Cloudy, Strong Chance of Rain

January 10, 2003 / / 24 Comments

A number of friends and neighbours have expressed some concern about my proximity to the Bouffant Brigades across the DMZ, and asked me for my take on the latest developments here in Korealand™. I am happy to oblige.
First, some background, which tends to be glossed over by the shiny-toothed automata reading the news, and seems to be missed by most of the print media I’ve seen too, unsurprisingly.
In 1994, the Clinton administration established an “Agreed Framework” with the well-fed wackjobs in Pyongyang. One of the drivers of the agreement was the desire on the part of the Americans to prevent North Korea from operating a weapons-grade reactor. The Agreed Framework promised North Korea progress toward “full normalization of political and economic relations.” It also promised shipments of heavy fuel oil, and two light-water reactors by 2003 to replace the weapons-grade facility Pyongyang was to shut down.
Several months ago (November 14 2002), the Bush administration decided to punitively cut off fuel oil supplies in response to Kim Jong Il’s latest hijinks (admitting to a secret nuclear program), just as winter was approaching and famine looming again. This is significant because these fuel supplies were basically the only thing that America actually delivered on to fulfill their part of the 1994 agreement, and given the poverty of the country, the only way that any fuel could be had for electrical generation and so on. Ironic, actually, because it is fairly clear that, at least in part, the reason for the nuclear program in the first place was to generate electricity (and make filthy bombs to sell off and/or kill people with, of course). Construction on the promised lightwater reactors began in August of 2002, 8 years after the agreement, and 4 months before they were meant to begin operation.
Not only had America in fact ignored almost entirely their commitment to the requirements of the Agreed Framework, and eventually by the end of the Clinton administration delivered solely (and then partially) on their commitment to supply heavy fuel oil, but as soon as Bush and his cadre of demonic sh-tweasels took over, North Korea was declared part of the laughable “Axis of Evil.” How’s that for “full normalization of political and economic relations,” huh? It may be worth noting that during the last few years of the last decade, during the time we’re talking about, North Korea was experiencing a famine that killed, by some estimates, more than 10% of its population, or about 2 million people.
In fact, the Americans can’t really even claim with anything like a straight face (although they try, naturally, and get away with it) that the secret uranium-enrichment program revealed by Pyongyang a couple of months ago puts it in “material breach” of the 1994 agreement, anyway : uranium enrichment is one of the things simply not covered in the Agreed Framework.
This is typical of the bullsh-t-spinning that these lying scum engage in (on both sides of the fence, of course. The North Korean mouthpieces do it so badly that it’s more comedy than tragedy, though.) :

Q Is there something the North Koreans can do that would prompt the U.S. to sit down and talk, which seems to be a key for them?
MR. FLEISCHER: Well, keep in mind, the United States has long supported South Korea’s engagement with North Korea. When you take a look at what’s happened, nations like Japan were engaging — were beginning engagement with North Korea. And as a result of North Korea’s actions, Japan examined what it was doing and has decided to proceed at a different pace. So various nations continue to have various levels of discussion with North Korea.
I want to point out that even while there were many conversations — in North Korea, North Korea was still breaking its word. So I don’t think the issue is whether or not North Korea is being talked to or not talked to. The issue is North Korea breaking its word. They have broken the word of the people they talked to, and they’ve broken their word with the people they don’t talk to. The one constant is that North Korea breaks its word.
So from the American point of view, we very strongly support the efforts to discuss with North Korea, through our friends in South Korea and Japan; we always have. But the United States has made it clear that North Korea knows what it needs to do, and it needs to come back into international compliance, as the IAEA has urged them to do today in the strongest of terms.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030106-1.html#4

The truth, as usual, is approxiately 180 degrees away from what is quoted above, for reasons I’ve discussed here at the ‘bottle many times before. What has been happening is what would seem to be a concerted effort by America, and particularly by the Arbusto Administration, to subvert and obstruct South Korea’s efforts towards productive engagement with the North. Not much wonder that the ‘sunshine policy’ of Kim Dae Jung has seen limited success in areas other than domestic.
The Bush administration’s policy of ‘tailored containment’, so remniscent of Reagan-era cold-war-speak (and not surprisingly given the array of Reaganite criminals and courtiers re-elevated to positions of power), displays a lack of any real understanding and responsiveness to the realities of the situation, and is counterproductive at best and a reckless endangerment of millions of lives at worst.
The wisdom of Kim Dae Jung’s sunshine policy, a strategy which the new president-elect Noh Moo Hyun (usually romanized as ‘Roh Moo Hyun’ for some reason) has pledged to continue, is more sensible given the context I describe above, I think, and is one which is supported by Japan, China and other states in the region. North Korea has always been responsive to chances for improved relations with the outside world, and its current attitude can be seen as defensive, and as with other bluffs and brinkmanship in the past intended primarily to bring America to the bargaining table.
Not to say that Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist Bouffant Butterball, is anything other than pure evil. But he’s not a madman. American media is always quick to demonize their so-called enemies : Saddam Hussein, of course, being only the latest in a long string of ‘madmen’ and ‘new Hitlers’. Kim JI is canny, and continues to respond with the only tools at his disposal – threats – to the posturing, lies, bad-faith negotiation and arrogance of the Americans.
This from the Guardian today echoes my point : “The North Korean nuclear standoff moved a step closer to a peaceful resolution yesterday as Pyongyang set a date for negotiations, amid reports that it was prepared to scrap its weapons programme in return for a security guarantee from the United States.”
There is a lot of talk recently, as well, about the idea of America pulling its 37,000 troops out of Korea. It’s difficult to say where they’d be withdrawn to : maybe they could share bunks with the 40,000 in Japan. The strong anti-American sentiment in South Korea in recent times, which I recently discussed here, has finally percolated through to North America, and of course the yanks are shocked and bemused. How could they hate us so? We’re the good guys, aren’t we?
It’s generally acknowledged that the 37,000 American troops here would make little to no difference were the North to invade again. The third largest standing army in the world – over 1,000,000-strong – is just across the DMZ. South Korea, with about 600,000 soldiers at any given time, a large segment of which is composed of university-age young men doing their two years of compulsory military service, would bear the brunt of any invasion. The reason that those troops are important is the psychological effect. The idea of those American soldiers being a tripwire of sorts is an outdated one : the US could just as effectively defend South Korea against attack from bases in Japan or even Hawaii. But to withdraw the troops, after 54 years, would raise questions about the role America wishes to play in Asia, how committed it is to maintaining stability, and make goverments in Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei and elsewhere very nervous indeed. It might even, given the apparent nuclear ambitions of Pyongyang, force Japan to ‘go nuclear.’ The role of the 37,000 American troops in Korea is mainly symbolic, and both the Koreans and the Americans calling recently for their withdrawal are swayed too much by emotion and too little by the ravages of intelligence to consider what the consequences of a withdrawal might be.
It’s generally accepted that North Korea already has one or possible two nuclear weapons, and they clearly have the technology to deliver them. Seoul is about 55 km south of the DMZ, and I live about 30 km south of downtown Seoul. I recently asked my wife if she knew what to do if she were to see a sudden bright flash in the sky outside our kitchen window, which looks north : drop, stay away from the windows, move to the bathroom at the center of the apartment, and wait for the shockwave and its backlash to pass.

seoul-pyong.jpg

My guess is that we’d probably survive an airburst, if it were to happen. But I don’t really think it’s going to, unless the criminals in Washington decide to turn their gun barrels this way after they raze Iraq (or are denied the opportunity to do so).
Related wonderchicken rantings : here, here, here and elsewhere.
Reading things like “North Korea Withdraws From Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty” is not as scary, hopefully, when one is aware of the game being played. That said, one hopes that mom stops them before someone loses an eye.
Also : this. [via provenanceunkown]

Goodbye

October 31, 2002 / / 12 Comments

[If you would like to read about what happened when my friend Rick was caught in the bombing in Bali, and the grief and hope of the people who loved him, in the order in which it all happened, start from the bottom of this page and read upwards.]
This site will go dark for technical reasons for a few days on or around Monday November 4th, but should be back not long thereafter. Before that happened, I wanted to write and post something more about my friend. Here it is.

“…I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”
– Jack Kerouac

Nineteen years is a long time. Half a lifetime, for me. For half my life, I’ve counted Rick as a friend. Think of that – 19 years. I had a brother who died when he was about 5 years old. Rick was my brother for four times that long.
I met Rick in the fall of 1983, when I’d first arrived at UBC. I was wet behind the ears, a boozy hayseed smalltown boy whose expectations of university sprang primarily from repeated viewings of Animal House. He was a year older than me, and though it seems an odd thing to say about Rick, who was determinedly uncool, he was not only boozy and friendly, but downright cool, by my lights at least. He was so approachable, uncomplicatedly kind, and totally unconcerned about how he was perceived that he was cooler than hell. We became friends quickly, and he showed me the ropes, and bought my booze for me before I had ID.
The next 5 years or so, those UBC years, were an idyllic time, the academic component of which I have almost completely managed to block from my mind. We drank and we talked and we learned some, more about being friends than about economics or math. We chased women, with an almost complete lack of success. Rick and I, Barry, Oliver, David, Chris D, and later Derek and DV and Alana and Chris R and Jen, and many others – we adhered into a loosely-bound group of groups that drew together again recently, years after some of us had last seen one another.
Rick knew retro-cool before it was cool to be retro. He had a ’64 Mustang for a while, which I worshipped. We’d take it down via the ‘scenic route’ to Spanish Banks and park beside the beach and drink. One time I begged him to go to the liquor store on 4rth Avenue, outside the Endowment Lands, to buy some rye. He protested that there was absolutely no brake fluid in the car – none – and the brakes were inoperable. I pleaded. He shrugged – a complicated, nuanced, truly Rickesque gesture – and we went anyway. When we got there, I had to hop out while we were still in motion and brace myself (as nonchalantly as possible) against the hood to bring the ‘stang to a stop in the liquor store parking lot.

