Guttersnipery

Queen's, Russell Smith, Cop Cars, and Other Stuff I'm Pissed About.

2008-11-27T09:57:00.000-06:00

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081127.wrussell27/BNStory/Entertainment/

Ah, Russell Smith. Love his stuff on fashion, hate his stuff on language. It isn't that he tries so hard to be GAY. It isn't even that he hasn't read any of the usage books he raves about (all of which contain an entry on "self-deprecating"--listen Russell, you never go FULL RETARD). No, it's something else. It's the way he always so pretentiously tries to use his little column to wiggle his way into the issues reserved (or so we thought) and rightly so reserved for the big columns and the intelligent columnists.

And what about Queen's? Well, I do agree with Russell about the nazification of campus. He's right to be hating on the new Thought Police there. But the predicated and exaggerrated licking the media is doling out repeatedly on the administrative backside of Queen's is itself fogyish. It is framed as though Queen's has good intentions. They (i.e. good-intentioned Queen's) just don't know what they're doing. So go the polemics. In fact, Queen's is only interested in _appearing_ to care about the allegedly racist attitudes of their students. And in this, they're successful. They do know what they're doing. They're shifting the blame for all the whiteness at Queen's into the pale arms of the students. Sort of like: yeah, it's no wonder we have no internationals/minorities here; the problem is our "racist" student body.

This is all totally backwards though. The real racism here is administrative. Racism isn't in what you see and hear. It's in what you don't. The administration has a responsibility to more than its budgetary goals. It has a duty to find ways to attract foreign students and minorities. One very obvious and big way they might go about doing this is by not trying to keep them out. The tuition (not to mention the international student fees) for programs that foreign students and minorities are overwhelmingly interested in (i.e. applied sciences and business) are so prohibitively and ridiculously and artificially expensive that they might as well have a "Whites Only" pop-up window on the Queen's application website. But, things could be different. Guaranteed, when you start seeing and hearing other races, you stop hearing and seeing racist pejoratives. Who knows: after a while we might one day be able to have all that cop-car-burning Homecoming energy at a political rally.

2008-06-28T11:07:00.002-05:00

Wow, how boring was that last post? A long synopsis of a Seinfeld episode? What was I thinking?

2008-06-27T19:03:00.003-05:00

Season 9, Episode 4 ("The Blood") of Seinfeld has got to be the greatest 30 mins. of comedy since Aristophanes.

Subplots abound, but a reminder is worth it:

Mr. and Mrs. Seinfeld are just leaving as the episode opens. They were in town for a 96 y.o.'s funeral which prompted them to start a new exercise regime, and as they leave, they point out that Jerry is putting on a little weight.

Kramer enters as the Seinfelds leave, and he tells Jerry that he is hoarding blood because, "Jerry, I know myself. If I'm out on the street and it starts to go down, I don't back off...until it's finished."

In the next scene, Elaine is angered to find out that her friend doesn't find Elaine responsible enough to babysit her son. Meanwhile, George finds the incense that his gf lights during sex makes him hungry, so hungry in fact that he leaves under the pretense that his bus transfer was about to expire.

At the restaurant, George orders pudding but wishes it had the layer of skin typical of the home-made stuff. This leads Jerry to query his weight. Elaine tells him that he's getting pudding under his skin.

Kramer encounters problems typical of all banks at the Blood Bank, and decides to close his account and store the blood at home, scaring Jerry.

George tries to include food in his sexlife, but his gf doesn't go for the pastrami sandwich. Later, he discovers a way to make Pudding-skin Singles.

Elaine returns her friend's call wrt babysitting, but her friend asks Kramer instead. Elaine shows up anyway claiming that Kramer is unavailable. However, the kid is such a pain that Elaine regrets the trust her friend has bestowed in her.

Simultaneously, George succeeds in combining sex and sandwiches--at least until his gf finds out about it. And Jerry, angry about George's pudding-skin removal equipment scattered all over his kitchen, slams his hand down causing an Exacto-knife to fly into his jugular.

At the hospital, Jerry learns that he owes his life to Kramer's blood--there's 3 pints of Kramer in him. Needless to say, this makes Jerry distraught. He claims he can "feel the blood inside of me...borrowing things from my blood."

George's success with the Sex Gourmet leads him to wonder whether he can include television into the mix.

As a result of Jerry and Kramer's new status as blood brothers, Kramer demands a number of favors including that he watch a video with Newman (which, it turns out, is about making sausages). But, when the Seinfelds discover that Jerry's been in the hospital they attribute it to his poor health, and hire him a (geriatric) personal trainer, Mr. Mandelbaum.And, right after Jerry kicks out Newman and Kramer out for making industrial quantities of sausages in his apartment, Mr. Mandelbaum walks and thinks that they are evidence of Jerry's gluttony.

