Who Sucks

Orgasm lifters. Those guys at the gym who sound like they're really enjoying every rep. I call them orgasm lifters.

In Pumping Iron Arnold Schwarzenegger is talking about the "pump" or the feeling he gets in his muscles when he's lifting. He says something like, well, here's the video:



Maybe they do have it figured out after all.

New Programs

I don't have much of a winter break. My last final exam was on this past Saturday, and my winter session class starts on January 5.

Next semester, I will be taking 2 high-level Japanese classes for the first time ever. I'm a bit nervous. I was asking the kids in the lower-level classes about their tests and quizzes, and, while I'm pretty set on the grammar, the kanji and vocabulary quizzes are seriously hard. Write out kanji characters? You must be joking! No? Oh... I had gotten used to simply typing them.

Starting today, I will be regimenting myself. I will build up to approximately four hours of straight Japanese studying per day. I'll probably track my progress on my long-silent Japanese blog, http://sokasoka.blogspot.com.

The other new program I will be starting is a program of frugality. Starting January 1, I will make an effort not to buy food at restaurants for the entire month (with the exception of possible Language Exchange meals, which fall under the Japanese-studying program). I'll have to learn new recipes. I foresee a lot more casseroles in my future.

If these two programs can get started easily, I might add a third (an exercise regimen), but I don't want to get too ambitious too fast.

じゃー、はじめよ！

What Unites Districted and Hatandcoat? In a Word: Manblogitude.

One of my favorite word blogs is called "Wordlustitude." Unlike many word blogs (including my own), it's short, funny, and unpretentious. The author finds real instances of made-up neologisms, defines them, gives a real citation, and then makes up a citation.

Here's today's word:

manblogitude

noun. What you'll find, if you dare to look, deep inside the pants of all testosterone-marinated blogs such as this.

Real citation: "I’m not sure I can take a calendar full of steaming hot manblogitude…"
(Dec. 3, 2008, The Comics Curmudgeon, http://joshreads.com/?p=1809)

Made-up citation: "Women love me for my manblogitude. Men hate me for it. Man-blogs admire me. Woman-blogs are curious. Woodland critters are just afraid."

I read that and thought of my little project here with my coblogger.

Please remember, whenever you add "man-" to a word, it makes it not gay and more stereo-hetero. See mancrushish, man-flab, man-fume , man-slutitude , man-strumpet, and mantourage. But I guess that's not a hard and fast rule: see happy man-loaf, man-chete, etc.

Celebratory French Toast

As I drove my rental car back from College Park, finally free of my most-hated class of all time (ANTH 260), I realized I had a car. And I thought, wouldn't it be lovely to go over to Hinata and have some celebratory chirasi-zushi? Yes, yes it would, I thought, and I began plotting my course.

And then I thought, but wait! I have no money. And the $15.00 bowl of rice with fish overtop is the best deal out there, but 15 bucks is still 15 bucks. So I decided to go home and make myself french toast instead.

Celebratory French Toast

• 3 eggs
• some milk (enough to make it a good mix of egg and milk, not just milky eggs or eggy milk)
• bourbon vanilla extract (a glug or two)
• cinnamon (a heavy dusting)
• sugar (a pinch)
  
• bread (I had wheat)

Beat eggs. Add milk. Glug vanilla. Dust cinnamon. Pinch sugar. Drown bread, one slice at a time. Fry. Enjoy celebratorily, with syrup or whatever.

Freedom Is Just Another Word...

As of about fifteen minutes ago my semester's over and I'm now writing stuff on the web again. Unfortunately my subject of study doesn't lend itself very well to long blog posts.

You know what, maybe it could. In retrospect I totally could've tried to explain what I'm learning. It's absolutely true that explaining helps to understand, so now I regret missing an opportunity. But I'm psyched to try it in the future. So five or six months from now when I have more reader-chasing-away fight posts behind me I can break that stream with some talk of greek symbols.

Oh yeah, that's a warning of more fight posts to come. Have you people seen the stuff in store for this month and next?

During my study period, this past Sunday, I have implemented a trial for the following month. This is part of my ongoing efforts to become more personally productive. I am now writing down a weekly schedule and sticking to it. This is revolutionary. Time is blocked out on a piece of paper (screw online calendars), longer term goals are written down and broken into doable chunks, lesser goals are getting triaged and then nixed or postponed. It is only a trial to see how I like the process. Next month I'll try catching squirrels with my bare hands.

Studying: Mongolian Impact on China, Japan, and Korea

The last question specifically focusing on the Mongolian Empire asks how it impacted the histories of the three countries above. This has elements that lead me to suspect that I'll need to know it for the exam: it's open-ended, vague, and has to do with a nomadic people's interaction with settled agrarians (which my professor really likes to dwell upon). But I'm a little tired of talking about the Mongols, so I'll keep this in outline form.

The Mongols in China:

• Unified the north and south for first time in a long time
  
• Militarized China. We see the Chinese arming themselves (Mongols had banned weapons) as control loosened. The countryside fell into chaos. Multiple warlords cropped up in microeconomic regions, and the eventual victor (Zhu Yuanzhang) was in the richest of these regions (Jiangnan).
• Encouraged interchange of ideas, arts, culture (see culture post).
• Prohibited Chinese scholars from getting positions, so they turned to writing dramas and operas.

The Mongols in Japan:

Okay, I need to tell this story. You know the word "kamikaze," right? But originally it did not mean a suicide-missioned pilot; it meant "divine wind" and referred to the storm that saved Japan from a Mongol invasion. Twice.

The Mongols had Korea and China, and Kublai wanted to enter into friendly relations with Japan. He wanted to send Japan a letter. Korea didn't want to send it; they had been suffering from "Japanese" pirate attacks for years. But Kublai knew how to twist Korea's arm, so they ended up sending the letter in 1266. The letter called for peace, saying ominously "nobody would wish to resort to arms." The Korean king appended the letter, saying that submitting would lead to prestige.

Japan said nothing but began fortifying defenses.

In 1268, Kublai sent another envoy. In 1269, he sent two more. 1271 and 1272, one each year. Nothing from Japan. The Japanese court was pretty terrified and wanted to surrender, but it was out of the emperor's impotent hands; the Kamakura shogunate (Tokimune) was in charge and ordered forces to be stationed at the most probable point of Mongol entry: Kyushu.

When the Mongols came in 1274, they landed on Kyushu a few times and just wiped the floor with the Japanese warriors. The Mongols were soldiers used to fighting in units; the Japanese had a tradition of one-on-one combat, even on a battlefield. Picture a lone samurai, expecting to fight just one Mongol at a time, yelling at the enemy--and getting shot by 10 arrows from all directions.

Then a storm came, and Mongol leaders told their troops to get in their boats (which had been made by Korean hands) so as not to be marooned. Smart move, that; about 200 ships were lost in what would later be called the Kamikaze, the storm that defended Japan. Japanese boats, which were better maneuverers, quickly finished off the remaining Mongol fleet. (wiki)

You'd expect the Khan to go back right away. Well, maybe he wanted to, but his navy had just been destroyed by wind. He needed time to build it up again. In the meantime, he sent embassies to Japan, telling them not to leave until they got a response. The shogun, after a while, decided to behead the ambassadors. Kublai, showing remarkable restraint for a Mongol whose ambassadors had just been killed, sent a few more. Same result; five heads came back.

In 1279, Kublai had conquered the Song (finally) and now had possession of their formidable navy. (Unfortunately, they picked riverboats to go to Japan in, and the Korean boats they commissioned were also unsuitable on the high seas.) In 1281, the Mongols landed once on Japan, but this time the samurai were much better trained to deal with them; the Mongols were forced back to their ships. All along the coast, they were repulsed, until finally, the second Kamikaze wiped out between 69-90% of the army.

Kublai was seriously put out, and he nearly planned another invasion, but didn't go through with it. Still, his historical impact on Japan was tremendous, even though the Mongols didn't actually succeed in invading.

• The shogun had no money to reward both the samurai he used and the priests (who claimed the Kamikaze was due to their prayers). He gave what little he had to the priests. The samurai, who were used to getting land after fighting, were discontent. They would stay dissatisfied with the Kamakura bakufu.
  
• This was a signal of the shift in power from the kuge (landed aristocrats) to the buke (the warriors, like those who had fought the Mongols).
• Kamakura became further unpopular due to the extra taxes it charged people for more defenses against a future invasion.
  
• The Hojo lineage used the occasion of the invasions to expand their power. They did this by promising more land to warriors, but they could not follow through. This was even more unpopular, and their power decreased.
• Pirates had taken advantage of the invasions to raid the countryside--people took this as further proof that the Kamakura bakufu couldn't do anything right.
• All in all, the invasions paved the way for Emperor Go-Daigo to make a play for power in 1333-1334, beginning the middle ages of Japan.

The Mongols in Korea:

• Neo-Confucianized Korea. They invited Korean successors and scholars to Beijing, where they could meet Neo-Confucians from China and eventually take the ethos back. This changed Korean society from partly matriarchal to very patriarchal.
  
