that would have jumped out at him in earlier times.

However that may turn out, in the context of the horrific fire that trapped and killed over 80 people in Kolkata, India, yesterday, with staff running away from the scene instead of assisting, it seems to me that the worst label humans could attach to such behavior is merely 'human'.

 

 

The "Akinator" knows ...

A friend sent me the link to this interesting web game and I am pretty impressed with the results. I have played it a few times and I can see that it can become quite an addictive distraction. The batting average of the Akinator in my hands is pretty impressive so far. Here are some of the "characters" it identified for me and the number of questions it asked to find the correct answers.

Rabindranath Tagore - 18
Jawaharlal Nehru - 13
Aung San Suu Kyi -18
Emperor Akbar - 19
Shah of Iran - 18
Friedrich Nietzsche -20
Aristotle - 10
Obama - 7
Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren - 8 each

I played the game on the American site. It is quite natural that Asian figures took a bit longer than a recent American president and popular western film stars. (I haven't tried Indian movie stars or fictional characters yet) Also, it is not terribly surprising that Nietzsche needed double the number of questions than did Aristotle. Even the couple of mistakes it made were not illogical - Ferdinand Magellan for Vasco da Gama and Guru Gobind Singh for Shivaji. The accuracy of the Akinator of course depends on the depth of our own knowledge of the character we want it to identify. What amazed me somewhat is the totally random and superficial nature of the questions it asks and comes up with the correct answer. 

Ask the Akinator and tell me how your real and fictional "characters" do in its hands. Just remember that they have to be somewhat well known.

Teeth of Tyrants

A wonderful article at 3 Quarks Daily by Ryan Sayre. Enjoy.

AMETRALLADORA (narayan)

I am a sucker for words with too many syllables that evoke memories of first encounters with them. There's 'propinquity' which I met in an article bemoaning the location of Canada, which like Mexico (setting a distant God aside) has the US too close for comfort. 'Proparoxytone' - I think I'll save that for another occasion.  'Escafandrista' brings on the image of a diver from a previous century, fitted with an umbilical tube and a spherical brass head. 'Ametralladora' is a word tossed off by Ruben Blades in his song about hired assassins - Sicarios. Machine-gun, the prosaic equivalent, just doesn't work the same magic for me, nor does Tommy-gun. Scatter-gun is what I'm after, from which, scatter-shot, which describes the preferred madness of my reading method. OK, I am an utterly shameless scatter-brained braggart, an idiot but no savant - satisfied? As I said elsewhere, my mind goes where it will.

Reading long works is a thing of my youth. I marvel at how I once got though classic tonnage like War and Peace and Les Miserables. I lay the blame for my affliction equally on age-induced ADD and the logorrhea of modern writers of lesser substance. A published author simplified the process of writing a novel for me. Just think of it as a page a day for a year, he said, and to this day I cannot see why an interesting yarn cannot be told in the space of 365 pages, 366 at most. If it's a page turner, the laguage engaging, and there aren't huge swaths of vapid conversation or jargon-filled academic analyses, I'll give a little - let's say 450, tops! The English Patient is the gold standard for me - just 300 pages to tell an intricate and compelling story. Since I know it all from the excellent film, I can enjoy the book ten pages at a time sampled randomly.

Among shorter works, above all, I am a fan of sudden fiction. Good authors may go for 20 pages, but 25 taxes my patience. When I pick up a book of short stories, I read them in order of increasing length, requiring the shortest piece to vouch for the author's art. Beyond that, there is the novella, for which I set an arbitrary limit of 175.

Brevity, unfortunately, is not an easy goal for the non-fiction writer. Once the subject and its scope has taken hold of the writer's mind, she faces the task of presenting a set amount of unavoidable detail. Thereafter, it is the skill of the author's trade-offs that determines the readability of the book for me. I like popular histories of a distant past, and I judge these against Alan Moorehead's The White Nile and The Blue Nile, non-fiction sisters of the Ondaatje novel. Browsing at the library today I saw a three volume book about Napoleon's Russian debacle, titled 1812. On the other pan of the scales, I have a book called 1688 that tells about happenings all over the world in that year in a scant 300 pages. Which would you rather read?

And so I commend to you Eduardo Hughes Galeano, the prolific Uruguayan writer, master of the short form, whose latest book I am now sampling. Sampling and reading are one and the same with Galeano. I found this summation on the Internet :

Galeano defies easy categorization as an author. His works combine documentary, fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. The author himself has denied that he is a historian: "I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."