‘Song of Myself’
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents
the same,
I, now thirty seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
– Walt Whitman

Rick and Chris Domitter went to Paris for a year, when Oliver and I were in our third year, and by now living in Gage Towers, from which we were later evicted. I remember sitting in my room with Oliver and Barry, drinking and smoking, exhausted, inebriated 4 a.m dorm room conversations, nights after the bars closed, music playing low in the background, red gel over the desk lamp whose beam was pointed out the window into the falling snow, drinking tea, putting out our cigarettes in the pot where my fig tree, Stoatgobbler, lived; feeling with a sense of pleasant lassitude every single world-weary minute of our 22 or 23 years, and listening to the cassette tapes that Rick and Chris had recorded and sent back to us, dreaming of Paris. Listening to their voices from half a world away, dreaming of getting out, going somewhere, seeing the world, living a life less ordinary.
I think it was that trip that turned Rick into the inveterate traveller he later became, and his letters and tapes to me that year inspired me to become a traveller too. His stories of sitting in a park in wintertime Paris, freezing, smoking to keep warm because his tiny rented room was equally cold and was ugly and depressing as well – these tales fit in with the books I was reading at the time and merged into a mythos that I knew both of us wanted to inhabit. I think it was around this time too that the swashbuckling part of Rick’s personality began to bloom. He was always fearless, it seemed, in an unostentatious way. Quietly, determinedly fearless. Terrified of women, of course, but fearful of nothing else. Thinking about Rick so much in recent times, of how to characterize him, how to sum up such a complex man in a phrase, I hit on ‘a combination of George Costanza and Doc Savage’. Rick of course, unlike George, didn’t have a meanspirited bone in his body, but those of you who knew him might undersand what I mean. Anyway, I think this might have been the time when Doc Savage started to appear.
The books – this was one of so many ways that Rick and I were of one mind. We both wanted to write, and we both did, a bit, and neither of us could stop compulsively reading. When we both lived near King’s Cross in Sydney, Australia, years later, we used to meet up at the library on MacLeay Street by chance, as often as we met anywhere else by design. (I remember when Rick got mugged in the Cross – by a ‘bunch of Arab guys’. They took the watch his Dad had given him, the one with gold nuggets embedded in it. That was one ugly watch, but he was incredibly upset by it, so much so that he developed a weird skin condition for a while. I remember his little bedsit room on Tusculum Street on the edge of the Cross, with his slightly threadbare grey suit in the closet, and empty Yalumba wine boxes, and stacks of books.) Books were more important than eating, and if not more important than booze, at least on a par. Rick didn’t actually talk about the books much – we weren’t so much into Literature as we were into learning about every possible way there was to live a life.

“Christ, I have read your classics, I have wasted a life in libraries turning pages, looking for blood.”
– Charles Bukowski

Rick’s letters to me over the years were the most memorable correspondance I’ve ever received in my life – uproariously funny, human, and luminous with his love of life. It will be my eternal regret that we’d stopped corresponding as regularly in the past couple of years as once we had, but I am thankful that a few months ago, we resumed our more regular correspondance via email.
One of the first trips Rick and I took together was to Long Beach, on Vancouver Island. It was cold, bitterly cold – September, I think it must have been – and the water was freezing. We rented surfboards for the weekend, scorned wetsuits, carried a fat-bellied bottle of Carlo Rossi red wine down to the beach in front of our campsite, and went surfing. We were in the water for nearly an hour, I think, and when we climbed back into the shell at the back of his pickup truck – Truckasaurus – he couldn’t stop shaking. He was blue. Skinny bastard had gone and gotten himself hypothermia. Utterly oblivious to the consequences, though, young and indestructible as we were, we drank some more wine and went to sleep. He woke up in the morning feeling fine as always, and I woke up with a debilitating hangover, as always.
Rick loved the sea, and the mountains. The places of power – where the sky meets the land, and the land meets the sea. He loved the world, and the people in it (particularly the female people).
For the decade after we finished our stint at UBC, in ’88 or so, we met up at least once every year or two, somewhere in the world. New Zealand, Australia, England, Scotland, back home in Canada. I travelled around the world clockwise, and Rick went counterclockwise, and our paths crossed as often as we could make them.
Scotland was the first, and maybe the most memorable for me. About 4 months in an ancient Scottish house beside the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh, a boarding house run by an ancient Scottish couple, almost completely surrounded by innumerable piles of ancient Scottish dogsh-t. Stiffy was there – Stephan Summerer who had lived in the same quad in residence for the year before I got evicted – and Barry, who came over the Atlantic after he had an accident and got some insurance money. Rick was working at a department store, Stefan had some sort of laboratory job, and I was drinking Bulgarian red wine, and when Barry arrived, we scattered again across Europe.
Other times, other places – literally thousands of nights and days making a beeline for nearest body of water whenever possible, time spent joking and consciously enjoying our lives, spent drinking or not, but rejoicing always, digging the marrow out of life.
Rick loved nature, and he loved film and art. He loved music, but in the stubborn, contrarian way he had, was always scrupulous in his disdain for….well, for things he disliked. His tastes were eclectic – he loved jazz, and music of the 60’s and 70’s, he loved ‘power pop’ (‘if it’s crunchy it’s good’), and anything lyrical, well-crafted, and authentic. Not to say that the schmaltzy Vegas stylings of the Rat Pack, or the rich, tasty cheese of Burt Bacharach were beyond the pale of his tastes – but his love for the music was less ironic than it was sacramental, and that somehow made up for it. For years we’d go to punk rock shows, me self-conscious in my leather biker jacket, and him unruffled in his grey melton UBC Commerce jacket. He had no need and no desire to don protective colouration, to look the part, any part. People underestimated him because of this, as people do. I respected him for it – realizing that I didn’t have the same strength of character to not give a good goddamn what people thought of me.
Authenticity. If Rick hated anything, and he was foremost a man who loved, not hated, but if he hated anything, it was lies, dissembling, falseness, pretension. He refused to be a part of anything that was false, that was anti-life, anti-love, but he was loathe to talk about it in terms like that, not wanting to trivialize it, to make it sound trite, as I’ve done by talking about it here. Instead, he’d talk about how important it was to say “yes” – yes to life, yes to life in its infinite extravagant abundance, yes to everything, yes whether it brought you pleasure or pain. When I came back one year from 9 months in Greece, and explained that I loved it there because I found it filled with people who smacked themselves lustily on the chest and declared “Christo like!”, he knew exactly what I was talking about. It became shorthand for us for this idea. He accepted with equanimity whatever life might bring him. He lived a life that both in its broad sweep and its details embodied the things he believed.
Think about that – how many people have you met whose lives embody their beliefs, who live according to the ideals they’ve set for themselves? Far too few, would be my regretful answer, at least.
Beyond all the other reasons I had for loving Rick, beyond the simple fact of years of our lives shared, beyond his kindness, his irrepressible sense of humour, his enthusiasm for life and his determination to enjoy it and cause no hurt to anyone in the process of doing so, it was his sincerity and his goodness that I will miss.
He was a good man. He shaped my life in ways he will never know. The world is a darker place without him.

And now, as I’m absolutely certain he would want, I’m going to shut the hell up about it.

Adventures in Bad Judgement

October 10, 2002 / / 12 Comments

As I was walking home through the clouds of industrial smoke this evening, I was reminded for some reason of one particularly wild evening in Quintana Roo, Mexico, a few years back.
We’d been hired, Greg and I, to do the sound and lights for a party, a big one, that was being held in ‘a barn’ in Tulum, a couple of hours south of Cancun. Tulum the town, which is a nondescript collection of buildings on a crossroads on the highway, not Tulum the gorgeous Mayan ruins nearby, which are, you know, gorgeous. And ruined.

We took the 3 ton cube van down, loaded with gear, made it through the army checkpoints (we always sweated a bit with them, carrying pyrotechnics as we usually were) and found the place in the early afternoon. It was a concrete shell, barn-sized all right, and it didn’t have a roof. Great. But we took it in our stride, in true make-the-best-of-it Mexican style, and had a beer while we figured out how we were going to set up. Manuel, the young Mexican guy who worked with us (and spent a great deal of his time shaking his head in bemusement at the antics of the crazy longhaired gringos) came back with some bad news : the building was connected to the grid, but that was it. No internal wiring at all.
Greg, who was the guy who actually knew how to do sh-t, after conferring with the promoters, told him to wire us up to the main circuit box. Manuel looked a bit doubtful, but after being reassured that everything was fine, he wandered off to start juryrigging sh-t together. It was the usual modus operandi – improvise, make do, and make it work.
We started setting up the triangle truss sections, the Par64 fixtures and their gels (sprinkled with sand from the last beach party a couple of days ago) and the amp racks and speaker enclosures, and 6 or 8 beers later, as if by magic, the sun was beginning to go down, and we had everything set up. There were a few more people hanging around, smoking dope, drinking, watching lazily as we tested the audio and lights. This was always my favorite part of a gig – finished the hard work for the moment, and relaxing before the party geared up. Leaving all the decisions and troubleshooting to Greg meant that I could enjoy as many beverages as I felt appropriate. The one exception had been when we’d done the indoor fireworks for New Year’s Eve at Senor Frog’s back in Cancun, but considering that we had blown off several thousand dollars worth of pyro inside a bar with sawdust on the floors, that had probably been wise.
Just as the last of the light was fading, it began to rain. The music had started, though, and people were arriving in droves, and they didn’t seem to mind. It was a flash crowd, and soon our roofless concrete barn was packed with wet bodies, dancing under sheets of hard rain and the intermittent flashes of lightning. We put up some tarps over the audio equipment and the dj, and let it go. The rain didn’t let up, but no one seemed to care. There was a weird earth-magicky kind of vibe happening, and the harder people danced, the harder it seemed to rain. Huge, warm drops grown fat in the wet air out over the Caribbean, hammering down like a waterfall.
The hippies and tourists just danced harder.
Manuel sidled over to us about half an hour after the rain really started coming down, looking terrified. Greg followed him outside, and came back a few minutes later, looking disturbed, which for him was a bit unusual. I arched my eyebrows in inquiry; he shrugged and handed me a beer.
Later that evening, things started to get bad crazy. Greg’s girlfriend arrived, and Manuel found himself a peasant-skirted girlfriend from Bolivia, who lived here in Tulum, and she had a large quantity of acid. Driven by the strange, powerful feelings I was getting from the storm and the crowd, I danced like a maniac in the warm rain, and swallowed everything anyone handed to me. The promoter was thrilled at the crowds, and kept us in drinks and smoke.

Dreamlike tropical hours passed.

I don’t remember the party winding up, or loading the gear back into the truck. I do remember Greg — who despite being gloriously stoned was as usual the one experiencing the fewest visual anomalies and general impairment — driving us at a snail’s pace down the narrow jungle road to the sea side cabanas where we were apparently staying.