• Bad economic situation. Big landowners became bigger, especially if they allied themselves with the Mongols. Land was snatched away.
• as they militarized China, Korea also became more reliant on military. The next leader, Yi Songgye, rode to power in 1392. He was from a military family and he was a yangban. His goal was to strengthen the monarchy, a direct result of the Mongol vassalship that Korea had been in.
  
• Yeah, I really don't know much else about the effect of the Mongols on Korea. I should ask the TA.
  

Interlude: More Mongol Destruction

The Mongol Empire didn't just spread culture, art, and ideas. It also spread the Black Death. All these people going around, low sanitary standards... yeah, it was likely to happen.

They've traced the Black Death to rodents in Central Asia. It was spread through the trade routes that the Mongols protected as well as through maritime trade on the Mediterranean Sea. But it didn't reach Europe until the Mongols reached Kaffa.

Kaffa was a city in what is now the Crimea, in the Ukraine, on the coast of the Black Sea. The Mongols were besieging it, like they were wont to do, but their army was not doing well. They were infested with the plague. So what's a Mongol army to do in a pinch but innovate?

They catapulted the dead bodies of the afflicted over the walls of Kaffa.

Whether or not this story accounts for the spread of the disease in Europe (Kaffa was full of maritime traders, who would've sailed west after the Mongols gave up and the siege was over) is far from proved. I'm not sure that the dead bodies were even contagious. But dude, flinging the dead over to the other side in a primitive attempt at biological warfare? Genius.

Studying: Mongolian Empire's Cultural Implications

The second question on this study guide asks about the cultural implications of the Mongolian Empire created by the carnage I related to you in the previous post. Again, a fun question, but I doubt that it will be the big essay on the exam--because the answer is at once too obvious and too impossible.

The obvious answer: it connected all of Asia with Eastern Europe and Persia, enabling globalization of culture and goods.

Take a look at the post below, again, and look at that animated GIF that I nabbed off of Wikipedia. The empire was huge. No other empire has ever covered that kind of area in the history of the world.

But just conquering the world would not have led to such a profound effect on these countries, had it not been for the way the Mongols ruled. Unlike Chinese and other governments of the time, the Mongols did not look down on merchants. On the contrary, they liked them, encouraged them, and protected them. The Mongols invented a kind of passport for travelers riding through their lands; it protected their right to be on the trade route. (Interestingly, the passport was written in the Mongol script, which was related to Aramaic.) The Mongols created and protected a unified, continuous, and safe trading network: the old silk routes as well as new avenues (maritime, etc.). The flow of goods was unmatched in world history.

The two hubs in this system, the two areas of privileged positions, were China and Persia. These were the two richest settled regions in the world of that time. Persian and Chinese scholars translated each other's countries' works on medicine, politics, economics, and agriculture. Artistic styles spread. And a very important export of China became so much more beautiful: blue-and-white porcelain.

While true that porcelain production had been going on for some time during the Song, and while true that the cobalt (for the blue color) had been able to be obtained from Baghdad since at least as far back as the Southern Song Dynasty, the Yuan period swiftly developed the art, the craft, and the market of the porcelain wares. The Mongols supported ceramic production at Jingdezhen, where cobalt was never in short supply (due to the stable trade routes). The kilns there were upgraded, and higher temperatures could be reached, which made the porcelain more durable and more sanitary. Arab orders for porcelain affected the pictoral style, the content of the pictures, and the very forms of the ceramics themselves.

Market goods, arts, and scholarly works flowed freely, and so did religion. The Mongols were originally animists, and they were extremely religously tolerant. From the textbook: "Khublai, for instance, welcomed Buddhist, Daoist, Islamic, and Christian clergymen to his court and gave tax exemptions to clerics of all religions" (page 165). On the same page the author goes into the fact that "European popes and kings sent envoys to the Mongol court" and it wasn't just to get them on their side against the Muslims; it was also to find "Christians who had been cut off from the West by the spread of Islam, and in fact there were considerable numbers of Nestorian Christians in Central Asia... there were enough Europeans in Beijing to build a cathedral and appoint a bishop."

So who were the winners in this situation? Merchants, of course. The Mongols allowed mercantilism to rise so much that, as we'll see when we get to Ming China, nothing could stop the economic development, not even Daoism.

Who else won? Islam. The Mongols enabled Islam to stretch all the way into Central Asia, pushing out Buddhism (the previous benefitor of the silk route, all the way back in 300-500 AD) in some areas.

Who else? Europe. Europe was far behind in the 1200s, technologically and scientifically, compared to the East. Europe got gunpowder, printing, and the compass from China and learned astronomy and mathematics from Persia (page 166 of text).

What did China get? Money. And an economic system that would only grow in the next dynasty.

Studying: Mongol Campaigns

The first study guide question is about the military campaigns of the Mongols. This topic is the most fun, because the Mongols are just a heck of a lot of fun to talk about. It's also least likely to be the big essay on the test. So I'll attempt to be brief.

I knew about Temudjin (later called Chinggis/Genghis Khan) through having seen the movie Mongol. My professor had seen it, too, and said that it was pretty darn accurate according to historical record. Temudjin did marry Borte, his father was assassinated by a rival tribe, he did live in poverty and enslavement for much of his young life, and there was some question about the paternity of Temudjin's first child. The only big thing the movie left out: that Temudjin killed his own brother.

The movie only takes you up to when Temudjin had just begun uniting the tribes of Mongols under himself. Imagine, if you will, the kind of man you would have to be to gather all of these commanders, who are used to doing things their own way, under you as Great Khan. You would have to have a superior military, great tactics, and a vision for unification.

You would also have to bribe them all. That's what began Genghis Khan's raids.

As a Mongol, your life generally sucked. Your food was pretty scarce. You relied on grass plants on the Steppe and on horsemilk (which was usually made into an alcoholic drink called "kumis," strong stuff). Since this sucked so much, you looked to your local khan to lead you into raids to plunder settled people, so your life could get better. The Mongols were really good at this, because they were horse people. They could ride the hell out of their little horses. They also had light armor, which they supplemented by wrapping silk around their bodies as a base layer. Was this just for comfort's sake? No way. Silk could not be punctured by arrows. If a Mongol got shot by an arrow, yeah, it would pierce the skin, but it would take the silk in with it. Upon taking out the arrow, the silk was immeasurably useful, ensuring the arrowhead could be cleanly retrieved from the wound.

The normal ways of the Mongols: small-time raids of settlements, or extorting tribute from same. So why did these guys build the biggest empire Asia had ever seen? What changed?

One interesting theory is that the mean temperature of the Steppe regions declined leading up to the 1200s, leading to an increased scarcity of resources and restless, hungry Mongols. Their economy, which relied on trading horses with settled peoples (when they weren't raiding them) just couldn't sustain them. So a leader emerged from the North. Temudjin had had little-to-no contact with the settled peoples of the South, so he had very little respect for them. He gathered khan after khan under him, and, since so many people in the tribal confederation demanded lots of rewards in return for their service, Temudjin, now Genghis Khan (had been as of 1206), led his armies into China.


1209: Genghis Khan led armies into the area of the Tangut Xia dynasty (another traditionally nomadic people who had taken a chunk of China long ago). He captured a few cities, and the Xia were forced to surrender.

1211: Not content with petty raids, Genghis Khan made a major move into Jin Dynasty territory (North China). The Jin did not strike first, to their cost. The Mongols would raid and destroy a city, then withdraw, leaving the Jin to pick up the pieces. During this time, a Jin messenger, instead of delivering a message, totally stabbed the Jin in the back, informing the Mongols of the Jin army's location.

1214: Jin negotiated peace, and the Mongols withdrew, but their new emperor was worried about the security of their capital (modern-day Beijing). They up and moved south. Genghis took this as a violation of the peace accords, so set out again.

1215: Mongols burned the Central Capital of the Jin (Beijing). Jin's control diminished to almost nothing, a mere province around their Southern Capital (Kaifeng).

1218: Genghis led his First Western Campaign into Central Asia (Kazakhstan and such) and captured all the big cities there, then went to the Indus River in 1221. This is the first time Mongol forces were conquering Islamic cities. And boy, did they ever. This stuff was quite bloody, even though Genghis at first claimed he only wanted trade relations with the Khwarezmid. The Khan sent a 500-man caravan of Muslims to establish trading ties, but all of them were arrested on suspicion of spying. Then he sent three ambassadors, and (from wiki) this happened:

Genghis Khan then sent a second group of three ambassadors (one Muslim and two Mongols) to meet the shah himself and demand the caravan at Otrar be set free and the governor be handed over for punishment. The shah had both of the Mongols shaved and had the Muslim beheaded before sending them back to Genghis Khan. Muhammad also ordered the personnel of the caravan to be executed. This was seen as a grave affront to the Khan himself, who considered ambassadors "as sacred and inviolable." This led Genghis Khan to attack the Khwarezmian Dynasty. The Mongols crossed the Tien Shan mountains, coming into the Shah's empire in 1219.

After that, it was pretty much a bloodbath. The Khwarezmid empire was done. So much more to go into here, but we didn't really concentrate on it, so...

1222-1224: Genghis left for Mongolia, leaving main forces behind to finish the job.