Evolution Foreshadowed (Sujatha)

Arcane as this might be, I thought an old, old song that I had been listening to was foreshadowing the theory of evolution and the Tree of Life concept. It was a Malayalam poem, composed by Poonthanam Namboodiri of whom little is known, beyond a few barebones biographical details. The singer was a well-known playback singer in South Indian films with a solid background in Carnatic classical music, P.Leela. (The lyrics in question are sung at approximately 2:30 into this clip)

(Translation from 'Jnanapaana'  - or 'Pot of Knowledge' by Poonthanam Namboodiri) 
 
"Ethra janama prayasa pettittu ikkala, 
Mathra vannu pirannu sukruthathal, 
Ethra janmam malathil kazhinjadum, 
Ethra janmam jalathil kazhinjadum, 
Ethra janmam mannil kazhinjadum, 
Ethra janmam marangalayi ninnadum, 
Ethra janmam marichu nadannathum, 
Ethra janmam parannu nadannathum, 
Ethra janmam mrigangal pasukkalayi, 
Marthya janmathil mumbe kazhichu nam." 
 
/What an effort we put to be born now, 
Because of the good deeds that we did? 
Many lives have we spent in shit,   (I think this might be better thought of a 'primordial mud', with my translation bias assuming that this is indeed a foreshadowing)
Many lives have we spent in water, 
Many lives have we spend in mud, (I think that this should have been translated as 'on the ground') 
Many lives have we spent as trees, 
Many lives have we moved around afraid of death, 
Many lives have we spent as birds, 
And many lives have we spent as beasts and cows, 
Before we were born as men/. 
 
On listening to the lines, it struck me  that the poet might have known of Darwin's theory and its  implications, or the Tree of Life concept 
when he composed those lines, (some 'me-tooism' in which  Indians like to indulge) , but was surprised to find he was from the 17th century,  not the 19th. 
 "Poonthanam Nampoothiri (1547-1640AD) Malayalam  devotional poet, lived in Keezhattoor near Perinthalmanna in Malappuram  district of Kerala.
 He was a famous devotee of Lord Krishna  (Guruvayurappan) . He is remembered for his masterpiece, Njanappaana  which means 'the song of wisdom' in Malayalam.
 Poonthanam was the family  name, his personal name is not known."
Maybe he was taking an extended page out of the Sankhya view  of the evolution of matter. Either way, it was interesting to hear these modern seeming lines
in an old poem.

What did the ancients know, and when did they know it? 

 

Who's buried in Jesus' tomb?

Here is an alternate view of Jesus' resurrection. This story makes its rounds every year around Easter in one form or the other and it is not really as new as the BBC report makes it out to be. I had heard it many times as a child in India.

The reason why the Rozabal shrine has only recently been getting attention in the west could be because not many people outside India knew much about the place until the 1990s and the advent of the World Wide Web. Jesus' resurrection is not uppermost in the religious narratives of Indian Muslims and Hindus. The local lore surrounding Jesus' tomb in Kashmir has therefore always been a minor myth in the northern Indian regions. It was only after India established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992 and young Israeli tourists began flocking to India that a large influx of foreign visitors to Rozabal began. For the Israelis, a non-Christian version of Jesus' fate after crucifixion probably has a high curiosity value. It is only since then that the "Jesus is buried in Kashmir" theory has found widespread popularity outside India.

 

A belief that Jesus survived the crucifixion and spent his remaining years in Kashmir has led to a run-down shrine in Srinagar making it firmly onto the must-visit-in India tourist trail.

In the backstreets of downtown Srinagar is an old building known as the Rozabal shrine.

It's in a part of the city where the Indian security forces are on regular patrol, or peering out from behind check-posts made of sandbags.

There are still occasional clashes with militants or stone-throwing children, but the security situation has improved in recent times and the tourists are returning.

When I first searched for Rozabal two years ago, the taxi circled around a minor Muslim tomb in a city of many mosques and mausoleums, the driver asking directions several times before we found it.

The shrine, on a street corner, is a modest stone building with a traditional Kashmiri multi-tiered sloping roof.

A watchman led me in and encouraged me to inspect the smaller wooden chamber within, with its trellis-like, perforated screen.

Through the gaps I could see a gravestone covered with a green cloth.

When I returned to the shrine recently though, it was shut - its gate padlocked because it had attracted too many visitors.

The reason? Well, according to an eclectic combination of New Age Christians, unorthodox Muslims and fans of the Da Vinci Code, the grave contains the mortal remains of a candidate for the most important visitor of all time to India.

 

A Magnetic Distraction

An interesting story in Thursday's Houston Chronicle about a scientist's decades long wait to patent an invention. There are no details of the exact bureaucratic snarl that held up the application for so long. But I suspect that the back and forth between the physicist and the patent office may have resembled Narayan's experience with Aetna when he applied for Medicare supplemental insurance. 

Roy Weinstein had given up.