The rain was still pounding down, there were no lights on the road, and the truck’s lights weren’t working. We couldn’t see a damn thing out the windshield. I made Greg stop, got out of the truck, climbed up on the bumper and leaned back against the cab window, facing forward, arms spread out as if I’d been crucified, like a huge hairy moth that had been splattered on the windshield, and alternately pointed left or right as he drove. He drove totally blind, guided only by my frantic pointing as he edged toward one ditch or another, while Manuel and his new Bolivian girlfriend made out on the passenger side of the bench seat.
It worked pretty well, except when we hit speedbumps.
We made it to the place we were staying, eventually, wired tight, but couldn’t handle it indoors in our thatched huts, and spent the rest of the night on the beach, watching the waves and the sparkle of phosphorescence as the raindrops struck the sea. All except Manuel and his girl, whose enthusiastic grunts and squeals we could hear in the distance, over the rain and surf.
Castillo_and_Bay
The next day Greg told me that Manuel had “wired us straight into the mains. No breaker, no ground, no nothing.” I didn’t see how that had been such a bad thing, but then I made the connection to the fact that the dancers out on the concrete floor, myself included, had been frolicking in water that by midnight was about ankle deep, sliding on their bellies like seals, doing rain dances, inches from the wiring that was feeding power to the audio and lights. Greg had wanted to shut it down, but the promoter was adamant, and in the way of connected men in Mexico, was not a man that one could say no to, and stay in the area for long. We got lucky, as usual.
The Bolivian girl disappeared before Manuel woke up. Through some strange coincidence, his wallet had disappeared as well. The drive back to Cancun was a quiet one.

Drugs

October 4, 2002 / / 15 Comments

Drugs, and lots of them. Whacking great quantities of mind-expanding and mind-croggling chemical treats. Monster Scarface-style piles of snowy uncut columbian cocaine on the desk. A cut-crystal bowl full of pills, in all the colours of the rainbow. Monster doses of dimethyltryptamine and d-lysergic acid diethylamide to make my mind ripple and flap like a flag flying in the breath of god. Musty peyote buttons and foil-wrapped grams of psilocybin mushrooms. Opium to smoke and heroin to snort. Alcoholic beverages in all their gem-like hues. Sweet stinky tobacco and marijuana, dark brown hashish in both chunks and oil. Mescaline and methamphetamines. That’s what I want.

jaded3.jpg

I feel the urge to clear the carbon out of the valves, dust off the mental cobwebs. I feel the urge to self-trepanate, sprinkle lighter fluid on the exposed ridges and folds of my cerebral cortex, and light ‘er up. I feel like slipping the surly bonds of earth and touching the cruel, elusive face of god, that old bastard.
But I won’t, because I’m a responsible member of society. I’ll just write a little weblog post about it instead, and hit the button clearly marked ‘SAVE’.

The Tension

October 3, 2002 / / 8 Comments

It’s all about the hopeful hymn-humming tension between the Two Things, life is, so often. Suspension, floating as long as possible, in that sweet gravitationally anomalous spot between bum and wage slave, between drunkard and saint, between drop-out and rebel, between breather-of-mountain-air and dead-eyed technophile. ‘Course, it may just seem that way after a couple of beers. f–ked if I know.
See, I’ve been a geek, biting the heads off digital chickens, from way back when. I’d spend endless hours at the age of 14 or so, back in 1980, tweaking the math and the BASIC code to make prettier shimmering patterns on the 147×47 pixel black and white monitor of my TRS-80 Model III. Only 16K RAM and 16K ROM on that sucker, with a tape drive for saving my handiwork, a tape deck that I played audio on – Life of Brian taped by leaning it up against the speaker on my little B&W TV and pressing the Play and Record buttons at the same time and being very very quiet – while trying to figure out by trial and error how subroutines were supposed to work. Hours, days, weeks alone upstairs in my lair, hunched over, in the dark.
I hated that machine and loved it in equal measure. It captivated me, hypnotised me. Red-eyed monomania, as the hours died overhead and dropped their dust in my hair. It almost ate my life, that f–king machine, before I discovered booze and women and dancing on the beach with a bottle in my hand and a song in my throat. Before the world opened its legs to me.
The monster is back, and it’s trying to eat my soul this time. I don’t quite know what to do about that.

Good Guy/Bad Guy

September 27, 2002 / / 4 Comments

This is related to this Metafilter thread I started last week, which had some interesting commentary from US Army personnel past and present, and may be worth reading, if you are interested.

In a small, plain office over a downtown Seoul grocery, eight young men hunch over a bank of computers. They aren’t writing software or playing video games. This is a command center for protest against American soldiers in Korea. Everyone wears a black ribbon that reads “US troops withdraw.”
The group – one of dozens like it – sprang up after a US armored vehicle accidentally killed two Korean girls walking along a country road in June. The incident continues to galvanize anti-American feeling across the country. Members canvas neighborhoods, run e-mail campaigns detailing American soldiers’ alleged crimes, and help organize a permanent silent vigil outside the presidential palace.
“We are like a military operation” says their leader, known only as Mr. Kim. “US troops here are a mistake of history and we won’t be one country until they leave; 9/11 is not our problem.”
Most Americans believe they are making a sacrifice – stationing 38,000 soldiers here – to defend South Koreans against possible Communist attack. Most ordinary Koreans, however, believe the US troops are actually here to promote American interests, opinion polls show. And “since 9/11, a strange but virulent anti-Americanism has gripped South Korea,” notes one expatriate American who works at a US company in Seoul.
….
“It may be difficult for us to sustain the same mood we grew up with,” says one older Korean diplomat who served in Washington. “We know the US helped us. But those under 40 … aren’t swayed by what we think. Their human nature is anti-US.”
[more…]

I reproduce the post here, for your linking-following pleasure, and also to satisfy my own mental-packrat tendencies as senile dementia creeps up on me. Please note that it is not as ranty as those who frequent the ‘bottle may have come to expect – agenda-driven rant-posts at Metafilter are a good way to get a swift kick in the virtual mothras, and that just ain’t no fun, friends and neighbours.
…
A blip on the radar, or a sign of shifting opinions? Can recent events in the Republic of Korea be taken as an indication that the special relationship between the US and South Korea is changing, and that public sentiment amongst Koreans is turning against America?
There’s always been some friction between US Forces and the locals, what with the 37000 US troops that have been stationed here for decades, protecting against the threat of invasion from North Korea. In the wake of Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech, which came at a time when the sunshine policy of Kim Dae Jung (the South’s president, outgoing in December, who won the Nobel peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts) was seeing tangible sucesses, and at a time when new revelations about the ‘My Lai of the Korean War’, No Gun Ri, were coming to light, many Koreans began to think the Americans were less interested in peace than in finding a reason to keep those 37000 troops in place. When Kim visited Bush in 2001, apparently in hopes that the rhetoric could be toned down, he was reportedly given the cold shoulder.
There have been a long series of incidents – hit-and-runs, murders, rapes [Warning : Graphic and disturbing image of rape victim, halfway down page.] – involving US soldiers and Korean nationals over the years. Some would say it comes with the territory. But recently, sentiment turned sharply negative when two 12-year old girls were run down and literally flattened by a US minesweeper during training exercises, an accident in which the USFK admitted it was negligent. This week, there was an altercation between 3 US soldiers, three Korean students handing out leaflets while on their way to a rally (or memorial service – reports vary) to commemorate the dead girls, and one 65-year old lawmaker (who was imprisoned and subsequently released in the late 90’s for visiting North Korea) with them. It’s still unclear what really happened, but tensions are high, and some foreigners I know here are concerned about being caught up in similar events.
This week has also seen Japanese PM Koizumi visit Pyongyang, opening up the possibility of diplomatic relations between Japan and North Korea for the first time. North Korea has admitted (recently discussed on MeFi) that it kidnapped Japanese citizens, and has announced it will allow IAEA nuclear inspectors into the country. The fifth reunion between families separated by the Korean War half a century ago (which was never formally declared over) has taken place, and plans are afoot to build a permanent reunion facility. The DMZ has been opened to South Korean minesweeping troops, and rail and road links should be re-established by Christmas.
This latest is perhaps the most important : although no one is speaking in anything but hushed tones of reunification yet, the possibility of an uninterrupted rail link from Japan and Korea through China and Russia to Europe has massive dollar signs floating in the eyes of all concerned.
Koizumi has made a personally risky but successful move towards rapprochement in the region, and the Bush administration, for the moment, has been left on the sidelines. Although Japan is still disliked by many Koreans thanks to decades of brutal colonial rule and unresolved matters like the ‘comfort women’ – tens of thousands of Korean women kidnapped and forced into sex slavery during WWII by the Japanese army – it is the role of the Bush administration in their affairs that many Koreans are beginning to resent more actively. It would be unfortunate for the last of the goodwill to drain away [u:metafilter12, p:metafilter123] unremarked and the opportunity for peace in the region to be lost, but with Bush’s current focus on oil-wars, it appears that this may indeed be the result.

Shambling

September 25, 2002 / / No Comments

So I’m shambling home after my last class of the day, 9 pm and the hole-in-the-wall factories I thread my way through a couple of times a day on the way to and from the train station are still in full voice, clattering and clanging, eating the souls of the indentured slaves migrant workers inside. Past a couple of the reekier smokepots, the ones that perenially smell of burning plastic, I hold my breath, imagining polyps growing on my lungs, sprouting in quicktime like those sexually arousing stop-motion films of flowers budding they showed us in high school biology. Always gave me a little wood, those films. ‘Course, most things did.
I remember when I was in my twenties, I’d breathe deep of stenches like that, savouring the chemical tang, showing off my misplaced confidence that I was going to live forever, ridiculing my meeker comrades for holding their breath. I was such an asshole.
So, anyway, I’m walking down this filthy alley, warily circling the horizontal metal rod that I’d walked smack bang into this morning (the black eye? no I really did walk into something!) while dreaming of a villa I’ve found on Koh Samui and how I’m gonna raise the deposit to buy the damn thing.
Sitting in an open doorway in front of a massive, rattling, deafening machine, a guy in a tattered muscle shirt was manipulating a gorgeous hi-res texturemapped image of some anonymous mechanical part on a 21-inch monitor, presumably the very part that the shuddering beast in front of him was busy fabricating, and smoking a cigarette. I walked over, pointed at the screen, gave the thumbs up. Grimy and unshaven, he grinned gaptoothed, and returned the gesture. There wasn’t a hell of a lot more to say, so I continued on my way home.

