Roll Play

A few years ago, shortly after 9/11, Bobby Bowden, as any coach tends to do, was thinking of ways to motivate his team. He wanted a theme, a phrase, which would inspire them to action. He (or his staff) picked "Let's Roll", which was supposedly uttered during Flight 93, the one flight that didn't reach a target because a few of the passengers tried to take control of the plane, and ended up crashing it somewhere in Pennsylvania, leaving no survivors.

Some were offended at the thought of using this tragedy as motivation for athletes, although Bowden, a religious man, felt it honored those who made the ultimate sacrifice so others would not die.

Although it's almost five years since the incident occurred, many are still not ready to deal with the moment-to-moment events that occurred during this day. Even so, a film has been made chronicling the subject. This has to be a difficult film to make. Paul Greengrass, the British director of Bourne Supremacy and Bloody Sunday, tackles the subject matter.

The first thing he had to do, of course, was to secure permission from the families to get approval to the story of loved ones. Even this was an issue as some families felt that the media unfairly selected a small handful of passengers and made them into heroes while the rest stood idly by. Some families wanted their loved ones to be heroes as well.

Greengrass's approach has been to tell the story like a documentary. There's even a sensitive issue of how to portray the terrorists themselves. Although the buzz I've heard has suggested that people will be angry at this moment at what was done, there is perhaps a sense that Greengrass didn't want to completely demonize the terrorists, even if he can't exactly make them heroes either.

Watching this film raises the question, can we make entertainment out of a harrowing moment? Daring films routinely do this. Films depicting topics as controversial as rape, incest, child molestation, torture, genocide, cannibalism, and controversial religious themes have all been filmed.

Michael Haneke directed a film called Funny Games about two men that hold a family captive as they torture various members. He dares the audience to walk away, questioning the motives of what audience members will sit through. Gaspar Noe pushes this even further by depicting a rape scene that lasts ten minutes in Irreversible, a scene that men tend to have much more problems sitting through than women. We can tell ourselves that it's fake, movie magic, much like the gruesome gorefest of Kill Bill, Volume 1, and yet, there's a fantastical element of that film that people are willing to judge the film by, that they are unwilling to apply to films that appear closer to real life.

It's even tougher for a film that is indeed based on real life. For some reason, I am morbidly interested in seeing the film. I've watched two films based on the Columbine tragedy, one by Gus Van Sant, called Elephant which offers no pat answer, and crisscrosses in Rashomon style in different timelines, offering many views of the same incident, but not revealing a great deal at each pass, and Zero Day, which follow two teens, which, if it were not about a Columbine-like situation, might have been lauded for its cinema verite representation of high school life. Neither film answers questions of why.

United 93 is likely to be more harrowing given the way it's presented. It already plays on fears people have of flying. We know how this film is going to end. Even the heroics don't save anyone on the plane.

At the time, I had wondered how the terrorists tried to gain control. There was mention of boxcutters. I imagined, at the time, that there must have been someone killed or close to keep passengers in line, then a threat made to the cockpit that if they didn't open up, more people were going to die, and possibly killing the pilots as well. This is a difficult situation to imagine, something that was hinted at, but not much more.

There are even logistical considerations. Think of the other flights which found their target, particularly the second plane. The pilot had to somehow spot which of the twin towers had been hit and try to aim for the other. Having never flown anything, I have no idea how that must be. These are horrid thoughts, and yet, it must have been planned.

I'm interested in watching the film not so much to be entertained. After all, not all films are meant to make one feel good. Instead, I want to see it to get a sense of what really happened. By all accounts, Greengrass has made a film that is respectful and effective.

As it turns out, it's not the only film on the subject matter coming out. Later in the summer, Oliver Stone comes out with his own film. It doesn't explore the flights themselves so much as it deals with the aftermath of the incident and how two people deal with the emotions. That's a safer route less likely to create controversy, though with Stone, you never know.

Ultimately, people are going to make such films and its benefits are sometimes not obvious. Hitler once said that the Third Reich would live for something like ten thousand years. Ironically, the memory of what Hitler did may live for a long time mostly because it has define the modern Jew. Six million Jews. It's a number oft-quoted, but has become the way Jews see their need to survive. It's often not mentioned that several million others were killed including gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, non-Jewish Poles, homosexuals, people with disabilities. Were their deaths less meaningful? They aren't mentioned very often. And Stalin killed somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty million people.

Despite numbers that make the number killed in 9/11 seem absolutely trivial, there have been plenty of movies about the Holocaust and there will be more, I suspect. A few months ago I saw Downfall about the last days of Hitler in the bunker.

While I doubt 9/11 will serve the same kind of touchstone for Americans as the Holocaust does for Jews, I do think some films will continue to be made on the subject, though since the incident was crystallized into one day, indeed, one morning, over a few hour period, leaving no survivors in the flights themselves, there may be less to talk about as time passes.

Finally, I want to make an odd point, and that's about technology. Ten years ago, the passengers may have been less able to accomplish what they accomplished. Information could be sent from people on the ground letting passengers know that other planes had hit, and messages could be relayed back, as people said their final words. This information may have served to cause passengers, who might otherwise believe they were merely being hijacked, to stay put.

And, think of this. It used to be quite common for planes to get hijacked. Throughout the 70s, planes were routinely being hijacked from the U.S., often to Cuba. It got to the point where the Swiss embassy had documents that the U.S. could fill out to serve as intermediaries for Cuba, and the Cubans would serve sandwiches to the hijackees and charge the state department. Airlines lived with this since they felt it was too inconvenient to passengers to beef up security.

It wasn't until November 10, 1972, when a flight circled near the Oak Ridge National Lab and threatened to run the plane into it, until they finally flew to Cuba where the hijacker was arrested, that Nixon eventually decided security in airports had to be increased.

By the 1980s, you just didn't hear of things like this happening in the United States anymore. Somehow, we had avoided this problem for twenty years more.

Perhaps we can avoid it for twenty more.

Feel a Draft?

The NFL Draft is in a week, which means sports commentators have been talking about for nearly a month. It used to be the draft was something people only marginally cared about and wasn't even televised. However, with the huge upsurge of people listening to sports radio and watching Sportscenter, interest in the draft is high even more than a month before the event.

This is a funny thing too. Most of the rest of society wouldn't draft people for a job. You think of the military drafting people. However, without the draft, there wouldn't be a fair balance among teams. You'd have baseball instead, or possibly hockey, where you might not be able to afford to keep a player (though they now have some kind of salary cap).

The top four draft picks are likely to be: Reggie Bush to the Texans, someone to New Orleans, Titans to draft either Leinart or Vince Young. The owners seem to like Young, the coaches seem to like Leinart, especially, Norm Chow who was the offensive coordinator at USC while Leinart played. The fourth pick would go to the Jets, who is likely to pickup whoever the Titans don't, although they may forego Young for someone else.

Other players named at the top are, most notably, Dbrickishaw Ferguson, who is an offensive tackle from University of Virginia.

Basically, people think Bush is the most talented player, that Leinart is the most ready to play right away in the NFL as quarterback, a position notoriously difficult to succeed in right away (which makes Ben Rothlisberger's accomplishments all the more stellar) and Vince Young to possibly have good upside (people had been a little down on him since he didn't do so well on the Wonderlic test, a test of football IQ).

Jay Cutler, QB for Vanderbilt, has seen his stock rise. Other players that are mentioned are A.J. Hawk, outside linebacker from Ohio State and Vernon Davis, tight end at Maryland. It's hard to believe how highly Vernon Davis is rated given that Maryland has missed the postseason the last two years.

Jai Lewis, who helped George Mason reach the final four, has also thrown his fortunes with the draft. We'll see how that turns out.

Mighty Couldy

Last night, it was raining. I was planning on getting a little work done, but had heard been listening to NPR. Three member of Might Could were performing in Bethesda at the East Coast Music Production Camp. As I was to learn, this is similar to the set up fro The Paul Green School of Rock Music though possibly lacking Paul's lashing personality (seen in the documentary Rock School).

I had to look up this information at the band's website, although I could have found them via the NPR segment they did on the local Metro Connection.

Although I knew the location of the performance was on St. Elmo Avenue in Bethesda, and I had heard of the road, I had no idea exactly where it was.

Let me back up some. I wanted to try out this Indian restaurant called Cafe Spice. I find, these days, I'm more up to find new restaurants than I was, say, ten years ago. I'm sure the web has as much to do with that as anything. Once information became widely available and once good online maps were available, I didn't have to read maps or even have maps anymore. This was something I avoided, for some reason, and leads many people to simply memorize key roads to everywhere.

Fortunately, Cafe Spice was located at the Rio in a complex I've eaten at several times. The Rio houses restaurants, a movie theater, a gym. The two restaurants I'd been to were Hamburger Hamlet and Tara Thai. I knew Cafe Spice was buried somewhere in this complex, but had no idea where. I eventually passed by Tara Thai, left the dry confines of the building, walked outside in the rain, and then to the restaurant next door.

The restaurant looks fancy enough. The ceilings have lamps with shades in bright red or yellow cubes of cloth. The menu was a bit pricey. I ordered a mango mojito, mulligatawny soup (each Indian restaurant seems to have their own variation), and Goan fish curry, which was good. However, the entire tab ran nearly forty bucks, tip included.

