At this point I was convinced he wanted something from me, but I looked up from my book, and into his eyes for the first time, and we began to talk. It went very nearly like this.

I said, “Well, it’s actually not my normal fare. I mean, it’s good writing, but the story—”
“What’s your normal stuff, then? What you usually read.”
“Science fiction. Lots and lots of science fiction.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that? Like, what kind of books? Which ones?”
“Well, have you ever read the Dune series, by Frank Herbert?”
“I’m not sure. Yeah, I think so. I think I did.” (Here I could not quell my smile.)
“Check it out. I guarantee it’ll treat you well.”

We were above ground by this point, and discovered to our mutual pleasure that we were serendipitously walking in the same direction. (West on Girard Ave from Broad St., for those interested.) Something else was said, and I asked him where he went to school. He lifted up his jacket, which he wore unzipped, and showed me the emblem on his shirt.

“HOPE. It’s a charter school.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”
“Man, it sucks there. It’s a terrible school. I got all As and Bs, but it’s not hard. I’m in the highest grade—well, not the highest grade—I’m in ten—but they just go over the same stuff all the time. For everybody else, it’s like they don’t get it or something. Maybe it’s because most of them smoke weed.”

Yes, there’s likely an association there, I said. I told him to stick to his studies. I started in talking about work—I’m that person, all of a sudden—and gave him some stories about adults I know who have spent too much time with drugs and regretted it, and are only now going back to get a GED, at 35 or 45. That seemed to validate his perspective, and he smiled at me.

I said, “Don’t ever stop learning. When I was little, I read a lot. My mom worked a lot when I was little, so I would read. She’d come home, pretty tired, of course, and I’d ask her about some words. I wanted to know what they meant. Every time, she told me the same thing: ‘Look it up!’ Every time!”
“She wouldn’t tell you? Really?”
“Yeah. But she was right, because now I feel like the only mistake I haven’t made is being sure that everything—that thing over there, or this, whatever—is learnable. I can learn that. I can learn this. You know?”
“Yeah. Sometimes, like if I’m at the library or something, I like to sit there and just think. I don’t always read, sometimes I just listen to music and think.”
“It seems to me that very many people are terrified of situations where all they can do is think. Sometimes people structure their life in activities so that they don’t have to think, and when they’re confronted with a situation where thinking is all they can do, they get scared. No one personality flaw hinders a person more than this, but everybody has it! It’s just a matter of when you shed it. I don’t know, but it seems to me like maybe you shed it a while ago.”

It was around this time that we’d reached an intersection where he needed to turn, and he asked for my “card.” I laughed and said that I had none, but that I’d happily share my email address with him. I did so, and he thanked me. He said he knew someone with my name who went to another high school in Philadelphia. I said I thought that was cool.

White people! White people have all kinds of ridiculous gadgets and toys in their kitchen. They’ve got 16 different knives, an eggbeater, a slicer, a dicer, a cheese grater, and all kinds of other wacky shit. My dad has one (1) big fuckoff cleaver, and chopsticks.

What can white people make in their kitchens that my dad can’t? Grits?

I found this both incredibly humorous—particularly because it was in my apartment a few weeks ago that he pointed to the Ikea knives in the Ikea knife holder on the Ikea butcher’s block and said, essentially, that he wasn’t in Kansas anymore—and quite accurate.

In Taiwan, every form of food I ingested was cooked with nothing more than:

1. A bowl
2. A wooden stick
3. A metal cutter

How is this possible? Obviously the paradox of choice and maximization of individual freedom so intrinsic to American consumer culture play a big role in this, but maybe also it’s that Chinese culinary accoutrements have merely been refined over millennia. There’s an efficiency implicit in the—excuse the misnomer—Spartan, function-over-form aesthetic of the Chinese kitchen.

Clearly, then, while both Chinese and Americans might be said to place great weight in the skill of a chef, the former would almost certainly define “skill” as a learned ability, whereas the latter might pay more attention to the pomp and circumstance around the person.

Perhaps I’m making drastic leaps of logic, but stay with me. Entertain the possibility that the above is correct, if only because it’s so contradictory to certain research that claims Chinese pay more attention to context than Americans.

When you look at the picture on the computer screen at right, where do your eyes linger longest? Surprisingly, the answer to that question might differ depending upon where you were raised. Americans stare more fixedly at the train in the center, while Chinese let their eyes roam more around the entire picture, according to research by psychologist Richard Nisbett, PhD.

Interesting, no?

The backstory for this excerpt is that a Marxist revolution (called in this book an “Odonian” revolution) led to the forced exile of the revolutionaries by the dominant political forces of the planet. After the establishment of the colony on the moon, all contact with the planet was severed, and no communication passed between the two civilizations for over a hundred years. In this excerpt, the protagonist Shevek discusses how good can come of their suffering in exile.

(Please note that the typo “principal” for “principle” is not an error in my transcription, but rather preserved from my edition of the book.)

“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the perfect health and strength of early manhood he was very beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others’, was fine and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the forehead with a band. Only one of them wore her hair differently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a crumb on her chin.

“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I—I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding—this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain. . . . If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could. . . get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self—ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality—the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness—that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.”

“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.”

Bedap shook his head. “No. Shev’s right,” he said. “Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.”

The girl with short hair shook her head vehemently. “But we won’t! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy, or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing.”