Naked and Shameless

August 4, 2002 / / 7 Comments

Back in about ’86 or so, the world paused for a moment in its orbit as the musical colossus known as Naked & Shameless spontaneously appeared, boozily clambered to the very apex of the Vancouver musical scene, and then flamed out and disappeared, all in the space of days, if not hours.
Well, what really happened is that my buddy Deviant, who was responsible for the creation and dismantling of various Vancouver bands of moderate success over the decade, decided that it’d be pretty damn cool to get me liquored up in his studio, record one of my infamous spontaneous rants, then put it to music.
Unfortunately, no matter how much Ouzo I swilled, sitting on the stool in front of the mike, it just wasn’t spontaneous. Performance anxiety. I did force it a bit once the booze kicked in, and pulled some ranty stuff out of my ass, but the resulting track didn’t meet the high standards we had anticipated, and after a few plays on CiTR, the UBC campus radio station (“all spaceship and satan music, all the time”), sank into history unremarked.
v1For the purposes of branding, though (we were ahead of our time, baby), I’d come up with the name ‘Naked & Shameless’ for our two-man band. Myself being Jim Naked, up there under the hot lights, baring my soul, and Deviant being Dave Shameless, the evil rocknroller exploiting my gentle drunken poetic weiner-talk to get chicks and stuff.
That part was good.
Wisely, though, with our first track sucking so heinously, we decided to shelve the project.
Fast forward to a few years ago, and Deviant, who has been living in Chicago and whom I haven’t seen for almost a decade, has restarted Naked and Shameless, with cousin Buck Naked replacing the dearly departed Jim. Buck can actually sing, and play. This is a good thing.
Why am I telling you all this? Besides the usual ‘I’m so goddamn hip I can’t see over my own pelvis’ stuff, mostly ’cause I remembered that N&S have an mp3.com page with some fun songs on, which I’ve been listening to this evening as I get slowly plastered, and they’re currently on tour, and will be playing one of our favorite Vancouver haunts this weekend, the Railway Club.
(The serendipitous thing here being that through completely random chaotic f–king weirdness, one of the owners of the Railway Club, Roger Trentenero, since deceased (murdered on his boat not long after I’d decamped, so to speak, at Playa Los Cocos, by hammer flung headward by his 16-year old Costa Rican girlfriend, is the story that I heard), was the owner of the first sailboat I crewed aboard in the Sea of Cortez, approximately midway, temporally speaking, between then and now…but that, as I find myself saying all too often, is a tale for another day.)
Drinking Song #16 is the one dedicated to me poor old Jim Naked. It’s funny, but not my favorite. C’est la vie.
If you do go have a listen to any of their stuff, don’t miss “Lawrence (Head of Lettuce)“. A true story from our UBC days. Not even the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Rock’n’roll verité, man.

We’re on a Mexican, whoah-oh, radio

July 28, 2002 / / 7 Comments

A few times during your life, you may have run up against situations that tell you what kind of person you really are, what your response to disaster might be, what your mettle is. Some people have these experiences and it breaks them. For others, it’s just an anecdote.
Greg and I had just gotten back from Isla Mujeres, off the Yucatan coast near Cancun. The sun was going down, and we were well lit up. We’d been on the island all afternoon, fixing up the light and sound systems, and as per the usual arrangement when we moonlighted, we’d been paid in food and booze. Given the quantity of beer we generally drank just to maintain our equilibrium and air of pleasant mañanaland befuddlement, it might have been cheaper for them to pay us cash, but this way it was off the books, and everyone was happy. We were looking forward to an evening at Dady Rock, on the strip, where we were customarily given open bar courtesy in return for helping out with sound mix and lighting there as well.
Greg and his Mexican girlfriend Bianca had a tumultuous relationship, to say the least. She was the very embodiment of the cliche of the fiery latina, and living with them as I did, I caught her wrath almost as often as Greg. She could be terrifying, and almost totally irrational when she lost her temper.
Bianca met us at the dock, and we wandered over to the main road into the Old City, intending, I think, to go find Greg’s dealer. I wandered over into the bushes to have a pee while Greg and Bianca waited at the roadside to flag down a taxi. Life was astonishingly good at that moment – drunk, living in Paradise, I rolled my head back as I peed to look up at the wisps of clouds that were painted a rich red by the sunset, and breathed deeply of the clean ocean air to clear my head.
Then I heard the yelling.
“Ah, sh-t,” thought I to myself, “they’re at it again.” I immediatedly started reworking my plans for the evening to be a solo flight. But as I wandered over (slowly, unkeen to put myself between the two combatants – I’d learned how ill-advised this could be before), I saw Greg on his back in some low bushes, and Bianca astride him, pummelling him, or at least attempting to. I stopped on the sidewalk about 10 metres up from them, and waited. No way I was getting involved once she started getting violent. I’d taken a heavy silver belt-buckle in the head last time I’d tried that.
A few seconds later, a police car pulled up, and the policia switched on their rollers. The cops got out, pulled Bianca off of Greg, and cuffed her. This wasn’t good. As I walked up to the police car, they were putting the screeching and struggling Bianca in the back seat cage, and Greg was telling them in Spanish that he was her husband and he needed to come along. He looked at me as he got in to the backseat and shrugged. In Spanish, I asked the shotgun cop where they were taking my friends, and their answer was incomprehensible. I asked if I could come with them, as I had very little money on me and no idea where they were going.
This was my first mistake.
They took us to the police station on the main street of Old Cancun. Bianca was beside herself, still cuffed, doing everything but foaming at the mouth. Greg had entered into negotiations for the requisite bribes, trying to negotiate his way down. Everything seemed under control, so I asked what seemed to be the guy in charge, behind the desk, if I could go and get a pack of cigarettes. He replied in the positive, and I wandered off, confident that all was well. I bought a pack of Montana lights, and a can of Dos Equis, and wandered back to the cop shop, getting impatient to get back to the Strip. This was my second mistake.
As I walked in the door, it became clear that something significant had happened. Two cops were restraining Greg, three restraining Bianca, who if anything had cranked it up a notch into complete non compos mentis wildness, and one cop was sitting on the bench, looking green.
“What the f–k?” I asked Greg.
“She kicked one of the cops in the nuts!” said he.
“Oh, sh-t.”
“Yep.”
I offered some of the cops cigarettes, which they took. Then, after a couple minutes, the boss said something to the others, and they took the whole pack. And my wallet and passport, and my belt, and they led me back to a holding area. I was now, somehow, one of the detainees. f–k.
Bianca was still screaming, kicking, trying to bite anyone who came within range. Cuffed as she was, it took what appeared to be a great effort on the part of the two cops still restraining her to keep her in place. Greg had been put back in the holding area with me, and was now pleading for our release for any price, rather than just trying to negotiate the bribe down.
I was starting to sober up. And the cops had taken my smokes.
Some time later, Bianca was brought back from wherever she had been taken, and she looked bad. Blank eyes, slack mouth, bleach-blond mane hanging in front of her face. I don’t know what they had done to her, but Greg bristled, and I started to get a little scared. I’d heard stories about the cops here, and how they dealt with gringos who weren’t tourists. Greg had a temper of his own, and two black belts, and I could see things getting out of control very quickly.
The cops led us out to a patrol car, with a bigger, sturdier cage in the back, and refused to answer our questions about where we were being taken. The three of us were pushed roughly into the backseat, Bianca in the middle, and the doors slammed.
It was dark by now, but it was clear that we were being taken west, out of the city. In the couple of years I’d lived in Mexico, I had heard enough first-hand stories to know that it wasn’t just in the movies that the cops in Mexico take people out into the back of beyond and beat them, or worse. And Bianca having kicked one of the senior cops square in the nuts did not bode well for our future. I started to get really scared, and when Bianca came out of her fugue state and started screaming curses and kicking at the cage between us and the two cops in the front seat, I started to, well, dissociate. Greg kept asking them in Spanish where they were taking us, forcing a calm tone on top of the growing panic in his voice.
No answer from the front seat, and we were leaving the last of the lights of Old Cancun behind. Greg murmured to me “When they open the doors, you go left, I’ll go right. Run.”
I didn’t acknowledge what he’d said. Bianca did, and fell silent. The sheer terror and helplessness washed over me, and I was frozen. I wasn’t sure that if the cops did stop and open the doors in the middle of nowhere, that I’d be able to move, let alone run. Like I said, sheer terror.
A few minutes later, there were lights beside the highway again, and we pulled into the parking lot of the federal prison. It looked like we weren’t going to be dealt with extra-judicially after all. The overwhelming joy and relief I felt at the realization that I was going to be put in jail is a very vivid memory.
That happiness dissipated rather quickly. Mexican jails aren’t very pleasant. But I wasn’t there long, and that’s a tale for another day, perhaps.

A New Hope?

July 12, 2002 / / 47 Comments

There are almost certainly more refugees from Metafilter than there are people who actively participate, these days. The registered user count is up over 14000 at the moment, but if I recall correctly, Matt recently said that the server logs indicate there are only (only) a couple or three thousand registered users that hit the site on a regular basis. All indications, based on the numbers, at least, are that Metafilter continues to be a robust and roaring success. Matt has recently purchased some new hardware, and there are days and threads when I would defy you to find anything smarter or more amusing anywhere on the iNtARwEb.
But everywhere I turn, there is a constant keening lament about how bad the site has gotten, as compared to its long-past Glory Days. It is typical of these things, I suppose, but amuses me anyway that some disgruntloids insist that the golden age ended only recently (with a raft of calm, reasonable, and highly respected old guard users quietly calling it quits) while others point to the beginning of this year (when there were some high-profile, I’m-taking-my-ball-and-going-home departures). Still others glare and hurl imprecations (though mercifully stop short of screeching and flinging their poo) at the huge upsurge in registered users following September 11th last year, and yet other others pinpoint the date that everything went to sh-t as November 16, 2000, a day of infamy that was marked by the first appearance of a certain wonderchicken on the #006699 scene.
Michael Sippey, for instance, lamented in Swiftian style

It is a melancholy object to those who click through to the great site of MetaFilter, when they see the front page, the comment pages and the MetaTalk sections crowded with chatter, with noise, and with meaningless posts that should have never seen the light of the submit button. Readers, instead of being able to rely on MetaFilter as a trusted source of daily diversion, are forced to employ all their time in scrolling to beg sustenance for their starving minds: which, as they evolve over time, either whither into dust, or abandon their dear MetaFilter for sites unknown.

almost a year ago!
A while back, I spent some time (way too much time, compulsively hitting the refresh button, wirehead monkey at the joyjuice hotbutton) hanging around with some folks who splintered off a long time ago from the grandpappy of Metafilter cult threads, 1142 (folks I miss, but in order to actually accomplish anything with my time must continue to hug from a distance – *waves*), and amongst all the other things that were talked about, they spent a lot of their time bemoaning how bad Metafilter had gotten. These were, are, some of the smartest, most creative people I’ve ever spent time with, virtually or otherwise. The few months that I spent a lot of time there were almost a year ago.
Since then, some of them have stopped appearing at all on Metafilter, although the occasional Special Guest Appearance leads me to believe that they are still watching, still disapproving, still shaking their heads in dismay at the decline of the Mothership.
Another gang of Meta-refugees with whom I hang out, the wacky kids at 9622.net, another MeFi splinter site that was birthed from a cult thread (9622 this time, duh), although much more concerned with having fun and being silly, also note occasionally, between flinging poo and screeching, that Bad Things are happening these days.
Recently, jpoulos (one of the admins of 9622.net) has been talking about his disenchantment in more direct terms in the comments attached to this post : Why Metafilter Sucks Ass. I find myself agreeing with him, with some reservations.
jpoulos doesn’t participate at Metafilter anymore, and is missed.
Many many words have been spoken and typed about the Metafilter and how it has changed over the past year or two. Hell, I’m adding to the wordcount now, and I can’t seem to stop myself. Nick Sweeney said a few months ago :

Matt’s always been very trusting towards his membership, and in general, receives the respect that’s deserved by such trust. I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t accommodate 13,000-odd members: partly because the times don’t lend themselves to seminar-style discussion; partly because you’re dealing with the friction between oldbies and newbies, and their different conceptions of what the place is, was, and should be. ‘Member memory’ is a vital aspect of community sites, even ones which profess to deal with the transient meme-feed, and I think it’s much stronger at MeFi than Plastic: so that when you have members who take perhaps two years’ worth of discussion into the day’s discussion up against new arrivals, it’s bound to create the same kind of frustrations as a USENET September.