I had arrived around 6:30, and knew I had barely an hour to eat. Even though I left just after 7:20, I had to get to Bethesda, park, and then find this East Coast Music Production Camp, which has an awful name to remember. And it was raining too.

I parked near where I usually park, the parking lot near the Ourisman Honda. This turned out to be a mistake because this was not that close to the location I was supposed to be. It was just short of 8 PM when I arrived, and I had less than five minutes to get to the concert. And I had to wizz. So I went to the men's room on the top floor at Barnes and Noble. It was in use, and a guy who arrived just ahead of me wanted to use it too (only one person at a time).

I went downstairs, and at least that restroom can handle more than one person at a time.

Once done, I started walking what I assumed was west. One block, then two, then three. I passed by one parking garage, then another, and realized that I should have parked at the Woodmont Triangle garage. I must have crossed about 6-7 blocks, past the Caribou Coffee, before I finally spotted the place. I went in, and they told me to circle around to the back.

I passed what appeared to be small classrooms along the way, and arrived in a room that looked like it could only seat maybe 50 people tops. They were seated on IKEA like benches, and some people had brought those collapsable seats that people bring when they go to football games to tailgate. I had to sit on the floor. The band had already started.

Fortunately, they would play for almost another hour.

Might Could has two acoustic guitar players (the two physicists) and an electic guitar player (the chemist). They don't sing, and therefore it sounds more like a small chamber orchestra than a typical band, as each player plays off one another. They use traditional methods of amplification to make their sounds resonate even more (they're no Segovia-like traditionalist, eschewing amplifiers).

They were followed by Ephemeral Sun, which are five people: Laurie Ann Haus on vocals, a redhead who has a haunting voice, Charles Gore on bass, John Battema on keyboards, Tim Miller on drums and Brian O'Neill on guitar. I was mostly seated where I could see the keyboard, singer, and the bassist. They seemed friendly with one another, but boy were they loud. It's a small venue, yet it was loud for the kind of music they play.

I remember being at the 9:30 clib listening to Doves which seems like a pretty low-key band, but live, they are ear-shatteringly loud. I don't get the need to have to wear earplugs just to listen to the band. I suppose it's typical to have to feel the band as the sound shakes your internal organs. At least, Might Could weren't that loud.

In between the performances, I talked to the various band members, though mostly to Tim McCaskey since he was the guy doing most of the talking. He is studying physics education. I told him a housemate of mine was studying computer science education. I suppose that's where it sounds funny. When you're the one studying education in your own field, it makes some sense, but hearing it about another field makes it sound strange.

I also asked Andy Tillotson where the name Might Could came from. Apparently, he's from South Carolina, and there, they use the phrase "might could" as in "I might could get that done". I suppose he still used that when he came to Maryland and people made fun of it (you can't really hear a southern accent in his voice though). They had explained it during the interview, but it got cut out. He does his research in computational plasma physics, and in the NPR interview, mentioned he was heading to Chicago to live with his fiancee (something similar happened to an ex co-worker of mine).

I have a CD from Eric Wollo called Guitar Nova
which I bought in November of 2000 (I had to dig this up through my Amazon account) which these guys remind me of, although their tunes are more complex (since there are three of them, and only one of Wollo). Alas, Might Could is difficult to describe. Some people have likened it to heavy metal, but it doesn't sound nearly as aggressive. The band members do seem interested in heavy metal, and there are some influences, but the acoustic guitars isn't nearly as edgy.

I bought a CD from Might Could for ten bucks. I'm listening to it as I write this. I'd recommend you order it as it costs less than most new CDs, though certainly, it's not free.

So give them a try.

You might could like it.

On the Road

I used to be an NPR junkie. I would roll into the university at 11 AM or so. This was life as a graduate student, when responsibilities are low. You have a few classes to attend, and the professors often didn't want to schedule them too early. On the way to work, I'd listen to WAMU, which is the DC affiliate for NPR.

WAMU is weird. Most of the week it is NPR. But for a few hours every afternoon, it would play bluegrass music. I don't know if they still do that, but they used to. On Sundays, these days, you'd hear radio shows from the 40s because some fan of old radio shows thought they deserved airing, and apparently, there are enough fans to listen to it.

In particular, I'd listen to the Derek McGinty show. Despite a name which sounds like some Irish fella, McGinty is African-American. The stereotype of an African American host is a decidely left-wing preacher type a la Al Sharpton, who rails against the white establishment.

McGinty hardly fits this stereotype. Sure, he's still somewhat left leaning as a commentator, but he's described himself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, which would make him almost a Clinton type (except Clinton/Gore were relatively moderate on both).

Despite this, what made his show interesting was the wide variety of topics he'd discuss, topics that would be considered too obscure or too tame for an Al Sharpton type. For example, he had a show once about how juggling could help you become a success. The point was that everyone typically starts off as a poor juggler, but through hard work, they can work to be better. Even the best jugglers aren't perfect, and do miss, but this is OK.

Clearly, the guy promoting this idea was something of a motivational speaker. McGinty must have looked a bit puzzled, and the guy asked him what he was thinking. He was thinking that this was a radio show, and having him try juggling probably didn't convey as much on the radio. That was intelligent.

Or one day, a guy was complaining why computer software wasn't like building architecture or building cars. They should be just as reliable he argued, and they weren't. McGinty pointed out that we ask software to do more and more as time goes on, and that's not always the same for cars or buildings. That was an excellent observation, which not many people could make.

Once a month, McGinty would invite the computer guys which were John Gilroy and Tom Piwowar. They would answer questions about Macs and PCs. They are pretty good at explaining computer stuff to those who don't know that much about computers. Initially, McGinty didn't know that much either, but he started to do more with his own computer, and got a lot better, to the point where he'd offer some basic advice. Not everyone would bother learning more about a computer, and would be happy in their ignorance.

Another time, McGinty discussed racism---in Brazil. He was talking to someone who said that while the average Brazilian would tell you that there is no racism in Brazil, black and white generally co-exist quite friendly with one another, there was a glass ceiling for blacks in Brazil. The people at the very top of industry and government tended to be white.

Or the time where they invited a guy who was talking about men in the 30s and 40s who were obtaining games that they played when they were little kids, especially using the toys in ways that they weren't designed. This included burning, using Lincoln logs as projectiles, and talking about the various shortcomings of the toys out there. As McGinty himself had grown up middle-class, he remembered having these kinds of toys as well, and people called him reminsicing their childhood.

I had recounted this story to some graduate students in computer science and they began recounting computer games they played when they were young, which was in the 80s. When you grow up, there's a sense that you are playing in your own universe. Parents, however, are advertised incessantly, and so are their kids. (I love the phrase "ravenous, ravenous, rhinoceros" which was The Simpson's take on "hungry, hungry, hippos"). As the kids play with the games, it probably doesn't dawn on them that there are hundred of thousands, if not millions, of kids playing these games.

When they come back as adults and begin their collective nostalgia, they begin to realize that they weren't the only ones doing this. The generation of kids growing up can say the same about computer games they play.

Then, Derek McGinty decided to leave radio. He wanted to try television out. Bryant Gumbel, formerly of the Today show, wanted to create his own news show and wanted McGinty to join him. That didn't work out so well. Gumbel did then go on to host Real Sports, an HBO program about life beyond the playing field, and McGinty, who he'd refer to as "D-Mac" (a la Tracy McGrady's, T-Mac), joined him for some segments. To me, McGinty hasn't been the same since he left the show, though it's always interesting listening to Kojo Nnamdi, who replaced Derek and now has his own show, mostly for his elegant accent.

McGinty, for my money, was one of the most intelligent and fair radio commentators out there. He wasn't dogmatic to the left, nor dogmatic to the right. He wasn't standing on a soapbox lecturing others about this or that. He'd listen. He'd have great questions. His breadth of knowledge on different topics was astonishing, from DC local politics, to computers, to local sports.

Sometimes I wonder how he'd have fared if he had a show on PBS instead of Charlie Rose, to whom people often say is an intelligent interviewer.

As the years passed, I started listening to other radio. On 9/11, I was actually listening to Howard Stern, something I had been listening to for a few months, while not listening to NPR. I recall hearing about planes crashing to the towers, and then flipped to NPR unsure that this wasn't Stern playing some weird joke, only hearing news about the president talking about education in Florida, before heading to a class, then leaving to hear of the aftermath.

I stopped listening to Howard Stern once I found sports radio. Nowadays that's what I listen to. If I get on the road early, I listen to Mike and Mike in the morning. If I roll out late, it's Tony Kornheiser. Mr. Tony is about to go off the air to prep for Monday Night Football, a gig he was tapped with. MNF, which was shown on ABC for years and years, has moved to Sundays on ABC. Meanwhile, ESPN will host MNF on Mondays. We'll see how it works out. I suspect Theismann, who co-hosts the show, doesn't particularly care for it, though he's been rather gracious on the air. Kornheiser, for his part, pretends things will go awfully, and is apprehensive about staying up late to do the show, which typically ends around midnight, two hours past his usual bedtime.

From time to time, I find myself listening to NPR, although far rarer than before. Today, I was listening to three things. The first was a local band formed at the University of Maryland called Might Could. These are Andy Tillotson, Tim McCaskey, Luis Nasser, and Aaron Geller. Three of them are graduate students, two in physics, the other in chemistry. Luis ("Gordo") was just about to complete his Ph.D.