Meanwhile, George's attempt to complete the "trisector" of sex and food with television fails. Moreover, he discovers that his sexual and gastronomical urges are now entagled; he can't eat without getting turned on. And when Elaine enlists George to help her weasel out of her babysitting duties, George finds in Elaine's friend a pastrami-eroticized soulmate.

Ok, now Mr. Mandelbaum has taken away all of the sausages, which makes Newman mad. This causes Newman to revoke Kramer's blood-storage privileges from Newman's freezer. So, Kramer needs to borrow Jerry's car (last favor) to bring his blood back to the Blood Bank because only Jerry's car has air-con, and Kramer needs to keep his blood from spoiling. But, when Jerry's car starts to overheat--and Kramer refuses to turn off the air-con--he resorts to using some of the blood as engine coolant.

Later, and for the ultimate excercise session, Mandelbaum and Mandelbaum Jr. tie Jerry to the back of his car. But, Mandelbaum Jr. (the driver) freaks out when blood starts to drip on his legs. An accident results, and Jerry ends up back in the hospital...but this time, it was Newman's blood that saved him.
-----------------------------
I think it's pretty clear that the theme of this episode is "taking care." Jerry is blamed for not taking care of his body or his car. Elaine is presumed to be unable to take care of her friend's kid. George's exclusive concern is to take care of his bizarre fetishes. And Kramer discovers that he is unable to take care of his own blood.

Portrait of a Sports Writer

2008-06-18T10:36:00.001-05:00

So you think you can write? Try sports writing. These guys are sitting down every day forced to find ever-new catchphrases and perfect adjectives and apt metaphors to describe an infinitely complex array of human physical performance (which performance is in itself hard to articulate anyway) as witnessed during the Game. And it’s a very make-it-or-break-it Darwinian sort of job too, since there’s always so many replacements sometimes literally standing in line to take your job. And then there’s the job itself, since none of your colleagues even take you seriously. Really, it’s only the extreme passion these guys have for sports that keeps them working. And that’s what makes the sports writer the last true artist. Of employed artists these days, writers and poets and painters and musicians and actors and yes athletes too have long ago sold out to the festering or suppurative wooings of capitalism. But sports writing is the only remaining employable passion you’re likely to find these days where the job demands daily creativity and the writer has no risk at all of “making it big” since no such thing exists in sports writing. Even though in fact there are clearly some sports writers much better than others, there’s no big-time publisher/dealer/agent vying for the sports writer; there’s just way too many unemployed sports writers with their impressive resumes piled atop the Editor’s desk for s/he to wonder whether s/he can draft the competition’s sports writer (and add to that the likely fact that s/he doesn’t really think sports writing is all that “worthy” anyway and almost certainly doesn’t read other papers’ sports writers’ stuff to see just how amazing sports writing can really be). And I’ve come to believe that if things were different and sports writers were as editorially desirous as say current-affairs columnists, then all sports writers in North America would be British. For confirmation of this just read the Guardian / Independent / Telegraph / Times today on the Netherlands-Romania and France-Italy matches and compare with the Boston Globe / LA Times / Chicago Tribune / NYT on the Celtics slaughter of the Lakers. And consider also—as confirmation that sports writing is hard—that I began this post with the intention of discussing the NBA Finals and a bet I made and lost during the final quarter that the Celtics would win by 40 points and how they won by 39 points and didn’t even bother to even try for more points in the final 30 secs. And so whatever, but I intended to discuss this and not sports writing generally and digressed instead because it’s true what they say: Sports writing is hard.

Review of _The Visitor_

2008-06-14T14:56:00.005-05:00

There have been a number of recent films just unabashedly critical of our post-9/11 world. And sadly most of them are pretty awful. Let's go through the utter worst of those just for fun: In the Valley of Elah (its clanky and plodding or hammering symbolism); Jarhead (good grief!); The Kingdom (which only even counts if you stretch it a lot, but like who wants to that with shit like this); Lions for Lambs (anti-war never stunk so bad); War, Inc. (clumsy satire taken much too far to say anything meaningful).

Of course, there are also some very good ones. But they range from otiose to invidious. On the otiose side: Children of Men and Rendition. They’re both powerful political statements that hide their real value inside a thick genre layer of sheep’s clothing called Action. And the avant-garde direction doesn’t always help to definitely bring home the whole point either. Children of Men’s sci-fi and sly camera work and the Christian overtones are impressive subtleties to a film essentially about our vicious immigration policies and the behind-the-scenes police state we live in. But, so many have misread the film thinking it’s about the Second Coming (which the plot itself certainly is in a way, but insofar as it is an adaptation, let’s ask ourselves what the director is trying to tell us for Christ’s sake) or a jab at the risks of the new techno-science screwing around with genetics et cetera, et cetera (which reading you give the text only if you suffer from acute narratological myopia and probably shouldn’t even be opening your big mouth at all when you’re at the post-movie coffeehouse). And Rendition’s nearly-but-not-quite-successful Pulp-Fiction-esque time-frame juggling gives it that juicy twist at the end, but the result is the moviegoer's equivalent of Cherries Jubilee: the audience instantly forgets the three-courses of substance that preceded the finale and leaves the theater filing the whole thing under Clever Action Movie w/ Twisty Ending.