1226-7: Xia had been sneaking around, trying to build support against the Mongols, and finally the Khan had had enough of that. He led the assault against the Xia again, and this time, it was personal. He obliterated every city in his path. He led the siege against the Xia capital. He died during this siege, but the army kept it under wraps. Quoting from the textbook by Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais (link):

When the Xia ruler offered to surrender, he was persuaded to walk out of the capital with a small entourage.... he was promptly hacked to death, and the Mongol troops, on entering the city, did their best to slaughter every living being in it.

At this point, when the Great Khan died, the Mongols had to regroup. That's the Mongol way. Genghis had picked his son Ogodei to be his successor, but this was not finalized for two years (until 1229). Our story pauses here, while, I assume, Ogodei was strengthening his empire, building his capital (Karakorum), and letting a few raids go around at the edges of their already quite large empire.

1235-1241 (2nd West Campaign): Ogodei's general Subotei and Jochi's son Batu (Jochi was Temudjin's first son, who was a bit bitter about Ogodei's succession) led the campaign to the West, first destroying the Bulgars, then going on to Moscow (not so important back then) and Vladimir (very important back then). They galloped through the Kipchak Steppe, Kiev, Liegnitz (Poland), Lithuania, Thrace, Bulgaria, Serbia, and part of Hungary. They might not have stopped there, were it not for Ogodei's death in 1241 that called them back.

1235-1281 (2nd East Campaign): Bam! no more Jin. Then Mongke Khan (successor of Ogodei) wanted to dip into the real South: the Song Empire. His brother Kublai was assigned this task. Problem: the Chinese navy was too good in the wetlands of South China. So the idea was to go around and flank them to the west. Kubilai went for the land of Dali, at first sending an envoy. Envoy was executed--and Mongols HATE that. Kublai captured the Dali king and found & killed the envoy murderer.

• 1250s: Mongols had Korea (Koryo).
  
• 1253-1257: Mongols still flanking Song, going south into Annam (Vietnam), but it's a little too wet for them and their horses.
• 1257-1279: The invade the Song empire. Back-and-forth until 1279.
  
• Success for the Mongols depended on Chinese generals surrendering.

1255-1260 (3rd West Campaign): Mongols go into Persia. Sack Baghdad, take Aleppo, then Damascus. Tried for Lebanon and Egypt, but were beaten back, finally settling in Persia for a good long time. The Khans of this region converted to Islam.

Kublai ruled in China in what became the Yuan Dynasty. For the first time since the Han Dynasty (one thousand years previous), China was united. And it took a nomadic conquest to do it.

I guess that wasn't very brief. I'd make a terrible history professor; I love the little details.

Merciless Ming

Last night I had a dream that Ming-Dynasty China (1400-1600 AD or so) was taking over the US. There were all these little hints that nobody else seemed to notice: a piece of pottery, horse tracks, etc. I was the only one in the country who realized that Ming China was coming from the past and preparing for a full-scale invasion of the country. The government only realized it when I showed them a piece of graffiti that clearly said "MING CHINA." By then, it might have been too late. The Ming men had adapted our technology to their knowledge of horseback riding, and they were poised to take us over. I woke up before I found out what happened.

My exam is on my mind. (In the spirit of full disclosure, however, I must say I gorged on Chinese food last night, too.) Therefore, I will be blogging about China again. Please don't complain, Lonely Readers of Hatandcoat, for, after all, nothing else has been going on here in this blog for over a week.

Robin Hood

I watched one of my favorite movies from teenage-hood last night, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. It sucks.

I still enjoyed it because I could watch anything with castles and fighting and a well-built community in the forest, and I'd watch Morgan Freeman read the back of a cereal box for two hours, Alan Rickman too, but watching Kevin Costner act is torturous. He tries to make all of his lines dramatic by hurling out the last word in a sentence as forcefully as he can. He trips over the language horribly. He has zero charisma.

The movie itself isn't much. It has a bunch of pretentious crap, like director's obsession with the fish-eye, or bubble, or whatever you call it lens. Conflicts are hastily thrown together and overblown. It's just not interesting.

My roommate is a theater critic and I get her input on productions or tv shows sometimes (though we rarely hang anymore due to scheduling). One insight she sometimes throws out is a particular performance or show and its quality having to do with the writing as opposed to the acting. I'll stretch that concept to direction and whatever else goes into making a film - lighting, editing, etc. I can't parse those things. I can't tell what did work and what didn't. Maybe Robin Hood was a stellar piece of writing, direction and everything but just needed a more charismatic star. Or maybe the whole thing sucked from top to bottom. I don't know. But the whole thing was downright silly in the rewatching. Too bad I spent many hours on that movie in my life. I've seen it about a dozen times.

And you know what...I'll watch it again. I loved their outfits.

Productivity

In the interest of greater productivity I am now imposing deadlines on myself. Instead of allowing myself open-ended time periods to take care of a bunch of stuff, I set a date. I will have my online class material done by Friday (possibly tomorrow - Thursday - for studying today was promising), request the quiz that day (it's a file that the prof. sends out), then I'll set a new timeline to take the final. The timeline stuff gets more difficult when it comes to learning new material for class, which is about as open-ended as it gets. It's also frustrating when your day gets away from you. But I figure that imposing such limitations may focus the learning mind.

There's no shortage of personal productivity gurus out there, I'm aware. On impulse I bought Getting Things Done, or "GTD," and I haven't cracked the book yet. And I don't plan to any time soon. I'm peripherally aware of productivity buzzwords such as Parkinson's Law, which is precisely what I'm going for with the deadlines, but I'm not a student of the genre. It would just be a whole bunch of stuff that I would inhale voraciously and do nothing about it.

I like the idea of Parkinson's Law because I hate losing a whole bunch of time unnecessarily. If I can define my goals for a given time I want them done asap, and if this is a tool that can focus the mind, bring it.

I read an article once about calculating your "fudge ratio," where you predict how long you'll take to complete a given task and divide it by how long it ended up taking. If your ratio is close to one then you're a good predictor. You can take it for periods of time over various tasks. If you know that you have a tendency overguess such and such a task by a certain percentage of its time, you plan accordingly. Over time your goal would be to get as close to one as possible. Then if you're a massive nerd you put it all on a spread sheet.

I'm a nerd, but a lazy one. I foresee many unfinished excel files.

Post Thanksgiving

Much of Thanksgiving was spent in the bathroom. I went to the gf's parents' place and someone in attendance tracked in one of those 24-48 hour bugs that completely levels you and empties your insides. Fun, fun. Gf and I are normally chatty when together, but the entire 4-hour drive home was in silence because talking was too painful for both of us.

I think my life is coming full circle, or at least my driving-listening habits. Along the way home I was in no mood for music. Instead I had a craving for talk radio. That didn't pan out at first, so we listened to classical for a while until we later found Prarie Home Companion. Yep, that's right. I'm in my 20s and I chose the two stops on the car radio dial that remind me of my mother. Garrison Keillor was a fixture in my home growing up. The man with the world's noisiest nostrils make me feel like it's Sunday afternoon, I'm playing Baseball Stars on the NES and in the other room I can hear that my Mom has NPR blaring in the kitchen while doing housework. But we were in the mood for relaxation the other night and found it.

I'd like to know if other people have the following experience. When I have a window open on my computer, there's often a pause while the computer is farting around trying to execute its next move, such as logging off my current page or loading a new one. Since I'm pretty impatient, that pause is plenty of time for me to decide that I want to look up something completely new. I then rapidly try to type a new url, usually wikipedia.org, before it loads the next page. It's a quick race against the comp that I just won about a minute ago. I do it all the time.

Messages in Books

I often buy used books, especially if there are some mementos left in them. I like bookmarks, receipts, memos. I like things written on the back-inside covers or maybe just one note in the margin on page 192. I don't like underlining and highlighting; it sounds like someone desperately trying to connect with the book, grappling with the neck of it, and I can't read with all that noise.

I like leaving my own mementos in books as well. I rarely write in them, but I leave bookmarks, receipts, memos, sometimes Polaroids or prints. If I ever sell a book, I hope that it will keep that memento like a secret until the right person finds it. If I lend you a book, it might very well have a bookmark that I insist you keep with it.

But today, as I lazily avoid working on my paper for class, I skimmed the spines of the books to my right and saw something I didn't ever recall: a heart sticker on the spine of my copy of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body.

And on the inside, opposite of the backmost cover, I found a note:


"Stamp redeemable for all positive feelings of receiving a 1.5 carat 'Bad Ted Special' diamond ring."

It's not my handwriting. The humor and the all-caps reminds me of an ex-girlfriend, but we were never even close to such a thing. Furthermore, it's not appropriate. Written on the Body is as sexy as its title, but, given the way the book ends, the reader would in not be in a joyous mood to be surprised by such a token.

But questions persist. Why did I never see these things before? I know I read this book to the end... maybe not this copy? Was someone proposed to through this book? And was the stamp unnecessary? Can I still redeem it? And where?

Doctor Who Ever

For the last few weeks, I've spent my off-hours consuming the four seasons of the new Doctor Who series (2005-2008). I became obsessed.

