Rather a lazy bumper sticker

I saw a bumper sticker today that said:

TWO DISASTERS
KATRINA AND BALDACCI

I assume Katrina refers to the hurricane. Baldacci is our Governor (I'm in Maine).

Either there's a reference or a play on words here that I don't get, or this is a pretty lazy attempt at a smart-ass political bumper sticker.

Katrina barely affected Maine. Baldacci had nothing to do with Katrina. And I've been running this bumper sticker through my mind and I can't think of any way punning or wordplay could be involved.

I mean, you might as well say:

TWO BAD THINGS
DIABETES AND PELOSI

Or:

TWO THINGS THAT HURT
CATAPULTS AND SARAH PALIN

Or why not just dispense with any attempt at being a smart-ass and just slap a bumper sticker on your car that says:

I DON'T LIKE BALDACCI

Seems like it wouldn't be any less witty.

...and I'm back in the States

For trip details and photos written by me, see Bundaegi. For trip details and photos by Jenna, see LaoRenCha.

Big trip

On Saturday we leave on our jaunt from Taipei to Singapore to India (Karnataka and Kerala) to Egypt (Cairo and Luxor) to the USA and back to Taipei (on February 25). For the first time in my life I will have crossed every line of longitude.

In preparation for my first trip to India I have read up the remaining pieces of Indian fiction on our bookshelves. An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma, the story of a corrupt low-level official in Delhi, is a difficult and often disgusting book to read. I've read short fiction with disgustingly unlikeable protagonists, but An Obedient Father is the first full-length novel I've read with such a unpleasant first-person narrator. Sharma makes it readable by making you feel pity for the main character, even though you'll never like him.

Like Rohinton Mistry and Manil Suri, Sharma's fiction depicts Indian society warts and all - particularly the warts. That's good for me. Helps me be prepared for what I'm likely to see. I've been to developing countries (Indonesia and the Philippines), but I've never seen the sort of large-scale poverty I've heard I should be prepared for.

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker Prize in 1975. It's about a British woman who comes to India to learn the story of a relative of hers who eloped with a local ruler back in the 1920s. Jhabvala married into Indian society rather than being born into it, so she can look at India with a knowledgable foreigner's eye.

In Beautiful Disguises by Rajeev Balasubraman is the story of a girl from a small town in Karnataka who travels to The City (never named, but I assume it's Mumbai) to seek her fame and fortune. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The main character (whose name we never learn) is immensely likeable. Balasubraman felt the need to invent a cartoony female antagonist who seems an amalgam of every Disney villainess, from Snow White's Evil Stepmother to Cruella de Vil. At first this annoyed me a bit, but then I figured it fit the book's dreamy, we're-all-characters-in-the-movies tone.

As for the actual logistics of getting around India, I'm leaving that to Rough Guide and Jenna's knowledge of the place. Should be fun.

Questions for the Explainer

Slate's Explainer column has dug through the bag of questions they never answered in 2008. Good fun.

Is it just me, or do all national anthems the world over, no matter how rich and exotic the culture, seem to sound like European marching-band music? Wouldn't one expect China's national anthem be more "plinky"? Shouldn't Iraq's national anthem sound a little more "Arab-y"?

I hope they pick this one to answer, because I've noticed the same thing. Years ago I had an Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM which let me listen to every country's national anthem, and they all sounded disappointingly similar.

When and why did the Communist Chinese change the name of their capital "PEKING" to Bazging? Sorry, I don't know how it is spelled. Thank you.

There are many opportunities for snark here (c'mon, "Bazging"?) but I just can't get beyond the fact that, with all the places to find information online, this person asked Slate a Wikipedia question. One might as well ask the Explainer what year Brazil became independent, or who was Prime Minister of Canada before Brian Mulroney.

If one gets a personal e-mail from a very famous or important person, such as the president, or the queen of England, or the Pope, or Paul McCartney, can that e-mail have monetary value? I guess not. It's just an electronic transmission on a screen. There's no original. There's no way to buy or sell it. Seems a shame tho.

I hate to be pedantic, but I'm not sure it counts as a "question" if you answer it immediately in the same paragraph. It's a shame; I'm intrigued and I can see a near-future SF short story exploring the idea.