On the invidious side: Redacted. Wanting filmgoers to listen, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledge hammer even when doing so is heavy-handed and cheap and critically ill-advised. Redaction did it, and did it well, but combined with the director’s apparently uncontrollable disgust with the war, it ended up pushing away it’s target audience. Really, it devolves into an postmodern epistemological exercise that ultimately fails to persuade for reasons the film itself is keenly aware and addressing. This proves that only “real” documentaries (e.g. Taxi to the Dark Side) can successfully pull off the stinging critiques that are the product and venting of enraged filmmakers. Only “real” documentaries, because only they can appeal directly to reality. The fact that Redaction is fictionalized is precisely what weakens it rhetorically. Now of course, even “real” documentaries are fictionalized and even Redacted is telling the truth, and yeah we can go on and on about this until the cattle are back, but the fact is that Redacted, while brilliant, pushes everyone away.

Enter The Visitor. I saw this movie last night, and I’m impressed. It’s a big story and worth thinking about. Its themes are daring and trenchant. At one point, the hero finds himself facing a literal wall against which his liberalism and good intention is completely ineffective. He learns a great deal throughout the story, but primarily he learns that for the past few years (and this turns out to be the years following 9/11--hint, hint) he hasn’t done anything at all except cope with the death of his wife. For him—as with us—the world around him has changed and his reaction has taken the form of laziness and cynicism and pitiful nostalgia (in the movie, this is effectively symbolized by some pretty bad piano playing). Hope and change are there to find, but require us to stand beside one another and look past race and nationality. The hero’s first step is awareness—his awareness that those he can help, and those that will help him in turn, are not at all hard to find. He realizes that the spatial boundaries we like to think are “ours” are really and rightly home to everyone. He then discovers that he is himself directly responsible for tearing families apart (a scene in which he goes first through a subway stall using up what’s left of an illegal immigrant’s MetroCard and leading to the disaster that befalls said immigrant). And all of this is done ever so subtly without the slightest sense of being contrived. Even the camera is instructive without being pedantic: it repeatedly blurs American flags and distorts other symbols of supposed liberty and tolerance, and it is as patient and hypnotic as a Djembe drum. But what is most impressive is that all of this is found within a story that is primarily about friendship. There can be no doubt that the movie is political. But, the political doesn’t take center stage, nor even does it sit elephantine in the room. It is just there, an important but not overbearing part of the story. Now ok yes, there are times when it feels as if what’s going on here is just pander for the placated bourgeois intelligentsia, and there’s some truth to that. But the film nevertheless screams at us to act: the hero is all alone when he comes at against the wall--and like the filmmaker, he is reduced to expressing his powerlessness in an artform that is being beaten like a dead horse.

Reflections on the Examined Life Supposedly Worth Living

2008-06-13T16:55:00.003-05:00

The 21st-century grad student is an odd species. He is best characterized by a number of should-be afflictions mostly summed up by a combination of cognitive narcissism and identity confusion. For some reason he is quite certainly conscious of the fact that to the best of his cinematic knowledge, the usual coming-of-age should take somewhere in the range of two hours, but for him it will take ten years. And just at what should be his sexual peak, there is a discernible lack of interesting women in his life. And, of the not-so-interesting yet available-and-sexually-adventurous types, most of them—the ones he knows at least—are his quasi-students and he isn't even sure what the etiquette for that sort of thing is, but knows that its is both social- and career-suicide to be airily tapping into that resource and where female grad students are rare and unavailable and not all that desirable except in a relatively diluted cerebral way anyway.

Yes, this is a creature who is constitutionally confused. They give him an office but nothing to do in it. They ask him to write papers even though he already knows how to write papers. The only real reason to write papers after you already know how to write papers is to publish them, but the grad student's work falls somewhere in between the indisputable garbage undergrads produce and the better-be-publishable stuff that postgraduates get paid to write. So, for no clear reason at all, he writes and writes these papers on increasingly specialized topics (and thus, of depreciating interest to everyone around him) and submits them to supervisory faculty who don't even really carefully read or assess them and at best only go through the motions of providing guidance on how the “ideas” might be “developed.” And very bizarre indeed is this relationship he has with the teaching faculty: He learns that the professors he used to worship as an undergrad for their seemingly unlimited knowledge about just everything are really quite unworshipable mortals once they step outside of their specialisms (re which specialism qua something "special" is the real joke). Of course, as he begins to see the inner-workings of the whole academic chimera, he realizes that were the public to get wind of the general averageness of academics the game would be up. So, he plays along and reinforces the authoritativeness of the T for whom he is TAing, and to his mixed horror/delight/guilt he finds this false pansophism bestowed on him as well.