As a kid, I would often catch ancient episodes of Doctor Who on PBS. My memory of them is hazy: a succession of running through hallways; a galaxy of blinking lights and buttons; a parade of different people all swirling around different doctors. I liked the curly-haired and long-scarfed Doctor of Tom Baker the best, for no discernible reason. I never really knew who the enemies were, but I understood the concept: the Doctor regenerates into new bodies instead of dying, his nemesis is the Master, the Doctor travels in a TARDIS/time machine/police box, and there are a bunch of supporting characters as well. I liked the old series but wasn't very well versed in it.

After getting Netflix, I became aware of the Instant-Watch option for several TV shows. Doctor Who was one of them. On a whim, I started watching and that was it. I couldn't stop.

The imagination, the humor, and the darkness are what get me. The ethical dilemmas and the twisting continuities keep me around. In 2005, Christopher Eccleston played the Doctor, and his emotional fire was exhilarating. I hadn't expected such life to be breathed into the character. When he changed into David Tennant, I thought I'd be disappointed... but he just got better.

Doctor Who has been on for such a long time, and the writers really try to use everything in the universe of the show. Which is why watching Doctor Who on your computer is so important and interesting. When the Dalek showed up, I could look up "Dalek" on Wikipedia and see their whole history. I didn't look down the page enough to ruin anything (although really, since the whole show is about paradoxes and time travel, does it matter that I know future events?). The only better way to view Doctor Who would be if they hyperlinked the image of each character on the screen, so I could just click on Rose Tyler and go here, the Master and go here, and so on. (I'll take .5% of the profits on that innovation, thanks.)

But the show is formulaic. Random people die just so the Doctor stays alive. Or somebody else does the dirty work while the Doctor sticks to his nonviolence routine. I'd have loved it if the simple, boxed-in, Twilight-Zone-esque drama of the Midnight episode had been resolved more cleverly than it was (watch it and you'll see what I mean; the whole buildup was so intense, and it really had me twisted in knots, but then it ended so abruptly).

All the same, it is worth watching, 2005 on. (On the other hand, I can't say I'm all that interested in Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff. It feels a bit like ST:TNG's Voyager--a noncompelling lead character mired in mildly-interesting plotlines.)

Guest Post 2: "Point In Case"

Just to follow-up on my blog entry, the most fabulous thing happened this week. My theory was proven correct (of course, as a scientist I should right the disclaimer that nothing in this world is ever PROVEN, it's just SUPPORTED...whatever...this is practically proof). In the very same bathroom mentioned in the previous post regarding bathroom etiquette and signage. A year or more ago, they decided to 'improve' our bathroom. These improvements included a simple removal of the wall-mounted unit that normally includes mounts for toilet paper, seat protectors and the disposal for tampons and pads. This was replaced with a double-roll toilet paper dispenser SANS seat protector holder (which, now, by-the-way, is now perched on top of said 'new-and-improved' TP dispenser in it's manufacturer's cardboard packaging (which, I find hilariously named 'Rest Assured' seat covers, produced by PROTECTO...sounds like a cartoon superhero), and SANS disposal. Now, and pardon the forthcoming visual, ladies have to wrap up their items, carry them out of the stall and throw them in the trash by the sinks. Not a very private endeavor. At any rate, I go to use the restroom and I notice a green plastic wrapper for a pad on the floor of the stall. I think to myself "Boy, wouldn't it be funny if someone were doing this just to make a stand that they want a little garbage can in the stall to spare us the embarrassment of toting used sanitary items (which are SO not sanitary!) around in semi-public?". Sure enough, trip No. 2 to the bathroom reveals a neatly TP-wrapped, used pad on the floor. Trip No. 3 (hey...I drink a lot of coffee, what can I say), reveals yet another wrapped, used, pad and a note from man-eating-doctor (signed and everything) firmly stating 'Please put tampons and sanitary napkins in the trash.' And I think: this is the perfect storm. Let's see if the sign actually works. Under my theory the perp. is either a) ignorant (in the original sense of the word, H&C) or b) lazy/inconsiderate/moronic/nasty (or all of the above) and in both cases, signage won't matter. Trip Nos. 4 and 5 reveal an accumulation of used sanitary napkins despite the sign. Glory, you ask? Well yes, but the real glory, is that the next day, there was a little trash can in the stalls. But the signs remain...

I'm Changing Doctors

My Dr. irritated the hell out of me. I went to her a couple of months ago with a minor issue. No biggie, she prescribed something, it went away in like 2 seconds. While there I presented another ongoing minor issue that I normally don't care about but will make the effort to solve while I happen to be at the Dr's office. She prescribed something for that too and told me to wait until the first thing resolves first. Ok. First thing resolves. I drag my feet a little in getting the second thing done because it's minor and I forget about it. Eventually I go to the pharmacy to drop off prescription 2. Next day I get a call that the prescription is discontinued and they will need to contact the Dr to get another one filled. Next day I get a call from the Dr's office but I'm at work and let it go to voicemail. I forget about it for a couple weeks. Yeah, I know, repeatedly forgetting is not a good habit, but the forthcoming is quite irritating.

I try listening to the message that's been sitting on my voicemail for a couple weeks now. The Dr's secretary's accent is so thick that I don't have a clue what she's saying (gf had to listen and send me a transcript. I was very impressed.) They want to send me to a frickin' podiatrist (completely irrelevant). !? Ok. So, I call their office like 4 times before someone finally picks up. I give them my shpiel, eventually get the Dr. on the phone, and she says that she doesn't have a diagnosis so I have to either be referred to a specialist or come in to see her. !? Convo. goes something like this:

Me: Well, you prescribed me this medication in the first place, can you prescribe me a generic or something similar?
Her: I cannot prescribe you something without seeing you. Do you know what it is?
Me: Yes, it's __________.
Her: Ok, you need to see a specialist or come in to see me.
Me: I don't need all of that. I know what it is. It's a perennial thing and I've fixed it before. You saw it, gave me [a bum prescription]. Can you give me a new one?
Her: You need to make an appointment. I do not have a diagnosis written here in my chart.

We then go back an forth saying the same things. There's a lull in the conversation, she says goodbye and hangs up. I'm pissed. I call back, get her secretary on the phone (Dr's no longer available) and tell her that I should not be penalized and charged for another Dr's visit just because she didn't write the diagnosis down in the first place. F$^& that. I lay down my argument, she tells me the Dr won't be available until such and such a time, and I hang up. I call back at such and such a time, and the secretary tells me that the Dr has just called the pharmacy with a new prescription.

Huzzah.

How To Study Chinese History, Part 1

I'm taking an East Asian Civ course right now, and it's by far my favorite class. I'd always heard that China is fascinating, but, well, it really is. So much intrigue. So many grasps for power. So much time spent thinking about how to govern. China's had so much success in ruling vast amounts of land, and yet the failures are fascinating, too.

At any rate, going into my class, I had no frame of reference. I couldn't even get the hang of how to pronounce the names of people and places. And there were so many people to remember. but on the test, I ended up with a 97%. I did it by: watching movies.

The first major player in Chinese history, the dude who changed it all, was Ying Zheng, king of Qin, who conquered all the other territories and became the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di. His dynasty lasted... 15 years. Qin Shi Huang Di is regarded as ruthless, violent, militaristic, bloodthirsty, but brilliant and visionary. He certainly changed the game forever by uniting his people, but he did so in a bloody and catastrophic way that caused a huge amount of suffering. Thus he's dealt with in contradictory ways. There are two great movies to watch to get some background on this guy.

• Hero (the Jet Li movie).
  Qin Shi Huang Di is shown to be highly protected due to all the attempts on his life. And he's shown to be powerful and mighty. But we're never shown all the blood spilled by the First Emperor; we're only told that he's disliked. This movie was directed by a Chinese man whose loyalty to China was questioned by the government; my teacher theorizes that that's why it shows Qin Shi Huang Di in such a moderately-good light.
  
  Why it's a good movie: Jet Li, swords, fighting, cinematography
  Why it's useful for studying: short, easy to remember
  
  
• The Emperor's Assassin.
  We're told a story about Qin Shi Huang Di at the beginning of his rise to power (back when he was just Ying Zheng) and shown how he progresses through the land, gradually encroaching upon every land. As he gains power, he loses his ability to connect to people.
  
  He sends his wife to a neighboring territory to encourage them to send an assassin, so he can have a pretext for invading. She sees how terrible Ying Zheng is becoming, and sends an assassin to kill him for real. There's also a love affair. Also lots of intrigue.
  
  What's great about this movie is that the acting pulls you through all the intrigue. Great acting all around. Another great thing for studying is that it shows you all the places that Ying Cheng conquers, and gives you two more important names to remember: Lü Buwei and Li Si. Don't worry that they try to make the case of Lü Buwei being the Emperor's father--that's ridiculous.
  
  Why it's a great movie: acting, plot, suspense, a little fighting
  Why it's useful for study: you'll never forget Ying Zheng afterwards

Like I said, Qin Shi Huang Di's dynasty lasted for 15 years. That's less than half of the time it took him to wage war and unify his country. He spent most of his life killing people, won the whole shebang in 221 BC, and died in 210 BC. The government was too severe for the populous to support, and none of the warlords in the outlying counties liked the Qin government much for destroying their lands. So then there was a brief period of unrest--a very fascinating time called the Chu-Han Contention.

