Category: Personal

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[a lack of palaver]

Okay, so I admit it’s been quiet around here lately. Partly that’s the summer doldrums — who can write when it’s five thousand degrees out? — and partly it’s that I have actually been pretty busy.

For one thing, I’ve been trying to get ahead on my Korean studies, because I will inevitably fall behind this fall when the General Assembly committees get going and actual work briefly becomes my primary activity at the office.

And then there’s the help I’ve been giving to Steve Harrison’s Congressional campaign. This week I wrote a Social Security speech that he’s delivering today, as well as a 60-second fundraising spot that will run nationally on AirAmerica, which is giving discount air time to candidates. I’ll be sure to post the speech and the spot once I get final versions, and hopefully I’ll get to find out when the ad is running and post the times as well.

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[new beck songs]

BeckThink I’m in Love | Cell Phone’s Dead by Beck

Beck has a new album on the way, this one produced by Nigel Godrich, who also did Mutations and Sea Change. Two new tracks, complicatedly leaked and then retracted by Beck.com and Beck’s MySpace page, give a sense of what we’re in for.

Despite advance word that this was going to be a hip-hop album, the first leaked track, “Think I’m in Love,” is anything but. A melodic, mid-tempo love song of sorts, with spare production that sounds possibly incomplete, “Think I’m in Love” picks up where Sea Change left off: with a fragile psyche working its way back from a horrendous breakup. It’s pleasant enough, but I don’t think it’d make me turn my head if I didn’t know it was by Beck.

“Cell Phone’s Dead” is another matter entirely, reaching back to Beck’s old abstract raps over eclectic soundscapes. The funky bassline sounds like a sample from Herbie Hancock’s “Wiggle-Waggle,” off the Fat Albert Rotunda album, over which echoey percussion rattles around as Beck raps. But then comes the jungle break, full of lush sounds and hoots, so that the track is like a conceptual mashup of “Hell Yes” and “Nobody’s Fault but My Own,” with a pinch of Odelay jitters thrown in. Let’s hope the whole new album is this sonically interesting.

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[blogging the secretary-general]

UNSG.org is an intelligent Canadian blog on the selection process for the next UN Secretary-General. The latest post has some trenchant tea-leaf reading regarding last week’s straw poll. The blogger’s inside sources suggest that the lone “discourage” vote for South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, rather than coming from Japan or China, came from the United States, which may have simply voted “discourage” for all four candidates.

This is made more plausible by US Ambassador John Bolton’s bizarre recent comment describing “the ideal candidate as a proletarian — somebody who will work in the system, who will get his fingernails dirty or her fingernails dirty, and really manage the place, which is what it needs.” I love it when neocons pull out the Communist rhetoric. It makes me feel so deliciously dirty!

Seriously, though, this seems to be an attempt both to discredit the current candidates and to suggest that the new Secretary-General should be an anonymous nobody, to be treated with all the respect neocons generally accord to the proletariat. Or perhaps it’s just part of the Bush administration’s overall contempt for expertise, qualifications or demonstrations of competence — starting, of course, from the decidedly mediocre top man, and extending to people like Paul Bremmer, Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, Harriet Miers, and of course Bolton himself.

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[good news for dems]

Moveon.org sent out an email today touting an exciting NPR poll that shows the Democrats as likely winners overall in the 50 closest House races.

Unlike most polls, this one didn’t just call likely voters nationwide and try to extrapolate. Instead, the pollsters talked to likely voters in the 50 most competitive districts. Nine of them are held by Democrats, 40 by Republicans, with one independent, and they went for the GOP by 12 points in 2004.

At the moment though, a mere 29 percent of likely voters say they will probably or definitely vote for the incumbent, while 46 percent say they’ll probably or definitely vote for someone else. When a generic Democrat and Republican are posited, the overall result is 48 percent to 41 percent in favor of the Dems; when actual names of candidates are used, this shifts only slightly, to a 49-43 split. (Keep in mind that this is in districts that went Republican by 12 points in 2004, well to the right of the national average.) Breaking it down even further, the poll found that in the “competitive” districts currently held by Democrats, the incumbent party holds a whopping 60-29 lead, while in the Republican-held districts, the Dems still hold a lead of 49 percent to 45 percent, a bit past the 3.2 percent margin of error.