Oh, and having to go to dinner and dinner-parties and Department functions and so on and calling professors by their first names and thinking of them as “colleagues” but not really is doubtless the most frustrating part of his life since he knows that his relationship with them will determine the nature/possibility of his career in the academy. But then, he isn't even too sure that this Ivory Towerism is for him anyway. But like what else is he going to do?

And anyway, he is not all that far from the disheveled and unkempt look that invokes the stereotypical eccentricity of professorial types. But the alternating cardigan/tweed jacket look sometimes accentuated by pipe-smoking and mild alcoholism isn't likely to fully materialize until mid-way down the tenure track. This is effectively a two-decade-long metamorphosis. And for now at least, he finds himself content to leave the baseball caps at home while remaining for the time being a stubborn jean-wearing iPod-wielding punk preppy.

And so this caffeine-addicted email-obsessed anti-hero of the campus finds himself with far too much time and far too little money. He closest relationship is to his laptop, and everything that used to be extra-curricular has somehow either become curricularized or ceased to matter entirely. Academic speech mannerisms have taken over even the most casual of conversations. Even drunk, he sometimes finds himself a chronic jargonaut incapable of going more than a few minutes without saying “discourse” or “rigor” or talking about the “politics of x.” There is even a nazalized stutter forming over which he has no control whatsoever. And all the while he is conscious of the absurdity of it all. Every non-academic he talks to (and there are fewer and fewer or these) rightly wonders why in the hell he ever actually decided to enter his thirties with an income of less than $8,000 and into a sector where good jobs for academics these days are about as common as good jobs were for thespians during the Depression. Something has definitely went awry; of that, there's no question. But there's no turning back now, and by now he's convinced himself that there's a certain freedom and importance to it all so like who would give that up for a trophy wife and a job on Wall Street? Right?

A Weakerthans cover from somewhere in South Carolina?????

2008-04-20T11:28:00.002-05:00

2008-03-19T13:27:00.001-05:00

International Women's Day: women in Afghanistan and those who suffer alongside them.

2008-03-08T16:18:00.006-06:00

Four minutes. That's how long the trial lasted for a 23-year-old Afghan journalism student. He had no lawyer, and no option to defend himself. The judge simply read over the charges and sentenced him to death. His crime is blasphemy. Blasphemy because he downloaded an article that discusses Islam and women's rights—an article he planned to discuss in class.

And what about women's rights under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan? A recent study conducted by the NGO, Womankind, reveals that women's lives are worse than ever. Presently, only 5% of women ever attend highschool, most are forced into marriages, and most are married before their sixteenth birthday. Girls as young as eight are sold into rape and slavery. Afghanistan has the worst maternal mortality rate in the world, and it is the only country in the world where women commit suicide more often than men. Lately, a commission recorded 165 cases of self-immolation, where women set themselves on fire in protest.

But surely, you say, it is a mistake to claim that women are worse off now than under Taliban rule. And yes, there can be no doubt that for women in the late 90s, the Taliban-controlled areas were hell on earth. But, to focus our attention on those few years is to miss the point. In fact, and with irony, the Taliban allegedly waged war in order to defend women! They justified their war on the grounds that the Mujahideen warlords were raping young girls. And doubtless, the Taliban were correct in this accusation. The point is that for women, Afghanistan has always been hell on earth. And the plight of women has been repeatedly held up as a pretext for wars that, in truth, care nothing at all about them.

Women's rights were the Taliban's pretext, and they are Canada's as well. Not long ago, the Canadian media was saturated with stories from embedded journalists reporting on the reconstruction efforts of Canadian troops. Of course, today's Canadian soldiers rarely go outside the wire for anything except search and destroy missions. Tactically, reconstruction has been placed on the back burner. The chronic poverty in the countryside has become such that peasants are forced to sell their land and even their children to pay off debts from failed crops as soldiers, insurgents, and warlord militia wreak havoc on the land. And according to the peasants themselves, as confirmed in last month's Oxfam report, Canada's troops are the greatest threat to the security of Afghans in the specific provinces we help occupy.

There are millions of peasants under continuous threat of attack from the ground and air. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed as the result of airstrikes on farming villages. Additionally, peasants face the very real possibility of being detained for any reason (or no reason) by Canadian troops who will transfer them to the National Directorate of Security, where documented cases reveal that they have been “beaten, whipped, starved, frozen, choked, and subjected to electric shocks” (Globe and Mail, 23Apr2007). One torture victim asks us: “Do the Canadians know what happens to us?”

Well do we? Canada is an increasingly important player in a mission which has as its mandate the extension and protection of Afghanistan's current regime. This regime is unjust and theocratic. Its courts hand out death sentences for religious dissent and conversion. Its security forces torture prisoners for information. The government has proved to be unable or unwilling to improve the lives of women and children. And many of its politicians are the very warlords who have for decades been terrorizing the countryside. This is the regime our troops fight to protect.