See, when Ying Zheng/Qin Shi Huang Di died, his eunuch Zhao Gao conspired with Li Si to put the ony one of the Emperor's sons whom they could control on the throne. Bad mistake; the emperor was completely unable to quell rebellion that sprang up all over the land. I'm not sure he even tried. There were many people vying to take down the Qin, and the two prominent people among them were Liu Bang and Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu is portrayed in history like a barbarian, as ruthless as the Qin emperor. Liu Bang is thought to have been more of a diplomat and much more lenient with respect to vanquished foes and the commoners.

I nailed this part of my test, and I lay the credit all at the feet of the Chinese TV drama called "The Story of the Han Dynasty". I don't know how to buy this series here in the US, but, if you search, I'm sure you can find it online somewhere...

"Story" is a bit of a soap opera when it comes to the female roles (but make no mistake, Liu Bang's wife was quite ruthless and became a powerful figure in Chinese history). I suggest watching at least the first 40 episodes to completely understand all that went on. It's not superbly acted, but it's involving enough to get hooked on. I admit some of the episodes suffer from bloat, where some dude laments his fortune for five or ten minutes, but ehh, just fast forward through that. Liu Bang is portrayed as such a buffoon, but he's lovable nonetheless.

I also suggest watching it on your computer with an eye on Wikipedia in another screen. That really helped me; as I watched and thought, That can't possibly be accurate, I'd look it up and, sure enough, what I was seeing matched up with ancient Chinese texts.

Selling

I need to sell my car because I'm now down here with all this public transportation available. It's been sitting unregistered and un-tagged in my parents' driveway for a year now (yeah, I should've sold it a while ago). The combo. of craigslist (daily posting), facebook marketplace, my sister's coworker network, and general word of mouth has produced a total of four inquiries after what I guess is over a month of advertising. One was from Canada (no thanks), one whose work status has changed from full to part time so they could no longer afford it, and the other two were friend and a neighbor who were both only "maybe" interested. I'm going to have to significantly reduce my price to sell, and finding someone online is way too unreliable according to scary accounts that I've read. I just want it gone now, so it's to the dealer for me.

Everyone I talk to instinctively says "oh, don't go to the dealer, you'll get screwed." Well, we'll see. The car's got a few problems, but I just put over $700 into it to fix things like rotors and brakes, so those bastards should give me some sugar. If I'd have known that selling would be such a bitch, I'd have saved that money.

I don't know if it's an instinctive or a learned thing, but I don't seem to have the natural ability to sell things. A couple years ago I set up a flea market table with someone, and the experience clearly told me that I had no natural ability to move merchandise. I would price cheap things way too highly and expensive things for pennies. I wouldn't chat up the walkers-by. More recently at the restaurant, I feel a sort of guardianship of my customers' wallets and don't upsell just for the sake of driving their checks up. When they ask for advice I offer the cheaper of two options. I can't help it.

I think the upside of this is that when I actually do believe in what I'm trying to push I'm very persuasive. When someone asks for a specific item or a choice btw. two, I give a very good and convincing reason for what I like. I think this might be an indicator that I might actually be good at selling once I find the bangin' sh**.

There was one guy at the restaurant who sold stuff for Quixtar and he was a natural born salesman. I sat down one day and listened to him break down the diffferent types of people and how to sell to them. It was fascinating. He told me his strategies for how to read people on the spot and deal with them a certain way. Now, talking to different people differently is natural. All the time I catch myself saying to one table with big smile "Thank you very much, everyone have a wonderful evening," then literally turn around, put on a casual sly friendly expression and say "'night, guys." But this guy he had a whole set of theory behind it. But when we got to talking - briefly - about specific products I didn't get the sense that he was that especially discerning about what was good or bad. He seemed Bullish about what he thought could make some money. I genuinely admire his sales charisma and his ability to push things, but I don't think I could pull it off. Not for me.

Interactions

I've figured out that you just can't predict how well you will get along with somebody based on interests alone. First impressions are useless. Some people will just never interact well, and you won't know it until you both face some sort of stress.

I will never interact well with depressive, bottled-up people; I won't cheer them up. And people who need a lot of approval and constant agreement will never get along well with me for extended periods of time. No matter how nice we are to each other, it will never happen.

Word Alert: FOB, ABC, and ABCDEFG

FOB means Fresh Off the Boat, and refers to any immigrant who doesn't quite get the culture yet, or who doesn't even know how embarrassing they are to their children. See http://mymomisafob.com/, a website whose tagline, "Is funk means sexy?" says it all.

ABC means American-Born Chinese. I overheard this term spelled out in my East Asian Civ class today, along with FOB (pronounced like the word "fob").

ABCD means American Born and Confused Desi. "Desi" comes from multiple South Asian languages and means "of the country," so desi has come to mean an Indian or Pakistani in America or Great Britain.

Some have attempted to make the term ABCDEFG, American Born and Confused Desi Emigrated From Gujarat. Someone please explain to me how they could be American-born and also emigrated from Gujarat, which is not in America.

There have been update attempts, like FOP (fresh off the plane) and JOJ (just off the jet), but none of them sing of complete unknowingness like FOB does. FOBs are so FOB, they don't even know you can take a plane!

Please note that even American-born people can be called FOBs if they do something really obviously against cultural norms, like eating popcorn with chopsticks.

Reference here.

Strathmore, Posture, and Tango, Oh Yeah

You are correct, H&C does fill a very special niche in the blogosphere. I'm sure the world needs more off-the-cuff ramblings.

So, I'm bringing two ongoing blog subjects up here: posture and Tango lessons. I was chugging along, leading my partners just fine during classes, but my back started hurting after the first dance and steadily a little worse over the night. My teachers gave me some posture advice that completely changed the way I approached everything, and all of a sudden I can't lead effectively. I don't give clear signals with my chest because now it's all supposed to move as one unit with my whole torso, which I'm not at all used to. I used to lean way forward with my chest apparently. Now the whole body structure is shot: leg movements get all screwed up, my partner doesn't know what I'm doing, I trip over her feet...it's a mess and I'm back to frustration phase.

I'm walking around trying to implement the changes that they told me about posture when I go about my everyday business. I realized that I can't change them all at once, so I settled on one: standing with my weight tending toward the balls of my feet. I figure that's a more fundamental approach. Usually I completely forget about it then remember and stand that way for about three seconds while the metro is pulling up in front of me. Hey, it's a start.

Last night gf, gf's coworker, and I went to a performance at the strathmore. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. They started out with a performance of the overture to The Thieving Magpie, then a musical interpretation of Poe's works written by the conductor, then some symphony written by some Finnish guy. The culmination of the Poe stuff was the Raven performed by some guy that looked just like John Astin. I kept saying that every time I saw him, annoying my viewing partner. Eventually I looked at the program, and sure enough it was indeed John Astin. How cool! None of us particularly liked his reading, unfortunately. I personally didn't like any of the five readers. Though I don't like dramatic readings in general.

The highlight of the night for me was watching the conductor during the Finnish symphony. I've never watched a conductor for any extended length of time before, and it's quite a treat. He got into quite a groove up there.

I just took a peek at the H&C site and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Districted posting archive that said "Cream with a friend." !!! What's going on over there? It was short for "...Voting: Ice Cream..." Yeah, kind of a disappointment.

There's a Blog For It

We are getting to the point where blogs are about anything and everything. A few months ago, a friend (let's call her... Juice) was saying how hilarious she found the blog http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/. But, as she lives in DC, she was seeing a lot of douchebags with douchebags hanging around, smoking, one hand tucked into their velvet sportscoats, no hot chicks in sight. She wanted to register douchebagswithdouchebags.com, but she found it was already taken.

Have a funny concept? Look it up, there's a blog for it already. That's what makes blogs like Hatandcoat so valuable: there's no concept.

I happened across a concept blog today and thought of a certain guest blogger. H&C's Girlfriend, this blog's for you:

http://mustwashhands.blogspot.com/

Election Night: Couldn't Study Edition

I had 40 pages to read for 11/5, but I was stuck with an 11/4 mindset. I could not stop wondering about the election.

Some of my roommates were not very interested. They preferred to watch the House marathon on USA, letting me flick back to CNN or FoxNews during the commercial breaks.

(Yes, FoxNews. I wanted to see how morose they were. I was not disappointed. I especially liked how they concentrated on the few Congressional races that Republicans won. Whenever they had to report a state going to Obama, they got mopey.)

(That's not to say that CNN was much better. CNN's coverage was so booooooring, I couldn't argue with my roommates when they said they'd prefer watching an Englishman limp around a hospital. CNN's anchors were so robotic. No enthusiasm. That was disappointing. MSNBC turned out to be much much better.)

Then my other roommate came home and ran into the living room, saying "What's going on! What I miss? What's... what are you watching?"

I pointed at her and said to my other roomies: "This is the enthusiasm I was looking for!" I happily turned it back to MSNBC just as Obama's win was announced.

"AHHHHAAHAAHHHHHHH!" I and the latecoming roommate screamed. We jumped around and hugged and highfived and screamed some more. It was no U Street celebration, but hey, it was exciting nonetheless.