To heck with the patent office, the 82-year-old physicist decided. After waiting two decades for a patent on his potentially revolutionary superconducting magnets, he'd had enough.

“As you might imagine, waiting 20 years is a pretty nasty chore,” said Weinstein, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston.

Then, amazingly, the patent arrived on Feb. 23 — 20 years and three days after he applied for it. The breakthrough came after the intervention of his son, Lee, an engineer and inventor who has had his own battles with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The patent lets Weinstein move forward with commercial development of his supermagnets that, when chilled to super-low temperatures, can produce a field with the strength of 2 tesla, billions of times stronger than the magnet on your refrigerator.

Weinstein's magnets are about the size of a stack of five dimes, weigh an ounce, and cost $300. Commercially available electromagnets that can produce a comparable magnetic field weigh two tons and cost $60,000 to $100,000, he says.

The most immediate application may be in motors, which use magnets to create motion. The stronger the magnet, the more powerful the motor. Although the magnets would have to be kept cool with liquid nitrogen, this would be cost-effective in larger motors, Weinstein said.

The prospect of a more powerful, much smaller magnet has experts excited.

“The basic design of motors has been understood for about a century,” said Robert Hebner, director of the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It's new materials that make it exciting, and it seems to me this is a material that has the potential to revolutionize motors.”

Weinstein said he is developing a $7 million agreement with Round Rock-based TECO-Westinghouse Motor Co. to construct a 1 megawatt motor that will be a prototype for a 10 megawatt version. The company declined comment.

The U.S. Navy is expected to provide much of the funding, Weinstein said, because of the potential to reduce the size of ship-borne motors by three-fourths.

“On a Navy ship that extra space is pure gold,” the physicist said.

And there are other potential applications, a gusher of which Weinstein expects to flow now that the patent has been approved.

Emily Howell (Sujatha)

Meet a composer without arms, legs or human faculties. Emily Howell is the name given to a software program created by David Cope:

"With Cope’s help, Emily Howell has written three original opuses of varying length and style, with another trio in development. Although the first recordings won’t be released until February, reactions to live performances and rough cuts have been mixed. One listener compared an Emily Howell work to Stravinsky; others (most of whom have heard only short excerpts online) continue to attack the very idea of computer composition, with fierce debates breaking out in Internet forums around the world.

At one Santa Cruz concert, the program notes neglected to mention that Emily Howell wasn’t a human being, and a chemistry professor and music aficionado in the audience described the performance of a Howell composition as one of the most moving experiences of his musical life. Six months later, when the same professor attended a lecture of Cope’s on Emily Howell and heard the same concert played from a recording, Cope remembers him saying, “You know, that’s pretty music, but I could tell absolutely, immediately that it was computer-composed. There’s no heart or soul or depth to the piece.”

Listen to the excerpts at the link above. Does it sound machine-made to you, or does your perception that it is created by a machine detract from its musical value?

Snowy Sunday Linkery (Sujatha)

Is it her art or her age that charms?

A Twisted Sense of Humor

Is it a leaf or..?

A Practical Atheism (Sujatha)

Since Ruchira has already proclaimed her (Ir)Religious Manifesto, I thought that I might talk briefly about mine.

Some of the time, I fit somewhere on the continuum between Atheism and Agnosticism. It's like the flavor of the month. If I feel in a mood to be 'mysterian', I claim Agnostic leanings. If I feel mystery gives me migraines, I lean towards the Atheist viewpoint. After all, there can be no omnipotent God if migraine pains exist -only omnipotent migraines.

I came by the atheism fairly gently. I noticed there was no being to fulfill my fervent prayers for some trifle as a kid, and without giving it much thought, slid into a don't know, don't care mode regarding the existence of a god(s). I learned and adhered to the form and ritual required by the religion I was brought up with, but there was no inherent belief in the magical properties of ritual or belief. It become something to be used if in the mood for it, and ignored if it didn't suit.

Tasked with bringing up kids and wanting them to know of their culture and heritage, I tried assiduously to study as well as expose them to whatever I could about my birth-religion. But there was no core of  wanting- to-believe to sustain it. It was nothing more than a hollow shell. The kids have sensed this long since, and seem to have adapted to the exposure, much the same way as I did.

There is no militancy, no urge to convert all to the same viewpoint. Chiefly, because it matters little whether one is a Christian or Hindu or Jew or Wiccan or Buddhist or whatever. It's enough to lead a moral life of sorts, following largely the Golden Rule, without being bound by any religion in particular. There is similarly no militant urge to convert others to the atheist standpoint, no anti-theism like Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett et al. If religion brings you happiness and doesn't get in my way, go for it. If it doesn't, feel free to ditch it or even diss it, like 'Ditchens'.