2007-12-23T14:30:00.000-06:00

Here's one way to get past a ban on smoking in restaurants.

2007-12-23T13:33:00.000-06:00

Wow. I didn't even know what a snowsquall was until this afternoon.

Is London a shithole? Are English girls ugly?

2007-12-22T15:14:00.000-06:00

I love generalizing.

Here's an article arguing that English girls are "lazy and unkempt."

As for London's shithole status: consider a line from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the new Tim Burton flick. The lyrics to the opening number "No Place Like London" are:

There's a hole in the world
like a great black pit
and it's filled with people
who are filled with shit.

Ancient Wisdom

2007-12-21T13:24:00.000-06:00

Here's a fable from Phaedrus. It's about a old man, pasturing a donkey in a meadow, when some barbarian army approaches. The man pleads the donkey to flee with him to escape the army. But the donkey just asks the man whether the enemy will make him carry two packs at once; and when the man answers that he doesn't suppose they will, the donkey refuses to move. "What does it matter to me whose servant I am" explains the donkey "so long as I carry only one pack at a time?"

Here it is (a terrible tranlation I found online):

The Sapient Ass

In all the changes of a state,
The poor are the most fortunate,
Who, save the name of him they call
Their king, can find no odds at all.
The truth of this you now may read-
A fearful old man in a mead,
While leading of his Ass about,
Was startled at the sudden shout
Of enemies approaching nigh.
He then advised the Ass to fly,
"Lest we be taken in the place:"
But loth at all to mend his pace,
"Pray, will the conqueror," quoth Jack,
"With double panniers load my back ?"
"No," says the man. "If that's the thing,"
Cries he, "I care not who is king."

This is my new fav fable. I'm gonna recite it to the next asshole who asks me why I don't vote.

2007-12-19T17:12:00.001-06:00

Oprah-atic Discourse

2007-12-19T14:01:00.000-06:00

Man, I love articles like these.

"The Strange Genius of Oprah"

I just gobble this shit up. However, Siegel doesn't talk about the most interesting (imo) thing about Oprah: her status as the North-American Moralist. Oprah's real power is to manufacture ethical reactions to contemporary issues. She's the source of white middle-class womens' temperament toward what's praiseworthy and condemnable. Oprah, is the veritable Priestess or Matriarch of popular opinion.

Name It and Win a Super Prize*

2007-12-17T22:32:00.000-06:00

*the prize will be awarded in the form of something related to the study of the history of philosophy and has no monetary (or otherwise) value of any kind. But none of y'all can figure it out anyway, cause it's something y'all can't Google, hahaha.

The Film-to-Stage Phenomenon: The Quirkiness of Late Capitalism

2007-12-17T22:02:00.000-06:00

Hey I don't know anything about theatre (I mean "YAWWWWNNNN." Am I right?), but what's up with this movement to adapt movies into plays and music into musical theatre? I just opened up my paper (I know it's 11:00 p.m., but that how I roll these days; actually, I'm talking about Saturday's paper too) and saw all of three ads for theatre productions: Dirty Dancing, We Will Rock You: The Musical, and Twelve Angry Men. I mean, what does the stage ADD to something like Twelve Angry Men? It's basically a play on film anyway. And it seems like this is a growing trend: Lord of the Rings, The Wedding Singer, Legally Blonde, and Gladiator have all been recently stage adapted.

Oh, and another thing. How come I never hear any Tone Loc anymore? Jeezsh.

2007-12-16T18:22:00.001-06:00

Report: Nationâ��s Wealthy Cruelly Deprived Of True Meaning Of Christmas

Zionism's Inherent Racism

2007-12-09T13:17:00.000-06:00

Israeli Report:

1/2 of all Jewish Israelis think Arabs should not have equal rights.
2/3 of Jewish-Israeli youth think Arabs are stupid and dirty.

And the Zionist Housing Minister thinks that this report is unfair since it did not include Arab sentiments regarding Jews. Ha! What do you expect their sentiments to be, given that the dominant ideology defines them as stupid, dirty, and genetically inferior?

Aristotle, Aristotle, Aristotle

2007-12-06T20:49:00.000-06:00

Well, it seems that most of my year will be devoted to Aristotle. I'm currently writing an essay on elitism in Aristotle's ethics. And, next term I'm doing a directed studies on the big bad Metaphysics. And, my thesis is gonna be on the Politics (spec., Aristotle the Marxist!--class struggle in the Politics).

Oh, and for anyone who doesn't find that incredibly exciting:

Viewer Voices: Where We Respond To The Opinions Of Our Uninformed Viewers

2007-12-04T00:49:00.000-06:00

Whoa. I guess I've been busy lately. Oh well, nobody checks this out anyway.