Their music sounds a bit like some guitar stuff I have, though I haven't played in a while. They also perform as Motherbrain! which plays acoustical (almost) versions of video games such as Super Mario. I didn't play these games as I grew up, mostly since I would have played Atari or Intellivision in my youth, and my parents weren't really going to pay to have their kids play video games all day.

The following story was about a Jewish Pole whose mother had been hidden from the Nazis, and how Poland has now begun to embrace its Jewish history, to the point where they are almost seen reverentially. In particular, Spielberg's film, Schindler's List helped to make Krakow popular as a place for tourists to visit. The woman, a reporter, goes to Poland to find the family that helped her mother, and what she discovers about Poland when she arrived.

This was followed by a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies read, I believe, by filmmaker Mira Nair.

Although I'm not Indian, I am somewhat familiar with Indian culture, at least, among those who have higher education. This story is about a man and his wife, who have moved in a new house, that has all sorts of Christian paraphenalia throughout. The wife is fascinated by all these things. The husband, more conservative, feels that they should be removed, as they are Hindus. It is a story of nostalgia, of how he remembers being a student at M.I.T., how he kept his college books even though he rarely referred to them, how he was lonely, and eventually decided to marry this woman (Twinkle?), an arranged marriage, of how they married in India, and now this situation, where he wonders if he's married a complete stranger, after only knowing her four months.

It hits all the issues that an Indian that moved to America would think of, from college, to food, to mothers giving advice, to the desire to keep some kind of heritage. Cities that are familiar to techies are mentioned from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Palo Alto.

These are the kinds of stories that authors are writing more of, where they show a great deal of inside knowledge of how life is lived. I recall a scene from Napoleon Dynamite where he works with chickens, and the guys who are hiring them are elderly Idahoan coots that drink an egg concoction in a pitcher. While that part, I'm sure, was a small exaggeration (I almost wanted to say, eggs-agerration, well, there, I've gone and done it), I'm sure working with chickens was something only someone who had done it would have even thought to commit to film.

The exodus of brain talent coming from India (and to a lesser extent, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) coming to the United States has been occuring for perhaps thirty years, and lagged the mass immigration of Chinese and Koreans by maybe ten years or so, has meant a great deal to the American economy. This is particularly strange for India, since it does have vast swathes of poverty, and reflects a decision to educate a small group very well, at the expense of universal education, in hopes that this will pay off.

This course of action may be more natural to a society whose class differences have a long history. The country's caste system still has a strong hold. Thus, having an educated elite may not seem that unnatural. Most of the educated elite don't quite think of themselves that way. To some extent, they live separated from the rest of the country and don't think of themselves as necessarily better or worse than everyone else, except in the quality of their education. There's also, to be fair, not a strong sense of trying to raise the literacy of India either (part of that may be a government that isn't really free from corruption).

Really, NPR's strength is not, as I've stated before, breaking stories. They're not so good at that. They're much better at finding personal stories to tell, of people that don't necessarily make news.

Overall, this was a good listen. I'm planning to head to Bethesda to listen to Might Could, assuming the NPR segment doesn't cause a huge flood of people to arrive.

Hidden in Plain Sight

A few years ago, I remember using a search engine that was not Google. I was looking up a few people I went to college with. In particular, I remember searching for a guy named Peter Zenge. Pete was from North Carolina. His dad was a music professor at UNC, who played the piano. Pete was trying to decide between majoring in physics and majoring in computer science. He picked physics, and then realized he didn't care that much for it, but as it turns out, physics, like many other science majors had cut down its requirements, allowing students to pick other areas to round out their knowledge. He picked econ, and that was that.

This webpage, as I recall, was from someone he had gone to school with, either middle school or high school. Pete's dad had a visiting position in Taiwan, and he had enrolled in some American school over there. He had a PC back in the days when such things were novel, and presumably, showed this to his friends in Taiwan, and this was remarkable enough for the guy to write a webpage, back when such things were novel.

That webpage disappeared. It is presumably lost in the annals of time, except search engines, at one point, must have indexed it. I had once suggested that to Google that they archive everything so you could do a "Google Wayback". You would enter a query and a date, and then it would give you the results that Google would have produced at the time. Of course, those pages would be missing, but if there was some partial record of that, even that would be cool.

There is archive.org, but it's slow, and doesn't have good coverage. I know. There are sites that try to prevent themselves from being recorded by search engines, which I think is too bad. I understand webpages can ultimately stay around so long that you may regret an indiscreet post, but I think it will be an interesting source of data that future generations may want to explore, provided the web's format doesn't change drastically (HTML, good or bad, is still around).

Peter had the advantage that his name was a bit unusual. Not so much his first name, but his last name. There's record of him from the late 90s, but nothing very recent. In fact, it's a bit easier to find his dad on the web more recently.

And that's interesting, because he's got a little web presence that's mostly disappeared. There are those who have a ton of web presence. They want their lives to be on the Internet. There are those where almost no information exists. There are far more people, for example, using instant messenging than you can query about. Find someone's unique screen name and then Google it. Odds are you'll find no information on it. This may be privacy at work. I used to get spammed when I had ICQ and that was years ago.

These days, I don't get spammed on IM, presumably since most IMs require permission before getting added.

I found someone I knew in college, but for a while, I had no information on his whereabouts other than he went to UCLA to do a M.S. in computer science. There was some indication of this, and nothing else. Every once in a while, I'd make the Google query. Then, a few years ago, I found a page he had written on anime, and was able to get in touch that way.

Tracking down someone on the web is a bit like cyberstalking, and there's sort of an art to trying to get this information, looking at multiple search engines, hoping some variation of words will trigger the result you want. Of course, there are pay services that claim they can track people for you, but I'm not that serious about it.

I grew up in an age before instant messaging, and therefore, having everyone's SN from college is uncommon. I know people who have sworn off IM, convinced it eats up too much time. And my parent's generation don't even see the appeal of such a thing. Who would they talk to? Why not use a phone? It's a foreign thing to them, even as it's so utterly common among college students now.

I'm curious how social networking will evolve. Already, you see teens who think nothing of having their lives public knowledge. They put their plans throughout the day. They want people to call them. The paranoid parent would think kids are setting themselves up for unwanted attention, and I suppose that's possible, but there are, I'd imagine that those who are interested in such ill will are far outnumbered by those who want their iternary available to all.

If more people become more open about their lives, will it become trivial for me to find people I knew once upon a time? Will I even lose touch with them? In fact, am I likely to lose touch even as they are right there in my contact list? How many people do you regularly talk to on your contact list? Some keep their list tiny. Others have massive lists, of which they contact only a few.

We live in a virtual world that's becoming disconnectedly connected.

Waste Not, Want Not

I never did understand that phrase "waste not, want not". I gather it means something to the effect "if you don't want, don't waste it, give it to me". But the phrase forces me to think about its meaning too much.

But it does relate to something I was thinking about, and that is the evolving state of the American mindset. Thirty years ago, one of the most famous commercials of the 70s was being aired. It depicts a guy driving in a convertible tossing all sorts of stuff out of his car on a stretch of highway. In the end, it shows a Native American crying, seeing the country littered. This was one of those early public service ads, and its lesson was not to litter.

While this commercial exaggerated the littering (the guy tosses out an entire bed out of his car), it reflected what some Americans thought at the time. If you had a can or a cup or anything and you didn't want it in your car, you jettisoned it outside. Today, the thought would barely cross one's mind. The only thing people toss out these days is cigarettes.

That, in combination with efforts to get Americans to recycle (and the government support to encourage recycling) has, I believe have changed the way Americans think about littering while driving. I've seen people's cars filled with crap (including my own), mostly because people can't imagine tossing them out on the street anymore. I know, there's penalties for littering, but you'd imagine it has to be one of those crimes that it's hard to get caught doing.

Can you imagine yourself littering while driving? At one point, people could.

Radiohead

Listen to a news broadcast. Or sports radio. Or anything where there's an announcer. They all speak in this announcer voice, and it's rather annoying. How did they learn to speak like this? Are they told "Look here, son [why is it never, look here, daughter?], you can't talk like you normally talk and expect to be taken seriously! Work on your radio voice."

Now some people seem to have a perfectly good speaking voice without having to devolve into radiotalk. Tony Kornheiser, Mike Wilbon, Jon Stewart. On the flip side, there are people like Mike Greenberg, Diane Rehm, Irving R. Levine, and so forth.

Can't you people speak in something less grating to the ear? Are there studies that show that speaking in radiospeak lets you get through words that much faster. You hear it all the time on airplanes when you receive useful directions such as how to fasten and unfasten seatbelts, breathing with the masks, and so forth.

The worst folks are people just learning how to speak in radiospeak. Prime examples of these are announcers for high school sports. Awful.

I suppose it could be worse. Most athletes would improve a notch if they could learn to speak in radiospeak. Many struggle to string sentences together. I know. It's not easy. I'm often surprised shows like 60 Minutes manage to have interviewees that sound coherent instead of fumbling over their words, being self-conscious in front of the cameras, and so forth. I'm sure it all gets edited out if it's that bad.

Americans, as a whole, really should learn better public speaking. We'd all benefit.