Nick doesn’t participate at Metafilter anymore, and is missed.
For my part, I’ve written defenses both impassioned and tongue-in-cheek of the place in the past. I’ve said

…things are pretty much as they’ve been since I started coming here, at least – some good days, some bad ones, some thread hijacks, some crap posts, some egos and wrestling matches, some absolute diamond-hard fascinating discussions, some erudition, some crap jokes, some pee-myself-laughing ones too, a generally tolerant and friendly hubbub.

and other things, more embarrassingly and openly in love with the place.
I personally think the exodus started when Jason Kottke posted this Metatalk thread not long after the massive influx of users after September 11th, which seemed to be a continuation of a real-world conversation that he and Matt had been having. Matt commented in the thread that he was tired of it all, and thinking about folding the tent. Much consternation ensued, and I honestly think that some people who might have stuck around and dug in their heels to try and make the place better and lead by example threw in the towel at this point.
There were other things – the rise in chattiness, the rise in incivility, the decline in collective intelligence, the increase in jokiness and pointless IRC-esque chatter (in which I admit my occasional participation) – most of which were probably as a result of the massive influx of new users.
Whatever the reason, even though there are many voices still participating that I enjoy hearing, lots of people with whom I enjoy interacting, I’ve got to agree for the first time in public that the Mothership is not what it once was.
What to do? This is the $64,000 Question, of course. I still enjoy the place a lot, and will continue to participate until Matt bans me permanently for conduct unbecoming a wonderchicken, but I am starting to understand a little better the complaints that I’ve ignored or argued against for so long. To some extent I wish that I’d paid them more heed a year ago.
(Should I mention my theory about the disenfranchisement of the A-List now? No, perhaps not. Not until my secret plans for World Domination have been hatched, my pretties. Not until then.)
It has been said, and truly, ‘it’s only a website’. Can you love a website? Is it internet-era pathological behavior to say ‘I love that website’?
I dunno.
But some days it feels as if my love is turning into common street trash before my eyes, and no matter how well-documented my weaknesses for common street trash, that’s just not the girl I fell in love with.

Public Service Announcement

July 4, 2002 / / 16 Comments

And now, as a special public service announcement, here’s some stupid sh-t that was running through my brain this afternoon as I made some chicken cacciatore :
Since it seems we’ve been saddled with the monicker ‘warbloggers’ for the forseeable future, I thought we should open up some more niches for folks, you know, so they don’t feel left out. You can have hours of fun, if you’re so inclined, assigning your friends and neighbours to the right Tribe, a la the Harry Potter thing. If I had the energy, I’d make one of those stupid f–king quizzes. But I don’t. So… onward!
I propose the foundation of the following new BlogTribes :

  • whorebloggers : only in it for the money, heart of gold or not.
  • were-bloggers : tried it once, didn’t see the attraction, went back to reading Fark
  • werebloggers : only blog by the light of the moon, have trouble with getting their claws caught between the keys
  • wearbloggers : fashion victims
  • wiredbloggers : learned all their html from Webmonkey
  • whybloggers : what’s it all about, Alfie?
  • whoahbloggers : Dude, Keanu says : ‘Whoah.’
  • warebloggers : just like playing with the tools
  • wherebloggers : huh? wha? who did what where now?
  • wartbloggers : ugly as sin In Real Life, beautiful flowers online
    and my favorite new Wonderchicken Approved™ Blogtribe

  • wheebloggers : fast, loose, enthusiastically voluble, and probably drunk

    • Any additions?

    The Hundred Thousand Years War Q&A

    July 3, 2002 / / 6 Comments

    What is happening in Cro-Magnon Territory and the Neanderthal territories?
    Cro-Magnon forces moved into key Neanderthal towns in the Big River Caves at the end of cold season to try to halt a series of suicide attacks on its citizens.
    There were many casualties in the military operation which also sparked a wave of protests in the Neanderthal world and led Cro-Magnon Territory’s main ally, That Other Tribe, to call for killmaker withdrawals.
    The action caused much hardship among Neanderthals and the militant rock-throwing campaign against Cro-Magnon Territory has continued since.
    So how did the violence begin?
    The Neanderthal intifada, or uprising, broke out at the end of The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died.
    Analysts say the atmosphere at the time was ripe for an explosion. Neanderthal frustration that years of the peace process had failed to deliver their political aspirations was intensified by the failure of the Deep Cave summit in Hot Season.
    Then Cro-Magnon hard-liner Arshon visited a site in Shared Hunting Grounds known to Neanderthal Shamen as the Noble Sanctuary and to Cro Magnon Ghost Talkers as Happy Killing Floor.
    The Neanderthals viewed the visit as provocative because the hunting ground lies on territory captured by Cro-Magnons in the Grandfather war and is at the centre of the fierce dispute over the sovereignty of Shared Hunting Grounds. It ended in bloody clashes at the Shamen tents, which quickly spread through the occupied Neanderthal territories.
    Correspondents say the visit was intended to underline the Cro Mag claim to the hunting ground and its holy sites.
    What has happened to the peace process?
    One of the weaknesses of the Father Times peace process was that it deliberately left the most difficult issues – the status of Shared Hunting Grounds, refugees and borders – until last, in the belief that this would make them easier to resolve.
    These issues were finally discussed when the former Other Tribe Chief Clon made an all-out attempt to bring then Cro Mag Ghost Talker Ehurak and the Neanderthal leader Yasafat together at The Other Tribe’s long house.
    An agreement was in sight, but talks broke down over failure to agree on the future of Shared Hunting Grounds and – to a lesser extent – the fate of Neanderthal refugees.
    Cro-Magnon leaders believed they had been generous to the Neanderthals, while Neanderthal negotiators rejected the proposals as inadequate.
    The two sides came even closer to agreement when they met during The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died. But this, too, ended in failure.
    There has been very little progress on the diplomatic front since Arshon took possession of the Leader Bone more than a year ago.
    He has accused his predecessor of offering the Neanderthals unacceptable concessions and that all Cro-Magnon Territory got in return was violence.
    One of the biggest obstacles to final status agreement is the issue of Cro Mag settlements, and Arshon has long been seen as a champion of the settlers’ cause.
    The Neanderthal Authority currently controls most of The Big River but less than 40% of the Big River Caves, in non-contiguous chunks that are dotted with Cro-Magnon settlements. The Neanderthals believe there can only be a purely Neanderthal state if the settlements are dismantled.
    Why are both sides locked in this violence?
    Arshon says there is no room for dialogue as long as violence continues. He said the Ehurak Government tried to negotiate under hails of rocks for several months but to no avail.
    The Cro-Magnon leader has shown a resolutely tough paw in his dealings with the Neanderthals – but commentators say his policies have support among most Cro-Magnons.
    They support the government’s view that Cro-Magnon Territory is exercising its right to self-defence in the face of attacks from Neanderthal militants on Cro-Magnon civilians and defence forces.
    The government accuses Yasafat of failing to contain militant groups like Big Stones Brotherhood and Neanderthal Ghost Eaters which carry out many of the attacks. But analysts are now increasingly arguing that Yasafat is in no position to control them.
    The Neanderthals say militant attacks on Cro-Magnon Territory are inevitable as long as there is no satisfactory Neanderthal state.
    The militant group BSB has pledged to escalate its activities and intensify the armed struggle against Cro-Magnon Territory. The group’s popularity has soared recently, following the demise of the peace process and general sense of despair.
    Could the peace process be revived?
    Any common ground that appeared to exist at the Other Tribe’s long house has been all but extinguished by more than a hundred thousand years of fighting.
    The only thing that could make the two sides move is outside pressure.
    There is hope that proposals put forward by more evolved branches of the species for peace and normalisation between Cro-Magnon Territory and its neanderthal neighbours could provide the much-needed momentum.
    Under the terms of the proposal which was debated after The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died, Cro-Magnon Territory would withdraw from territory occupied in Grandfather Times and a Neanderthal state would be created with its capital in East Shared Hunting Grounds.
    In return, Neanderthal nations would give Cro-Magnon Territory full diplomatic relations, including security guarantees, trade relations, animal skins, and some women.
    But this plan will only be taken seriously by Arshon if it is actively promoted by the Other Tribes Big Chief Geush.
    So far, the homo sapiens proposal has not led to any moves to halt the violence and revive the peace process.
    [Search and replace liberties taken with this article.]

    Tripping over the p0rn

    June 18, 2002 / / 10 Comments

    Reading a thread at the SA forums tonight, which began with the question : “Did you ever find porn in the woods as a child?”
    My immediate answer was “Yeah! I did!” And apparently dozens of other goons did too, leading to the positing of a magical Johnny Pornoseed who long ago in a more idyllic age travelled the byways of North America and charitably scattered dirty pictures in the forests for pubescent males to discover and cherish. Astonishing. Something I’d never thought about as a common experience, hadn’t really thought about in decades, but there it is : finding porn in the woods is something that many many young men have experienced.
    And what a joyous, revelatory experience it is, too! Explains the fervor of a lot of Green Party members, I reckon.
    One SA Goon said this, which is so evocative for me of my teenage hunger for porn :

    Has anyone noticed that smell forest porn always has? Kind of musty, but unlike any other kind of smell in the world. It always smells exactly the same. The forest porn smell….
    I will never forget the smell of rained on porn mags that have been dried up. For me, it’s the smell of porn.
    What’s f–ked up though, is that to this day, my brain associates the smell of ferns with porn. No lie. We hid our rescued stash in a small cave that was hidden by a blanket of ferns.

