I and I

June 5, 2002 / / 3 Comments

Taking a page from the Mighty Mighty Mike Golby (aka the Zimmerman Professor of Music and Poetics), some Dylan I’m listening to tonight :

Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed.
Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams.
In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed
To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams.
I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.
Think I’ll go out and go for a walk,
Not much happenin’ here, nothin’ ever does.
Besides, if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk
I got nothin’ to say, ‘specially about whatever was.
I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.
Took an untrodden path once, where the swift don’t win the race,
It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth.
Took a stranger to teach me, to look into justice’s beautiful face
And to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.
Outside of two men on a train platform there’s nobody in sight,
They’re waiting for spring to come, smoking down the track.
The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right.
She should still be there sleepin’ when I get back.
I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.
Noontime, and I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part,
Into the narrow lanes, I can’t stumble or stay put.
Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart.
I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot.
I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.

This is the first time I’ve ever read the lyrics, and for almost 20 years I’ve thought that it was ‘…justice’s pitiful face…’ Freaky.

Sportmanship

June 5, 2002 / / No Comments

I feel bad about disappointing Jonathon and Fishrush with my lack of Worldy Cuppy Updates from ball-kicking ground zero, but I really haven’t come across anything that was sufficiently out there enough for me to report (Me, not journalist be!) in the last couple of days.
Until the Korea-Poland game tonight, which was quite handily won by Korea. It was Korea’s first-ever World Cup win, and so a deeply emotional moment for the million or more middle-aged Korean women who have been instantly and miraculously transformed into rabid soccer fans, and will continue to be so until the Korean team is knocked out of the running, at which time they will spit and turn, with disgust and resignation writ large on their faces, back to their large plastic tubs of kimchi, muttering imprecations about how that foreigner coach Hiddink failed them.
But right now, the fever is up, and there are literally millions of women-of-a-certain-age in this country who would slip ol’ Coach Hiddink the tongue in a split second in an instant if they thought it would help The Team, butter-smell or no butter-smell.
The little bit of Korea-insider intelligence I thought I’d pass on this evening is this : it’s been reported that in the wee wee hours of this morning, outside the hotel at Haeundae Beach in Busan where the Polish team is staying, a large crowd gathered. A large crowd of Korean fans. They proceeded to make a large noise. In order to deliberately deprive the Polish team of their beauty sleep.
I’m not sure if this is standard procedure or not, for the supporters of the home teams in host countries to try to disturb the sleep of competitors in hopes of a small advantage for the home team. I don’t follow this soccer stuff very much.
Congratulations to the Korean team. They looked pretty well-rested out there.

Parse this, if you can

June 5, 2002 / / 1 Comment

“Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities.”

A friendly suggestion : How about you take your ‘moral clarity’ and shove it up your ass, you simpleminded sack of sh-t? How’s that for clarity? Might be immoral to use such words, might even be wrong to call the Most Powerful Man In The World a simpleminded sack of sh-t, but I’ve got to call a spade a spade, you know?
I realize of course that overwhelming evidence would indicate that the Resident couldn’t string together a foreign policy more complicated than ‘George not like, George hate, George kill’, and that it would seem that most of the time (‘Do you have blacks there too?’) he’s not even sure whether that’s a horseshoe, a handgrenade or a crucifix he has jammed up his fundament, and further that the words he was reading in the passage quoted above were written by someone else.
Almost certainly that someone is not quite so simpleminded as Our Hero, and painfully aware that simple parables of White Hats and Black Hats will make Georgie clap his hands in glee and stop touching his penis quite so often, frantic as he is to reassure himself that it’s actually there. That speechwriter, whether he believes the words he writes or not, dutifully churns out on demand these slightly-veiled calls for Blood! Murder! (and this year’s top of the monkeykiller hit parade) Vengeance! that get the crowds on their feet.
You hasten the end of us all, and guarantee by raising the stakes the deaths of uncounted thousands, soon or later, when you put words like that in the mouth of the beady-eyed, murderous commander-in-thief, you speechwriting scum. People, simple common f–king people listen to that drivel, and believe it, and take up arms and kill after they hear it. God damn you to hell.
[Excised : A wish for the painful death of the speechwriter in question. I get carried away sometimes.]
Does that make me a bad person? Not to a utilitarian, perhaps.
(Edit : Even the Please Tell Me What To Do, Daddy brigades at MeFi are unimpressed, or silent. Rusty dreams a beautiful, optimistic, doomed dream, though, which is worth hoping for, at least.)