“What are we supposed to do,” said Tirin, “go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?”

“You’re making a cult of pain,” another said. “An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”

“What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted.

“But the whole principal of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”

Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. “Have you ever seen anybody die?” he asked the others. Most of them had, in a domicile or on volunteer duty. All but one had helped at one time or another to bury the dead.

“There was a man when I was in camp in Southeast. It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him along with a couple of girls. We’d been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn’t do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. I don’t think he knew the rest of his body was all charred, he felt it mostly in his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he’d scream. You couldn’t do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don’t know. It didn’t do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw . . . you see . . . I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.”

“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” the tall girl cried.

“No—no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain.”

“Then where does it end?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”

It’s difficult to begin talking about what this passage means to me. I believe this is enough for now.

This is pretty much the only course I’ve ever taken where the class size is too large to have an active discussion. It’s in a lecture hall with stadium-style seating, and class participation (and attendance) is measured by clicking a button on an RF remote which is linked to one’s student ID number. The prof periodically throws out questions in his presentation, and by submitting an answer with your remote, you verify that you attended the class. Not exactly foolproof, right? But that’s not the subject of this post.

Let me stress that I know very little about the hard sciences. It’s just something I never really cracked a book on, and it’s a hit to my pride that I’m so weak in this area. Nonetheless, I have skills to avail me!

Today, the professor tossed up this question on the presentation, and we had to vote for what we thought the correct answer:

When an air bag deploys, what actually happens?

1. Air is pushed into the bag from the outside of the car.
2. It’s not actually air, but a liquid that fills the bag.
3. A chemical reaction forms a gas.
4. Gas is already present and expands in the bag.

Now, knowing absolutely nothing about the subject matter, but knowing on pretty solid ground that I’m attending a chemistry class, which answer am I likely to pick? Probably the one that says chemical reaction in it!

This is particularly surprising to me, because the prof’s questions aren’t always so remedial. Take, for example, this answer set to a prompt about why an unopened soda can expands on a hot day:

1. The expansion is due to the decreased solubility of CO₂ (g) in water at higher temp, so the dissolution of CO₂ (g) is exothermic.
2. Energy is always required to dissolve a solute molecule in water, because to do so requires the breaking of hydrogen bonds within the water.
3. The dissolution of a gas into a liquid corresponds to an isothermal compression of the gas.

Not the most taxing exercise, but it’s also not insultingly obvious: all the options have very chemistryish jargon in them.

I’ll add that I’m well aware that the choices in the first example all somehow relate to chemistry, but I’m focused much more here on the reasonableness in the design of the answer choices. I wonder whether being a professor myself will give me more insight on this matter, or just numb me to being disinterested in it myself.

I just wrote the two best papers I’ve ever written. One was a critical take on postmodernism and the future of critical theory. The next was a simple rundown of sociological concepts of my own choosing. A delectable excerpt from the latter paper follows.

Repressive desublimation

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man made for an interesting read. As I understand it, the perspective Marcuse has crafted is an approximate (read: critical) synthesis of Marxism and Freudianism, a rather timely theory for the age in which it was conceived. (Look, I like Hegel, OK?) The specific concept of repressive desublimation refers to the conflation of freedom and indulgence so rampant in post-war America, and likely even more so today.

The sociological implications of such a theory are the waning prospects of revolution, or, in more contemporary jargon, an erosion of the expressive capacities of the average American. Steeped in stupefying entertainment for all our waking hours, we lucky few in the post-industrialist societies of the world have little hope of breaking out of the mold crafted for us and donning the gauntlets of critical theory to duke it out with the capitalist system—particularly its prize-winning fighting cock, the military-industrial complex. We become dumb mouths above genitals numb with monotonous, unending stimulation, existing only to feed and mutely perpetuate our feeding. Repressive desublimation is the method by which the tyrant constructs delicious complicity. It is the plastic bag we place over our heads to masturbate.

Take that, BDSM imagery of Foucauldian power dynamics!

I daresay it’s never been said better.

So, I’m seated at the tables outside a coffeeshop here, working on a 13″ MacBook I borrowed from an awesome friend. While here, the wonderful girl I’m seeing found me and decided that she might as well write her papers here, too, and pulled out her own laptop, an aging 17″ Dell XPS. The size disparity between these two machines is absolutely absurd. Knowing full well what might or might not have been on my mind, this delightful girl quickly commented on how small my penis must appear to any passersby, as her laptop was so much larger than mine.

I laughed a lot, but I didn’t really think she’d be right.

The tables in this area are becoming more crowded as the morning wears away, and several girls have sat down near our table, looked at the computers, and laughed. Apparently, they really are looking at me as a wuss for having a laptop so much smaller than the girl beside me. How can this possibly be?

Naturally it’s got me thinking about what might be an adequate equivalent for if the genders were reversed. In other words, what conceivable scenario would lead me, as a heterosexual male, to size up a girl and think, “Due to x quality of her apparent boyfriend, I will not hit on her.” I really can’t imagine anything like that affecting my decision.

My lady friend has counseled me that that’s natural, as that women tend to evaluate men based on interpretations of the symbols found in the context in which they’re situated. I find that sexist—but not entirely inaccurate.