    The reason I talk about this, though, is because it reminded me of what I like to think of as one of my more amusing off-the-cuff comments, one of the proud random snapshots from my life that I like to remember when I’m in need of proof that I’m not a complete moron.
    It was Edinburgh, Scotland, in the winter of 1998, I think. Me and Rick (of whom I’ve spoken many times before) and the Bearman and Stiffy The Magic Austrian were living in a B&B in Portobello, which is a grey concrete seaside suburb of Edinburgh (which we customarily referred to as Edithburg, just to be annoying), perched like a frozen dog turd on the southern edge of the Firth of Forth.
    For some reason, while drinking the cheap Hungarian wine (‘Blood of The Bull’) that fueled my joyous and aimless unemployment at the time, I’d gotten it into my head that I was infallible at finding sexy bits in novels. I’d sit down with Rick or Barry and make them riffle through the book of their choice. I’d melodramatically stick my finger into the flying pages, and 4 times out of 5, stop the cascade on a page that contained some sort of sexuality. It was downright spooky. But an amusing party trick.
    So. One afternoon we’re walking back from downtown Edinburgh, which was only couple of kilometres away, through the shortcut alleyway which bore a sign that designated it, colourfully enough, as the ‘Fishwives’ Causeway’. Some way along the narrow, high-walled, piss-reeking, dogturd-littered alley through which we meandered, I spied a flash of colour to the side, investigated it, and discovered it to be a Nudie Magazine. Huzzah!
    Says I off the cuff, as I reach in under the vines to peel it off the asphalt, breathing deeply of that magazine-that’s-been-rained-on scent, unmindful of possible cooties : “Not only can I find sex passages in books, I can find sex books in passages!”
    Much hilarity ensues, hindered only by the lack of a laff-track and rimshot.
    Having actually written the little story down, I now realize how lame that comment actually was. I swear to god it was funnier’n hell at the time…
    Proves, I guess, how deeply unexciting the day to day existence of being a World Traveller can actually be when you get right down to it (at least if you did your travelling with us)…remind me to tell you the tale of Ailsa the Hogmanay Girl sometime, just to balance things out.
    So : you ever discovered woodland porno?

    What I really meant to say was…

    June 17, 2002 / / 26 Comments

    No, I’m not recanting my earlier lambasting of Meg for that article folks are talking so much about. Although in true wonderchickonian fashion, I tacked rather heavily into the tradewinds of hyperbole – hard ‘a port, Mr Qeeqeg! – and it’s entirely possible that my surprise and disappointment at reading a piece quite devoid of blood and juice, in tandem with what may fairly be described as my impatience for this efflorescence of creativity to mature…well it’s possible that my rain dance was a little, shall we say, intemperate.

    Starting at the unforeseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir.”
    “Avast!” gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
    “No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog, sir.”
    “Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I’ll clear the world of thee!”
    As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
    “I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.

    Over at Jonathon’s, where Meg responded to his excellent translation and elaboration of my rant into calm and well-crafted English prose (thanks, mate!), one of Jonathon’s other guests has weighed in on my bare-breasted, blood-streaked ululation :

    The arrogance and hyperbole astounds me. The weblogging “community” would do well to learn some humility as they go forward into this bright Utopian future he describes.

    I responded :

    f–k humility, let’s dance.

    For a split second after I pressed the submit button, I regretted that a bit, but now, as I sit back with my cup of green tea, it’s growing on me. So much so, I think I’ll make it the new tagline of the week.
    Why on earth should I be humble? How is that going to help anyone? It’s a dance, my friends, and if you don’t care to join in, you can help call the tune. If you don’t care to do that, well, pour the drinks or something, while the rest of us whoop and holler and kick up our heels for the sheer joy of it, for the pleasure of creation, of comradeship, of life. Humility just doesn’t enter into it.
    Not for nothing do I have this quote on my little website :

    “I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!”

    Although that paragraph was written almost 70 years ago, if you replace the word ‘book’ with the noun of your choice [hint], you can perhaps see where I’m coming from, or where I’m going, or something.
    But I’m getting off track again, as I so often do.
    I do not begrudge Meg her mild fame or her position of influence, or any of the other people who make up the oft-derided, oft-denied, semi-imaginary ‘a-list’. And nor, when it comes down to it, do I disagree with much of what Meg had to say, because, at the end of the day, it was pretty mild stuff.
    Where I do part ways is at pretty much the same spot as Shelley and Jonathon : the tools, the technology of it all, the minutiae of the format, these are not the common ground from which the communities and friendships and creative ferment that blogspace is fostering spring. This, to my mind, is a dangerous misconception that will ensure that what we are doing remains on the sidelines of the new mediaspace, a diversion of the geek and the technofetishist.
    The fertile common ground is the common ground we share as humans : our creative urge, our need to find like-minded people, our need to challenge ourselves and others, our need for play and conversation, our fascination with the New.
    Now I sound like a freakin’ hippy here, so I’ll add in to that list ‘our need to argue, to engage in combat, to breed divisiveness and segregate ourselves into tribes over infinitesimal differences of opinion or lifestyle’.
    But the tools? The tools are just tools, for goodness sakes. Meg says, over at Jonathon’s :

    … what I was trying to do in my article was simply point out that we can’t define this thing based on the content we’re outputting…

    I understand that she was talking about the format, dumbing it down for non-bloggers and the non-technical (I mean come on : is there a single person who has ever had a blog who needs the concepts of permalinks and posts explained to them?) But my argument is that we can, we must define this thing based on the ‘content we’re outputting’ (and that phrase reminds me that she was the director of development for Blogger, because the mechanical sound of it reminds me of all the coders and business types that I used to work with in Sydney at HyperGlobalMegaNet, who were good and kind people, but not precisely, uhh, lyrical), not on the tools, or on how it’s temporally arranged or permalinked.
    A couple of things seem pretty clear to me : one, that the article was written for non-bloggers. It talks (in simple terms, yes, but nonetheless) about technical things, that dollars-to-donuts, your average web-user already knows and understands about blogs, and your average non-web-user doesn’t give a rat’s ass about, or even understand. Or want to, for that matter. So what audience is it intended for? I’m uncertain.
    Two : the article is written by a technologist (who is certainly more than that, and is not a one-dimensional cartoon, and is from all accounts a really nice person, but) : someone who seems to apprehend what’s happening out there through the lens of technology, of Product Development.
    I’ve worked with folks who do this. Some of my best friends do this. But this is not the kind of article that’s going to excite anyone. And it’s not likely to even interest people who don’t already know what a blog is and what it looks like, anyone who’s not a technophile already. “Permalinks? Datestamps? What the hell is this geeky crap supposed to mean?” would be Joe Sixpack’s response, I’d say. It strikes me as odd that the outpouring of praise for Meg’s piece comes from the very webloggers who already understand intimately and work daily with the very concepts she painstaking explains. Have so many people lost sight of the fact that the vast majority of humanity just doesn’t give a sh-t about blogging, and probably never will? But at the same time, that same majority loves poetry and music, stories and songs, all manner of art and craft. But they don’t care about the technology, even if we do. And we already know a blog is bite-sized, permalinked and temporally arranged.
    Jonathon said :

    Which is not to say there’s no place for an explanation of the mechanics of weblogging: tools, posts, links, time-stamps, permalinks… But wouldn’t it be better to leave those prosaic details for later? And to start by mapping out an imaginative vision of the medium’s potential?
    To focus attention on the magic and mystery of blogging. To acknowledge (paraphrasing Burningbird) that the key to weblogging is people, not a format. To admit that—five years on—we’re only just starting to realize what might be possible. To stress the communal nature of the activity. To celebrate the amplification of meaning that occurs when smart, creative people collaborate. To invite newcomers to join a grand adventure, a networked version of Hesse’s Journey to the East.

    This is what I’m talking about. What I’m trying to figure out is who the piece was intended for, and why. It doesn’t really seem to serve anyone’s needs, and perhaps this is why I reacted so strongly. Meg says, again over at Jonathon’s, “I tried to look beneath the content to the tools and format that enable us to make connections.”
    I understand where she’s coming from, and I respect that, but I think she has it ass-backwards. I’m a technologist too, or at least I used to be, and I am as certain as I’ve ever been about anything that you need to look beneath the tools and the format to what she calls the content, and what I think of as the people. A blog is not a container for content, or the product of some cleverly designed software tools : it’s a person. That’s the bedrock of this thing we’re building.
    Meg also says “I wasn’t saying that’s all there is to blogging, I was just saying that’s one piece of it,” and of course she’s right, and it was my mistake to imply, if I did, that that’s what she was saying. It would seem that Meg and many others around the traps do feel that what she wrote about is the most important piece. I would call it the least.
    I’ll also say, for what it’s worth, that my ranting of a couple of nights ago was meant to stir a little reflection, and not intended as an attack on anyone. I get carried away sometimes.
    It was arrogant and hyperbolic indeed, in the same way it would have been if I hand-edited the HTML and uploaded it with a command-line FTP client.

    I Sing The Body Electric

    June 7, 2002 / / 14 Comments

    While reading the recent posts from Mike Golby about the struggles with alcoholism buffeting his family, as well as being struck both by the bravery of his candor and the lucidity of his prose and wishing there were something I could do to help him in his dark times, I got to thinking about my own long and deeply intimate relationship with the booze, about the times I’ve been called an alcoholic, by myself and others over the years. This is hopelessly self-indulgent and journally. I thought I’d share, because that’s what it’s all about, right? I beg your forgiveness. Blame Mike for starting me on this train of thought.

    Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but it only lasted a couple of days?
    Do you wish people would mind their own business about your drinking?
    Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another in hope that you wouldn’t get drunk?
    Have you had to have an eye-opener upon awakening during the past year?
    Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?
    Do you need a drink to get started, or to stop shaking?
    Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year?
    Has your drinking caused trouble at home?
    Do you ever try to get “extra” drinks at a party because you do not get enough?
    Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking anytime you want to, but you don’t stop?
    Do you have “blackouts”?
    Have you ever felt your life would be better if you didn’t drink?