Blogging State of Mind

Stand in the place where you live
Now face north
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven’t
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face west
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t before

Now that I've been blogging almost a year, I realize that whenever I do anything, I'm thinking about blogging about it. It's a rather unnatural feeling, because I'm consciously aware of it. I'm thinking of phrases and words I want to use, trying to piece out the ideas in my head, so I can type it up.

The funny thing is there's something that I already do that's comparable, but I've done it for so much longer that I don't think about it anymore, and that's trying to be funny. Being funny is incredibly difficult. There are some people who clearly know they should avoid being funny, a few who don't know and try anyway, even if they mostly come up lame (how lame they come up depends very much on the audience), and others who are hysterical.

Here are a few rules of thumb. Laughing is contagious. You're always funnier in front of a large crowd than a small one, because once you hear someone laughing, you're more likely to laugh yourself.

Humor is often about playing against expectations or seeing something that should strike us as funny, but doesn't always. For example, Mike Birbiglia says that Busta Rhymes interjects his name in songs (even if it's surely not his real name) and Mike wants to do the same. It sounds cool when Busta does it and humorous when Mike does it.

Some people find shocking humor funny, while others find it offensive. I told this joke once. Do you know why Indira Gandhi was shot so many times (she was the prime minister of India who was assasinated by her own Sikh guards)? They were aiming for the dot. Why is this amusing? For a while, people are thinking, what dot? Oh, Indian women were a dot. Oh, they were aiming for that, and it's hard to hit. Ah, I get it.

Of course, it's also offensive because someone was killed, after all, due to that. The few people listening didn't find it funny. I suspect there were jokes told about 9/11, though personally I don't know of any (I do know Challenger jokes). Those kind of jokes try to diffuse tragedy with comedy, and are edgy, and often inappropriate to a certain audience.

Birbiglia also does a routine where he is alternately making fun of white and black alike called "Cracka Please". At one point he says "You may not call us 'crackers'. Only we may call each other 'crackers'. You can call us 'crackas', but not 'crackers'", which is one of those riffs on the "N" word, which is funny partly because it's white people doing black people, but also, perhaps inheritly funny because the distinction between those two words is trivial, and yet, people draw that distinction (much like Coke and Pepsi).

He then says "people say 'white bread'...why that's not even an insult. That's my race and a food item. I can do that too, 'black bean soup', Stay out of this 'Asian Chicken Platter'". Of course, race is a touchy issue, even made more touchy because some people find it an artificial categorization, yet people relate so much to it culturally that it might as well serve as some kind of real indicator.

When I listen to people talk, I'm trying to think of something humorous, which may be repeating a phrase that people have thought was funny, or making a pun out of something, or what have you.

The toughest kind of humor is physical humor, because you have to work at it. I remember listening to Dave Thomas, writer of Ruby books, talking about flying a plane, something he likes to do. He talks about how his flight instructory says that he's going to note a certain sensation as he flies, and he's going to make a mistake, and he's going to have to fight it. Dave thinks "Since you've already told me, I'm warned, so I should be good" and yet when he takes the plane out for real, he's doing those motions that his mind told him not to do.

And he's showing his body jerking as he's simulating the flight of the plane. Not only does it make for an interesting story, where you're hooked, but as a person who wants to tell jokes, it's the kind of physicality you marvel at. In other words, realizing what Dave is doing makes you appreciate all the more how he's doing it.

Tom, the psychology grad student, tells about a Russian girl who's also in the department, who he claims walks as if she has one of those poles that strippers dance too. Now, this is savvy in several ways. First, you have know about stripper poles, at least seen images of it before. He's creating a visual that works for all but the most wholesome. Then, as a guy, and presumably non-stripper, he's now trying to gyrate and move around like this girl, more than likely, far exaggerating every movement she makes.

Making fun of someone is particular challenging because, much like a caricutarist, you're trying to find something to exaggerate that's recognizable and funny. Impersonators also do this. There's an impersonator, Frank Caliendo, who does Clinton, Bush, John Madden, and a whole slew of other people. When he makes fun of Madden, he has Madden talk about Brett Favre all the time. For example, he says "Madden manages to work Brett Favre in everything. He'll be talking about stuff like hybrid turf: which is half fake and half real. But let me tell you someone that's all real. Brett Favre."

Humor is challenging because it's very audience dependent. Someone who doesn't follow football may not find that so funny. American humor is rather sophisticated because it relies on a lot of pop-culture knowledge. Many immigrants, for instance, don't follow popular music, Hollywood, movies, etc. So these jokes fly over their heads. It flies over my parents heads. If they can't track pop-culture, can they even begin to track Internet culture which requires a great deal of surfing around?

For example, Wikipedia. If you don't surf the web, do you know it exists? Do you know what a Wiki is? Do you know why it's used? Do you know about fake entries being put in the Wikipedia? Are you smart enough to realize that despite that, Wikipedia has a lot of good stuff in it?

When I blog, I'm not really thinking about humor, so much. I'm writing down stuff that interests me. I'm trying to draw several different points together. I'm hoping it makes a modicum of sense. I'm trying to practice writing, even as I need to edit more.

Perhaps if I do this a lot more, I won't even think about how I'm planning what to blog as being unnatural. I'll just see it as my normal state of mind.

Of course, this is what happens when you have too much time on your hands while you blog. You begin to think about thinking about blogging. It all becomes very meta.

Oh, do I have to explain meta? Hmm, OK, here it goes. In the study of logic, you learn a logic language which is a bit like a programming language. It has rules. It should, like a programming language, also have semantics, i.e., meaning. But how do you describe the meaning? You can do so in a meta-language, i.e., a language to describe the logic language.

If that sounds confusing, I'll make an analogy. Suppose you want to study the English language. To do so, you need a way to describe the English language. Nouns, verbs, rules of grammar, and so forth. This is a meta-language. Now typically, you describe English in English though certainly you could pick any other suitably expressive language to do so. For example, if you study Spanish, you'll often learn the grammar rules by having someone explain it to you in English.

To introspect about something. To think about thinking is considered "meta". In movies, this is also called navel-gazing which is again staring at oneself. Languages like Java have even built a facility to introspect called reflection.

That's meta.

The Dyeing Gall

Once upon a time, the only way you could watch a film was to go to a theater and watch it from beginning to end. Once the VCR came out and then the DVD player, people could alter the way they watched a film. They could watch it they way the read a book. In bits and pieces. Whenever they have the time.

Do directors want people to watch the film in its entirety? After all, as a filmgoer, you are trying to follow what's going on, which means keeping track of characters, their relationship to one another, and possibly the emotion that's the director is attempting to induce. Films are a bit purer than television, which forces interruptions in the form of commercials. Television, aware of such interruptions, often ends each commercial break in a mini-cliffhanger.

I remember watching Love and Death on Long Island which stars John Hurt and Jason Priestley about a British man who has eschewed technology (televisions, answering machines, even watching movies) until he decided he should watch an E. M. Forster adaptation, and instead, accidentally attends the screening of Hotpants College 2 starring Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestly), where he becomes smitten, and is eventually reduced to a schoolgirl, collecting pictures, reading teen magazines, finding out all about this guy, and eventually deciding to stalk him in Long Island.

At one point, he is lecturing about film and how people can now go back and dissect each moment. While he's giving the appearance of an academic, of course, the real point is that he's done this with his current obsession.

While it speaks to one extreme of how one can watch films (another example is Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts where Arsinee Khanjian
plays a hotel cleaning woman who is obsessed with her coworker, an aspiring actor whose never had any speaking parts. She repeatedly rents films and only watches the segments that he's in), a less extreme version is simply stopping the film and getting back to it, much like you would get back to a book and read it.

I'm starting to watch a film, The Dying Gaul which stars Peter Sarsgaard and Campbell Scott. Strangely enough, I've heard almost nothing about the film, even though it stars Peter Sarsgaard. I've seen three films with Sarsgaard so far: Garden State, Shattered Glass, and Kinsey. Of the three, his performance in Shattered Glass is perhaps the best.

I would have thought that I would hear about most of his films. On the other hand, actors can make two films a year, and with so many films coming out, there's bound to be a few that aren't so well publicized. I'm bound to miss some. A few years ago, when Sarsgaard was still just starting out, people would confuse him for Stellan Skarsgård, mostly because the name sounded similar. Skarsgård hasn't made many English films that people have heard of. Perhaps his two most famous films are Breaking the Waves and Good Will Hunting.

The Dying Gaul is a film within a film. It's about a screenwriter, Robert Sandrich (Sarsgaard), who has written a film called The Dying Gaul about two gay lovers. A producer, Jeffrey Tishop (played by Campbell Scott), says he loves the film, but no one will watch a film about gay characters that's a weepie (what about Brokeback Mountain, but Dying Gaul came out already), and wants to alter the story to make it about a heterosexual couple. It tries to raise the issue of purity of art with the crassness of commercialism.

As a person who watches films, now more than ever, it's interesting to see which films are picked. Gus Van Sant's name is mentioned. Tootsie, Philadelphia, Spike Lee, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg are all name-dropped. It seems odd to hear films referred to explicitly. It's something you don't notice in films (just as people watching television is rarely depicted in television programs).