We've been here before

June 4, 2002 / / 16 Comments

Pravda quotes a US soldier who apparently took part in ground engagements in Eastern Afghanistan :

“We were told there were no friendly forces,” said Guckenheimer, an assistant gunner with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. “If there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women and children to kill them.”

If more mechanical and less evocative, this puts me in mind of the following quote from one of the soldiers who were present at what is being referred to as the ‘Incident at Nogun-Ri’ during the Korean War, which I talked about here a few months ago :

“There was a lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill ’em all,” recalls 7th Cavalry veteran Joe Jackman, “I didn’t know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn’t matter what it was, eight to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot ’em all.”

Killing civilians : a long, noble and continuing tradition in America, as elsewhere, it would seem.
Edit : The Pravda piece is a mirror of an article from the Ithaca Journal, here.

Beer Consummation

June 3, 2002 / / No Comments

From an MSNBC handwringer about some trailerpark-special TV craptacular called “Beer Games” :

“Glorifying beer drinking is just another example of irresponsible marketing and promotion of beer consummation,” says George A. Hacker, director of the Alcohol Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.

You reckon he meant to say that?
From the same article :

If you are kid in a classroom with 10 other children and need the teacher’s attention you raised your hand,” says Prof. Robert Thompson, director for the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “But if you are in the classroom with 500 other children you may have to jump up on the table, drop your pants and say a naughty word.”

Does anyone edit these things? Who are these halfwits they’re dredging up for quotes? What the hell is happening out there? Thank crikey I’m not a journalist, say I.

Synchronicity

June 2, 2002 / / 2 Comments

Just as Mark was discovering that I oughta be one of the people in his social network that he doesn’t yet read, I was implementing his LINK tag, in part because I felt a little bad that I mentioned at Phil’s how cool I thought Andy’s linkback thingo was (after Phil in fact mentioned the thing at Mark’s), having forgotten that I also saw that very same thing at Mark’s and thought it was indeed whizbang. Funny how that works.
I’m dizzy.
Big-ass Edit : There are more people than I knew talking about this manufactured serendipity instant feedback stuff that linkbacks or backlinks (or whatever you wish to call them) imply.
deus_x says here, for example :

Referral-driven linkbacks on all pages on my site do this. If you post to your weblog and include a link to me, then I hear about it the first time someone traverses that link. This, to me, is even better than the comment feature. And, as Mark Pilgrim observes, this is better that a single referers page because these linkbacks appear in context. The conversation is built up from links in place and on topic and where the action is.

I won’t go as far as ranking referrer feedback over comments – I’d like to bring comments into the whole picture, bring them up front and center dynamically, when appropriate, and tie them into the linkbacking too. I’d like to see weblogs where the comments threads offer more value to some visitors than the actual posts, while others never hit the comments at all and still derive value (I’m slipping back into my old corporate-speak, sorry) from their visit. Not unlike the way some folks go to Metafilter for the links, some for the convo, but both groups get what they want from the place. I’d like to be able to follow both speakers and topics (based on permission being granted) around blogspace, depending on the mood I was in. I want my MemePop thing. And I want a pony!
As you can tell, I’d like to tie all this in with the half-assed thoughts I’ve been having recently about following conversations in the blogosphere, but I haven’t thought it through yet, really, as is probably clear.
The word that’s bouncing around my brain right now is ‘swarming’, but that’s not right, either. I’m not much attracted to the ‘news aggregator’ take on all of this, but then I haven’t played much with that sort of thing yet. I will, soon.
Cool – I always like new toys to play with.