I would have coopted the term 'Practical Atheist' to describe the above approach, but found it had already been given negative connotations by theists, as referring to someone who professes religiosity, without true belief in the deity of choice.

"This is a category used by some religious theists to describe all those theists who technically believe in a god, but who behave immorally. The assumption is that moral behavior follows automatically from genuine theism, thus immoral behavior is a consequence of not genuinely believing. Theists who behave immorally must really be atheists, regardless of what they believe. The term 'practical atheist' is thus a smear against atheists generally."

Maybe it's time to reclaim the term proudly:

"I am a Practical Atheist. I adhere to the external form of my birth-religion, primarily to please my elders- After all what is a small fib to let them live with peace of mind. Internally, I don't particularly worry about my 'eternal soul' or salvation of any kind. All that matters is this life, and how I live it."

Maybe there is something to being a female that has to do with this practical approach to practicing atheism. It's a secret version and let's itself be known to the children  around the age that they start to question the existence of the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. There is no Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus (only a long-dead historical personage of that name)----just someone who is very alive and real and loves you very much. The nitty-gritty of diaper changing and mopping up messes day after day lead you to the conclusion that there is no magic, only hard work that has to  be done to get the kids and house clean and the dishes done. From no magic, it is but a short step to 'no supernatural solutions' to 'no miracles' to 'no benevolent and omnipotent deity'.

Surprisingly many of the women among my acquaintances seem to adhere to this practical atheism. The true believers among them are probably numbered in the handful, while the majority glide by gracefully following the form of whatever religion they profess, untouched or untrammeled by any deep beliefs.

Only coincidences exist. Take joy in the good ones, and don't let the bad ones get you down. After all, tomorrow is another day, as another practical atheist said in 'Gone With the Wind'.

Here's an interesting musing on the 'Gentler Face of Atheism', free of the accusations of misogyny levelled at atheism by Kathryn Lofton.

"We all know the names (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) of those angry white men who tend to antagonize the world’s believers. But the most persuasive voices for the ‘new New Atheism’ tend to be women."

Also, from the same article, comedienne Julia Sweeney's take on how she became an atheist.

Oba Mao

The Chinese enthusiastically await President Obama. He is by far the most popular foreign leader in China.  To commemorate the visit artists have created the likeness of Obama in Chinese Red Guard uniform on t-shirts and other paraphernalia (not for sale) and a flaming Obama statue (because he is so hot).

 

A man, a bird and a million dollar automobile

Actually, this is all about the automobile. Normally, given the same circumstances - on an interstate feeder road near a hurricane levee between Houston and Galveston, a car veers off into 3 feet of water and no one is hurt, the news would have only made it to the police blotter or perhaps garnered a few lines in the local news section of the city paper. Instead it was plastered on the front pages of Texas newspapers and has appeared in several news outlets and blogs all over the country. By curious coincidence, on last Wednesday, the day the accident took place, the brown pelican was deemed safely out of the endangered list by the Texas Audubon Society and the US Department of the Interior. See the full man-bird-car story here.

(A Bugatti Veyron EB and a brown pelican in flight)

 

The Love of an Old Book (Sujatha)

It was a small volume tossed carelessly in with the rest of the frayed spines on the Public Library bookshelf :  "Love of Seven Dolls" by Paul Gallico.
He was one of my favorite authors as a teen, and this was one book that intrigued me, with a faded rendition of a full-skirted girl looking at what appeared to be a puppet show on the cover.
I borrowed it frequently, whenever I felt the urge, over the next several years. I must have been the only person in the city who took out that particular book, judging from my ability to always locate it on the shelf, whenever I wanted it.
The years passed, but it remained one of the books seared in my memory, even though the story, in retrospect, doesn't seem that remarkable now. On a rereading, some of the story seems rather dated, but the charm of the main plot still shines through.
After much deliberation, I decided to see if I could locate a new copy of it for my home library. It was out of print, only available through second-hand book sellers. So I turned to the likes of abebooks.com and alibris.com and placed an order for the least expensive hard-bound edition I could find.
The book arrived, among others that I had ordered at the same time. This had a faux leather cover, with the name of the book and the mysterious legend ALYCE PEKORS at the bottom right.
I couldn't resist checking for the name on Google. And, the history of this particular carefully-preserved copy fell in place.
The original owner of this book was Miss Alyce Pekors, the longest serving US civil servant in Singapore, who died in Michigan last November.
From a newsletter with a memorial article:
"Of course, much of the details of her “working” life prior to taking the administrative role with the Navy in Singapore were never discussed among her many friends. She brushed off enquiries with Lauren Bacall like aplomb. By her very nature, she was reminiscent of an interesting earlier era.
Whether it was her Isadora Duncan impersonation as she drove her vintage MG around town (of course, it wasn’t vintage when she first bought it), or her Givenchy and pearls Audrey Hepburn look when she entertained, Alyce was always one classy lady."
She must have loved the book very much to have taken pains to have the original paperback replaced by a custom hard-binding.
Now the book sits on my shelf, bringing with it a whiff of the chequered life of the one who owned it before me. We are strangely bound across space and time, through this slim black volume with gold lettering.