So, in lieu of writing papers, I IM’d some friends, asking what they thought might be an adequate equivalent. One friend said “fashion,” which to me doesn’t really compute: if I saw a girl whose boyfriend was better dressed than her, I might be initially turned off that she’s evidently into guys who are into fashion, but I wouldn’t at all be put off by her own lack of fashion sense. I mean, how could I guy like me possibly afford to be?

Every other friend I asked agreed that there is no equivalent, and such comparative analyses can only happen by females sizing up males in the context of other females (assuming heterosexualiy across the board).

My favorite moment in the brief surveys I administered was the following exchange:

12:46:24 PM Dude: maybe
12:46:38 PM Dude: like the dude has a club foot that she can’t stop footsying under the table
12:46:52 PM Dude: honestly though, fuck gender correlation to computers
12:46:54 PM I: ok. ok, yeah, I’ll put that in my dataset
12:47:00 PM Dude: that 13″ macbook is by far the superior machine
12:47:07 PM I: ok, that’s going in the dataset too
12:47:08 PM I: but
12:47:18 PM I: the fact is, it’s 13″ and clearly I have a small dick
12:47:24 PM I: and my girlfriend dominates me in this relationship
12:47:24 PM Dude: 17″ screen is nice thoughj
12:47:27 PM Dude: though*
12:47:29 PM I: oh man i love you
12:48:03 PM Dude: just grow a beard and feel better
12:51:00 PM I: yeah, I can’t.
12:51:17 PM Dude: …oh.
12:51:54 PM I: yeah, I don’t wanna talk about this anymore
12:52:06 PM Dude: hah
12:52:15 PM Dude: so, how bout them [insert sports team here]

I feel like I learned something today.

In some ways, I’m sad to be away in a different country while this happens in the U.S. (Don’t worry, I voted via absentee ballot!) The joy welling up in me is something I very much want to share with my friends and family in the States, and it’s something that my Taiwanese friends very much respect and admire, but cannot understand, just as I could not hope to fully appreciate their hatred of their last president for betraying them.

Some Americans I know here in Taiwan are trying to withhold themselves from premature revelry, perhaps out of fear of jinxing Obama’s win. Yes, he’ll likely win, they say, but what if he doesn’t? They say they wouldn’t be able to deal with the disappointment.

But I look at it this way. Now is the time when the cheering should be loudest. It’s home team advantage. You give your man all you’ve got, and yell yourself hoarse as he comes down the home stretch. Trepidation now can cost the world so very much.

This weekend I was reminded of this lesson when I faced what was to me a deplorable lack of world understanding. It’s been ages since I’ve logged onto Facebook, but I thought I would give it a go and see if I could get in touch with any blueshifting friends—or acquaintances, I suppose, because I have an e-mail address for pretty much anyone I’d ever call “friend.”

I was met with the discussion that follows. Of course I couldn’t help but chime in. I warn you that at parts it reads like a series of YouTube comments, and at others like an introductory logic course.

At times in that discussion I think I was a real prick. That’s typical of me, and while perhaps not the best method, I do think there’s something to be said for shaming individuals into self-reflection. Some are more susceptible to this technique than others, of course, but I’ve seen some deep moments happen in other people when undergoing ridicule. I know I’ve experienced such magic myself.

Here’s to tomorrow. Raise your glass with me, won’t you? And don’t forget to debate!

Can you tell what’s wrong with this picture?

1. That man has King Leonidas’s head plastered on in a really shitty GIF way.
2. The title of the video implies there are other techno remixes of “This is Sparta!”.
3. It has over 17 million views.
4. I’m watching it, too.

In case didn’t cause you to hang your head in shame for being a part of this mess called the internet, try this one on for size.

Exhibit B:

What’s wrong here?

1. Over 19 million views.
2. Over 19 million views.
3. Will you look at these fucking peppers?
4. Over 10 million views.

The internet is dying, folks.

For the record, this particular YouTube excursion happened as a result of poring over the Internet Memes timeline over at Dipity. Requests were made to verify some of the claims laid out, and hence the “leeroy jenkins” in my search bar.

Hence also the flying spaghetti monster wallpaper. (For the record, the timeline credits the FSM as being born on January 14, 2005, while the website itself claims it all began in May 2005. It appears the domain name venganza.org was registered on November 24, 2004.)

And then I blogged about it. Sigh.

We could communicate
by Bill Stilwell. License:

Think about it.

I liked the article, despite its failings to disclose much about the dataset and investigate methodological flaws, because it offered an opinion on metal listening habits other than “metalheads are social scum.” Today, however, I found another article. I honestly wonder whether any research was performed at all, so closely does it adhere to stereotypes.

She said an Australian study of year 10 students had shown significant associations between heavy metal music and suicidal tendencies, depression, delinquency and drug-taking.

An American study had also shown that young adults who regularly listened to heavy metal had a higher preoccupation with suicide and higher levels of depression than their peers.

Who paid to have this written? It’s quite clearly cherry-picking. And lest you think I’m objecting to this article because my genre of choice is being presented in a less than favorable way, take a look at the aggregate findings.

WHAT STUDIES SAY ABOUT YOUR SOUNDS:

POP: Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance.

HEAVY METAL: Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex.

DANCE: Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background.

JAZZ/RHYTHM & BLUES: Introverted misfits, loners.

RAP: Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

What stuns me about this is that the article author (or the researchers performing the study, but right now I’m blaming shoddy journalism) is clearly looking only for negative associations. What the hell is “overly responsible”?