Belief-o-Matic

June 2, 2002 / / 3 Comments

Jonathon led me to the Belief-o-Matic. I usually avoid these things, but this was interesting. I ended up marking all but two of the questions as high priority. I wasn’t aware I was such an opinionated bastard. Heh.
Anyway, my results, for what they’re worth :
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Secular Humanism (95%)
3. Liberal Quakers (91%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (89%)
5. Nontheist (75%)
6. Neo-Pagan (74%)
7. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (68%)
8. Bahá’í Faith (66%)
9. Theravada Buddhism (65%)
10. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (63%)
11. New Age (57%)
12. Jehovah’s Witness (52%)
13. Orthodox Quaker (49%)
14. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (48%)
15. New Thought (45%)
16. Mahayana Buddhism (43%)
17. Reform Judaism (41%)
18. Sikhism (41%)
19. Taoism (39%)
20. Scientology (37%)
21. Jainism (33%)
22. Hinduism (30%)
23. Eastern Orthodox (24%)
24. Islam (24%)
25. Orthodox Judaism (24%)
26. Roman Catholic (24%)
27. Seventh Day Adventist (24%)
I’m not going to tell you the ‘official faith’ of the university at which I teach. That would result in gales of uproarious laughter, and this is a serious subject, damn it!
(Oh, and it’s not Scientificology. What the hell is that doing on the list? If Sciencology is a religion, the Pope is a cheeselog.)
Edit : The above might have looked very different if I’d seen this Scientific Proof of GOD (SPOG) first! Or not.

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.

Trail Mix

June 2, 2002 / / No Comments

A little summary of some of my thematically linked wanderings this evening…
Student to be put on trial for heckling Bush I…

..”At some point I think Bush made a reference to Nicaragua,” said Kenneth Houp, one of Markovich’s attorneys. “That’s when Markovich stood up and yelled (an expletive) and was hauled off by the gendarmes.”

What was that pesky f–king thing called again? The constitution?

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Bill Bennett to Noam : Jane, you ignorant slut.

“Noam Chomsky : …Well, for example, the United States happens to be the only state in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism, would have been condemned by the Security Council, except that it vetoed the resolution. This referred to the U.S. terrorist war against Nicaragua, the court ordered the United States to desist and pay reparations. The U.S. responded by immediately escalating the crimes, including first official orders to attack what are called soft targets — undefended civilian targets. This is massive terrorism.”
Bennett : Yeah, well you’re a big poopyhead! Nyah!†

Bush II, meanwhile, is back to his usual jukes-and-kallikaks action :

“During a conversation between the two presidents, George W. Bush, 55, (USA) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 71, (Brazil), Bush bewildered his colleague with the question “Do you have blacks, too?”

As the search for a scapegoat other than the blindingly obvious unelected pResidential one really gets underway :

Dear Director Mueller:
I feel at this point that I have to put my concerns in writing concerning the important topic of the FBI’s response to evidence of terrorist activity in the United States prior to September 11th. The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI’s law enforcement mission and mandate.
[…]
To get to the point, I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring.
[…]
I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons…

What is happening to your country, my American friends? How sad it is to watch it all fall slowly apart.
†OK, I made that part up. See, I told you I wasn’t a journalist!

No security clearance for you, dogfcuker!

June 2, 2002 / / 4 Comments

Via MeFi, of course, this gentleman was turned down in his application for Military Security clearance because of his slighty excessive fondness for our canine pals :

“Applicant admitted the factual allegations of the SOR; accordingly, I incorporate Applicant’s admissions as findings of fact.
Applicant–a 25-year old employee of a defense contractor–seeks access to classified information.
The allegations of the SOR revolve around Applicant’s zoophilia–his sexual attraction to animals and his sexual activity with dogs from approximately 1987 to June 1996. On 13 August 1998, Applicant described his zoophilia to a special agent of the Defense Security Service (DSS)(Item 5):
I would like to take this opportunity to explain that I am a zoophile, sexually attracted to animals. I fantasize about sexual activities with anthropomorphic (cartoon character types) animals, friendly big cat like a lion, any medium to large size dog, horses, cows, etc., but to actually engage the animal must be a dog. The reason I state it must be a dog because a dog is the only animal who has the closest personality to a human being.”

I don’t really know what to say about this. I’d like to say “Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto,” but this just pushes the envelope a little too much for me, ya know?