--------------

Note:Cross-posted from Fluff'n'Stuff.

Addendum from the comments:
 I found the details about the particular copy of the book fascinating,
"Even more than the original book that led to this unexpected discovery of Alyce Pekors.
Here's what I pieced out from what I read about her. She was a huge fan of Hepburn and Leslie Caron (the latter acted in a 1953 movie called Lili, loosely based on the Gallico novelette.) In her career, she may in fact have been a precursor of sorts to the Valerie Plames, a hidden asset whose role can be never be revealed except in private. She was a bowling champion in S'pore long before I was even born, earning mention in the newspapers of the day.
It might have been wonderful to have known her in person, but I now have to settle for making a picture of her in my mind based on the obituaries."

The long arm of justice and overcompensating for one's genealogy

I don't know if you are aware of or have paid any attention to the raging debate over the arrest of director Roman Polanski in Switzerland at the behest of the California courts on charges that stem from the rape of a child thirty years ago.  The facts of the case are little in dispute but the morality of arresting the culprit, now an old man, is being argued from all sides. Many sympathetic to the film maker are invoking moral philosophy, classical literature and the perpetrator's own life story in order to find exculpatory reasons on his behalf. For example, here,  here and here.

For others the case is simply one of crime, punishment and the law - the moral issues are undebatable (I agree). It is also worth noting that the best no-nonsense articles from this angle are written by women - here, here and here. 

I am hardly surprised by the Polanski debate and even less by who his supporters are. The narcissistic and seemingly liberal world of the arts in general and cinema in particular, is notorious for what it deems appropriate for the common man and non-artistes and what it feels should apply to its own glitterati set. But here is an article unrelated to Polanski which did take me completely by surprise and the underlying psychology and morality of which is far more interesting to ponder than whether a 76 year old lecher should go to jail or not. (links to the articles in the Telegraph, The Village Voice and The Smart Set via 3 Quarks Daily)

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.

Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him.

"Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.

"By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society."

I am curious now. Will Ahmadinejad /Sabourjian be allowed to migrate to Israel based on his ancestry, in case the Iranian elections are overturned and he finds life in Iran a bit uncomfortable?

 

The Hammer Hams It Up

While we are on the subject of You Tube videos:

Somehow, it is still hard for me to believe that this guy was my representative in the US Congress for many miserable years. Beginning around 1:30 the video becomes ridiculously scary. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up! How will all this booty shaking affect the money laundering charges? (link: Sanjukta)

Racing through the Louvre (Sujatha)

From the New York Times a few weeks ago:

"Spending an idle morning watching people look at art is hardly a scientific experiment, but it rekindles a perennial question: What exactly are we looking for when we roam as tourists around museums? As with so many things right in front of us, the answer may be no less useful for being familiar."

Why indeed do we wander around museums? Is it the age-old quest for finding ourselves in our past, the thirst for knowledge? Or the window-shopper and street-gawker's instinct? Is it less about stopping and staring and more about bragging rights as in "I visited the Louvre, when we were last in Paris." Or maybe a combination of 'All of the Above"?
As a kid in Paris, I had been on school field trips to various sections of the Louvre, spending a few hours once in the Egyptian section, and another visit in the Greek section, but remember very little of what are considered to be its main attractions. My recent visit was an all new-experience,  reminding me that it was perhaps at the Louvre that I acquired my taste for museum-hopping no matter where in the world we went.

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Ah, the Louvre! The perfect place to loiter leisurely, gazing at John the Baptist's all-knowing smile, or perchance the mysterious magnificence of the Mona Lisa.That is, until the hordes of tourists and tour guides waving flags, assorted brochures and even umbrellas to keep their groups together, all trample over you in their eagerness to see the next item on the 'Da Vinci Code' tour.

The Monna Lisa was unreachable. A special line of the devoted faithful had to be stood in and endured, before you were able to partake of her timeless gaze at closer quarters. We settled for the distant view. Even hoisting my daughter onto her father's shoulders and placing a camera in her tiny fingers elicited an indignant "Not allowed" from a museum security official doing due diligence.

Never mind the barely visible main attraction- the huge painting of the Wedding Feast at Cana (Veronese) on the opposite side was quite a show-stopper, though precious few of the crowds milling around the Gioconda paid any attention to it.