I live in Washington, D.C., and we have very long escalators coming out of the Metro. If I grabbed the handrail when I first step onto the escalator and did not let go until I was at the top, my body would be almost prostrate across the steps. As I go higher on the escalator, I have to readjust the hand that is grabbing the rubber handrail. Why can't the companies that make escalators sync the steps and the handrails so that they go the same speed?

I lived in DC for a couple of years. This is absolutely true!! Escalators here in Taipei don't work that way. OK, this is another question I genuinely want answered.

How did early man deal with growing toe and fingernails?

Early man did not sit in an office all day long. Early man had to run around barefoot outside and find food with his hands. Early man scoffs at you and your delicate sense of personal hygiene.

If someone with DNA from the Stone Age were born today, would they be normal?

There are two ways to answer this question. The reasonable scientific answer would be to point out that the Stone Age was a really, really long period of time; it began at whatever point you want to arbitrarily designate as the beginning of the human race, and in some parts of the world it hasn't actually ended yet. If you create a child today with Homo erectus DNA (in some sort of unholy anthropological version of Jurassic Park), you're going to have yourself a poor kid who's going to be a freakish curiosity his whole life. But if you create a child who's got the DNA of the guys who created cave paintings in France, you'll have yourself a perfectly normal kid. The other way to answer this question is to refer to the excellent 1987 documentary The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, in which actual Stone Age physiology can be compared directly with modern human beings.

During this weekend's football playoff game in Green Bay, the temperature at kickoff was 0 degrees, and by the end of the game was -4 degrees. When players get injured in such weather, do they bother putting ice on the injury? Wouldn't that warm up the injury to 32 degrees?

I'm not sure of the science involved here. I'd like to point out, though, that ice can become much cooler than 32 degrees. 32 degrees is just the upper limit, beyond which it will melt. Also, which will make your hand freeze faster: leaving your hand exposed to cold air, or sticking your hand into a snowdrift?

Burma's dictator has a chestful of bullshit medals. What's up with that, Explainer?

I like this question. Compare Burma's dictator with North Korea's Kim Jong-il, who wears the drabbest clothing ever seen on an evil dictator (assuming he hasn't died already). Someone should do a study of dictators' dress styles. I suspect the main fault line lies between (noninally) Communist and non-Communist regimes.

Can men eat the Activia yogurt that is advertised exclusively to the modern woman in khakis? Will it have the same internal regulatory effects on the male system that are promised for the female bowels? If not, why not?

I am a man and I have eaten Activia yogurt religiously for the past year. My bowels have never been more regular, although I do menstruate.

Can an average person not in politics get a pardon from the president of the United States? (Possession of forged instrument, October of 1989.)

Can you see what I'm doing? I'm making the "rubbing coins between thumb and forefinger" gesture.

Please explain the method of formation and origin of black holes. Are they located at the Bermuda Triangle area and why there?

The question that launched a hundred made-for-cable sci-fi movies.

Who made up the rule that if you wore a shirt all day, went home, and washed it, you can't wear it the next day?

This law was passed by Congress in the fall of 1882 and signed by Chester A. Arthur in the Oval Office.

Why don't humans have a mating season?

I think this is my favorite question of the lot of 'em.

Hi, I am Anna. I am only 11 years old! My friend told me about this black hole, and I have gotten really scared. I don't want to die! I thought if it didn't happen today, it wasn't going to happen. I did not know nothing about it happening in Spring! I find it unfair that scientists are making a machine that could possibly destroy the entire human race. Me and my friends have cried about the black hole, and I find it really upsetting. There has been barely nothing about it on the news. I am so nervous. I just think I am too young to die—is there any way we could stop it happening?

I'm leaning towards the assumption that "Anna" is male, a physics major, about 21 years old, thinks this letter is the funniest thing ever, and wrote it while helplessly giggling. I also assume "Anna" is referring to CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Now, as I understand it, the scientists at CERN are trying to create a black hole in order to drop the Earth into a wormhole which will enable us to access parallel Earths at earlier stages of chronological development, enabling us to revisit bygone periods of our history. For example, a temporal assassin can kill Hitler while he is still a struggling artist in pre-WW1 Vienna, thus preventing the rise of Nazi Germany and saving the Jews who would have died in Holocaust.