Distant water-coloured me-mories…

June 2, 2002 / / No Comments

Just finished watching the Ireland vs. Cameroon match, and though I’m far from an expert in such matters, I enjoyed it a fair bit. Averaging one goal every 45 minutes : I guess that’s major excitement in the soccer world, huh?
The reason I mention it is that it was almost precisely 12 years ago, during the World Cup in 1990, that the Wonderchicken was born, the uncreated conscience of my species, forged in the smithy of my liver. A couple of days after this blessed event, Rick and I were in a lovely little B & B in Aberystwyth, Wales, and watching the match between Cameroon and Ireland. Our viewing was made more enjoyable, if indeed that were possible, by the presence of a Large Bottle of Vodka. This we drank (which is the primary use to which one puts Large Bottles of Vodka, other than bonking people over the head, of course), and cheered lustily for the underdogs, Cameroon, who ended up the victors.
Although my powers of recollection tend to suffer when battered by such oceanic quantities of booze, I seem to recall that we ventured out into the night at the conclusion of the game, wobbly but under our own power, navigating by the bottle, and ended up in a pub, where Rick also ended up swapping saliva with a nubile young lady. This was the time in our lives when this sort of thing still happened, albeit irregularly.
The next morning, the proprietress of the B & B, waggling an admonishing finger as only middle-aged Welsh matrons can, suggested that we should find alternate lodging.
She must have been an Ireland supporter.

Rank

June 1, 2002 / / 4 Comments

I’m not American, but I still find it interesting, if pointless, to observe that my surname (that is, my secret identity when I’m not fighting crime) was ranked #5662 in the last census there. The name I was born with, which was different, for reasons I can’t be bothered going into at the moment, is ranked #2666.
‘Wonder’, however, was ranked 48,816th. That’s cool.
It would seem that no-one in America has the surname ‘Chicken’. Go figure.
‘Kim’, number one with a bullet here in Korea, is only #233 in the States. Korean surnames are in and of themselves an interesting study. There are only about 270 last names in Korea, but the five most common – Kim, Lee (variously romanized as Yi or Rhee (actually pronouced ‘Ee’)), Park (Pak, Bak), Choi (Choe, Chae), and Chong (Jong, Jung, Chung) – belong to more than 50 percent of the population. Kims make up 22 percent of the population, or about 10 million people, and the Lees (Rhees, Yis) comprise about 14 percent.
America’s number one? ‘Smith’, of course. Why is it that I’ve only met one person named ‘Smith’ in my entire life? And further, why the heck would that name be so common? There couldn’t have been that many blacksmiths around, back in Ye Olde Oldentymes…

A request for assistance

June 1, 2002 / / 1 Comment

Shelley has asked : “If you work with Linux (all flavors), Darwin, Solaris, HP UX, FreeBSD, etc. – any version of UNIX – and you have a tip or trick based on the following subjects, could you please send me an email with your suggestion […] If you’re the first with a tip, I’ll make sure you’re accredited for it in the book. I need to get these chapters finished next week, so I’m hoping to get tips and tricks this weekend.”
If you’re one of them Unixfolk, please go help the ‘Bird – you’ll get a BurningBird™ Brand Flame Retardant Beanie*!
*not really, but you will get credited in her book.

Wonderchicken World Cup Update #2

May 31, 2002 / / 6 Comments

I’m not terribly interested in soccer, but I might just mention some of the other stuff around the edges that you might find amusing (thanks fishrush!) and that you might not otherwise see. This does not make me a journalist. Heh.

For example, this picture from Kimpo Airport of Big Football Hero Ronaldo (reportedly), making a complete f–king racist ass of himself.
cultural ambassador_lo.jpg

Footballer.

Cultural Ambassador.

Cretin.

[found at the ‘pile]

Conversation Maps

May 31, 2002 / / 2 Comments

I’d like to lay something like this on top of blogspace, using posts and comments as data. Just because. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to actually see any of the demos, probably because it uses DejaNews as a datasource, and of course DN is no more, having been eaten by Google. Still.

Delicious cute little bastard, ain't he?

May 31, 2002 / / 6 Comments


A Spanish TV reporter, in a burst of inspiration apparently untempered by any inconvenient pretense of journalistic detachment, has purchased one of the meat-puppies on sale at a market in Ulsan and given him to the Spanish World Cup Team, who have made the pooch team mascot. This would seem to indicate that he will not end up on the dinner table. I will be surprised if the dog is actually taken with the team when they leave Korea.
Nonetheless, cleverly done.

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.