Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

This is the way I go through life:

This morning I woke up in Cairns, where I landed last night in the first leg of my flight from Honolulu to Papua New Guinea. I woke up and got on the Internet to check my email. My wife was on IM and we were talking back and forth and she said “It will be nice for you to have a day in Cairns to spend before you head to Moresby” (from now on POM = Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea). I said to her: “No, I have a day stop in Cairns on my way back. I am leaving for the airport in an hour to fly to POM.” Then I got in the taxi, went to the airport, and went to the Air Niugini ticket counter, where they told me I was travelling the next day, and that I should have listened to my wife.

This is a lesson I have learned many times before as she has patiently and lovingly remembered — indeed, created — both of our schedules. But I guess that even in the relatively high-stakes realm of international travel, plainly and clearly written itineraries, and reminders THAT SAME DAY from my Wife who is thousands of miles away and has much better things to do than deal with someone as hopeless as me still did not help. At any rate the price of taking the cab to town and then back to the airport again was about the same as just changing the ticket, so I decided to go to Por Moresby early. So here I am.

On the plane, the Kindle started paying for itself and I read some science fiction: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell and The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Leguin (which I am still reading, the LeGuin). The Sparrow is a really famous novel, apparently, and deals with several of my favorite themes: imaginations of alien culture, first contact, small-group personal dynamics, religion. I admired how well-written the book was, but ultimately it didn’t appeal to me. I guess Russell is a lapsed Catholic who converted to Judaism and the book centers on a priest’s struggle to live with, to make a long story short, the experience of absolute evil. It is supposed to be a piece of holocaust literature with a Jesuit overlay, but I ultimately found the central dilemmas of the books — celibacy for religion’s sake versus secular, sexually fulfilling relationships, the possibility that God wants us to suffer and is evil, etc — way too Christian or, perhaps more narrowly, Catholic. The idea that God demands that you give up true love in the name of faith just sounds silly to me. Equally, the idea that God is responsible for the holocaust rather than say, oh I don’t know, the Nazis doesn’t really parse for me, and neither does the idea that this piece is some sort of apologia for the colonization of the New World because it reminds us that sixteenth century colonizers ought not be considered culpable for the crimes of colonization and missionization because they didn’t share our moral code so should not be held ur standards. Again: not working for me. As a portrayal of a man’s inner struggle with the uncertainties of the Catholic religious experience it was compelling, I suppose, but at the end of the day I just found the terms of that experience extremely, shall we say, unintuitive. Apart from people saying the shehekianu like seventeen times in the course of the book, it didn’t seem particularly Jewish to me — or at least it didn’t resonate with my flavor of Judaism.

The LeGuin, on the other hand, is absurdly well-designed. When I was in China with The Scarily Erudite Beloved we visited the oldest wooden building in the world still standing. It was a Buddhist temple from the Tang dynasty. It looked like most of the Buddhist temples I was dragged in the course of our Buddhist Temple Tour Of China’s Coal Producing Regions. However it had a sort of broad, thickened proportionality to it, and was well but simply made. There was a family or two who looked after it and the government gave them some buckets full of sand in case there was a fire. It was gorgeous, and it was a hundred centuries old. LeGuin’s book is like that. Just marvelous.

One of the stories is set on a world ruled by women with a small minority of men who are forced to do nothing all day but play sports and visit ‘fuckeries’ where guy-obsessed women pay them for sex. It’s a world where the women have all the power and the men have all the privileges. Men who want to, say, read or help raise the children they have conceived are viewed as abominations (I think you can see where she goes with this). This world presents us with an exaggerated version of the crisis faced on our own college campuses, where men struggle to be successful academically because intelligence and studying are seen as ‘feminine’. I am going to the story the next time I teach intro anthro and then teach the literature on male underachivement in college, just to let my male students know that they have the option of seeing a world of compulsory athletics and casual sex as a place to flee from, rather than to.

I am leaving tomorrow to fly to Papua New Guinea. I have known this for quite some time — I didn’t just pick up the traveller’s checks from the bank the other day on a lark — but it really hit me this morning, for some reason. Yowch. Time to get packing.

I think that is what I study: the performativity of collectivity. What does it mean? I’m still working that part out.