2007-11-03T18:46:00.000-05:00

1. Seinfeld's still got it. And Larry King's an idiot.

2. War films from The Deer Hunter to Redacted.

Who ever said philosophers don't like to celbrate Halloween. Here's one:

2007-10-27T15:00:00.000-05:00

Afghan Poll

2007-10-20T18:01:00.000-05:00

In my newspaper today, the editorial cartoon is a disgustingly racist drawing of a Muslim terrorist wearing sandals, a headscarf, and an ihram and sporting an unkempt beard. He is shouldering a bazooka and bandolier, and with one hand he is pointing a gun at some peasant while holding a clipboard with the other. The cartoon reads "Taliban Polling..." and the pollster is quoted as saying: "'Religious fundamentalism is swell. Death to America, Canada, and all infidel sons of swine!' Do you... Stongly Agree? Agree? Somewhat Agree? Want to die like a dog?"

OK. This is a comment w.r.t. the recent Globe co-sponsored Environics poll that found that 3 in 5 Afghans support the foreign occupation. The cartoon is suggesting that any Taliban-run poll suggesting otherwise (i.e. popular support for the Taliban) is nonsense and probably conducted under duress. By implication, the cartoon is suggesting that a "real" poll such as the Environics one is accurate and proves that most Afghans love having their country occupied--(well by "most" we mean slightly more than half of those polled in the NATO-centered southern provinces).

But consider this: exchange the scary looking terrorist in the the cartoon with an Environics pen-pusher and have some scary looking NATO soldier behind him with his hand cupping his ear as he listens in. Have the pollster say, "'The NATO mission is swell. I hate the Taliban! Things are so much better now.' Do you... Strongly Agree? Agree? Somewhat Agree? Want to be arrested and tortured and have your house and family and neighbors air-bombed by the Americans for admitting to supporting the Taliban?"

Come on, wake up Canada!

Sorting Out Reviewers

2007-10-19T15:37:00.000-05:00

This new film Rendition, by Gavin Hood (dir. of Tsotsi) looks interesting. It is a film about the current practice by Americans of shipping off any person P (such that P belongs in the subset T [=terrorist], and such that if not "truly" American 'A' then T, thus "all {~A*P, which really means ~P} are T") to some foreign place where torture is legal and American imperialism calls the shots. The Canadian case here is Maher Arar.

The Globe gave it three stars. (And btw, Rick Groen scores again! He fits in the prolly saved-up line re Streep's character, "This time, the devil wears Pravda" and uses the underused "Byzantine" adjective. I'm so jealous.)

But overall, at least among American reviewers, the film was poorly received--the word "heavy-handed" gets used a lot, interestingly. But some reviewers are really wearing their W-SS tattoos on their critical sleeves with this one. Here are three such insights from American reviewers:

It's all too simplistic to really engage the deeply complex dilemma it seeks to pass judgment on. (Dallas Morning News)

We are ambushed by a simplistic storyline that's more interested in sermonizing and demonizing than existing in the real world where things aren't as clear-cut as the movie would like us to believe. (Reelviews) [storylines existing in the real world???!!!]

A movie whose hot-button political issues already seem too warmed and worried over. (Detroit Free Press)

Well, damn. I had no idea that the question of whether to torture was such a worried-over complex dilemma that isn't clear-cut in the real world. But yah, I haven't seen it yet so maybe this is shit I really do need to taste. I was supposed to go to a conference at Trent this weekend, but ah fuck it.

The Long Blondes and The Aliens

2007-10-15T16:12:00.000-05:00

Well, everyone I know is talking about the new Weakerthans album, but here are two other recommendations you might check out:

I really dig this new British pop band, The Long Blondes. Their first album, Someone to Drive you Home, was just released this June. But the single, "Giddy Stratospheres" has been on the UK charts for some time--it made it to #1 on the UK Indie.

And speaking of new British indie pop, I just heard this album by a Scottish band, The Aliens, called Astronomy for Dogs. The first half of this album is spectacular, esp. "I am the Unknown." Here's a video for their very cool (though, a little too Stone Roses-y) track, "Setting Sun."

Toward an Analysis of the Saffron Revolution

2007-10-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

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Part 1: Myanmar or Burma or WTF?

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Back in June, my alma mater's newspaper wrote an article claiming that I had spent the summer in "northern Burma (Myanmar)." At the time, I was nowhere near Burma (Myanmar), and in fact I didn't really know anything about the country. But, in case someone (cute) were to ask me, "Hey Cool Backpacker Guy, how was Burma?," I thought I should be prepared to make something up.

So, to this end I began gathering info on this country nobody'd heard of. Basically, I just wanted to know a couple cool things about Burma (Myanmar). I wasn't writing my thesis on it; I just needed enough material to make up some plausible story.

Thus, I was interested to learn that "Burma" is actually a racist name. "Burma" refers to the Barmar ethnic group; it means simply "land of the Barmar." The Barmar are the dominant ethnic group forming more than two thirds of the population. But, the problem with "Burma" becomes clear when we note that not all "Burmese" are "Barmar." Follow?