With over 35,000 paintings and antiquities, we could have spent an entire month in the museum, but having only a day, we could only spend a paltry few minutes in each section, catching the 'highlighted items' suggested in the museum's brochure.
Then, we decided to linger in certain places, not quite the stuff of tourist lore, but quite fantastic nevertheless. The Persian section was eye-popping, with its huge capitals that took up so much room that one could barely imagine the size of the pillar that supported it.

A small crowd was milling around a rock edict which bore the Code of Hammurabi, with a prominently displayed French translation nearby- 'for X, off with the hand... for Y, off with the leg... for Z, off with the head..."- I provided a quick translation for my son: "...It's the Off-with-his-head school of justice",as an eavesdropping tourist nearby snickered in agreement.

The sculpture courtyard adjoining the Persian section was a relatively quiet place to recuperate from the milling crowds jostling to pose with the Winged Victory. I sat behind a statue of Hercules battling a gigantic snake , though not at a good vantage point (read, treated to a prominent view of the Derriere). I was reduced to sneaking peeks at the red charcoal drawing of the statue, which an art student was working on, right next to me. She had time to spare, tracing every contour with careful concentration, but tiring presently of her drawing, whipped out a cellphone and started a quiet conversation with a friend. So much for the slow version of museum enjoyment in the era of the cellphone.

My daughter wanted a drink of water, and the quest for a water fountain began in earnest. But the Louvre, being a palace more than a few centuries old, didn't have the requisite plumbing to handle the thirst of the trampling hordes, unlike the new-fangled shiny rest-roomed and water-fountained American museums. We waited in line desperately at the entrance to a crowded café in the museum, and 15 minutes after we made it in, a bored-looking waiter finally brought us a tiny cup of cappucino (10 Euros! Eeek!) and a bottle of Evian (3 Euros! Eeek-squared!). Next time we visited a Musée, we resolved to carry our own water, even if it was in a distinctly unfashionable recycled Fanta bottle.

The famed glass Pyramid was but a snatched glimpse through the windows of various wings, as we gaped our way through the luxurious apartments of Napoleon III. Then we redoubled our walk through the section of European painters, catching a few famous Rembrandt self-portraits in the process.

How did we manage to spend the better part of a day in a museum with my children who are notoriously allergic to museums? My teenager didn't complain much, having succumbed quite happily to the touristy notion of 'catching all the highlights' in the brochures. My 8-year old daughter was anointed the official photographer and religiously clicking away at everything in sight. Unfortunately, we only have a handful of usable pictures from her collection, but the camera was worth its price in gold, for the peace of mind and the Prime Whiner's busyness that it brought us.

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Cross-posted from Fluff-n-Stuff

It's not our fault

Our forefathers were responsible for global warming. I don't know if this article belongs in Joe's friend's blog, NCBI ROFL.

A more powerful way of naming names (phi-to-the-large-power D)

It is a just and proper convention we use in naming authors and thinkers that the immortals have only last names. After all, to name an author is to enter into a game where we are to rank them in an implicit list by excellence, profundity and significance. Hence, to Gustave a Flaubert is to commit a faux pas, while depriving a Roth of his Philip sounds odd. I have been using this elegant and delightsome signaling scheme for years now, though in my college years when I hadn't yet mastered its intricacies I did commit some few gaffes. Still, the skill has now been acquired, so I rejoice in seeing its proper use in others, and police violations diligently.

And yet, and yet. This venerated scheme is obviously too simple to be perfect. We perforce Emilify and Charlottize our venerated Brontë's, and this when we yearn so earnestly to deprive them of those cumbersome affixes. Then too, rare names seem to unfairly boost reputations. Hence DeLillo or Dawkins, and this while poor Adam shall never be a Smith. And then there are those annoying writers of whom we know no other name other than the one in common use. Both Aristotle and Adonis are known by a mere single name. What a pity to be unable to mark just and proper distinctions in these cases! And, to get to the very core of the issue, does not the mind of delicacy rebel at the coarseness of a mere binary distinction where so many finer gradations may be fruitfully deployed?

Allow me these simple suggestions:

1. Since the great thinker is firstname-to-the-zeroth-power lastname, and the rest are firstname-to-the-first-power lastname, mayn't we make this explicit? Then we may speak properly of Adam to the zeroth Smith and Nico to the first Malebranche.
2. Immediately as we recognize this, we are able to shake ourselves free of the binary hypnosis, and perceive the number line in all its elemental glory. For if firstnames are an embarrassment, how much worse it should be to have them repeated, and what an honor it should be to have the first name divided away from the last! Properly, we may speak of inverse-leo-to-the-sixth Tolstoy, Kant by Immanuel-to-the-fifth or Jacques-cubed Lacan. He who is as yet unconvinced needs merely repeat 'Yann-to-the-fourth Martel' a few times to recognize the wisdom of our proposal.
3. The problem of missing firstnames is adequately dealt with by means of introducing the null first name (denote phi). Then, Voltaire by phi, but also phi Cher, inverse-phi-squared Pele and so on.