It starts off well and that's where I stopped. Since then, I couldn't help but check if Roger Ebert had reviewed it. Ebert's a prolific reviewer, so chances are he did see it, especially since this isn't a low-budget film starring unknowns. Alas, Ebert liked its start, but said it went downhill when it veered to a plot point he thought wasn't worth exploring. I'll probably still watch the rest of it, since I've already started it, just to see if I come to the same conclusion as Ebert.

Psych!

Remember when this was all the trend. You'd reach out your hand and offer to shake and just as a person was about to shake, you'd put it back and yell, "Psych!", because, well, it was some kind of psych-out.

Yeah, that was real popular.

And that's my weak lead-in to psychology vs. psychiatry and hanging out with the crowd.

Yesterday, I was told that the girlfriend of an ex-CS grad student was going to defend her Ph.D. thesis in psychology. Shortly thereafter, some people went to grad pub, which is kind of a happy hour for grad students on a Friday evening at a nearby bar. We were to meet at an Indian restaurant called Tiffin. It's good, if a little pricey.

I showed up about 15 minutes after 7, which was 15 minutes after I should have been there. The place was mostly empty. There was a party way, way in the back, and a few more around them. I didn't recognize anyone I knew back there. I thought maybe they decided to go elsewhere. There was a group of two or so up front, but I didn't recognize them either.

I finally called up Jaime who said he was running late, and that he had just called Jeremy who said they were heading there as well. So basically everyone was arriving late.

By the time everyone showed up, there was maybe 11 of us. There was Jaime and his girlfriend, Amy. There was Jeremy and his girlfriend, Penny, the one who just became Dr. Penny. There was Rob and his girlfriend. There were maybe four other psychology majors, two guys and at least one girl, possibly two.

We segregated into two groups, with psychology majors on the one side (and girlfriends) and computer science types on the other. There was one psychology guy, Tom, who decided to sit among the computer science types. He said he already hung out with the other psychology students all the time, so he wanted a change.

Tom's a very funny guy, though I couldn't tell you much of what he said, partly because of the din, and partly because I simply can't remember.

Humor's an interesting thing. It requires a quick mind to think of appropriate things to say. It also requires a savvy for knowing cultural facts. You can make fun of modern music, music from the 80s, from politics, to video games, to who-knows-what. To do it effectively means you must have observed something people recognize, and yet twist it enough to make it funny. For example, a white guy making fun of a psychotic Russian girl. That's funny.

Tom's also gay. Or as Jeremy likes to say, "he's very homosexual". Now, I suppose his buddy, Jimmy is, as well. And one of the girls seemed to suggest she was a lesbian. This makes the graduate psychology department one big rainbow coalition, and not of the Jesse Jackson variety.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In fact, that's part of the interesting point. Would anyone honestly be able to be part of the graduate psychology program, yet be closeted? There's something that seems inherently wrong with that. If it were theater, there's perhaps a badge of honor. If it's the sciences, people tend to uphold their image of nerds unable to get dates anyway, and there's less of a need to wave a flag, rainbow or otherwise.

Being gay and closeted in psychology seems like being a political sciece major and hiding your party leanings. It just doesn't seem to gel.

One thing I've noticed about psychology majors is that they are much more outgoing and extroverted than, say, computer science majors. Again, that may have a lot to do with their study. If you're trying to get people to open up and deal with their emotions, it might be useful for you to deal with them as well.

As Tom said later that evening, many people enter psychology after having been treated themselves. Similarly, many computer scientists enter computer science after playing video games. OK, a bit of a joke, though true in both cases.

This is particularly interesting because psychology scares some people. Parents want their kids to be doctors who heal people, but not necessarily psychologists. Psychology, after all, doesn't have definitive answers. Neither does medicine for that matter but they can look for very specific symptoms that can, in principle, be measured (sure, there are a few maladies for which modern medicine has little idea how to treat).

Psychology does fascinate me mostly because they study people, and how people react, and mostly how to help people help themselves through talk. I was curious how culture plays a role. Both Penny and Tom felt it was more challenging for African Americans to be open with their feelings. There are trust issues, especially when talking to whites, and I think, especially when dealing with emotional insecurities. African Americans want to be seen as in charge of who they are, which is a kind of insecurity, whereas whites and Asians seem more attuned to their own weaknesses.

However, I was thinking that it might be even tougher to treat someone in a foreign country with different worldviews. For example, many years ago in the US, housewives who had very little to do in the workworld might find themselves bored, and spend their time gossiping about one person or another. After a while, this might lead to a kind of backbiting as one person tries to smear the reputation of another.

I don't doubt that this kind of thing happens today, but with women able to have careers of their own, there's less need for gossip. However, it may be that Asians still peddle in gossip, and that worldview may be more prevalent. You see a little of this in the show Sopranos. I saw one episode about how Italian men were supposed to avoid saying they performed oral sex for their wives and girlfriends. It was perceived as something less than masculine. Men would keep it secret if they were doing it, according to this show. And of course, the main premise is how the patriarch of the crime family seeks help from a psychologist.

So I had to ask the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Turns out they're rather similar. Psychiatrists are medical doctors, so they get a medical degree and go to med school. They typically prescribe drugs to deal with problems. Psychologists, on the other hand, typically deal with people by talking to them. I tend to think that that's the better option, but then I've never sought out either for help.

During this discussion, it came up that both Penny and Tom (and all of the psychology department) had regular patients. For a computer scientist, that's rather novel. In order for a psychologist to complete training, they must talk to real people and effectively do the things they will do for real, much like a medical doctor does.

A computer scientist in grad school, on the other hand, isn't training to be a programmer. They aren't trying to become better coders. They are trying to solve problems, with computers as their tools. Now, sometimes the problems are quite academic, thus the solutions they find aren't applicable much to the real world. For example, computational complexity studies how hard problems are to solve, and some are so hard as to be not practically solvable. They try to construct hierarchies of difficulties and show why these form separate classes.

All that information progresses the field in a way, but it's not real world training to do anything besides research.

Although psychology is a kind of science (is it? it feels like a kind of medical study), it reminds me a bit of theater. In theater, people study to be other people. They learn to deal with how to portray or magnify their emotions, to understand human nature so they can portray it on stage. Psychology seems to deal with similar emotions, but mostly to help people who have a difficult time dealing with it themselves.

Some people have sought medical treatment wanting to avoid the highs and lows of emotions feeling a middle ground all the time would make them feel better. Penny said "that's just part of being human", that is, the highs and the lows. While I agree, I tend to believe I'm someone that's not neither up nor down a whole lot, and so that being even keel isn't that unusual either. Maybe it would be better to be up and down. I don't know.

In fact, that's what made it somewhat difficult to relate to these folks, although simply by virtue of what they study, Penny and Tom tend to get along with people and know how to get people to relax.

There's one thing that's almost ironic about very out gay guys. They seem to get along really well with women. Now, this has often been attributed to gay men thinking they're women (which isn't often the case, I think, but many don't feel they're jocks either) or that women think gay men are safe. However, even straight men sometimes like flamboyant gay men. Witness the perception of the hetero sports media of Johnny Weir, who, while not exactly claiming he's gay, comes across as very gay.

And by that I mean there's a kind of campiness affectation that some gay men have. Who knows why this happens. It's not universal by any means. Joel Spolsky is gay, but he's not camping it up in his dialogue. Timothy Treadwell, the guy in Grizzly Man, sounded plenty gay, but he was actually straight. So, when people are said to be gay, there's a certain way of dressing and speaking that is associated with that.

And it only happens, alas, with gay men. Lesbians get far, far, far less airplay. Think of a good lesbian film or one that resonates with the lesbian community. Can you think of any? I saw Saving Face, but really, the lesbian community wasn't even mentioned. The main stereotype for lesbians are women that cut their hair short and spiky and sound like Italian Americans.

Tom, for instance, doesn't quite have a campy voice, though it's got some affectation. He does have his hair dyed a bit blond, wears clothing of a certain type that might suggest gayness, and has a penchant to impersonate folks and is a bit flamboyant. There's a need, I suppose, to advertise so as to not cause people to be deceived.

As someone once said, for the most part, African Americans don't have to advertise they are African Americans (same with Asian Americans) whereas Latinos can blend in and may have to indicate they are Latinos. Since homosexuality isn't exactly heriditary in the way "race" is, gays don't exactly stand out, unless they find someway to purposely stand out.

The interesting thing is how gay men often get along better with women than straight men, perhaps because some gay men like the same kinds of things that some straight women do, and because gay men are more open with their emotions than straight men. And even that's a stereotype of sorts.

This works against all sorts of expected stereotypes you might imagine people would have about gay men (i.e., they would hate women and only want to hang out with other men).

Anyway, I found it a fascinating evening because of that, and was glad that my desire to eat Indian food outweighed my sense that I wasn't all that close with Jeremy nor Penny (even though both are pleasant enough individuals).

It's made me wonder how well I would have fared in an area that's quite different from computer science, and whether I would have had any aptitude for that area.

One Billion Indians

Today would have been tax day, but it fell on a Saturday, so they pushed the due date until Monday. Tomorrow's Easter Sunday. I should have something to say about Easter, but my knowledge of the resurrection is rather limited, so I'll let someone who has more to say about it deal with that.

Instead, I'll talk a little about India.

Recently, some coworkers recommended Madras Palace, which is located in a shopping center near a Giant, near Dogfish Head (I figured it should be Doghead Fish, but apparently not) Brewery, a place I'd also been with coworkers.