The Dance category is particularly incendiary in that it implies that only poor people do drugs—unless the rich person listens to Dance music, in which case they don’t belong.

I really hope the article is substantially misrepresented by the media coverage. Maybe I’ll put in a request at my library to get access to the paper, and I’ll see for myself which party is at fault. I must admit, though, that part of me hopes that it’s not the journalist, because on some level I’m really looking forward to when l I get tenure and can jack off like this and call it research.

A New Zealand judge has made a 9-year-old girl a ward of the court so that her name can be changed from Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii, the country’s national news agency reported Thursday.

I just don’t know what to do about that. I’ve raised my eyebrows and exhaled through pursed lips, I’ve looked off into the distance and shook my head violently in waking from reverie.

I love America.

Further insults to deceny include:

The Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages said in a statement that it had rejected names including Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Stallion, Twisty Poi — a staple food in Polynesian cuisine — and Sex Fruit.

That’s right, someone has already given “Yeah Detroit” a go. They may have failed, but I shall stand tall on the shoulders of visionary giants.

I have a dream, America.

What’s really frightening, though, is that my mother sent me this article in an e-mail with the subject line “I feel so uncreative.”

Dearest One,

I bring you greetings in the name of our creator, it is in my search for a reliable and God fearing person and having gotten your contact through prayers and pains taking efforts via searching i made on the internet on my bed side.

Presently, I’m in a hospital here in Abidjan-Cote D’Ivoire where I have been undergoing therapy treatment for Oesophagi Cancer.

Though its a sad and long story but I will cut it short for your quick and easy understanding. I am Janet Fernandez (Mrs), widow to Late Mr. Edward A. Fernandez, former Defence attachee to Benin Embassy in Germany. My husband was murdered in 2005 by those who are envious of his position in the same office leaving me with our only son Desmond.

Before his death we were both born again christains and because of our new fond Love in Christ Jesus we both made a convenant with God to use his wealth for the down trodden,orphanages and the less privileged in the society. Having known my condition I decided to donate part of this money to an individual or better still a God fearing person who will utilize this wealth the way I am going to instruct herein. I want an individual that will adopt my only son, use part this wealth and provide succor to poor and indigent persons, orphanages, and widows and for the propagating peace.

I took this decision because I do not my child to suffere or continue to leave in this part of the world, moreover my late husband’s relatives are not inclined to helping poor persons and I do not want my husband’s hard earned wealth to be misused or spent in the manner in which my late husband did not specify. I do not want a situation where this wealth will be used in an ungodly manner which will be contrary to the convenant we made with God Almighty.

What is required of you is your honesty, trust and sincerity. Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing for another individual for this same purpose.

Please reply in case you are interested on this alternative email: janetfernandez39@gmail.com so that i will go into details and furnish you with all further informations.

May God Almighty bless you.
Janet Fernandez (Mrs)

I can’t figure it if by posting this here I’m going to get more spam comments, or what. But Akismet has snagged virtually every single one since I installed it, so no worries!

Man, how bad would I feel is this is a real person? Maybe I should write her just in case….

I need signatures and scads of paperwork from various officials. And I have nothing.

So, I wrote an e-mail to the scholarship committee, donning my most humble of humble miens, explained that I’m an epic douchebag failure.

I’ve already heard back from someone within the scholarship organization, someone who either works in a west coast office or has a brutally dominating boss, given the timestamp on the e-mail, and it’s all good.

Everything works out. Always. I learn no lessons.

Ever.

It still hasn’t cleared up yet, so I figured it’s Gay Awareness Week or something, but Googling for that hasn’t helped me very much. Can anybody explain this?

I mean, it’s raising my awareness alright.

Amazing, no?

It only bothers me because the articles are syndicated from years ago. If the writers at The Onion keep depriving me of relatively fresh sardonic content, I’m going to gather them up like bundles of sticks and burn them to death—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Update:

There’s a banner big as life on the homepage that says “CELEBRATING GAY PRIDE.” Funny that because I only ingest media via RSS feeds, I never saw that. Ah, well. Still, I’d like to know why Googling for “gay week 2008″ doesn’t explain this cosmological event to me, and instead points me to:

Aspen Gay Ski Week

Another year, another great Aspen Gay Ski Week! We have hardly had a moment to miss all the fun times, great snow and friendships made during Ski Week 2008. …
www.gayskiweek.com/ – 13k – Cached – Similar pages

Best search engine my ass.

On a related note, my goal in life is to express every desire with deadpan sarcasm.

We have a little saying around these parts. It started among the Americans, actually, but it’s since spread to the Germans. The saying is, as you can guess, “six Maßes later.”

If you don’t know what a Maß is, here’s a little help.

The Maß (“measure”) is an old Austro-Bavarian unit of volume, now typically used for measuring beer. Originally it measured 1.069 litres, equivalent to 2.259 US pints, or 1.881 UK pints. Nowadays, a Maß is defined as exactly 1 litre.

OK, so now we’re clear on that much, I hope.

This little ditty of a saying cropped up around the time of Oktoberfest, and has remained in the vernacular due to our would-be-alcoholic-in-any-part-of-the-world-except-Bavaria lifestyle. “Six Maßes later” pretty much means “fucked up beyond all belief,” that the world is in a completely different state, and the laws of the universe now longer necessarily hold true.