Stayed up, watched McCain apologize for the "associations" attacks, and heard Obama reach for the stars. I didn't sleep until about 2am. Test was 10am, and, ehh, what the heck. Who cares about cultural anthropology when you saw History made last night?

Miso Soup Tips

I made miso soup this morning mostly to entice my roommates into waking up early with me and going to vote.

Non-instant miso soup is so easy, it's retardulous. I used daikon chopped into thinnish rectangles, dried seaweed that I hydrated first, green onion, and tofu. But here's the basic recipe:

miso
dashi (a kind of Japanese soup stock) or any soup stock
any kind of vegetable and/or tofu

• Pour water into a pot and pour some dashi in, just enough so that it's not uber-powerful.
• When boiling (or before), add vegetables. If some take less time to cook, throw them in toward the end. For example, daikon and carrots take longer, so I put those in first, but green onion, seaweed, and tofu don't need much time to become palatable, so I put them in when the daikon or carrots are almost done.
• When veggies are done, stop the heat. Take a spoonful of miso, put it in a ladle, and add water to the ladle.
• Muck around the stuff in the ladle until the miso is not a paste, then stir the murky liquid into the general soup.
  
• Repeat adding miso until flavor intensity acheived.
  

Details: miso is fermented soybean paste, available at most stores these days but certainly at Whole Foods and Asian stores. Buy it in tubs or plastic bags. There's white, red, brown, brown rice, etc. varieties. They're all good for you. White is more creamy and light, red is a little more flavorful, brown is rich. No big deal. Store in the fridge FOREVER; I've never known miso to ever go bad.

Dashi is available at Asian stores. It's a nice touch to the soup, it's cheap, and it's easy. If you can't find an Asian grocery store, just use vegetable or chicken stock. Not as authentic, but ehh. Just pour a little in; you want a touch of a base, but you don't want to make chicken noodle miso. Also, you could always be adventurous and make your own dashi, but it involves more Asian stuff. Finally, a Japanese woman told me that the key to a good miso soup balance of flavors was that, if you are going to use vegetables only, then use the fish dashi, but if you use shrimp or any kind of seafood in your soup, use veggie dashi.

Tofu: firm or soft does not matter. (That's what she said.)

Consumption tip: When eating miso, the Japanese use chopsticks to pick out the veggies and tofu, but for the broth, they just drink out of the bowl. Put down your spoon and take a drink. (That's what she said.) You'll be glad you did.

This Post Was Supposed To Be On Districted

But the forthcoming stylings are too varied for my coblogger.

A funny thing on the front page of the Washington Post: John McCain's goal is to keep black people out of the white house. "John McCain faces and enormous task in trying to prevent Barack Obama from winning the White House and becoming the first African American president in the nation's history." Just some funny wording I noticed in passing that I decided to point out.


Apparently there is a comedian somewhere who jokes "I have news for you, hiking is just walking." I like it much as a hobby sometimes, but it can be a little boring after a while. As far as I can tell the Appalachian Trail is not all that interesting. After so much time walking on a rocky path it's not all that interesting. For the first time in a pretty long while yesterday I got bored of hiking. Gf pointed out to me that hiking is so much more fun when you have a peak to reach. I agree. You do all this work and you struggle and you get to the top, eat some lunch, and look at the farms below you. Then on the way down you feel a little spent, like you've reached your day's sublimity. Months ago our first hike together was Old Rag. That was great. I understand that it's extremely crowded usually, but we strategically went on Easter Sunday.

I haven't changed much since childhood in my bug curiosity. A highlight of yesterday's excursion for me was when we stopped to read a guidepost and found a colony of inchworms wandering around. They move so interestingly. We decided they must all have incredibly fit abs. At one point there was one larger one and one way smaller one. The smaller one was doing a tentative back and forth thing, acting like maybe a newborn or a toddler. We thought such limited movement was all he was capable of, but then the big brother decided he was going to plow right over him. Then the little guy scurried like I have never seen an inchworm move.

I'm going to dedicate myself to 15 minutes of meditation per day. It doesn't seem like much. I'm not sure I want to do it all that much, but it seems to bring benefits with it. I just did a quick look online to find something cool to link to here. I thought "hmm, what's the difference bewteen regular old meditation and transcendental meditation?" Turns out Transcendental Meditation is a friggin' trademark!

Guest Post

From Girlfriend:

Bathroom Etiquette: Wipe, wash and no signage! (NOT a micturation blog)

We all know proper bathroom etiquette, right? I guess for girls it’s a little different than for boys, but basically, if you miss, wipe it up and wash your hands when you’re done. It doesn’t take a scientist. And I would know, I’m a scientist. What’s not cool is people posting signs in public bathrooms telling you exactly what proper etiquette is. Really? Am I a child? Is there anyone in my whole building who has never been taught this? Right about now, you’re tempted to say “Yes, Girlfriend, there are people who have never been taught.” But here’s my argument.

My feeling is that people who don’t perform what society considers adequate etiquette, simply don’t care. And you hanging your sign there isn’t going to make them care. Much like protests, hanging signs might make you feel better, but do they really do anything? Is someone going to say “JESUS…there are a thousand people outside my house screaming with signs! Garn, a thousand people can’t possibly be wrong! I guess I’ll change my mind!” Sidetracked. I guess the point is that I think it’s patronizing to hang signs detailing the intimacies of how to wash your hands. And for those people who think that some haven’t been taught…well they’re not going to read it, anyway.

This practice seems to be rampant at my place of work. Everyone has their own version of the sign. We went through a debacle a few years back where a sign appeared hanging on the mirror in front of the sinks that said “Wash your hands! You MUST wash your hands!” That was really the gist of it. Just God demanding you wash your hands. Well the sign disappeared, much to my delight. Apparently someone else feels as I do about bathroom signage. Well, the next day it reappeared and it was signed from one of the senior scientists down the hall (aka God, at least in her mind). As if to say “This is MY sign, and if you don’t like it, you can come tell me, and I will eat you alive.” Well, the sign kept anonymously disappearing. After a month or so, said man-eating-scientist gave up her quest and we’ve all been walking around with dirty hands ever since. Take THAT.

H&C Leaves Out the Best Parts

I seemed to recall that story that H&C wrote about in his last post on Districted. Which one? Oh, right, there were several. I mean the one about the torture device in the shape of a bull. It's the one in the last half of his last paragraph. I'd like to link directly to it, but single-subject paragraphs are for losers, apparently.

I thought I remembered it because it was tied to some vocabulary word I'd learned long ago. I checked Wikipedia, and found out why I remembered it so vividly: that Greek king tested out his "brazen bull" torture device on the inventor himself.

The inventor was showing the king how the thing worked. "And here is where you place the victim." He unlocked and opened the hatch.

"And you say the screams will really sound like a bull?" the king asked.

"Absolutely," the inventor said. He climbed into the hatch, pointing to the inside of the head. "These tubes have been calibrated to modulate the sound of whatever voice inside into the roar of a maddened bull. See, here is the first valve, where-"

"I can't quite see what you're talking about," said the king.

"It's just under here," the inventor said, kneeling down.

The hatch slammed and the lock clicked shut. The inventor started shouting. The king said, "Hmm, yes, well that doesn't sound quite like a bull. Let's see what he sounds like over a fire."

They put the brazen bull, inventor inside, over the fire. The king waited until the screaming had turned fully bull-like before letting the inventor out.

"Did you hear me... my king... screaming inside?"

"Yes, I did! And it jolly well sounded like a bull, too. Guards, take him to his reward."

And the guards threw the inventor off of a cliff.

Eventually, the king was himself roasted in that bull, but that is another story.

Random Non-Sequitur Posts Are For Hatandcoat

So let's keep that over here, eh? I offer you a challenge: try to stick to one subject on Districted. I'll try your method over here, sometimes...

I got hated on today on my bike on Georgia Avenue, going south towards the Beltway. All of a sudden, the road was congested and the cars behind me kept honking. They kept yelling as they passed me all too closely "Right side!" or "Side!" Maryland law states bikes are allowed to use the roads with all the rights of other vehicles, except that they are prohibited from "the travel lanes of roads where there exists a smooth shoulder or bicycle lane (except to make left turns or to avoid debris in the shoulder space)." There was no shoulder, and there was plenty of stuff to avoid all the way on the right. I was as much on the right side as I felt safe to be. Covered! So I biked up to one old lady while she was at a red light. She refused to roll down her window (although she had rolled it down to yell "side" at me). I said "But you don't know the law!" She shook her head and jabbed her finger at the right side of the road. "But that's not the law!" I said, as she drove off. Hopefully she will look it up.

I didn't end up spending Halloween with my friends last night. I felt bad because they'd lugged my Little-Prince-o-lantern to the house where we were going to be. I had my costume ready: I was going to be a biker with a (Tostitos) chip on my shoulder. I was going to walk around like I owned the place, cutting people off, shouting "LEFT" whenever I would go around someone else, and chiming my bike bell whenever I was moving. I got ready to go and found that the tire that I'd fixed by myself was again deflated. I thought, hm, it's in Virginia, and walking to the Metro adds about 40 min to the total time, plus I'm getting on the road late, plus I have a lot to study... man, I want to see people but I'd mainly be going just not to be a flake. So I gave up, fixed the tire, curled up with my schoolbooks and read and slept the night away.