Bugs doubtless remain to be fixed, chief of which seems to me the inability of many rendering schemes to properly do mathematical exponents as in 2. Still, at least the explicit accounting of 1. may be achieved by writing firstnames, then striking them through when appropriate. This scheme, if followed, should make discussions of the more intellectual sort rather more exact, and by virtue of its more fine-grained telegraphical nature, superior at concise assessment. Alternately, we might name people pragmatically as we please, but this is less excellent.

Cats Will Sleep Anywhere!

Honest. See for yourself.  

Texas Department of Unintended Ironies

The Texas legislature has given preliminary approval for issuing state licence plates that read "Choose Life." The revenue raised from the sale of the specialty plates will be used to fund adoptions and pro-life counseling at state pregnancy centers.

The Senate tentatively passed a bill to establish "Choose Life" license plates, with revenue going to promote adoption. There was no debate on SB 1098 by Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas. The vote was 22-9 with one Republican, Sen. Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio, joining eight of the body's 12 Democrats in opposing the bill.

The bill faces a final Senate vote before going to the House. Gov. Rick Perry favors the bill. Texas would join 19 states that have similar plates, which have raised more than $9 million to support pregnant women who are considering adoption.

UPDATE: Perry's office just issued the following statement:

"I am pleased the Senate has passed legislation authorizing the creation of a Choose Life specialty license plate. Texans have long been able to support their causes in this way, so I'm glad they can do so now to assist pregnant women who are considering adoption as an alternative to abortion for their unborn children."

"This license plate will give Texans a subtle but meaningful way to express their personal views, while supporting pregnant women making the decision to choose adoption. I applaud Sen. Carona and Rep. Phillips for sponsoring this bill."

There would be nothing objectionable about the proposed plates had it not been for another inconvenient fact about the state of Texas' commitment to life. See here and here for the most recent data.

The Most Influential Person of 2009 Is .... Moot!

Who is the most influential person of 2009?  Instead of relying on assorted "experts" Time magazine decided to open this year's annual polling on this topic to the "general public." And just as democracy is messy, so are on-line public polls. Totally unexpectedly, the top position has gone to someone named "moot." (There is more to moot than meets the eye. Read the story). The following nine positions are equally stunning. According to the "public" the ten most influential people of 2009 are:

1. Moot

2. Anwar Ibrahim

3. Rick Warren

4. Baitullah Mehsud

5. Larry Brilliant

6. Eric Holder

7. Carlos Slim

8. Angela Markel

9. Kobe Bryant

10. Evo Morales

How many of these have you heard of? Okay, at least some I am sure. A couple are leaders of their countries (Morales, Markel), one is the newly appointed AG of the US Justice Dept who beat out his widely popular, better known and vastly more influential boss in the White House. Then there is also a Christian pastor (#3), a wanted terrorist (#4) and a basketball player (#9). # 2 is someone I have never heard of. What gives? I guess this will teach Time (and other media outlets involved in list making and wishing to influence public opinions) a lesson in at last figuring out that the "public" is not only quite often ignorant but sometimes, as in this case, also mischievous. NASA learnt the same lesson when it opened up the naming of the International Space Station to public voting and was mortified when it ended up with Stephen Colbert. I suspect that this result too was skewed by the parochial partiality of the voting public.

Barack Obama does figure among the top 100 most influential persons of 2009.  He is at a hopelessly feeble # 37 ... well below Britney Spears, Jon Stewart, Ron Paul, Tina Fey and some other knowns and unknowns.  

Travellers (Sujatha)

I had been recently asked to translate the lines from an 18th century Tamil poem, written in the lingo of the Koravas or Narikoravas, an itinerant tribe often termed the 'Gypsies of South India'.As I researched verse after verse, I found some very interesting essays and commentaries about their history and traditions.

Today Kurava people in the area are officially prohibited from even going into the mountains to collect materials for basketry and broom-making, an occupation that provides a large portion of their meager income. Did the differential literary portrayals, in works like Kutrala Kuravanji, of Kurava people and of wealthy, powerful landowners and little kings factor into justifications for dispossessing real people from their ancestral homes? Literature and entertainment styles and forms from other times and places have clearly played such a role in justifying dispossession. Might Kavirayar’s portrayals have served the expansionist needs of little kings and big landowners by painting Kurava people as so markedly different from those powerful people, indeed painting them as untamed, independent, and silly, that they might seem perhaps unworthy of ownership rights?

Here is a more recent article about their current status as a protected tribal group.