I am 79 years old. I bring this up first to help explain my question. In the late 1930s or early 1940s, I was looking through an old stack of Life magazines, and there was a picture of an old couple sitting on the porch of a cabin (or shack) up in the mountains somewhere in Appalachia, with the notation: "The King and Queen of America?" The small article with the picture stated that if George Washington had become king of the U.S., these two would (under the usual custom) be our king and queen. I have thought of this from time to time, even doubted it. (It might have been part of the propaganda of the time, the Depression years, that we were all equal, etc.) I am dimly aware that George Washington had brothers, and that it is possible that the descent is known. As I remember, it was a lovely picture, the old couple looking out over a valley, with mist, and smoking their corncob pipes. Can you find the picture? Can you tell me whether there was truth in the assertion?

I love this idea. I have no idea how much truth there might be in it. But it inspired me to go to Wikipedia to look up:

The current German Kaiser. He's 32 years old.

The current Tsar of Russia? There are two claimants, this lady and this elderly gentleman.

The King of Italy is apparently a rather infamous figure in his homeland.

Ever wondered about the heir to the throne of the Qing Dynasty in China? I get the feeling he's led a relatively modest life. Living in the PRC, you can't blame him.

The French throne has lots of claimants, thanks to the multitude of royal houses they had in the 1800s. There's this guy if you're a fan of the House of Orleans; there's also this guy for you Bourbon fans. And of course there's a head of the Bonaparte dynasty.

Taxation Without Congresspeople

I used to live in Washington DC, land of license plates that proclaim "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION". Washington DC is a city of six hundred thousand people with no voting representation in Congress. The District has three electoral votes in Presidential elections, although it only earned those votes in the 1960s with the 23rd Amendment.

The debate over whether to grant the District full voting rights in Congress can be boiled down to three statements:

(1) Washington DC is an overwhelmingly Democratic city which generally elects Democratic politicians.
(2) Generally, Democrats support DC voting rights on principle and Republicans oppose DC voting rights on principle.
(3) There is absolutely no relation between statements (1) and (2) and to suggest otherwise is to be cynical, disrespectful and cheeky.

I happen to disagree with statement (3).

There are two commonly discussed alternatives to keeping with the status quo:

1. Make DC a state, or at least give it voting rights in Congress. This would (until the next massive tectonic shift in American party politics turns DC solid GOP or Green or something) give the Democrats two more Senators and one more Representative, since DC is so overwhelmingly safely Democratic.

I personally have no problem with this. A lot of people think there is something deeply unaesthetic about altering DC's status, or that it goes against the wishes of the Founders. People who say this tend to be Republicans who insist it has nothing to do with the fact that DC's Democratic leanings are pretty obvious.

2. Give DC back to Maryland already, if the residents can't stop bitching about having no voting representation in Congress. What would the political ramifications be? Maryland would get an extra electoral vote and a reliably Democratic House seat. Democratic Senate candidates from Maryland would find a more favorable electoral landscape. But the Democratic Party would lose its 3 safe electoral votes from DC.

Frankly, I don't have a huge problem with this idea either, although it would slightly hurt the Democrats around Presidential election time.

Both of these involve getting rid of the Federal District that's in the Constitution and everything. But either of the above solutions would require a Constitutional amendment anyway. And I don't fully understand the need for a Federal District in the modern United States anyway, given that we're no longer really the "federation of squabbling states" whose representatives needed a safe neutral ground for meeting and lawmaking.

But for those who want to retain the idea of a Federal District which doesn't vote in Congress, Matthew Yglesias has the idea of shrinking the constitutionally mandated "federal district" to a little rump that no one actually lives in. (Except for the President and First Family, who aren't legal residents of DC to begin with.)

This is a very odd idea and I'm not sure what I think of it, but now that I've heard of it I can't help myself from pondering it.

Conservatism!

P. J. O'Rourke's got a retrospective up on how the conservative movement in America screwed up, crashed, and burned.

I disagree with a lot of what O'Rourke says, but it's impossible to totally dislike him when he comes up with prose like this:

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

And this:

The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

The main problem is that O'Rourke seems to think "liberalism" and "conservatism" are going to have coherent meanings to his reader. Maybe you're required to assume that if you write for The Weekly Standard. But I honestly can't say that I know what those words mean in the context of American politics. Maybe one or both of those words mean something to you. Maybe you can come up with high-sounding definitions of "liberalism" and "conservatism", and maybe those definitions might make sense for a while. But getting politically-minded people in the United States to actually behave in ways that fit your definitions will be like herding cats.