    I had an uncle Ron, who wasn’t really my uncle, but was the husband of the woman who took care of me when I was an infant, while my mother worked. About him (and about most of my childhood, if truth be told) I recall little but mental snapshots, with thick white borders and faded-to-sepia colours. In my mind, he has a perpetual 5-o’clock shadow, and wears the sort of white, sleeveless t-shirt with suspenders over the top in the hot weather that is iconic of the home-from-the-office man of the first two-thirds of the last century. If my memory serves, he had ruined his stomach with rotgut whiskey, and had taken to drinking his rye with milk. He was the first and only person I’ve known who did this. He was a kind man.
    I recall one evening, my parents were sitting with Ron and Nina and their linoleum-topped kitchen table, drinking, smoking. It must have been 1969, or 1970, or somewhere around there. I was about 5 years old. Everyone would have been about 10 years younger than I am now, but they seemed ancient, Easter-Island monolith old, to me. I was tear-assing around the place, as usual. Ron stopped me up on one of my laps past the table, and I jumped up on his lap. Curious about the pungent smells wafting around, what the small city of bottles on the table meant, and why everyone seemed so animated and good-natured, I pointed and asked. Some meeting of eyes must have happened over my head, because to the chuckles of the assembled, Ron poured out about a third of a water glass of rye and handed it to me.
    One of the few times I've ever puked blood was after a session with Captain Morgan. Scary, scary stuff.
    I took the glass from him, drank it down in about 4 swallows, then hooted in rough-throated glee at the gobsmacked faces around. I remember running around some more, less and less steadily, giggling at the gravitational anomalies that had suddenly manifested themselves, before settling myself cross-legged on the floor in front of their big console TV in the den, and slowly toppling over backward as the Flintstones flintstoned and the lights went out.
    I suppose, if one was to pick the very beginning of a love affair, the instant at which your eyes meet and those mental tentacles spring out and grapple greedily and invisibly with the object of your desire, well, that’d be it.
    A decade later, I was a pimply teenager in a tiny town in the deepest northern interior of British Columbia, a town where the only real option for entertainment was booze. I was 15 or 16, and I’d finished a 26’er of rye with a couple of my buddies in the trailer out back of Leon’s house. For some reason, we felt it necessary to make the trek to Brian’s house, a hundred metres or so up the alley. And over the fence. I recall with a seraphic clarity — though it was two decades ago and I was piss drunk — that endless moment of teetering atop the man-high wooden fence behind Brian’s house, then falling like a rock and landing on my head. The moment of impact was a revelation. It didn’t hurt, not a bit. I was so astonished by this fact, by the sheer wonder of it, that I sucked in the summer night air like it was rocket fuel, jumped up with mud on my face and laughed and danced and whooped like a monkey.
    My illness and pain the next day was my introduction to the wages of the drink.
    It was a good while after that before I had my first real night out with the boys and, guilty but filled with the wonder of boozy camaraderie at the end of it, hauled my ass into my parents’ kitchen by the watery light of a northern BC dawn.
    It seems like I’ve always been a drinker. By the time I was finishing high school, and had headed off to Vancouver for university, I had carved out an identity for myself, one that I came, I see now, from the marriage of a desire to stand out from the sea of small-town boors, to excel, to exploit the Big Fucking Brain I’d been gifted with and for which I’d been so lavishly praised, and the overwhelming desire to belong, to Be A Fun Guy, which seemed easy, and to Get Chicks, which seemed utterly impossible. In that tiny little town, the possibility of finding a high-school social milieu not intimately tied to the consumption of alcohol and the concomitant possibility of finding yourself a young lady with which to frolic pastorally and learn the ways of love, was, if not precisely zero, so miniscule as to be invisible. Which is to say: I didn’t get laid much, in those early days.
    It turned out that my ‘Uncle Ron Experience’ as a child had been prophetic, and that I was capable, through sheer animal robustness if not sheer force of will, of swilling oceanic quantities of liquor, and never ever devolving into headbutting, gutter-puking beast mode. At worst, go-home-and-sleep-mode, but always: under my own power.
    I was painfully shy as a teenager, until I found the drink. After the fencetop revelation, I consciously worked the booze and its magical inhibition-loosening properties, and zeroed in on people in a way I never had before. I was hungry, jesus I was ravenous for stories, for the meat of life. In a complete turnaround from my reticence to ever ask any questions of anyone, I would quiz people, girls mostly, about the most intimate details of their lives, and they would, without fail, tell me all. By the time I was in my early twenties, I’d heard so many personal tales of rape and molestation, of broken homes and familial violence, of harrowing pain and loss, and yes, of the horrors of alcoholism, that I sometimes felt like my eyes must glow in the dark. Times I felt guilty were few, because most of the people who spilled their stories to me eventually became intimate friends, and told me, at the gravel pit or the graveyard, how relieved they’d been to unload their burdens.
    There’s probably some sort of unpleasant pop-psychology term for the way I behaved back then, but it filled the hollow at the center of my soul with stories, and it seemed to help many people who later became friends or lovers to get over childhood traumas of their own. Booze was the tool I used to grant me the unselfconsciousness to get into people’s heads, and let them into mine. I loved the stuff.
    The drunk-on-life’s-joy, clever-though-smashed, writerly-but-boisterous persona worked well for me. I was popular, well liked, and socially successful. I had a group of close friends who knew me intimately, and trusted me implicitly, as I did them. I was reading voraciously all the while, and some of my favorites recommended to me a controlled madness that appealed, irresistably.
    These last couple of years of teenagerhood and first few years of university saw the first few times it was suggested that I was an alcoholic, though. I would, like any boozy university student, go on binges. Mine, being as closely married to the bottle as I was, were perhaps a little longer or more intense than most others. It was still a competition to me – I was King Boozer, while also determined to get the best marks in the hardest field, to be the best lover, the wildest madman, and write the best damn stories too. I wasn’t entirely successful, but it was enough. I did some astonishingly silly things while drunk: ledge-walking on the 17th floor, driving while blind, the usual array of bad judgement calls that reformed boozers trot out to show why they eventually stopped.
    Now, see this is the point in most people’s Tales of Booze where it all goes to shit, and they begin to outline their inexorable descent into alco-hell. I’m sorry to disappoint, but this didn’t happen to me.
    I thought long and hard about those first few accusations of alcoholism, coming as they did from friends, often after my more spectacular examples of bad judgement. Mostly female friends, for whatever reason. But I just couldn’t see it, to be honest. (‘The alcoholic can never see it’, came the standard rejoinders…) My drinking clearly wasn’t affecting my studies. (‘You just think it has no effect’, sang the chorus) I did do some stupid stuff sometimes, but life without some danger was not worth it, I reckoned, all Hemingwayesque. (‘You’re rationalizing your dangerous lapses in judgement’, tra-la-la) I sometimes went for weeks without a drink, and didn’t miss it at all. I loved being drunk, not shambolically, mindlessly drunk but playfully, lightheartedly drunk. But if I were asked to choose, and I was, a few times, I would always say in an instant that I preferred to be sober. A life of constant inebriation would be hellish – a life of constant sobriety less enjoyable, perhaps, but no worse for it.
    So I continued on in my boozy ways, graduating university and hitting the road. I’ve been wandering around the planet for more than a decade now, sometimes drinking, sometimes not. There’ve been a few times when I wondered if my drinking was unhealthy, or destructive, and stopped, effortlessly, for a while. Two decades after I started my career as an afficionado of the drink, three decades after my first taste of the stuff, I am happy, healthy, wiser, and if not especially wealthy, quite comfortable. Of the pure, heart-squeezing joys that I’ve felt in my life, those shivering moments of connection to other souls or to the world itself, many have happened when I was sober. Of the most memorable, ecstatic and monumentally fun moments so far, many have happened while inebriated.
    I weave the drunken threads and the sober ones together, and the fabric is all the richer for having both. My life would be infinitely poorer for being drunk all the time, but would be very much impoverished too were I never to taste the sweet madness that the liquor brings.
    I beg those of you who have made it down this far not to take what I say as in any way devaluing the stories from Mike and Mark and others about how much the liquor and the craving for it have damaged their lives. I mean no disrespect – just the opposite, in fact. I understand and respect their decisions to attempt to banish it from their lives : I’ve been close enough to the deceptive janus-face of it myself enough times to understand that as much as I feel it’s been a good thing in my life, it can be the Destroyer as well. Hell, it killed my father.
    I tell this fragment of the story in part because, as many mature and beautifully-written tales about the horrors of the drink as I see, I see very few paeans to it written by anyone other than drunken frat boys.

    Somebody stop me before I blog again

    June 2, 2002 / / 9 Comments

    One final one before I go watch some funny moving pictures : Graham says

    I came to the conclusion, which I believe is a fairly rare one, that I don’t like being anonymous. That writing under a pseudonym (or no nym at all) feels more stifling than the responsibility that comes with openness. That I am willing to accept the fact that my students, yea, even my colleagues may eventually find this place. I’m counting on the fact that most of them won’t care. I understand that for every academic blogger who gets tenure, there will be many, academics and non-, who get dooced.

    Warning : Shameless narcissism ahead!
    These are thoughts that have crossed my tiny feather-capped mind more than once, and I have elected to go in the other direction – towards some degree of anonymity in my ramblings and rantings here. I realize, of course, that anyone with even moderately advanced search skills could dig up my real name, and fairly convincingly tie it to the pseudonym I use here, if they wanted to.
    ‘Anonymity’ is probably the correct word to use, technically speaking. Many of the folks who come here frequently probably don’t know my name. Most don’t care, I’m sure. As far as they are concerned I am mercifully free of an onyma. I am aware that the use of a pseudonym so flippant and fanciful predisposes many to expect me at all times to be similarly flippant and fanciful, in much the same way that my choice of domain names arouses expectations of what may be found here, and encourages attitudes towards myself and my words that differ with the reader. Not all of these preconceptions are positive, this is certain.
    But it’s all good. It adds a level of metaplay to the whole thing that amuses me – I think it’s much more fun to use the opportunity bust up those mental Markov chains a bit. I derive some pleasure from anticipating and feeding the expectations that some people must no doubt have at the prospect of reading the words of someone who calls himself stavrosthewonderchicken and who puts his writing and pixelling up at a place called Empty Bottle, and then gently, with a grin, confounding them. Such opportunities would not arise if you, dear reader, had typed in http://www.johnsmith.org to get here, and if posted by John Smith were appended to each post. If that were the case, you’d have no real idea what to expect, I don’t think, other than perhaps an intimation that you might be looking at calm seas ahead.
    Note that my real name is not John Smith. Or Markov Chaney, for that matter.
    But all this is really an aside to my main reaction to what Graham was saying, which is this : I don’t really feel that I am at all anonymous, despite the fact that I use a pseudonym here for fear of repercussions from my employers. On the contrary, I get the feeling that there are quite possibly more people around the world who recognize the (hopefully memorable) silly name I’ve adopted here and at Metafilter than there are people who know me by my real name. There are many who know me by both, and that’s fine too.
    It’s certainly possible that I am taken less seriously as a result of my pseudonymity, but it’s also possible that more people remember who I am, and identify with or enjoy in some meaningful way the persona I’ve created here, which bears if not a 1-1 correspondance, at least a very significant resemblance to my Self. I am, as are all of you, much more than my words and links and photoshop jobs could ever really capture, and I think it would signal a descent into madness if I began to try to express the Whole Story of Me here in these pixels and bits. Better for me, I think, to filter the large and rather incoherent Me through the pleasantly warped lens of my alter ego. I’m cool with that.
    There are a multitude of John Smiths, some more memorable than others. But there’s only one Wonderchicken.