If you’ve somehow made a grave mistake, you can invoke this face-saving adage and all is well. I’ve relied upon it several times myself.

Theory in practice

As can be expected, there are some epic tales associated with this expression.

Tale the First: Craig astray

There was a night a while back, let’s say a Friday, when we decided to go drinking. Because a Maß at any beer hall will usually run you about €7, the standard protocol has become to buy a case at a beer store and pregame with that. (A case will be €15-20, for 10L. Hella cheaper.)

We had pregamed. Then, since there were a bunch of visitors in town that weekend, we decided it was an appropriate night for Hofbräuhaus. More Maßes were consumed, and although I didn’t make it to six myself, good ol’ Craig did.

Craig is a rugby player. Big guy. We didn’t realize how drunk he was until he tried to tell us a story on the tram on the way to Hofbräuhaus. Then, once there, he dumped in two more, and that made for six.

As we were all sitting around the table, laughing stupidly, clomping our glasses around and punching one another if any spilled, someone noticed that Craig was missing. We checked the bathrooms and everything, but he was nowhere to be found. We concluded that he’d had enough and had decided to go home, which was reasonable. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon on the following day that we heard the true story.

Poor, muscular, wasted Craig did indeed decide it was time to go home. He was able, even six Maßes later, to compute that in order to get home, he had to take public transportation. Unfortunately he selected the subway instead of the tram, which didn’t make a lot of sense for where we were in the city. He even got on the wrong subway line, one that didn’t lead in the direction of home at all.

As he explained to us, his reasoning went like this: He noticed that the stops on the subway weren’t ones he wanted. So he decided to stick it out until the train went somewhere he needed to be. This wasn’t such a good idea. He ends up at the end of the line, somewhere in south Munich, and has to get off. He starts walking around that area of town, looking for something he recognizes. Craig wasn’t wearing a coat, and as this happened in February, he gradually (once again, Craig is a big guy) grew cold. He decided to start jogging in order to keep warm.

While jogging, he of course covered ground more quickly. This only led to exasperation, as he realized that he had no idea where the hell he was, and couldn’t find a way back home. So he began to run. (See what I mean? This decision doesn’t make too much sense without the six Maßes.) He was drunk, so ended up slipping on wet cobblestone, fell hard, and cut up his hand.

He was still freezing at this point, and now a little sore, so he went up to an apartment building and pressed every single button until someone buzzed him in. He lumbered into the lobby and slept underneath the stairs there.

When he woke up, he was sober enough to find his way back home and relate his adventures to us.

Tale the Second: Conor goes whoomp

OK, so this one time I got utterly plastered and kinda sorta fell asleep in a weird section of a bar and woke up way past closing time and the bar was locked so I couldn’t leave so I just kinda went back to sleep and then when the owner came in at 6am to open up I scared the hell out of him and asked if I could go and he said yeah so I left.

I didn’t think anyone would believe this story so I took a picture of myself shortly after coming to.

Let us never speak of this again.

There is no escape

The motivation to write this post was last night’s shift at the pizza place. The shop owner is a great guy, OK? Just awesome. I really enjoy working for him, because he’s a total bro.

Last night my shift started at 6pm. When I got there, he seemed happy. He seemed like three Maßes worth of happy, and that’s exactly what he was. He called me over to the part of the kitchen where he prepares the pizzas, and he lifts up a tin foil container that had been resting on something. He wanted to show me the six empty beer bottles he’d been concealing.

Everyone in the kitchen knew Ben was buzzed, so we started egging him on. I told my story about the phrase “six Maßes later,” and after much disbelief (“You fucking American, you probably didn’t even taste beer until you were 14, and you’re telling us you can drink six Maßes?”), it was unanimously agreed that Ben had to go for 12 beers. (Bottles are 0.5L.)

Well, let it be known that before closing time, Ben made it to six. And he was gone. The deadline for employee orders is 10:30pm, a half hour before the shop is closed down, so I made sure to ask him to make me a pizza around that time. I had to repeat my order several times, even though it was the same pizza I order every freaking night (Odin Pizza). He said he would try.

I got stuck doing the last run, and when I was back at 11:15pm, the guys in the kitchen were dying with laughter, and asked me to try my pizza. That gustatory-archaeological expedition yielded the following pizza makeup, from bottom layer to top: dough, tomato sauce, cheese, potatoes au gratin, peanut butter, bacon, red onions, broccoli, and peppers.

And you know what? It was fucking great.

Only in Bavaria can one hope to see their boss six liters deep, tripping over invisible things, yet still pressing onward with work. God I love this place.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/10/six-mases-later/feed/ 6 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/18/i-still-picture-bavaria-like-this/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/18/i-still-picture-bavaria-like-this/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:37:18 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=534 Years ago, I came to Germany on a brief trip with my high school. I don’t think the trip was even 2 weeks long, and it was designed to provide a general image of Germany, so we stayed in several major cities at most 2 or 3 days. I had an absolute blast, and my German was crap back then.

Toward the end of the tour—at least, I think it was toward the end—we cruised through Bavaria and the tip of Austria. The pictures I took down there, with an old, rather beaten-up 35mm which my girlfriend at the time had lent me for the trip, are still the iconic pictures of Bavaria for me.