I spent 45 minutes today trying to remember the name of the early-oughts blogger who had a side website with MP3s of acoustic covers of, among other things, “Going Through The Motions” from Once More With Feeling and, my favorite, Mr. Rogers’s “Its You I Like”. Some desperate googling later and I not only find it is “Kevin Fanning”:http://www.kevinfanning.com/ author of “Whygodwhy”:http://www.whygodwhy.com/about/ but the “entries for the lounge are still around”:http://www.whygodwhy.com/category/lounge/, but the mp3s aren’t there anymore and the Mr. Rogers number seems to have disappeared completely. If you’re reading this, Kfan, hook me up.

Today I went to the library to look for a book called something like “First Steps Towards Cyberspace”. It is an early collection from like 1991, which is pretty early for people academics to be thinking about Cyberspace.

It turns out that back in 1991 when librarians got books about Cyberspace they were still rare enough that they didn’t say “Ah, yet another volume about cyberspace”. In this case, they said “Space, huh? Well we have a call number for that.” And they filed is under QC173.59.S65, which is the Library of Congress catalog number for studies of space and time — like as in Einstein space and time.

It was a unique and special time for me, because I think there is very little chance I will ever visit QC173.59.S65 again in my life. It is not that I am not interested in theories of relativity — although I am not — but rather that it is one of the few areas of the library where I can literally physically not understand a damned thing they are talking about inside of the books there. Like, not even a little bit.

As it turned out, QC173.59.S65 was extremely poorly shelved and none of the books were in order. Or perhaps there was just a disturbance in the space-time continuum that moved them. At any rate the book I was looking for wasn’t there. So maybe I will have to go back again, someday.

As I reflect on this post, I realize I have gained insight into two things.

First, that many of my students will not have the physical ability to find stuff in the library that I do because they did not grow up learning to check to see if books had fallen behind the rest of the books in the stack, had been misfilled, etc. They just lack (I imagine) those sorts of physical shelf-searching skills oldsters like me have.

Second, this blog has probably become like the #1 google hit for the string QC173.59.S65.

Or maybe not.

An entry level vouvray and almond tofu go together pretty well together, actually.

Yesterday was a very important one in our history — you can “read the full patch notes for yesterday’s update here”:http://www.chromecow.com/2009/01/20/us-democracy-server-patch-day/

So I have a question for all you readers.

For years I was very proud of the fact that I didn’t own a television because I considered the vast majority of what came out of it to be pollution. However times have changed — TV has gotten better, and DVRs help filter and timeshift it. More and more these days, televisions have stopped being receivers of broadcast and screen to show content on with everything from tivo’d shows to downloaded movies, to streaming Netflix etc. We might even get a Wii.

So the scarily erudite beloved and I have been thinking about getting serious about digital content and investing in… something. That’s where you come in. What should we get? We are thinking either a big TV with a DVR or, perhaps, even just getting a bigger monitor and showing stuff off the computer. It seems like there are a number of options. What do you think the best way would be to get content onto a screen? Are all TVs hookupable to computers now? What is your setup, and how does it work for you?

Remember that scene in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom where the ridiculously othered and exoticized evil south asian priest puts the mojo on Indy and turns him into a bad guy and then Short Round realizes that fire will break the spell and grabs a torch and stabs Indie in the heart with it and he wakes up and is a good guy again and is like “omg we’ve got to get out of here and save the world!”? I woke up this morning realizing that Indiana Jones is our country, Short Round is our 349 electoral votes, and the torch is Barack Obama.

Two quick notes:
1. A Savage Minds entry of mine “got the nod”:http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/29/indiana-jones-a-pink.html at either Boing Boing or the Boston Globe, depending which one you think is more important.

2. A forthcoming article of mine got a nod in a “Chron article by Siva Vaidyanathan”:http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=k8yk3t00wchd2kvvxpfmm7rkcl0n7lpt — or so I’ve been told, since its behind a content wall.

3. No, I have no idea what happened to the formatting on my blog. I kind of like it, though — harkens back to the _just one column_ days.

The past few days have been really unfortunate — people who I know or who have played an important role in my life have passed on, including:

“Gargy Gygax”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2008/03/05/gary_gygax_cocreator_of_dd_dies_at_69.html – Creator not just of D&D but opener up of geekdom as a possibility or movement

“Joe Williams”:http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1280 – the author of the best book on how to write ever

“Chris Kosmidis”:http://www.littler.com/people/index.cfm?event=getPerson&contactID=3326&office=406 – I used to work for Chris when he did computing stuff. His loss — especially at his young age — is tragic.

Rest in peace, each and every one.