    That's got to hurt

    May 30, 2002 / / 3 Comments

    Bum firmly socketed into sofa cushion, I was having one of my occasional ‘flip around the multitude of Korean-language TV channels none of which I can understand to any degree’ sessions when I stopped on one of the 3 or 4 Home Shopping Network-type stations.
    These, I find, are often good for some shadenfreude-laden amusement. It is one of my guilty pleasures, watching the human mannequins go through the self-conscious motions of simulating a life that is almost unbearably joyful, enhanced as it is almost to the point of bursting by whatever product is currently being hawked. You can almost hear, watching their avidly gleeful faces, the exhortations of the stage manager to look more joyful. Watching for a while allows me to feel superior and self-righteous in my chosen role as a singularly poor consumer.
    The food porn, which is so obscenely fixated on wetness and bubbling, on glistening surfaces and suddenly-exposed textures, can be depended upon to make me a little nauseous, and since I can afford to lose a couple of pounds, losing my appetite for a while isn’t such a bad thing. It must be said that these food porn producers have their job down to a fine art. They are incredibly skilled at eroticizing foodstuffs : so much so that I sometimes worry that I’ll wake up mid-sleepwalk one night in flagrante delicto with our store of kimchi.
    The models tend to be on the sexy side of the street, too, which is certainly not a bad thing.
    As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself : the screen at this particular moment was occupied by a pair of hands, turning and displaying a live crab, which was waving its legs about in dismay. Understandably. You’d be distressed too. With no warning, to the jaunty retro-pop harmonies of the title song from the mostly harmless Tom Hanks vehicle, ‘That Thing You Do’, the hands proceeded to rip open the shell of the soon-to-be-not-so-live crab, as its little legs went into spastic ‘oh-my-god-I’m-being-dismembered‘ gyrations, and expose its glistening, wet guts to the camera, which dutifully zoomed in. It was a weird combination of the usual food-porn with sudden, unexpected violent death, and it left me a little… discombobulated.
    It’s been a fair while since I lived in the west (if less than a year since I lived in Oz), and so I might well be wrong, but I’m pretty damn sure this sort of thing would not go over well outside Asia. It was yet another of the hundred daily reminders I get of difference, and I thought I’d share.

    I am Con-tent

    May 10, 2002 / / 5 Comments

    Exhibit The First
    Exhibit The Second
    A Rant, in One-Part Harmony.
    See me feel me touch me heal me. Wasn’t that what the Burning Sun God sang, all falsetto fakery? It’s really all in the way the words are said or sung or screamed, rather than the actual words you choose, isn’t it? I am content. I am content. See what I’m sayin’, there, folks? Not what you deliver, but the delivery itself!
    Shuffling, whether off the mortal coil, or into the spotlight, it’s the motion, not the meat, mama. The medium ain’t worth a rat’s posterior. The eye is drawn to motion – ‘don’t move or he’ll see us‘ is whispered child’s-voice breathlessly in a technicolour dream of Monsters Under The Bed.
    Shoot the messenger, or wait until the marathon man Phidippides collapses of his own accord, it’s all the same to me. Amp up that pure sweet white-noise signal. “These ones go to 11!” Don’t talk to me about Signal versus Noise – the noise is the signal. The carrier wave carrying itself. Not amplitude, but frequency modulation.
    It’s not the Message, by golly, it’s the Carrier.
    Go go gadget fugue state!
    Comedy comma improv. The native indian aboriginal american whatever the hell we’re supposed to call those poor bastards these days (racist sacks of redneck dung, amongst drooling cadres of whom I spent my formative years, referred to them as ‘chugs’), anywaywhatevernevermind, the tribe that lived for a few thousand years in the area in which I grew up in Northern British Columbia before us white devils arrived, the Nikozliautin the Pintce and the Nakraztli, are collectively referred to as the ‘Carrier Tribe’. This name arose from their custom in which a widow was obliged to carry the cremated remains of her husband on her back for three years after his demise.
    Just think of that. Three years of carrying that dust and those bones.
    Exeunt omnes, with sackcloth and ashes for damn sure.
    All that you see, all that you eat, all you excrete (sucker that I am for scatalogical humour, one of my favorite moments of the late lamented Family Guy is when the son, Chris (ain’t that a kicker), stares intently at a chocolate bar before gleefully declaiming in his oddly-timbred voice : “I’m going to turn you into poo!” and taking a bite), and so on a la U2 ripping off Pink Floyd : it’s content, baby. And we are all just containers : conduits, conductors, conspirators. In this I am content.
    Now gimme that money, ‘fore I smack you up!

    Ad Absurdum

    April 21, 2002 / / 4 Comments

    This latest semi-coherent rambling comes in response to the comments at BurningBird’s place here, and some comments made by AKMA here. I apologize if it is facile – I just wanted to get some partly-formed ideas off my chest.
    In the comments at ‘Bird’s place, Mike Golby mentions something about Mike Sanders redubbing ‘warbloggers’ ‘lifebloggers’. I couldn’t find any reference to this phrase at Mike Sanders’ blog, so I won’t pursue the dissonance of that equivalence (*ting* the tiny echoes of the phrase ‘moral equivalence’ might now be playing about your mental shell-likes) any further. It may have just been a brainfart on Mike Golby’s part. (But if a warblogger is somehow a ‘lifeblogger’, then mark me down as a deathblogger. Tangentially, does anyone else notice the slow shift of the meaning of the neologism ‘warblogger’ to mean a blogger who supports and cheerleads military killing, by someone or anyone, rather than just someone whose main topic of blogging is things to do with the current American War on Terra? Or maybe that’s just me…)
    I don’t say ‘deathblogger’ simply to be contrarian, though such is my tendency. I regard death as less of a Nemesis than many, for reasons stemming from experiences in my young life rather than religious faith, and I do think that some large component of the irrational, deeply-felt response people have to things like the current sh-tstorm over in the eastern mediterranean comes directly from a horror and fear of Death. Isn’t that odd?
    Apologies to AKMA may be in order, but : if these people, in the middle east and Ireland and elsewhere, who are killing one another as much because of their religious beliefs as mundane matters of territory and bloody revenge, if they are indeed so devout…well, it strikes me then that their respective religions teach them that their bloodthirsty righteousness will be rewarded in an afterlife of some kind, no?
    AKMA says :

    ..those who adhere to the Way of Jesus have been not just advised, but commanded not to kill–not even to contemplate killing (nor even losing one’s temper at another); those who adhere to the Torah have the prophets’ word that the Eternal summons us to lives of justice and peace, where nation no longer lifts up sword against nation.

    This may indeed be the case, but it seems to me in practice that the ‘thou shalt not kill’ edict has often been, and still is relaxed, by the man (and woman) on the street, is it not, when it comes to killing in the name of God? Leaders both religious and secular invoke the name of whichever almighty they imagine to be their benefactor, to strike down the enemy, to lend strength to their killers out on the bloody plain. The people who listen to these leaders take up their guns and cudgels secure in the knowledge that smashing the skulls of their enemies or putting bullets through their hearts are actions mandated and approved by their deity and his representatives on Earth. We’re talking about the reality of belief here, not the ideal. I assume this is somehow mystically reconciled in their minds with the ‘God is Love’ mantra of more peaceful times – call it Tough Love, I guess.
    I say this not to ridicule Christian belief. I find the metaphors embedded in the faith, as in others, to be rich and rewarding. Though countless lives have been lost in the name of God and Christ, Mohammed and Allah, countless deeds of mercy and kindness have been performed, as well.
    But back to the Fear of Death. I’ve always thought it odd, and it’s always been one of the things that I couldn’t really get my head around, when it came to Christianity : it seems hard for a devout Christian to justify anything other than feelings of joy when a presumably heaven-bound relative makes the Big Swan Dive into the abyss. There’s self-pity, of course, or fear for a more lonely, or poorer, future here amongst the living. These grief-triggers I understand. But I have a little difficulty understanding grief unleavened with what should be happiness for the deceased, for the spirit drawn unto the bosom of the Lord, among the devout.
    The ritual wailing and moaning, the tearing out of hair, the sackcloth and ashes that some cultures indulge in as a ritual response to death : these, I understand, too, as catharsis, as closure. Ritual response to events of great magnitude in our lives help us to cope with those events without thinking too much about them, and help to incorporate those events in the fabric of our community.
    I catch a scent of the ritual response to death in the response to the killing in the Middle East at the moment.
    There is, as always, division into camps amongst the not-very-clever : Side A is right! No, you bastard, Side B is right! Amongst others, there is a weary acceptance that both warring sides are right, and amongst a subgroup of those, an awareness that both sides are also equally wrong. But even within this camp, there are those who call for warfare and those who call for ‘peace’. There are also a large number who, through laziness or bodhisattva-like equanimity, through utter misanthropy or through dirt-stick-stone stupidity, via ‘good’ or ‘evil’ intention, modulate their outrage, or accept what is as inevitable and thus good.
    There are some who believe that the raging, naked ape in us will keep the tribes at each other’s throats for a good long time, if not until the last of our species stands over the lifeless body of the unlucky penultimate one, triumphant. There are some who would welcome ‘peace’, who would work for it each day of their lives, who are also certain that it is a chimera.
    There are those who see the arguments among the observers as fractal, self-similar meta-examples of the bloodletting amongst the combatants, and grow more pessimistic about there ever being an end to warfare.
    The question is this, perhaps : whether a life spent working for this idea of ‘peace’, always aware that such a goal may never be reached, in one’s own lifetime or beyond, is a life well-spent.

    Kill

    April 16, 2002 / / 5 Comments

    KILL

    KILL!

    KILL!

    You f–king primates. Kill each other until you’re all dead, grind each other’s bones to make your bread. Swing the infants by their heels and shatter their tiny skulls on the doorjambs of your hovels. Kill! Hate! Let it never end! Swear blood feuds, and carry on the senseless slaughter of your fathers’ fathers, and their thick-fingered simian fathers, too. Bathe in the blood of your enemies, before they have a chance to caper like children in arterial gouts of yours. Cleanse the world of your hated foes, yes, that’s it, ethnically cleanse. If there are any women left alive, don’t forget to rape them, and rape them hard. Slitting their throats after you’ve spilled your filthy warrior seed is optional, but recommended. Kill! Lay waste! Wreak havoc! Defend the honour of your people, sink your hands deep into the warm entrails of those you would destroy as they cough out their last curse! Kill!
    Just hurry it up, already. I’m waiting to dance on your unmarked graves, you cheeseheads.