The geographical term "Burma" originated under British colonialism, where the region was violently seized and made into a province under British India. The word Burma is merely a casualism that, at the time, British colonialists decided would suffice to describe a region mostly composed of Barmar. Nowadays, however, it is an insulting reminder of colonialism to the numerous other ethnic groups (there are over a hundred) who have lived there for centuries.

So what? Is this just a bunch of PC crap? Well, actually no. You can often tell a lot about a where political sympathies lie in the Saffron Revolution from whether the speaker/writer/newspaper uses Myanmar or Burma. I just now punched "Myanmar" into Google News and the first result was an Al-Jazeera article whereas the first result from "Burma" was an article from the Voice of America.

(Incidentally, the Voice of America is the AM broadcaster that in 1980 the Americans used to illegally broadcast from within Cuba instructing Cubans on how to take down the Castro regime, just in case they might be interested--not that that sort of thing is going on here, but you know that old maxim: once a propagandist, always a propagandist.)

So anyway, in 1989 the newly unelected military ruling party decided to change the name from the old colonial "Burma" to the new supposedly anti-colonial "Myanmar." They also changed the names of several cities including the capital: Rangoon --> Yangon. Actually, "Myanmar" has the same etymological root as "Burma" in Burmese, but...whatever we needn't get into it. The problem with this new military government was that general in charge was a little too un-UN and a little too bedfellowish with China. Nevertheless, the UN decided to recognize this change, citing that countries should probably be able to call themselves whatever they like. But American and Britain never did recognize the change (nor have they ever recognized the government)--not only did they disapprove of the pro-China, anti-UN, anti-IMF, and anti-World-Bank junta, but they cited the further difficulty in making "Myanmar" into an adjective without something as preposterous and extraterrestrial-sounding as Myanmarian.

So, anyway this is why when you buy an American-made map, you see Burma, not Myanmar and Rangoon, not Yangon. But it is also why you will see that "Myanmar" has lately dropped almost completely out of the Western media's vocabulary, and the capital is almost always called Rangoon. And it is not a coincidence that the opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) an admittedly pro-UN, pro-IMF, and pro-World-Bank party backed by the Americans, also refuses to accept the new names and would change back the country's name given the chance.

And now that we've some idea about the country's name, we can move on...after I note that I think it's kinda funny to see the word (Burma) in brackets as if the brackets referred to the very bars imprisoning NLD leader Sun Kyi. Except that there are no bars, she's under house arrest but you know what I mean.

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Part II -- Cellphones and Saffron

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Letterman is my hero.

2007-10-01T23:21:00.000-05:00

The Relentless David Letterman goes down in history for this interview.

OED Mania

2007-09-29T10:34:00.000-05:00

Good god. How come no one told me about the new edition of the Shorter OED? And what's this, a intro by David Crystal that hack?

My Thoughts So Far on Analytical Philosophy

2007-09-23T22:57:00.000-05:00

It's true:

Analytical philosophy can dissolve the Free Will Question. It can unpack these concepts of "determinism" and "compatibilism" and "libertarianism" and "possibility" (in the general or tout court sense) and show me through analysis that practical reasoning resolves the sidestepping dialectical stalemate and the Mechanist's Explanation and that the ensuing local fatalism ignores deliberation w/r/t the set of genuine alternatives that manifest the belief that we would perform any alternative by virtue of our choosing to perform it.

But what about this:

Nightswimming / Deserves a quiet night.

Analytical philosophy raises it's eyebrows at that. And then proceeds to cast away that as meaningless?! The cruelty.

Ignatieff, you are a lesser evil.

2007-09-21T14:35:00.000-05:00

Michael Ignatieff, Deputy Leader of Canada's Liberal Party, held a lecture here at Queen's yesterday.

Back in 2006, Ignatieff was instrumental in reaffirming Canada's present involvement in the bloody occupation of Afghanistan. He and his caucus were pretty much the only Liberals who voted to extend the mission. In fact, after the vote, the Conservative Prime Minister made his way across the Floor to shake hands with Ignatieff--a truly disgusting sight: two warmongers congratulating each other on their "success."

I was present at the Ignatieff lecture and all but nodding off as he rambled on about Canadian identity and nationalism, when someone asked him a question worth paying attention to. It went something like this:

The Afghan Constitution strictly maintains that the state religion is Islam, and prohibits any non-muslim from becoming President. The stated goal of the Candian-led mission--a mission which you voted to extend--its stated goal is to preserve and defend this government. So, my question to you, Mr. Ignatieff, is: Why are you so fond of this vicious theocracy that continues to uphold the death penalty for such things as religious conversion and adultery?

His answer? Blah blah blah...hard choices...blah blah blah...it is a democracy...blah blah blah...our foreign policy goals must be just...blah blah blah.