Based on its name, I should have realized this was a South Indian place. Most of the people who were eating here were Indian. I was one of two groups that was non-Indian, the other being this white couple. Generally speaking, that's a good sign. I once had a summer job where I worked with a guy named Rob Oddone and another guy named Robert Parrish (no, not the basketball player). Remarkably neither have much of a web presence, though I suspect over 90% of the public lacks one.

Rob grew up in California near San Francisco. When he'd go out with his dad to Chinatown, his dad had a rule of thumb. Pick the restaurant with the most Chinese people. That's probably a good place to go. And they said they never picked a bad spot by following that rule.

I suspect the same can be said of Indian restaurants.

There's a South Indian place near where I live called Udupi Palace. Mostly, South Indian places serve dosas, which are thin crepes that are huge, on the order of a large pizza or larger. Tonight, I saw one woman who had a dosa that seemed to be at least 20 inches in diameter. Inside the dosa, there's usually some combination of potatoes and onions.

In general, I find dosas a bit bland. However, this placed had a "spring dosa" with veggies in it. In particular, carrots and onions, as well as the potatoes. They precut it in thirds, though each third was the size of a burrito. It was hard to eat that much. Thus huge dish was only $6.50.

You can also get uttapam, which is something like a steamed pancake, often with stuff in it. There's also something that resemble a bloated crepe balloon.

South Indian restaurants are typically all-vegetarian, which may be one reason that Americans don't go. As it is, many Americans don't like Indian food, finding it too spicy or too strange or simply not there. Of those who like Indian food, many prefer northern Indian restaurants where they serve meat. India is mostly vegetarian, but there are plenty of people who eat meat. India has a huge Muslim population who eat meat. Some Indians, say Bengalis, eat meat. Bengalis, in particular, like fish.

In general, Hindus won't eat beef, because it comes from cow, and the cow is sacred. However, they'll generally eat chicken, and presumably pork as well. They will eat milk. In fact, quite a lot of Indian desserts are milk-based. Americans (including myself) have found Indian desserts quite sweet. However, it turns out that it's not so much sweet, but milky sweet. The Indians have the same complaint about American desserts. They're too sweet. But really, it's non-milky sweet. The Indians are used to having sweet flavors with milk. Americans, outside of ice cream, are not.

There's a general divide between north and south in India, culturally, and somewhat politically. The major cities of India are: New Delhi, Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (now Kolkata), Hyderbad, Bangalore and Madras (now Chennai). If you picture India as kite shaped (diamond with the top triangle a bit smaller than the larger bottom triangle). Delhi is the furthest north, the closest city to Pakistan and Nepal. Bombay is in the middle left (sorta like San Francisco) right on the coast. Calcutta is on the far right, near Bangladesh. Hyderbad is further south than Bombay in the center. Even further south of Hyderabad is Bangalore. To the east, on the coast, is Madras.

Of the cities, you'd consider Hyderabad, Bangalore, and especially Madras, South India. Delhi is prototypical north. Bombay is considered the "New York" of India (although it's on the west of India). Calcultta is off on the other end (roughly where New York might be were it in India).

The official language of India is Hindi. The religion is Hinduism. People who practice it are called Hindus. However, India has plenty of languages, much like China. In the South, for example, they speak Tamil (in Madras). There's Mayalayam. There's Kahmiri, Punjabi, Gujrati, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi. Those in Pakistan typically speak Urdu, which many Indians believe is a purer, more beautiful form of Hindi.

This evening, I ordered: mulligatawny soup, spring dosa, aloo paratha, and mysore coffee. I suspect each, in its own way, wasn't quite authentic. Indians, as a rule, don't really have soups. They do have "gravy", but that's not American gravy. It resembles soup. I believe mulligatawny soup is a bit like hot and sour soup, a kind of soup served to westerners. A little Googling shows this to be true. The British adopted rasam, which is a kind of soup from South India to become mulligatawny soup.

This soup varies a great deal from restaurant to restaurant. It's generally yellow, made of lentils, and may or may not have little bits of meat depending on how vegetarian the restaurant is. Rasam, by contrast, is usually a bit more clear and has tomatoes.

Indians are known for their breads, though it's eaten more in the north than the south. By breads, I should say it's closer to a tortilla than French bread. There is the large puffy baked naan (pronounced "non"). There's poori, which is a bit greasier and flatter. Similarly, there's paratha, which is what I had. Aloo paratha is potato paratha. (Aloo is potato). This is usually a bit greasy too. (I think both are a bit like tortillas, made over a pan with some oil to heat it). Finally, there's chapathi, which is the thinnest of the breads and perhaps the closest cousin to tortillas.

Indians have told me that Indian breads are difficult to make. Most Indians don't usually make their own. Many will use pita for a shortcut.

Those who eat rice usually have basmati rice. This is a long-grained rice. Chinese and Japanese, for instance, prefer short-grained rice. It has a distinctive, though not strong, taste. Texas grows a form of basmati rice called "Texmati" rice, a combination of Texas and Basmati (much like Bollywood is a cross between Bombay and Hollywood).

Indians have a huge film industry reminscent of the American film industry 50 years ago. Asian countries generally have similar film industries, where they crank out one film after another. Most Indians prefer watching rather formulaic films, because they see movies as escapism. They don't (in general) want art or depressing or confusing stories. Most Indian films have a large musical component. There's typically singing and dancing.

Unlike American films where many actors attempt to do their own singing, this is almost unheard of in India. Singing is considered something professionals do. Women tend to sing in an almost childlike falsetto. Singers voices are dubbed over actors lip-synch. In Hong Kong, by contrast, real singers often become actors, and so can really do their own singing.

There's not too much in the way of "art films" in India. The most famous Indian art filmmaker is Satyajit Ray, who passed away a few years ago. There's Mira Nair who's made Indian films but mostly for Western audiences. There's Shekhar Kapur, who made a name for himself with his film Bandit Queen about a real life Phoolan Devi who was kind of a renegade leader. He's since made Elizabeth and Four Feathers. There are Indians in the US making films, mostly M. Night Shyamalan, whose set all his films in the greater Philadelphia area, and to my knowledge, has never made a film starring Indians. Gurinder Chadha made the film Bend it Like Beckham about a Sikh girl who is a soccer star.

Ah, the Sikhs. Most people think of Indians wearing turbans. However, only the Sikhs wear turbans. They are a minority religion, that is monotheistic. Its originated in the 1500s. Sikhs (also called "surds" or "surdarjee") follow the five "K"s. These are (from Wikipedia): Kesh (uncut hair), Kanga (small comb), Kara (circular heavy metal bracelet), Kirpan (ceremonial dagger), and Kacha (long underwear).

Many Sikhs have the last name Singh and often have a first name that ends in "inder" as in "Surinder". You'll notice the female director of Bend It Like Beckham is Gurinder.

Although Indians have been perceived as a third world country, they took an unusual policy to educate their people. Rather than attempt for universal education, they decided to educate an elite. Those who can succeed in education are sent to elite schools, many conducted in English.

The top Indian univerities are the I.I.T's, the Indian Institute of Technology. To get in, you must take an exam that over a hundred thousand students take each year. Only a few thousand students qualify to enter one of the five IITs. (Upon further checking, there are seven IITs now, two of them added in the 90s). They are located in Dehli, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur, and Madras. The last two are Guwahati and Roorkee.

These exams are not like the SATs. The questions are truly challenging. Your admittance is based solely on the exam, except for a few minorities who are allotted a fixed quota of students.

The IITs are based on American schools in that they have frequent exams. Other universities in India are more like the British system, which have one large final exam at the end of a semester. IITs generally require a large number of courses. Six or seven courses is not uncommon. Computer scientists often have to take a few courses in electrical engineering, for example.

The IITs rank their majors. At one point, computer science was the top major and electrical engineering was number two. This is probably still the case. Each student picks their major before entering with those having high rank picking their major first. Students from IITs are generally quite bright and outgoing. They are often quick thinking and vocal in their questions, unlike, say students from Asia (China, Korea, etc) where students are usually very quiet, and don't ask much, if at all, in class.

Many graduates of IIT head to the United States to further their education. The brain drain is noticeable. Ask a typical Indian who has come to the U.S. if they plan to head back to India when they graduate, and many will say yes, but often find themselves, years later, still in the United States, since the opportunities are better. Even so, there's been talent heading back to India.

Outsourcing has headed to India where well-educated Indians work at a fraction of the cost that their Western counterparts do because of the vast difference in the cost of living. Added to that, Indians often speak very good English, at least, those that are well-educated, a side-effect of the British occupation.

There are other universites besides IIT. There's BITS, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science. The Birlas are a wealthy family in India who've funded education. There's also IIS, which is the Indian Institute of Science.

Although India has long been independent, there are many Indians, especially educated Indians that are Anglophiles. Many educated Indians are voracious readers, and read British literature. Ironically, South Indians, who often dislike Hindi as the official language (it's a northern language), prefer English, which is seen as suitably neutral. Some Indians have refused to learn Hindi, especially in the south.