The results on specific issues are also pretty interesting. Most startling is the discovery that on “values issues, like stem cell research, flag buring and gay marriage,” the Democrats have an 14-point lead, which jumps to 18 points when the question is just on stem cells. So far, at least, the Republican wedge issues aren’t getting any traction.

It’s a long way to the November election, but this poll doesn’t bode well for the GOP.

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[watching the walls]

This past weekend, Jenny and I made a purchase we’d been researching and planning for some time: we bought a video projector, the Sharp XR-10X. Gone is the small flickering tube, a mere 18 inches across diagonally. Replacing it is our flickering living room wall, or rather a flickering expanse of it that’s about 100 inches diagonally, or 80 inches from one side to the other.

It’s a helluva way to watch the Simpsons.

The new projector isn’t perfect. For the moment, we have an s-video cable snaking its way across the room, but that means the picture quality is a little off: you can see flicker lines gradually scrolling up the screen, and sometimes quick motion is a little glitchy and pixelated. Hopefully this can be corrected by switching to component video cable, but that’ll mean calling Time Warner and bugging them to get me a cable box with a component-video output.

But even with the extant flaws, it sure beats the old cathode rays, especially for Jenny, whose distance vision isn’t great. Even with a fair amount of ambient light, the image is clear, and somehow the mind is willing to believe that a patch of white wall in a lighted room is black if the surrounding area is flooded with brighter light. There’s a bit of the window-screen effect from visible pixels, but I have to pause the video to see it clearly, and it’s actually kind of useful for making sure the focus is right. The sound of the fan in the machine is far less intrusive than the air conditioner across the room. And at the rate we watch TV, the lamp should last us at least a couple of years.

Now I just need to get a hold of some quality ambient films to show at parties. Fluxus films? Warhol screen tests? Fillmore-style psychedelic light shows? Daniel, I’m counting on you to have some kind of Russian avant garde something-or-other that gives good background.

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[all the pieces of a language]

When you start to learn a language with the intention of really understanding it deeply, you quickly discover that there are many more aspects than the few taught by formal pedagogy. Most teaching systems will give you the writing system, grammar, standard vocabulary and a certain amount of listening comprehension. Beyond that, everyone wants to learn the slang and dirty words, which are rarely included in Beginning I textbooks.

But languages have further corners and byways, and one that is often overlooked is the handwriting of ordinary folks. In America, kids are drilled (or at least were when I was young) in cursive writing, which is disappointingly free of any curse words, but which is helpful when you’re trying to scrawl notes fast enough to keep up with someone speaking.

Korean has its own cursive writing, but unfortunately I’ve been unable to track down any books on the subject. As it is, my Korean handwriting is slow and laborious and earns compliments from people here in the office for its tidiness — like a second-grader’s, basically. In an effort to change that, I downloaded some Korean handwriting fonts and have been attempting to parse and apply them.

For now, I’m stuck with a bit of a hybrid style, one that allows my writing to flow more easily, but that doesn’t change the shapes of the letters so much that I can’t read them easily. After all, part of what makes a morass of loops identifiable as a word in English is our ready knowledge of English vocabulary and grammar, and even then, we regularly find ourselves squinting at scribbles as we try to decide whether that’s answer or cursives.

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[where blue helmets come from]

Well, not so much the helmets as the guys under them. Slate has a helpful Explainer on how to become a UN peacekeeper.