What's up with everybody trying to call Halloween "Hallowe'en"? In the US, UK, and Canada, the predominant spelling is sans apostrophe. The original name of the day is "All Hallows' Even." Yes, in poetry, some people abbreviate v with apostrophe, and that's likely how we got to spell it "Halloween." There's no need to be overly archaic about putting the apostrophe in. I don't know that that was ever a standard spelling. It just looks weird, and I think that's why people use it--it makes them appear smarter for using "Hallowe'en" instead of the common spelling.

Also, I overheard a woman at my school, an administrator, say she didn't want to call 10/31 "Halloween." Why? "Because it's the Devil's birthday." Come on! There is no Satan-worship in the origins of Halloween. Lots of cultures celebrate days of the dead, but they're never Satanic. Samhain, the pagan god of the Celts, was not their idea of Satan. Furthermore, just dressing up in costumes does not mean you are worshipping the Devil. I wonder if this woman believes in giving gifts on 12/25. Does she believe in Easter egg hunts?

I am not prepared for my Japanese test, coming up on December 7. I'm really not. What am I doing, blogging like this? I should go away and study.

Some Hummus (The "I Made It Myself" Kind)

I wrote of a recent Whole Foods excursion recently, when I found myself buying only snacks. Really expensive snacks. Delicious but exorbitant snacks.

I love snacking. It's the best part about the "don't eat big meals, just graze all day" kind of diet. But I don't love spending ridiculous amounts of money on snacks.

When I went back to Whole Foods two days ago, I thought to myself, "What's a good snack that I can make myself?" I had already done homemade salsa and homemade tortilla chips earlier in October (with fresh, self-picked tomatoes). What else could I... hummus!

Hummus. What could be easier? Chickpeas, tahini, blend, serve. I bought the ingredients plus garlic and prepared for greatness.

Some Hummus

1 15-ounce can of chickpeas/garbanzo beans
some raw tahini
some apple cider vinegar
some lemon juice
some garlic (8 cloves)
some ground cumin
some olive oil

(I used a blender. You people with food processors, I hope you know how lucky you are.)

1. Drain can of liquid, saving the liquid in a cup.
2. Put about half the can of chickpeas into the blender.
3. Pour a little of that bean juice from the can into the blender.
   
4. Glug some apple cider vinegar into the blender.
5. Put 2-3 spoonfuls of well-stirred tahini in blender.
6. Cover top of stuff in blender with a dusting of cumin.
7. Mash garlic cloves, or dice up into little pieces. Add half to blender.
8. Blend.
9. Add the olive oil that you forgot. Blend more.
10. It's probably too thick to blend properly. Dump it into a bowl.
11. Do the same thing over again, but this time add lemon juice instead of the vinegar, since you just found it in the back of the fridge. Add a little more bean juice, too, to make it blendable.
12. Aww yeah, it's blending now.
13. Spoon the thick first batch into the second batch and blend on high.
14. Add more cumin because you don't know if it's too bland or not.
15. (That was a little too much cumin, but you'll find that out later.)
16. Blend again. Aww, fudge, it's not blending any more.
    
17. Oh well, it's done anyway.
    
18. Spatula it out into a bowl.
    
19. Make a little hole in the center of the hummus and pour a little olive oil in. Serve.

Some parts were wayyyy too cumin-y. But on the whole, this turned out really well. And I now have a ton of hummus. Well, actually, about the amount of 4 Trader Joe's hummus containers. I will make again.

What Kind Of A Blog Post Comes Out When You Have About 15 Minutes...

Just went for a run on the Custis Trail. I don't like the feeling when you're running and it's cold out and the back of your throat burns from inhaling such frigidity.

I have yet to get into any sort of meditative state while running. I also don't have any experience with the "runner's high." Aak's Dad is a marathoner and I think once said that if you've run over six miles many times and haven't gotten it, then something's weird. Well, six is about my upper limit. I think I'm a natural runner, and I think I could do pretty well if I were to train myself to go higher mileages, but I just don't enjoy it enough. I like it a lot more that I have a running partner these days, marathoner girlfriend, but that's pretty much the only reason. I used to row in college, and that was a lot of running. I hated it every time.

We're going hiking this weekend in the Shenandoahs, at Matthew's Arm. (Btw, Aak should totally bike that trail I'm linking to here).

I caught David Letterman last night for the first time in ages. It's good to know that the show hasn't really changed over time. He seemed more bored with it than I remember, but I only saw the early part of the show. He was always bored with the monologue, like something he needed to get through. Last night he had a sketch where they had a camera set up across the street from a Lens Crafters and they wanted to see how many people dressed like Sarah Palin they could fit into it. So, one would walk in and stand behind the glass door and...well, it was funny. Gotta go.

Sometimes at the end of posts I fight the urge to sign off like it's an e-mail.

Phone Screening

I was just screened over the phone.

A girl from Match.com emailed me, I emailed her back, and in her next email she asked for my "#." I thought that was pretty fast, but I gave her my digits anyway.

She called me just now, from a "Private" number, and said she wanted to make sure that I wasn't crazy. I guess that she's had experiences with crazy people before?

She started asking me about stuff, and when she found out that I had an OKCupid account, too, she looked it up on the phone with me. Which led to her asking me how many girls I'd slept with... and she was shocked at the answer...

After I hung up the phone, I looked up her OKCupid profile. She was a lot more racy on OKCupid than she was on Match. And her answer for "What I'm Really Good At"... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Hypersocial

I'm going to have to wean myself off caffeine now. I'm perfectly happy drinking a ton of coffee throughout the day. I drink 2 in the morning, and extra couple while at work, and a whole pot while at home studying. It's great and I think it has minimal effect on me except maybe in waking up in the morning. I may now need the boost to feel normal. But I now feel like I'm so in the habit that it's just so natural.

I held off from coffee drinkerdom for a long while because I figured it was an inevitable thing to become hooked eventually. Yes, I know this is wrong, but it seemed that every adult alive is completely hooked. My Mom gets headaches when she doesn't have hers. So, I figured I was merely delaying and waited for the time to come. That time came with the introduction of coffeemate.

I too feel sometimes like a High-kick-a-you-kick after a day of studying solo. The other day I spent a whole day reading out of a damn textbook in my apartment. By the end I felt physically restless and cabin-fevery. It's those times when I most realize the value of social contact. I think that this habit of a solitary pursuit is making me more social. I go for broke more around people after being away from them for a while. I strike up more convos, tell more jokes, listen more, tell more stories, ask more questions, etc. And it's genuine. It helps with the sales mindset that waiting tables relies on. That night gf and I had our weekly tango lessons and I think it was the single best class we've had.

About tango (if our massive readership has any experience), I find the close embrace far easier than the open embrace. Open E felt more mechanical and technical and made it way harder to simply feel the music and improvise. It's possible that it was simply harder for the first classes where we were getting the basics down and now it's just clicking, but it seems more than that. When we go back to doing open E it still seems technical, though it's easier having done closed E for a couple classes now. I feel like open will be a lot of flashy fun later when we know what we're doing. Right now, though, I loooove feeling the rhythm of the music and dancing accordingly. My lower back starts to hurt because I'm in the habit of bending down to my partners (I'm 6'1"), and I need to rectify this tendency, but it's a blast.

Religulous. Again.

Aak, girlfriend, and I went to see Religulous the other night. I enjoyed it immensely. Of course, he picked some pretty weak proponents of religion to argue with, so it was easy to make them look ridiculous. When I invited roommate and her mate to see it they turned it down because they didn't want to see Bill Maher talk down to idiots for two hours, and that's exactly what it was. But you gotta hand it to him. Or at least I do. It was funny. He interspersed discussions with clips that usually mocked the person he was talking to. There was one particular clip of some TV show called Hell Town that had me laughing long after it had passed. You know, one of those laughters where everyone else has moved on and you're still there trying to stifle for about ten minutes because you don't want to piss them off.

The thing I like was how ballsy the movie was. It's true that once you come to matters of faith you're supposed to stop asking once someone throws it out there. I wonder what sort of mortal danger Bill Maher is from whackballs right now. I also liked in the end how he took a stand. It wasn't just two hours of debunking and mockery. He gets on his soapbox and talks about how we need the hocus pocus of religion out of the world's decision making processes. I didn't expect that.

As I'm sure has happened with other people, post movie consisted of a pretty fun and lengthy conversation between us. I don't believe in any religion, but I am curious about whether or not it has had a net benefit on mankind historically. Probably yes, I say. Pissy anti-religious people like Bill Maher always point out wars, terrorist events, and other killings such as the crusades, 9/11 and other suicide bombings, the inquisition, and other easy to cite very very bad things as reasons why religion is devastating to mankind. Fair enough. But how much has human kind survived and thrived based on the stabilizing force that religion creates for all of us? I mentioned this to Aak, and he mentioned how he was doing research for his anthropology class on Muslims. I don't remember the details, but he talked about a bunch of rituals that some people at some event were doing. (I think it was an open-air market?) He'll have to comment on the specifics if he cares enough, but it made my point pretty well.