Indians have find Chinese cooking funny. Indians cook with a variety of spices, in fact so many that the best place to get cheap spices is an Indian store. Here is a partial list of spices and their translations: cumin (jeera), tumeric (haldi), chili, mustard seeds, asafetida (hing), fennel (sounf), fenugreek (methi), green cardamom (elaichi), black cardamom, cinnamon (dalchini). There's even more than that.

There is no such thing as curry. Instead, it's a combination of spices. Indians generally have masalas, with garam masala, the most famous of these spice mixtures. Typically, they are made by heating the spices and grinding them. They are very fragrant, so if you want to cook Indian, realize the smell can hang around a bit.

On the other hand, Chinese cook with sauces. Soy sauce, chili sauce, plum sauce, and on and on. Indians find sauces a bit inauthentic, but there's really no way to do Chinese cooking otherwise.

Interestingly enough, Indians often use many of the same ingredients to cook as Chinese cuisine, including ginger, garlic, and bitter melon, even though the resulting taste is quite different. Both cultures eat a lot of rice, though Indians typically use their hands, while the Chinese use chopsticks.

When Indians eat, they eat with their right hand. Like Africans, the left hand is perceived as unclean (think of toilet habits), and not meant for eating. The right hand therefore serves to rip and scoop. If you're eating bread, you must hold and rip the bread, then mix it, and eat with the finger tips. Food can also be mixed in this fashion with rice. Indians who eat Western food, however, tend to use fork and spoon, again, most likely leftover from British influence.

A relatively common Indian food is dal, which is lentils of a sort. There are several kinds of dal. Normally, you boil dal to cook it. However, dal can take a very long time to boil to softness, up to an hour. Many Indians use pressure cookers to cut down the cooking time to only a few minutes. The two most commonly eaten dals are toor dal and masoor dal (I can't really say that, but those are the two I've seen). Technically, dals are pulses, but I couldn't even begin to tell you what that means.

Well, there you go. I could probably write a few more pages on what I know about India, but I'm already getting tired.

In the meanwhile, bon appetit.

Suhdookoh

I don't know what it is about strange words with more than two syllables. Americans can't pronounce them. Heck, if Americans weren't so used to pronouncing American, they'd mess that up too. Really.
o
There's this new craze of a game called Sudoku. The game's simple enough to explain. You have a 9 by 9 board (that's 81 squares for the mathematically challenged). You can think of this as a 9 tic-tac-toes in a 3 by 3 grid.

Let's try this experiment to visualize that. Draw a box. Draw two horizontal lines (left-right) about a third down, and then two-thirds down. It looks like three stripes.

Now draw two vertical lines. A third and a third. It looks like a tic-tac-toe board with a box on the outside. Now copy this 9 times.
Arrange 3 tic-tac-toe on the first board, 3 on the second, and 3 on the third.

Now, why tell you this convoluted picture? I suppose I should have just found some image of a sudoku board, and have you look it up.

But I didn't. Anyway, here are the rules. Some of these squares have numbers. The numbers are between 1 and 9. Pick a column. That column must have the number 1 through 9 somewhere in that column. Since there are 9 squares, each number can only appear once.

Now, this is true of all the columns. You must place them in such a way that all columns have the values 1 through 9. Same thing with every row. Same thing with every 3-by-3 tic-tac-toe board.

It's one big constraint game. Some numbers are filled out, and you must use those.

Sudoku is relatively young, maybe a year and a half before it became all the rage in England, then hopped the Atlantic and became all the rage in the US. It's supposed to be Japanese.

There's a related game called Kakuro. I forget the exact rules. I think you need to find some set of values that sum up to a number. It looks a little like crosswords. You'll have, say, the number 11. There will be 4 squares across. You need four numbers that add to 11, but do not repeat. Thus, 1, 4, 5, 2, could be those numbers.

Like crosswords, you have these values across and down. Unlike crosswords, you need not know anything about a culture to figure out the clues. You just need numbers.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

Read the following word: Sudoku.

Now, break it apart. Su. Do. Ku.

Let's try to pronounce it. There's "su". That's like "Sue". Most people don't mess this part up.

Then, there's "do". I see. People do mess this up. They think it's "Love me do" or "Do..or do not...there is no try". They don't think it's like "d'oh" or "dodo" or "do-re-mi". Once they want to pronounce it like dew, they're in trouble.

Because now you get to the last syllable. It's "ku", pronounced like "koo" or "coup". It's almost "kool", but not quite there.

So, if they put all that together, it sounds like: sue, dew, koo. And that grates on my ears, though I can sorta see where it comes from now. But wouldn't they have spelled it "Suduku"? And then, I suppose some people think "sue, dew, koo" doesn't sound Japanese enough, so they make it "sue, dew, koh" (as in almost Coca, but no "ca").

It's sue, d'oh, koo!

Read it slowly, syllable, by syllable.

And that's not what I really wanted to talk about either.

I want to talk about Mike Birbiglia.

Pronounce his last name.

Go on.

Birbiglia.

Let's try breaking this into syllables. You know. How they taught you to read when you were a wee tor.

Bir. (That's like "brr", it's cold). Big. You can probably handle that. And "lia" (as in "lee-uh). Bir. Big. Lee. Uh. Bir-big-lee-uh.

Well, Mike knows people can't pronounce his name, because many people syntax parser breaks down after four letters of unknown origin.

Now, this is the Internet for you. I was going to read one of my favorite movie critics online, a guy named Scott Renshaw, who's been writing in Salt Lake for a while. Normally, he does movie reviews, but he occasionally does other reviews. This time, he wrote about Mike Birbiglia.

I do the sensible thing. I google him. Yes, you know a company is successful when people use it as a verb. Google's been the best verb since. Well. Xerox. Or Kleenex. Or Band-Aid.

This leads me to his, surprise, myspace page. Here it is: Mike's Myspace page. Of course, he also has a page for himself: Mike's page. And while he's at it, why not have one for t-shirts?

He does two routines that are pretty funny, if only because they have more context for me than most people. Both can be found on his myspace page.

The first is "Cracka Please". Apparently, African Americans like to call white people "crackers". Birbiglia wanted to do a routine about this because he noticed how he could use it as a riff on the word "nigger".

That word has become so offensive, that people won't even pronounce it. But, much like the gay community embraced the pink triangle, a symbol the Nazis used to refer to identify gays, some folks in the African American community, particularly rappers, use it internally. Thus was born the phrase "Nigger, please!", which then somehow evolved to "Nigga, please!". "Nigga" was seen as more hip, and not nearly as offensive.

Thus, there's "cracker" and "cracka". In the end, they're words, but people have elevated how bad it is by now referring to it politely as the "N" word. Comedians are, if not anything, observers of human behavior. The refusal to use the word "nigger", the hipness of "nigga", the use of "nigger" within a cultural group. That really makes little sense, and yet, it represents the culture as we stand. Even Birbiglia has to be careful talking about it.

The other routine is far funnier if you know someone like it. This is about the "guitar-playing guy" who comes to parties to play his guitar, with the hopes of stealing someone's girlfriend. It's funny on a variety of different levels. First, that Mike's even been able to observe this often enough to make a joke of it. Second, the kind of music such a person would play. Third, the reason he's playing guitar to begin with.

I had to play this for one of my housemates, and it was just too funny. Once I play it for the other one, he'll just die. It's scary real.

There's one other thing that's particularly indiciative of the evolution of music tastes, and I wonder if this is a trend that's generally held true.

In the US, who are the main listeners of jazz? Probably white folks, right? (Crackas!). Who plays jazz? African Americans, for the most part (there are folks like Benny Goodman and perhaps contemporaries that aren't Kenny G). R&B still appeals to enough of a mixed audience. Rap is also crossing over in the last ten years. I know quite a few, non African-Americans, who listen to rap as part of their regular music listening. (To that end, I have more of a "white" listening habit, as I don't think Asians have managed to carve a niche in their own music scene). Is rap going to go the way of jazz? Soon, a new form of music that comes from African Americans will rise and replace rap, much like rap replaced rhythm and blues and disco.

But this is my shout-out to Mike B. Give him a listen.

NPR Rocks

It's rather amazing how much interesting news comes out of NPR. When you compare it to nightly news, or even to PBS or CNN, it far outshines them. For me, it has less to do with the timeliness of the news or the depth of its analysis. It has to do with their ability to spot trends or pick good human interest stories.

For example, I remember a few years ago, they were talking about this British game show called The Weakest Link and describing how that worked, and how it was likely to come to the states. Indeed it did, and indeed it's since faded.

Or I remember a segment about the Promisekeepers. Remember that? Kind of a Christian version of the million man march. You know, how fathers need to reaffirm their responsibilities to their families. Anyway, one of the stories NPR told was about a gay man whose brother was a religious Christian, and part of the Promisekeepers. He had been invited to attend because this meant a lot to his brother. He thought it was rather touching because his brother wanted to show him something of his world, and he wanted to reciprocate on the idea.

Or even something as simple as the Charlotte Hornets moving to New Orleans. Here's a situation that was reported on by the media, but it wasn't clear why they were moving. It turns out that Charlotte had been eager to have an NBA team, and early on, had very rabid fans. But due to some indiscretions by the owners (an affair?) which turned people off, they stopped showing up, and the team started to lose money, and eventually moved. Now, that's detail that a news organization ought to have but didn't.

There are two trends I heard about on the way to work. There's discount real estate where you meet an agent online, and pay far less than you normally do to sell your own house.