Years later, but still years in the past, I went to Bavaria again, this time just for a week-long stay. I had been offered a scholarship to study in Munich for a year (one which I declined—later, the scholarship I’m now taking advantage of fell into my lap, and I couldn’t say no again), and this brief stay was meant to be an introduction and a tease for what was to come.

We of course took a trip to the Alps, my second.

Even now, after having actually lived here for the better part of a year, these pictures still come to mind whenever I need to think abstractly about Bavaria. Nothing helps more to understand the Bavarian people than to take a look at these few glimpses of the landscapes. As I mused in an earlier post,

I’ve often noticed that Bavarians aren’t always looking over their shoulders at the revenant of the war, that they remember instead the cobalt blue of the Alps in the distance on that one day when autumn came so quickly.

I’m no de Tocqueville, but I stand by those words all these months (and Maßes) later.

I hope you now know at least a little better what it feels like to live here. The weather is changing. It now rains for two days and then is sunny for one. More pictures to come, I hope.

For all its uber-seriousness, you can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of black metal.

There truly is nothing in the world more absurd, sad, and awesome to me than black metal. I often impersonate a black metal enthusiast during daily activities, just because it makes my life seem way more intense. These two chaps understand that philosophy, and decided to make a video of black metal cookie baking.

That was pretty extreme. While the video was poorly edited (which is funny, because it’s ragging on low-production-value black metal), the final scene of the two guys running into the woods in their backyard, poorly concealed by either a fog machine or an out of control barbecue grill, made up for it.

After trolling around YouTube (ha ha, get it? black metal is about trolls!), I found some absolutely killer parodies of black metal music videos. Then I looked up the originals and realized it would be funnier to just show those. Enjoy.

Trollech – Ve stinu starych dub (view parody video here)

Immortal – Blashyrkh (view parody video here)

I want to cry and laugh at the same time.

I warn you, it’s weird.

In a small farming town somewhere in Russia, a family noticed that their cow had gone missing. The men of the family conclude that the cow has been stolen, and proceed to determine the thief. The grandfather says, “Whoever stole this cow must be homosexual. Only homosexuals steal cows.” His son, the father of the farming family, replies, “Then whoever stole the cow must be short, too. All homosexuals are short.” The grandson chimes in with the capstone to their investigation, concluding, “The shepherd that lives at the edge of town is short! Therefore he must be the person who stole our cow.” They all agree to go beat up the poor shepherd.

Upon arriving at the shepherd’s hut, the grandfather declares, “Give us back our damn cow, you faggot.” The shepherd explains he knows absolutely nothing of any cow-stealing incident, and his three accusers decide to take the issue to court.

Once in the courtroom, the shepherd uses as his defense the absolutely absurd chain of logic the men used to accuse him. The judge inquires as to the nature of the reasoning, and the men explain. The judge says, “Well, let’s test the validity of this logic.” With that, he points to a box sitting on a table at the edge of the courtroom, and asks the grandfather, “What is in that box?”

The grandfather thinks for a moment, then replies, “Well, it’s a box, so… it probably has another box inside.” The father says, “A box inside a box would probably hold something round.” The son finishes it off with, “If it’s round and inside a box, it’s probably an orange.”

The judge says, “Just give them back their damn cow, you asshole.”

This joke has become a party classic, and it gets better the drunker Pavel is, because then his English is mangled and newcomers to the joke aren’t sure whether they missed something, or whether the verdict by the judge really is the punchline.

I was inspired to tell this story by reading an article about a Russian doomsday cult that just came out of its cave, evidently having had their doomsday date wrong.

Thirty-five people took refuge in the cave in the Penza region, about 650 kilometres southeast of Moscow, in November, threatening to detonate 400 litres of gas canisters if authorities tried to remove them. The cave dwellers, members of a group calling itself the True Russian Orthodox Church, said they were waiting for the end of world, which they believed would come sometime in May

Oh, yes. What an honor to be a parishioner of the True Hardcore X-treme Russian Orthodox Church, complete with a badly dilapidated cave as demesne and 400 liters of gasoline as a characteristically Soviet tithe.

The story gets better when the cult members explain their decision to leave the cave.

Vice Governor Oleg Melnichenko said more of the cave had collapsed around dawn Tuesday, and cult members told emergency officials that a divine vision overnight had instructed them to leave.

Last Friday seven other cult members emerged as melting spring snows caused part of the shelter to cave in, sparking fears that the entire structure could collapse.

Well I’ll be damned, there’s that comet speaking to you again—you must be a prophet! Just how do you tap into these cosmic messages? What did the comet say this time, anyway? “Get the hell you, you drunken idiots, this shit is falling down!”?

Maybe they’ll get the date right next year.

The New Yorker recently put up an article about some Al Qaeda hippie and made sure to draw some bizarre connections to death metal.

Death metal is a severe offshoot of heavy metal, a reaction to the superficiality of eighties popular culture. In the early nineties, bands that played death metal considered themselves part of an élite vanguard. They tuned their guitars in unconventional ways, and some, influenced by classical musicians, composed songs that required high degrees of discipline and technical virtuosity to play. Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense; the genre’s signature vocal style is a heavy growling chant. (“We like it when it’s simply rotten,” one musician told me.) It is a subculture in love with its offensiveness, and obsessive about guarding its artistic purity.

In case you missed it, I’m going to repeat that little gem.

Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense;

I know a fucking lot about death metal, and more than a bit about sweatpants, so maybe I’ll just come off as sounding like part of some “elite vanguard” when I say this, but that passage is a crock of shit and the author has to know it. Here I cite a legendary Facebook thread, in which some guy named Scött [sic] muses:

Florida Death metal is for fat guys who wear black sweatpants, eat Cheetos by the truckload, and get their hair caught in their guitars’ tuning pegs.

Amen, brother. I love Cannibal Corpse and Hate Eternal as much as the next headbanger wasted on too much cheap beer, but the scene is unfortunately fraught with, well, fat white guys in sweatpants and knotty hair.

The author of the New Yorker article doesn’t understand death metal, and I’m fine with that. But why lie so poorly that even the uninitiated can spot your idiocy? I’m as much an armchair anthropologist as my whole lazy wannabe-Web-3.0 generation, but even I find this lack of effort appalling.

By the way, as of today, Google reports 0 results for “Florida sweatpants metal” and only 7 for “sweatpants metal.” I’m proud to be contributing to this great cesspool called the internet.

(via Metal Inquisition)

Update: A recent post on Invisible Oranges references the sweatpants metal meme without an ounce of respect.

There was definitely a jeans era (thrash) and, to some extent, a sweatpants one (death metal).

The post itself is a moderately interesting look at the use of camouflage attire in metal getups.

Here in Germany, I’m quite proud of my linguistic ability. German is far and away my strongest foreign language, so I can have some serious fun with it. (I still suck at Bavarian, Frankish, and Swabian, so don’t go there.) Although I still have a deplorable American accent, I’m quite fluent, and can joke and converse freely. When I first got here, it was quite a challenge for me to learn casual, slangy German, as I first learned the language on paper, and had no experience speaking it or even hearing it be spoken.

Some of the Americans here have a different perspective, and have picked it up mostly through conversation, not by combing through Goethe line by line or translating poetry for fun. These individuals are completely lost when it comes to differentiating between the dative and genitive case, who are clueless when it comes to proper declension of adjectives, because Germans typically slur over that stuff when speaking. To quote Mark Twain:

I say to myself, “REGEN (rain) is masculine–or maybe it is feminine–or possibly neuter–it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either DER (the) Regen, or DIE (the) Regen, or DAS (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well–then THE rain is DER Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being MENTIONED, without enlargement or discussion–Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is DOING SOMETHING–that is, RESTING (which is one of the German grammar’s ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it DEM Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something ACTIVELY,–it is falling–to interfere with the bird, likely–and this indicates MOVEMENT, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing DEM Regen into DEN Regen.” Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop “wegen (on account of) DEN Regen.” Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word “wegen” drops into a sentence, it ALWAYS throws that subject into the GENITIVE case, regardless of consequences–and therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop “wegen DES Regens.”

Speaking German is a real party and a half. Although I’ve repeatedly assured friends here not to stress about these grammatical trivialities in casual conversation, as der, die, das, and dem pretty much all become dɛ when speaking quickly, there’s something alluring about mastering such absurd complexity. Understandable.

Well, it turns out that at least in French, native speakers can’t make up their minds about gender.

Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.

[...]

There’s an even more interesting twist in Ayoun’s native-speaker results. Her native speakers fell into two groups: 14 adult speakers and 42 teenage speakers. On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers’ native-language abilities are identical to adults’ abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, ‘target’. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Must be all those damn lolcats. (I would so love to see lolcats in French.) While it’s quite easy to have a “damn teenagers” attitude about this, I’ve found it quite remarkable here in Bavaria how many of my German peers seem able to flip effortlessly between blessed High German and whatever dialect is native to them (e.g. Bavarian, Frankish, Swabian). While it could be construed that such frequent transition would facilitate the proliferation of variation and inconsistencies, I must note that the young people I speak with very consciously categorize their speech patterns. In other words, they know that in High German it’s “die Butter,” and that only the goofy old Bavarian people around town say “der Butter.”

Polyglotism has a lot going for it, to be sure. I’m not convinced, however, that it contributes as substantially to the occurrence of linguistic variation as monolingualism does. Either way, I’m damn glad to know that it’s “wegen des Regens.”

My primary gauge for what the norms are thinking about is The Onion. It is my barometer for Western culture at large, sardonically yet tactfully cluing me in on what I need to believe.

This morning I found an article called Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book.

Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

[...]

“The whole thing was really engrossing,” said Meyer, referring not to a movie, video game, or competitive sports match, but rather a full-length, 288-page novel filled entirely with words. “There were days when I had a hard time putting it down.”

Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.

I lose. Obviously people don’t read anymore, and that’s a damn shame.

I guess I need to start selling Tupperware or Pepsi or American Idol-themed underwear or whatever it is people are interested in these days.

But what I didn’t know is that books are already toast. Steve Jobs recently told the New York Times his opinion on Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Ouch.

Truth is, I’ve been thinking about writing a book this year. I was approached by a publisher last year, did the prep work, and they pulled out after they found another author that had already written a book on a similar subject. After that experience I was thinking of self publishing in print or an ebook. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t record video and sell DVDs instead.

Yeah, because people still buy DVDs, you idiot. Somehow in the midst of perpetuating this whole “the internet is destroying traditional media” bromide the poster managed to miss the fact that distributing video via DVD falls under the same category taking out a contract with a publisher to place dead trees on store shelves. And that’s saying nothing of the dated economic model both industries rely upon.