What is American "conservatism"? What do the philosophies of Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Arlen Specter, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin have in common that sets them definitely apart from the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Besides the fact that the first group thinks Democrats should be defeated and Republicans elected, and the second group thinks Democrats should be elected and Republicans defeated. That's not a philosophy.

So my eyes tend to glaze over when people talk about the state of "liberalism" and "conservatism". Using those blanket words just leads to easy stereotyping. Liberals want to subsidize lazy welfare moms! Conservatives enjoy beating up gay people and tossing them off bridges!

P. J. O'Rourke is a great comic writer, and I enjoyed the article I linked to. But he's better when he writes about real life.

Where Patriotism and Stinginess Meet

From the Taipei Times:

A Chinese woman who immigrated to Taiwan through marriage earlier this week got into a dispute with a clerk at a convenience store in Kaohsiung City after saying that Taiwan is part of China.

The two-hour dispute occurred after the woman faxed a document to Xiamen, Fujian Province, and insisted that because Taiwan is part of China, she was only willing to pay the “domestic rate” for the service.

The woman said that since primary school her teachers and textbooks had taught her that Taiwan is a province of China and did not know why the store owner, surnamed Yen (顏), would not “admit” that Taiwan is part of China.

Rather than paying NT$85 per page for international faxing, the woman said she would pay the store NT$20 for domestic faxing, which the store owner refused, saying that yielding to the woman’s demand would be an affront to the nation’s dignity.

This amused me, although it will probably never be clear if that woman was motivated by Chinese patriotism or a simple desire to save NT$65 (about two US dollars).

I like how she "didn't know why" Mr. Yen would not "admit" Taiwan is part of China. As if, prior to walking into that convenience store, she had no idea that Taiwanese people were not proud citizens of the People's Republic of China.

Six Novellas

The other day I bought Seven Contemporary Short Novels, a collection of seven well-known mid-twentieth-century American novellas, at a local used bookstore. The novellas come complete with essay questions for the college English students who would presumably be the book's main readers.

Unfortunately, at some point in the book's existence somebody took a sharp implement and excised Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Fortunately, the structural integrity of the book is still holding together pretty well. So I got six novels for the price of seven, but the price was only about two US dollars so I can't complain too much.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

Although the story made enough of an impact to inspire a play by Edward Albee and a movie starring Vanessa Redgrave, I found it artificial. It exists solely as a Work of Literature to be discussed and written about. McCullers infuses her characters with Meaning and Symbolism, but I never felt Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy to be real, living, flesh-and-blood people. But McCullers' writing is engaging and it drew me in, and I had no trouble finishing the story in one sitting.

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

Sometimes I wonder what I missed by growing up in America as a lily-white Western European with no discernible "ethnic" background. The thoroughly Yiddish Aunt Gladys strikes me as the epitome of the Jewish mother stereotype, but I have no doubt that there are many real women just like her, and Roth grew up surrounded by them.

Mid-twentieth-century American literature was much franker about sexual issues than movies or TV from that time. I found this novel (published in 1959) to be an interesting time capsule. Neil and Brenda become lovers almost casually. If either of them is having sex for the first time, it wasn't indicated overtly enough for me to notice. Brenda's mother's over-the-top reaction when she realizes her daughter has been having sex seems like it's from a wholly different culture. Goodbye, Columbus was written before the years we think of as comprising the "Sexual Revolution", but if the novel is any indication the generational shift in values was already well underway before Eisenhower ever left office.

I was also intrigued by the issue of birth control. There is one method of protection mentioned in the novel - the all-important DIAPHRAGM. I realize there were great strides in contraception yet to be made when the novel was written, but the world of Goodbye, Columbus is apparently a world without condoms. I thought that was odd.

Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter

A Southern farmer hires a taciturn, hard-working foreigner to help out on the farm. He becomes an accepted if enigmatic member of the household, but years later a stranger's arrival triggers a scene of violence that leaves two dead and the farmer's mental stability in tatters. A haunting little story.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellows

I must admit I never felt drawn in by this story of a middle-aged man with an estranged wife and children, an acquaintance who may have just swindled him out of money, and a general train wreck of a life. Maybe if I manage to re-read it all in one sitting it will cast its spell on me, but I read it in bits and pieces and that just didn't do the trick.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

By far the best-known piece in the anthology, Of Mice and Men probably holds the dubious distinction of being the work of serious American literature that gets made fun of most frequently. I suppose it was inevitable. For some reason we're wired to laugh when we a short, clever guy teamed with a big, stupid guy.