There's also the trend to drinking less beer and wine, but an increase in hard liquors and the corresonding rise of so-called micro distilleries, often started by the same folks who did microbreweries.

Now that's interesting stuff to me and just the kind of news you don't hear about. I once heard a long segment about older people selling their houses and buying RVs and driving around the country. The next time I heard anything like this again was in the Simpsons where they made a brief reference to it (Milhouse's granddad had bought an RV).

This is the kind of trend you want to hear about, and why NPR rocks!

From Hell's Heart

I've never read Herman Melville's Moby Dick. They say it's one of those books that should be taught in a graduate English course. Maybe it has Christian allegories, or some such. What little I know comes from Star Trek 2.

That's right. The movie that gave you William Shatner yelling "Khan!" and has been made fun of in Seinfeld. I had seen Star Trek 2 (and read its novelization) like ten times or more when it came on television. I had it recorded on videotape. I don't even recall whether it was VHS or Betamax. My parents had both. When Sony lost the Betamax war, we got a VHS machine.

In the scene that leads up to Shatner's primal scream, Khan says something like "I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her, marooned for all eternity in the center of dead planet. Buried alive. Buried alive". At which point, Shatner shakes as if he's about to burst, then yells out "Khaaan!", then again, but this time, the camera focuses on the planet, and you now hear Shatner's voice resonating as if his voice were piercing the planet, and going out into space, then focusing back on Khan (a great turn by Ricardo Montalban, reprising his role from the series) who is savoring this moment, a kind of justice meted out.

The "her" in this case was his wife from the episode, Space Seed where Khan is the product of twentieth century genetic engineering, but then fled Earth and stayed in cryogenic suspension until Kirk and the crew wake him. They try to take over the ship, and are eventually dropped off on a planet, where Khan and his crew must survive.

This is a memory I have of growing up in the eighties.

It is, I suppose, relevant to the film, The Squid and the Whale which is also a very personal film for Noah Baumbach. The story of two academics, a father who yearns to be recognized for his literary talent, and his more successful wife, and how their divorve affects their two sons, one who worships his dad, the other his mom.

Few films seem to deal with the topic of divorce and how it affects children. While the plot itself isn't particularly strong, the point, I feel, is to evoke a time period. While Wes Anderson contributed to this film, it never quite feels as out of time as some of Anderson's films. Rushmore's lead character, Max Fischer, just seems a bit too odd, and therefore, it never quite resonates as a real story, which it isn't exactly.

Jeff Daniels does an excellent job playing an academic who looks down on most of the rest of the world, and yet, even in the academic community, he can't gain much recognition. His son seems to worship him, yet is eventually let down by his dad's pecadilloes, even as his dad encourages this in his son. Daniels plays a character that's not the kind of guy that seems to have real heart-to-heart talks that you expect television dads from the 60s to have.

Laura Linney, more or less, plays the role that she generally plays, but it works fine here. She's the mom that was dissatisfied with the marriage. She comes across warmer, even as she's the one who had multiple affairs. Neither parent is exactly a role model.

The kids react in funny ways. The older son sides with his dad, and blames his mom for this situation, even though he remembers a fond memory as a child. One of the better scenes, which plays somewhat against expectations, is when he meets the school psychologist. He mimics his dad's reliance on credentials. Ph.D. s mean a lot to him, and thus mean a lot to his son, even though his son doesn't appear to be living up to what his dad has accomplished (which alas, isn't that much).

The younger son has a more disturbed outcome. He does things to make himself be more adult, but in odd ways. He begins to masturbate, and put the result of his work on books, on lockers. He starts to drink. The kid is like ten years old. This is a delicate topic to deal with. I suppose Baumbach is making a statement on how divorce can affect one's innocence about the world.

Having not been a product of divorce, the film still felt rather personal and real, and while it doesn't head to a definitive conclusion, we have no idea what will happen to this family, it does seem to capture the feelings of alienation and uncertainty that children go through when dealing with divorce, and that weirdness is magnified when parents are academics.

I did enjoy the film, and would give it a B+.

To Have and Have Not

There are people who, for one reason or another, who don't drink. Some avoid it for religious reasons. Some avoid it because they're allergic to alcohol (many Asians lack tolerance for processing alcohol). Some have seen the effects of alcoholism on their family and don't want the same thing to happen to them. Some just avoid it because they think it's bad to drink alcohol, even if there's no religious or other reasons.

When you've avoided something, like alcohol, then your perceived notions of what a person who drinks alcohol thinks or behaves or how they perceive those who don't drink. For example, there's a sense that drinking any alcohol, no matter how little, can cause a person to act irrationally. That varies from person to person. I knew one guy who would be rather rude when he had alcohol. He'd make fun of his girlfriend. But when he was sober, he was as nice as he could be.

Other people are simply quiet or passive or loud or whatever. Alcohol doesn't necessarily cause people to act a certain way. The most pronounced behavioral change is the ability to concentrate, and then eventually to walk, then possibly even speak. At a certain point, with too much alcohol, a person can't even easily focus his eyes, and his gaze becomes distant.

Alcohol isn't the only thing that people can't relate to. There's also sex. The percentages of people who've had sex in high school is fairly high, and is even higher as you head into college. There can be cultural pressures. I was riding in the Metro shortly after watching a movie. These three black teens got aboard, and one guy was bragging. He said "I banged a girl, and you didn't". His friend was a bit doubtful. The other guy said "I swear to God, I did. All I know is I banged a girl, and you didn't".

The other guy wasn't denying this at all, but he felt he needed a retort. He said he had heard from a friend that this girl he slept with had AIDS. The other kid didn't seem concerned. He probably didn't believe it. I sat near two women, and they didn't seem all that pleased with this commentary, which basically amounted to the need to have sex to be a "man", regardless of who the woman was. Did he love her? Did he care for her? Didn't sound like it. All that mattered was this rite of male passage.

For those who haven't done it, it's easy to convince oneself that no one that young does it. After all, it's typical for people who haven't had sex to hang out with others in the same boat, or for the topic not to come up. The perceptions can be whack. There's a supposition that maybe folks have sex all the time, that if you see someone dating, well, surely sex must be behind it all (this turns out to be especially true if sex is important in your worldview). Those who haven't had it think people have it all the time. Those who have it all the time think the same of anyone else in a relationship (why else would they be in a relationship if they weren't?).

But we can pick more uncommon behavior. For example, there are those who have avoided illegal drug use, because it's illegal. They tend to equate any illegal drug with any other. They think marijuana and cocaine have the same danger, at least, if they've kept relatively ignorant of drug use. If you know some drug facts, non drug-users think you've tried it out. (I once asked someone if he had tried marijuana, and he didn't want to answer. If he said yes, I'd perceive him as some doped-up guy. If he said no, he'd be this weenie puritan. Either way, he thought, it would make him look bad). Alcohol can have effects that are at least as bad as marijuana, but advertisers don't press that point nearly as much as they do with marijuana. There's even a case to be made that marijuana was made illegal so that they could arrest more African Americans.

There's a society called NAMBLA, which has something to do with man-boy relationships, typically a much older guy with a much younger one (say, 40 and 17). This is seen as something bad, bordering on pedophilia. I have no idea whether this is good or not, but given that families have kicked out teens for being gay, finding someone that's supportive, regardless of reason, may make the relationship work, instead of the freak show that many people perceive it to be.

We can find all sorts of behavior that people perceive in a simplistic way because they refuse to learn anything more about it. People who are religious. People who believe in open marriages. Nudists. People who play video games a lot. People into anime. (Those two groups tend to be the same. This reminds me, one time, I saw these three guys, and they simply looked so geeky, I had to ask--do you guys watch anime? Boy, did they ever! A stereotype, but they fit).

Many people draw conclusions but often because they lack the sympathy to understand why people perceive the world in the way they do. Parents fret over myspace.com, but don't understand what it's all about (of course, I can't either).

There's this need for us not to stereotype, but we end up doing it anyway. It's hard to avoid. We do it because it simplifies life. These stereotypes may not be all bad. Germans are considered efficient and orderly. Asians are considered students (actually, even the seemingly positive, model minority, has drawn criticism, as some Asians have not fared that well in school, and it forces people to compare Asians to, say, whites, African Americans, Latinos, etc. and say "why can't you be more like them?").

Let me briefly talk about a kind of reverse discrimination. Michael Wilbon has written columns about white flight. In basketball, good white American basketball players are often discouraged from playing because there are so many good African American players. I should point out that it's American players, because Europeans seem to do fine cultivating white European players.

J.J. Redick and Adam Morrison were being interviewed by John Thompson. Morrison said that people had considered some kind of hope (he seemed embarassed by that comment), and Thompson wanted to press it just a little bit, and asked him a hope for what? Of course, he knew they meant the next great white hope, the next Larry Bird. Comparisons had already been drawn between Morrison and Bird. Of course, there are good white players. Steve Nash, a Canadian, is up for MVP honors. Nowitzki is good. But there's the complaint. Neither are good defenders. (There's a joke with that, where reporters wanted to call them the "Allas Mavericks" because they have no "D", i.e., defense).

We're surrounded by many people we don't care for, and often it's because we just don't grasp their worldview, and imagine one for them (essentially, decide they are bad people).

It's tough not to do this, alas.