Gypsies used to wander from place to place for their livelihood, receiving sustenance from hunting in whichever region they moved to. “Those belonging to the gypsy communities still have no skill but that of hunting, like their forefathers, who lived in forests and had plenty of game to hunt. Now, hunting is illegal. And since development too has passed them by,  the gypsies lead a precarious existence,” Siva says. While some like the sparrow hunters manage to make a living by hunting and selling beads, many of them live on the alms of travellers and passersby.

Many hundreds of years ago, they claimed hunting-gathering rights in the hills of what are now Tamil Nadu,Kerala, and Karnataka states, awarding the rights over the hills to the various clans in their tribes, a fact frequently referred to in the poem, as well.

Now, they have in general, been banned from those very hills, as practitioners of slash-and-burn style agriculture and inveterate hunting, detrimental to the beauty of the forests, never mind that their numbers are too small to cause significant damage.

Many in this group have been cut off from their nomadic ways, and lead more settled lives, but at the cost of taming the wanderlust which still holds a strong sway over them.

I still remember the harshly musical "Kallukothanundo, ammikal kothanundo, aattukal kuthanundo"  (Do you have grinding stones to be resurfaced?)that the korava woman used to call out, walking the streets of the neighborhood in her swinging skirts, baby with sun-browned hair peering out of the sling on her back. Despite the life of dire poverty, there was always a gracious beauty to these women, going house to house selling small trinkets or resurfacing granite grindstones with their little iron awls and mallets, watched over with an eagle eye by the housewives, who mistrusted their reputation for 'light fingers'. Work done, they would haggle over the price, finally settling for whatever they could extract, milking whatever pity they could muster for their runny-nosed little ones.

They were soothsayers too.

I vividly recall the time when I visited Thiruchendur, a seaside temple, with my parents. We were enjoying the bracing sea breeze one evening when a kurathi came up and insisted on reading my mother's palm. I was about 13 years old at the time. She took a look at my mother's palm and had us close to collapsing in laughter when she predicted that my mother would have another child.
"Look at her," my mother said, pointing to me. "That's my child, and my only one." I was taller than her at this age. "Are you saying that I will have another after all these years?" We were incredulous.
"Amma, I have never made false predictions in my life. You will see. You will be back here in two years to look for me and thank me."
Two years later, we were there... for my baby sister's first birthday ritual hair offering. We looked for the kurathi, but never did find her. She must have moved with the wind, in the manner of her people.

Austin Sky Limits

A strange thing happened over the weekend in Texas. Last Sunday morning in broad daylight, a fireball appeared in the sky over Austin. Apparently, it was also visible over Houston but no one I know saw anything. People were both scared and thrilled to spot the unusual phenomenon that was "competing" with the sun, as one man observed.

Fiery debris burned through the Texas sky Sunday morning, alarming some and enchanting others but resulting in no apparent injury or damage.

From Dallas to Austin and beyond, sightings were reported of a red and orange fireball with a small black center speeding toward Earth before burning out in a trail of lingering white smoke.

Roland Herwig, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration’s southwest division, said the fireball was probably superheated debris from a broken satellite falling to Earth.

The FAA could not directly link the debris to the reported collision last week of Russian and U.S. communications satellites, however.

“It’s yet to be proved it’s those satellites,” Herwig said.

However, a spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command said the fireball spotted in the Texas skies Sunday was unrelated to the satellite collision.

Now the Federal Aviation Administration has declared that the object over Austin was an IFO (Identified Flying Object) and not UFO. Moreover it was a natural phenomenon and not the result of any activity by sentient beings, earthly or extra-terrestrial.

The fireball that blazed across the Texas sky and sparked numerous weekend calls to police agencies now can be considered an identified flying object.

The Federal Aviation Administration said today the fireball was a natural phenomenon — not flying space junk — and a North Texas astronomer said it probably was a meteor about the size of a pickup truck, with the consistency of concrete.

The FAA backed off its weekend statement that the fireball might have been caused by falling debris plummeting into Earth’s atmosphere after Tuesday's collision of two satellites from the United States and Russia.

The FAA fielded calls from across Texas on Sunday morning with sightings of a fireball in the sky. Callers also reported hearing an explosion, probably a sonic boom caused by  an object moving faster than the speed of sound, said Roland Herwig, an FAA spokesman.

A chief of staff for Mayor Bill White, Michael Moore, said a blindingly bright flash made its way across his windshield in a matter of seconds. It seemed nearby, but Moore realized it had to be closer to heaven than Earth to appear so clearly in the morning sky.

“It’s hard to compete with the sun,” said Moore.

Moore was just leaving Austin when he saw the bright blip in the sky around 11 a.m. He assumed it was an unusually large meteor.

Hmm... are they sure? Should we believe everything the government tells us?