I just wonder if it's possible for people to have such a stabilizing force that will spread moral behavior without cooking up what I believe to be utter fictions. I don't need to believe that some white bearded guy in the sky sent his son/self to "save" me by getting whipped with a cat of nine tails. I can simply accept that it's wrong for me to steal my neighbor's possessions. Why? Because if I can steal his, he can steal mine. Plus life is so much more enjoyable if you get along with and take care of one another. No resurrections necessary to teach me that.

Back to the movie. I was bummed that Bill Maher didn't spend more time with people who seemed level headed and faithful. There was an astronomer priest who I wanted to hear more from. There were others I can't think of at the moment. He certainly could've found some more. But I would have loved to see someone challenge him.

All in all, a well spent 10.75.

Ha! Sometimes I need to read more before I post. In looking for the above link, I found the post that Aak has already written about this movie. Oh yeah, I forgot about the Japanese Animism.

Well, now I've spent a bunch of time on this and it's going up anyway.

Hikkikomori no Anime

A "hikkikomori" in Japanese is one who secludes him/herself from society, staying in an apartment or a single room all day and night. This is a growing phenomenon in Japan. Sometimes it's in a family house, sometimes in an apartment. They usually don't have jobs, relying on parental allowance.

I'm in the middle of a series called "Welcome to the NHK." "NHK" is the name of the big channel in Japan, like our NBC. The main character of the anime comes to believe that "NHK" stands for Nihon Hikkikomori Kyokai (Japan Hikkikomori Association), and that they are the creators of a conspiracy to keep him isolated and alone. This being an anime, there's a sweet girl who takes an interest in him and tries to get him to change his behavior.

Watching this anime, alone, in my room, after a weekend of studying alone, in my room, made me feel very hikkikomori-like. Even when the character's lifestyle inspired revulsion, as in his madcap flipouts in the outside world, or as in his obsessions with erotic dating games or, later, a WoW-based online game, it felt like I was the target audience of this strange program. Then I began to think it was all a conspiracy. The makers of this anime knew what kind of people were in their audience and geared it exactly to them.

This is part of a movement I have noticed. Otaku things have become anti-otaku. My only other example is a Nintendo DS game I picked up, called "The World Ends with You."

The World Ends with You's protagonist is someone who distrusts everyone, has no friends, and walks around with headphones on so he doesn't have to interact with anyone. The game forces you, through the character, to interact with other players. A prominent feature of the game is working together with your partner, simultaneously controlling both the main character and the secondary. Working together is the only way to survive and beat the enemies. Another feature of the game is looking into other people's minds and reading their thoughts. This "gets you into other people's heads." The gameplay incentivizes putting the game down; you earn points by only playing a certain amount any day. Finally, an interesting feature is that, when you are near someone else with a DS, there is an incentive to interact with that other person: you ask them to turn on their wireless signal, you turn on your game and sense the incoming signal, and you get points/items that you otherwise would never have gotten.

So the game is designed to wean you off of the game world and inject you into the real world.

Hikkikomoris are a growing problem in Japan, and these kinds of anime and games are interesting ways to address the problem. Too bad they do not speak to the source of the problem at all. Japan is in many ways a terrible place to live; societal pressures are just too much for some people. Change the society, and fewer hikkikomoris will appear. Simple as that.

Mr. Hatandcoat Fears Lexical Change

Or, rather, my mostly-absent co-blogger is annoyed by it.

Just ask him about the word "ignorant." For years, he's been very bothered by the use of "ignorant" to mean belligerent. You know:

A: "Did I tell you what Marvin did?"
B: "No, what'd he do?"
A: "After I told him to be careful about taking long smoke breaks, he rolled his eyes, said 'whatever', and slammed my office door so hard my picture of Princess came off the wall. He is so ignorant."

This sets H&C into a prescriptivist fury. He has asked a woman who he frequently heard misuse "ignorant" what she thought it meant. She said, "I don't know, belligerent?" He looked it up on m-w.com and proved her wrong.

Luckily for H&C, the word "ignorant" has not changed its meaning (until now) from the time it was incorporated into English. Unfortunately for H&C, he's been spelling it wrong his whole life. "Ignorant" was originally spelled ignoraunt and probably sounded a lot more French.

The trouble with being prescriptive about language is that language has no standard. Language is not static. The rules change, meanings warp, fade, or are completely opposite of what they used to mean.

The word "nice," for example, entered English meaning "foolish, stupid." Here's a list of its transformations through the ages (taken from etymonline.com):

1. foolish, stupid, senseless (1290)
   
2. timid (before 1300)
3. fussy, fastidious (1380)
4. dainty, delicate (1405)
5. precise, careful (1500s)
6. agreeable, delightful (1769)
7. kind, thoughtful (1830)
   

(If you want to go back before English, "nice" came from Old French where it meant "silly, foolish." It came from Latin nescius, which meant ignorant.)

Whether or not there is a standard, I suppose you could argue either way. It's clear that language is always changing, though. Since it's always changing, how can there be a standard?

The main point of this post is to tell H&C that another of his annoyances is now in the dictionary. H&C told me last night that he hates it when people say "people of the female persuasion." He says that "persuasion" there makes no sense. Unfortunately...

1. The act of persuading or the state of being persuaded: “The persuasion of a democracy to big changes is at best a slow process” (Harold J. Laski).
2. The ability or power to persuade: “Three foremost aids to persuasion which occur to me are humility, concentration, and gusto” (Marianne Moore).
3. A strongly held opinion; a conviction. See synonyms at opinion.
4. 1. A body of religious beliefs; a religion: worshipers of various persuasions.
   2. A party, faction, or group holding to a particular set of ideas or beliefs.
5. Informal. Kind; sort: “the place where … rockers of any gender or persuasion can become megastars” (Christopher John Farley). (answers.com def)
   

Not Cool

On the plus side, H&C now has more posts in total than districted. But at the expense of political contamination...uh.

I haven't read Aak's recent posts yet. I saw the intro to one and retched. Immediately, I said, I must submit. This must stop.

I'm sitting in the waiting room, feeling zen-like, waiting for my turn to come for my first professional massage ever, when I get a text from Aak. He says I seriously need to blog soon. I put down the interesting magazine and rush to the laptop. And there we have it.

Yuck.

Annoying (and I bring this up at risk of sullying my zennish state): all these absentee voting registration people at every metro station. I don't feel the least bit bad about completely ignoring the well-intentioned 21 year old like he's a homeless guy. Those people ruined my mood the other day. I don't know what it is about being interrupted on my daily commute that upsets me so. I have a friend of a friend who I was told goes into a bit of a rage when he is approached by store salesmen. I think I'm the same way, although recently on trips to home depot and the like I needed their help. Those people make me sooooooooo mad. I want to walk in peace. I want to take the fifty paces from the curb in front of the station to the top of the escalator without hearing "excuse me, sir, are you registered to vote in Virginia?" But that's not gonna happen. Then they tag-team me with people at the bottom of the damn stairs. Then there are more when I get out! They ruin my mood. I want them gone. They're like the greenpeace people on steroids. At least those f***ers get a little intimidated and give up when you don't give them any eye contact.

Now I'm going to get naked in front of a stranger. Oh, there'll be a cloth...right? Awkwaaaaaard.

Silent No More: an Abortion Post

That's right, Hatandcoat, I went there: an abortion post. I'm gonna leave this one up here on top for you to replace.

I was on campus the other day, and I saw an ad for Silent No More, an event where women "who regret their abortions will be speaking out to the public about their experiences." I thought, okay, whatever. Then I got a Facebook invite to it from a girl I know through class. I don't really know her, though. At all. It was a little strange to get the invite, but I guess people who are active on campuses just invite all their Facebook friends.

So I thought more about it.

On the one hand, I think it's fine to speak about such things. Maybe I'd even say "good." I don't really want to hear about them, but that's because I have to go to school with the girls who would be talking, and I don't really want to think about dead fetuses whenever I see them.

On the other hand... the event is sponsored by a group called "Students for Life." I checked their website, and yeah, it's about what you'd expect. They're anti-choice. So the event "Silent No More" is not about coming together to talk about traumatic events from a choice that these women made; it's about encouraging people to vote to take away that choice altogether.

So the regretful women wish that they had not even had the choice to begin with. If they hadn't had that choice, they wouldn't regret it now.

Don't you think this is strange?

There's a lack of responsibility that just stuns me. It wasn't the doctor's decision; it wasn't the lawmakers' decision; it wasn't the Supreme Court's decision. It was yours. And many of you would have made the same choice were it illegal, and then you'd be regretting it even more than you are now.

It's the same attitude that stuns me when I hear of women treating abortion like any other form of birth control. The same lack of responsibility.

It's fine to regret your abortion. And if your "Silent No More" event is just about telling people about the possible pain of having an abortion, fine. I'm happy to support that. But if your organization is for tearing down Roe v. Wade, and you're only telling your story to do so, then I can't support that. It was your bad choice, so take responsibility for it, and don't place it on the government.