Well “now the wait is over”:http://www.amazon.com/One-Pound-Fat-Replica-1Lb/dp/B000BHQLY6/ref=pd_sim_dbs_misc_title_4 — also available in “super sized version”:http://www.amazon.com/Five-Pound-Fat-Replica-Demonstration-Model/dp/B000BHONVE/ref=pd_sbs_hpc_title_1.

Apparently these are used in ‘aversion therapy’ for people trying to loose weight.

I had no idea that Amazon had a “lunatic fringe”:http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Unified-Theory-Equation-Journal/dp/B000Y9N8W4/ref=pd_sbs_misc_img_4, but I suppose that as the long tail grows ever longer and the catalog gets more complete it won’t surprising to see “churches”:http://www.amazon.com/Wedding-Chapel-10-Wood-Roof/dp/B000HUQ1C4/ref=pd_sbs_misc_title_5 or “tanks from Jabba The Hut’s Sky Barge”:http://www.amazon.com/JL421-Badonkadonk-Land-Cruiser-Tank/dp/B00067F1CE/ref=pd_sbs_misc_title_3 for sale.

“Step one”:http://www.nypress.com/18/8/news&columns/proptales.cfm

“Step two”:http://www.allguinness.com/2008/01/03/did-i-forget-to-mention/

Space Marines: Nothing can stop them.

When I try to sing like Tom Waits, I sound like Marlon Brando trying to sing like Tom Waits.

When I try to sing like Billy Holliday, I sound like Adam Sandler.

My good friend Biella “Maddog” Coleman has been chronicling “her woes dealing with Blue Cross Blue Shield”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=783. I thank my stars everyday that UH has a strong union, good healthcare… and that I’m mole free! Biella’s asked me to help spread the word on her plight, so do take a second to check out her blog and spread the word.

“Oh my oh my oh my”:http://www.agwieland.com/?p=30 AllGuinness has just incremented. Gratz to all!

For the record: yes. We _did_ go to the beach.

Ok so here is a longer note on the earthquake in Hawaii. The first thing to say is that everyone here is safe and sound that the earthquake was for us here in O’ahu, luckily, a non-event. This is perhaps best symbolized by the fact that the 6.0 quake resulted in a “four inch tsunami”:http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Oct/16/br/br2659183047.html.

Growing up in California and living in an area of Papua New Guinea where we got not only the usual _guria_ (earthquake) but also blasting from an enormous goldmine, I tend to be schizophrenic about earthquakes, tremors, and whatnot. I feature either feverish over-preparation (stockpiling food, locking doors, readying basebal bat to fight off raskols) or disregard. I apparently chose disregard this time around. When I was woken up by the earthquake my first response was to go back to bed. But it kept on going and the scarily erudite beloved did too and by the time I got up and out of bed it was clear that it was a big quake. The aftershock immediately afterwards was also long and just about as strong, which was quite sobering. Still, after a brief consultation with the neighbors, we went back to bed.

The next day we found that power was out all over the island — not because the system was damaged but because (apparently) the system is designed to shut down automatically to prevent catastrophic breakdowns and flare-ups and so forth. So as a result we had 24 hours of no power so that the engineers could get everything up and running. The result was no cell phones, no Internet, no traffic light.

This ended up being not much of a big deal. I mean we live in _Hawaii_. The danger here was not lack of heating. If anything, we are at the hottest and most humid part of the year because the tradewinds have died down. But luckily they were up for most of the day yesterday and it was quite cool. And of course not having stoves to cook on is not a problem in a place where people can (and do) barbeque every day of the year. Water was still on, so drinking water and showers were no problem. And of course one nice thing about being Jewish in Hawaii is that you are never in danger of blackouts — you always have a full stock of candles.

I think the people who lived in high-rises had it far worse than us — no pumps in high-rises meant no water pressure and of course those big towers become quite still and dark when the power goes down. Except, of course, for the swankier ones (of which there are many) which have backup generators. But for us in our ohana-style home with lots of friends and the extended family living on the lot, this was no big deal.

If anything the earthquake was a chance to catch up with reading, break out the ukelele, and play boardgames by candlelight with family. Indeed, with no way to make coffee and an enforced break from work, it was difficult to do anything but catch up on reading and nap. A lot.

Luckily, most people had the experience we did, although apparently a few had it harder for us. Most of all we are glad that there was so little damage, so little violence, and so little injuries reported. If the black-out has lasted a day or two more it might have been a very different experience indeed. But as it was, we are glad to report that all are healthy and happy and even well-rested.