Basically, UN member states contribute them, and they mostly come from poor countries because the UN pays them $1,028 per month, which is crap if you’re from the developed world but is quite a lot for major troop-contributing countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (the 2005 monthly per capita income in the latter was $33.58). In such countries, the government typically takes a cut to cover expenses and contribute to the national coffers, while the individual peacekeepers are paid low wages that nevertheless beat what most people can earn back home. A problem with this scheme is that the UN peacekeeper salary is not nearly enough to pay for quality equipment and ammunition, so peacekeepers have been known to arrive on the scene underequipped and hungry, adding to the logistical crisis they’re supposed to be defusing.

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[bringing the war home]

Major Eric Wolf of the United States Marine Corps is a logistics officer who has served a six-month tour in Iraq. He’s also my brother-in-law — my wife’s sister’s husband — and he and three of his four kids are staying with us at the moment. They’re moving from his Washington, DC, posting to Camp Pendleton in California, and they’ve decided to do it as a drive across the country in the family van. (His wife and one of his daughters chose to fly instead.)

Shortly after his arrival at our apartment, Eric dropped the news that he’s going back to Iraq almost immediately after he gets to Camp Pendleton. Last time he flitted around the country collecting information on how units were using their equipment in various contexts, but this time he’ll hopefully have a safer job. Still, I’m not happy to have yet another family member in a Middle Eastern war zone (my brother Effie is still in Safed, though he’s heading for Jerusalem tomorrow). This morning I awoke from dark dreams of a first visit to Israel that, instead of giving me the warm and relaxed feeling virtually all Jews get when they go there, was full of falling bombs and foreboding.

All day I’ve had John Kerry on the brain — not John Kerry the presidential candidate, but John Kerry the antiwar protester in 1971:

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say they we have made a mistake … We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? (Full Testimony | Video Excerpt)

Substitute “Iraq” for “Vietnam,” and these words could’ve been spoken by a soldier yesterday.

Of course, there’s an easy answer to Kerry’s questions: lie to the troops. According to a recent Zogby poll, “Nearly nine of every 10 [US troops surveyed in Iraq] — 85 percent — said the US mission is ‘to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,’ while 77 percent said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was ‘to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.'” Even so, “an overwhelming majority of 72 percent of American troops in Iraq think the US should exit the country within the next year.”

This is the situation into which my brother-in-law is being tossed, this time with no particular mandate, but just to fill some boxes on a troop chart.

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[the race for secretary-general]

Yesterday the Security Council held an informal straw poll to see where they stand on the various declared candidates for UN Secretary-General — Kofi Annan’s term ends on December 31 of this year — and Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon of South Korea got the most endorsements.

To understand what this means, it might be helpful to back up and explain how the Secretary-General is chosen. According to Article 97 of Chapter XV of the UN Charter, “The Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” On the surface, this makes it look like the power resides with the General Assembly, but in reality the Security Council recommends just one candidate, which the General Assembly then approves or not. So it’s the Security Council’s views that matter most.

In the secret-ballot straw poll, each Security Council member could check “encourage,” “discourage” or “no opinion” next to the name of each declared candidate. (The declared candidates are Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, former Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka, and Indian novelist and UN Department of Public Information head Shashi Tharoor.) Minister Ban received 12 “encourage” votes, one “discourage,” and two “no opinions.” Tharoor came in a close second.

So who’s the “discourage,” eh? If I had to guess, I would say Japan, whose attempts to join the Security Council as a permanent member South Korea has vigorously resisted. But who knows?

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[prunella’s blog]

Meet Prunella P. Pistlethrot, sometime misanthrope, cataloguer of bad things, and a very dear friend of mine.

You might notice that her links look a lot like my links, which is because I helped her with her web design. But this is not a side project of yours truly. Oh, no. Prunella has a sharp and funny mind of her own — she writes glorious sentences like “Being Miss Poofy Blankeypoo doesn’t really work for me” and “On a general scale of evil I’m going to rank them somewhere between hangnails and nice people you know, but whose names you can’t remember” — and I look forward to reading more of her cranky views on the world.

Oh, and if anyone who knows her way around Photoshop wants to take that lovely picture of Prunella, sharpen it up and then email it back to me, that’d be much appreciated.