First, to quote Jobs on the matter is absurd, as he’s obviously going to bash any consumer device that isn’t made by Apple. To suppose that the future of experiencing text isn’t portable digital devices is madness, and the extremely web-capable iPhone is only a testament to that. Apple will introduce an e-reader of their own, or at least greatly expand the reading capabilities of devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch–although I genuinely believe we’ll see a new device in the next year or two, sized between the iPhone and smallest MacBooks.

I don’t think there’s ever been a time when people haven’t been complaining about the younger generation’s lack of education, though the particular gripe about not reading is obviously only as old as writing has been standard practice for communicating knowledge. People will always ingest knowledge. I even believe that they will always read, too, just as humans still use speech and body language to communicate. We are diversifying our modes of input, not replacing them. We are at nature multi-taskers, as the very act of speech would seem to confirm.

Recently there was a new video posted by e-anthropologist extraordinaire Michael Wesch, trying to develop a dialogue on how to adjust education practices to harness new technologies. It’s not as good as his first, which has over 4 million views on YouTube, but it’s in the same line.

The other day, while I was doing a little research on Jean Shepherd, I came across some great political cartoons archived in Time Magainze. I think I liked them because they all played on the fact that this election has some pretty slim pickin’s.

Not bad. Really, I’m not motivated to vote for any one of these losers. Getting Gore back would pretty much rock, but instead the only latecomer we’re going to have this year is going to be Bloomberg. I’d be tempted to vote for him if he has the balls to run as independent, just to show that I hate the electoral college. But if Huckabee is still going strong in the polls, then I won’t dick around. I’ll vote for Obama like a good little Democrat.

Of course, since I’m making a blog entry about politics, it’s mandated that I mention Ron Paul. Otherwise I’d lose my internet card. Ron Paul is a crackpot Constitutionalist douchebag whose entire platform is just saying “No” to everything. To everything! No to war is good, but no to financial aid for education is very, very bad. OK, you’re right, it wasn’t in the Constitution, but that argument is eerily like “but it ain’t in the Bible!” to my ears. Times change, and literature is literature, regardless of whether people choose to live and die by the document immortalizing it.

Honestly, despite all the antics on Digg to get Ron Paul attention, he’s doomed to obscurity as Howard Dean 2.0. Remember in 2004, how galvanized the entire internet was to get that guy in office? Then actual voting took place, and nobody got off their ass to vote for him? Yeah. Kind of happened in Iowa already, I guess. Just read some of the things Ron Paul has to say.

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion.

I just blinked a lot when I read that. I couldn’t even get angry. It’s just so bizarrely inaccurate that it seems I should focus more on checking whether gravity still exists than trying to correct this deranged old man. I mean, if a person can come to believe this, I do honestly question whether the laws of physics will hold until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November this year.

Oh, well. Obama isn’t such a loser, I guess.

Because I’m throughly uncultured, I thought it was a prank somehow, and considered submitting it to Digg. That suspicion of mine also reveals a cripplingly weak understanding of closed versus open systems in content production. Did I think somebody had clicked “Edit this article” on the thesaurus entry for “ignorance” and added this weird phrase? Sheesh.

So I wreak my Google Fu and find out that the term refers to an article from 1957 by Jean Shepherd entitled “Night People vs. Creeping Meatballism,” in which the author attempts to persuade his readers to combat consumer culture and learn to laugh it out the door at every opportunity. (View a high-quality scanned version of the article here.) Here’s a snippet.

The average person today thinks in certain prescribed patterns. People today have a genuine fear of stepping out and thinking on their own. “Creeping Meatballism” is this rejection of individuality. It’s conformity.

[...]

The guy who has been taken in by the “Meatball” philosophy is the guy who really believes that contemporary people are slim, and clean-limbed, and they’re so much fun to be with… because they drink Pepsi-Cola. As long as he believes this, he’s in the clutches of “Creeping Meatballism”. He’s a “Day People”. Let me give you some examples of “Creeping Meatballism” at work..

My appreciation of American culture just leveled up. I guess it makes sense for a thesaurus to include this entry as a synonym for “ignorance,” but I definitely have a problem with the fact that there’s no dictionary entry for it:

There are no dictionary entries for creeping meatballism, but creeping is spelled correctly.

Fantastic. Thanks a million for that one, Dictionary.com, you useless piece of trash.

Now, the most interesting aspect of my forays across the information superhighway was that I found out that I really should know who Jean Shepherd is. He’s the mastermind behind the movie A Christmas Story, having written both the novel on which it was based and most of the screenplay. Unfortunately, the film is on neither the top 100 films nor the 100 funniest films list put out by the AFI. That’s a damn shame, though it kind of curiously affirms Shepherd’s creeping meatball theory.

I also found an article in Time covering Shepherd’s radio antics, dated 1956. (He obviously talked about this night versus day person thing a lot, as the article quotes definitions of creeping meatballism not found in the 1957 version.) The article discusses Shepherd’s being alternately banned from and quickly regiven access to airwaves in America. To complement this, there’s a New York Times article from 2000 which details the influence his work wrought across American media, taking a look at the generous memorials given him, by journalists as illustrious as those responsible for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Now please excuse me while I go shoot my eye out.