I'm intrigued by how Of Mice and Men is written. As Wikipedia explains:

Of Mice and Men was Steinbeck's first attempt at writing in the form of novel-play termed a "play-novelette" by one critic. Structured in three acts of two chapters each, it is intended to be both a novella and a script for a play. He wanted to write a novel that could be played from its lines, or a play that could be read like a novel.

I was halfway through when I realized I was reading a stage play in novel form. It's easy to see how the novel can be divided into scenes, and everything is communicated either through dialogue or action. There's hardly any introspection. Change the formatting, and you've got a script without having to alter a word.

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was not a prolific author and she did not write big bloated novels. If you add up every bit of fiction she ever published, it probably won't come to one thousand pages. But think of the respect her works receive in American literature.

I find her fiction extremely compelling. Part of it is just her ability to tell a story, but there's also the impact of her religious beliefs. O'Connor was devoutly Catholic, and the Catholic perspective with which she viewed the world permeates every aspect of her fiction.

I grew up in a nonreligious family. I've got a thoroughly secular outlook on life. Reading Flannery O'Connor's work gives me a look at the universe and human beings through eyes that are very different from my own. And I think that's one of the most valuable benefits that reading fiction can give a person.

My brain's tied in knots

Fascinating little headline I just saw:

'Idol' Star Clay Aiken to Reveal He Is Gay

Now, I'm pretty indifferent to Clay Aiken. All I can say is I'm aware that there is a celebrity out there with that name.

But I'm very intrigued by the form of that verb "to reveal". Apparently it's known that Clay Aiken will reveal he is gay, but he has not yet actually revealed he is gay. How does that work?

The more I try to unravel this, the more my brain hurts. I must consult my secret cabal of linguists and logicians.

Comics Snarkiness

I've been a fan of The Comics Curmudgeon for some time, but I've been feeling lately that it's just not enough to satisfy my need for comics snarkiness. I need more.

Fortunately, I have happened across Angry Kem's Japes For Owre Tymes.

I know what you're thinking. "Not another blog that takes Blondie and Beetle Bailey and translates them into Middle English! I mean, granted it was a noble and much-needed service when the first couple of blogs appeared that translated comic strips into Middle English. It's generally accepted that the dot-com boom of the late 1990s was fueled by the need to make Middle English-language versions of Garfield and Dilbert available to every schoolchild in the country. But nowadays the market for this sort of thing is so saturated, how is one more blog that translates comic strips into Middle English going to survive?

Angry Kem, though, is an actual English professor who brings some much-needed rigor to the field.

Internet Morons

Thanks to the Internet, every day people who follow American politics get to read such eloquence as this:

It's pretty funny that how bad it is for Palin to be a Pentecostal BUT it is just fine for Obama to be Muslim.
That is ironic liberals...........

And this:

We need to deport McBush back to where he came from}PANAMA--no illegals allowed.

And I know intellectually, in that high cerebral cortex part of my brain, that it's not real. I know they're just Internet morons, doing what they do. This is why we have the expression "Do not feed the trolls."

But part of me doesn't realize that. Part of me thinks those are the real opinions of real people. And my tummy hurts.

I know Internet morons don't want me to be sad. So I propose that every comment like the ones above be preceded by an "Internet moron notice", to put it in its proper context. This is a voluntary plan that I hope all Internet morons will adopt.

**Internet Moron Post**
It's pretty funny that how bad it is for Palin to be a Pentecostal BUT it is just fine for Obama to be Muslim.
That is ironic liberals...........

And this:

**Internet Moron Post**
We need to deport McBush back to where he came from}PANAMA--no illegals allowed.

(Full Disclosure: I got those two comments from YouTube. Some may regard that as cheating, given YouTube's reputation, but I didn't want to waste too much time hunting for moron droppings.)

She Stole His Spleen!

She Stole His Spleen, Then His Heart is an absolutely wonderful headline which could even be adapted as a Lyttle Lytton contest entry.

But it turns out it's just a review of some novel where a girl steals a guy's spleen and then he falls in love with her.