-"Hard choices": Read "lesser evil." And is this really the direction we need to take this? Doesn't that mean that we are preserving and defending evil? Whether it's a lesser evil or not, I don't know. But one this is clear: it's very convenient that this "lesser evil" is so accommodating to the interests of Western imperialism. Just so's you know, he really does believe this lesser evil bullshit--he's got a book out called Lesser Evil.

-"Is is a democracy": Read "semi-democracy." The kind of democracy that has--built into it--the Constitutional non-eligibility of any non-muslim leaders and judges.

-"Our foreign policy must be just": OK, that makes sense, but I'll echo the questioner's bold retaliation to this when I say, how can our foreign policy goals be just when goals of the mission are not?

It just plain amazes me that Ignatieff and Co. can even manage to sleep at night as they tour around Canada speaking at universities about justice. What the fuck do they know about justice?

2007-09-16T21:23:00.000-05:00

I've never been much of a fan of alt country, but I have to say this Rilo Kiley album, Under the Blacklight, is really addicting.

Offices, Building Keys, and Extention Numbers

2007-09-16T14:45:00.000-05:00

I know it's sorta childish, but I really enjoy having an office. I find that I'd like to just ask someone to come to my office for no reason other than just to use "my office" in a sentence. I also feel the urge to like do something stupid like invite a dozen people into my building late Saturday night and just drink beer and blast music and so on.

Nevertheless, so far I've only used it as a nice quiet spot to read this hyper-analytical garbage they're having me digest (it digests about as well as styrofoam, imo). It's better than reading at home because at home there's something in the walls (maybe a pipe) that makes a sound similar to the dribbling a several basketballs.

That said, so far grad school is great. I've pretty much done nothing other than attend Departmental parties and administrative meetings. Plus, I'm TAing for a super-cool Existentialism course for a sorta-cool-but-half-insane French-Canadian woman (who better embodies existentialism than Simone de Beauvoir).

But, I must get back to work. Check this out, the last sentence I read was this:

Thus, on our "sets of possible worlds" model for propositions, a law of nature is any set of worlds that has as a subset the set of all worlds in which the laws of nature are the same as those of the actual world, or, as we might say, are nomologically congruent with the actual world.

Well fuck me sideways.

Twas the view at lunch today:

2007-09-08T18:36:00.001-05:00

I drove to Niagara Falls last night--stunning. And what did I learn? Bring a date next time.

Most Important Movie of 2007?

2007-09-04T21:12:00.000-05:00

I think I've said already that Children of Men was the most important film of 2006. Now, I'd like to nominate Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley as the most important film of this year (so far).

But much like Children of Men, people (esp. critics) are missing the point of Ken Loach's spectacular film. I read reviews and listened to blabbering idiots trying to suggest that Children of Men was reeeeallllyy about the Second Coming or the dangers of genetic modification.

Now, I'm hearing all about how The Wind That Shakes the Barley is about being pro-terrorism (see e.g. The Sun, 30May2006). The London Times (18Jun2006) compares Loach to Nazi-apologist filmmakers--ironically, since many Black and Tans (the movie's bad guys) would later become the energy behind British fascism in the years leading up to WWII. The Daily Mail (30May2006) ran an article entitled "Why Does Ken Loach Loathe His Country So Much?" (honestly, WTF!!!!????)

But even some of the less reactionary stuff out there seems to get it wrong. David Denby in the New Yorker boldly writes "There's our theme: the revolution devours its children." (19Mar2007) Similarly, the great (-ly appreciated in the blog) Rick Groen writes in the Globe and Mail that "Like most revolutions, this one has begun to eat its own." (16Mar2007)

OK. Well after all that, maybe I don't even know what it's about anymore. But let me tell you what I see. First, the film is just a great example of social realism. I mean, even if you don't agree with the politics, it's worth watching just for style.

But also, and more importantly, the film is about a retreating British army (sound familiar?) trying to maintain some level of influence by scaring their enemies into ratifying some bullshit treaty on the grounds that if they don't, they will face utter destruction. So what do I see? I see an imperialist government on the run from a people's army that almost succeeded in attaining complete independence. -----------[WARNING: SPOILER-->>>>] The death of the Marxist hero does not suggest the revolution eating its own, but rather a mistaken and ultimately tragic fear of British retaliation.

If it's clues to the meaning we seek, then we need to look at the third act during the fervent debate over the peace treaty. In this scene, the hero argues that if the revolution is not continued, a great opportunity will be missed. The ending symbolizes exactly that tragedy. The lost chance at a better world--one where doctors are no longer faced with the impossible request of helping children whose only malady is lack of fucking food (to cite probably the film's most heart wrenching scene). The point is this: such a world is within reach, if only we're willing to face our fears.

Free Sison!

2007-09-04T11:55:00.000-05:00

On August 28th, the Dutch government arrested Professor Jose-Maria Sison, Philippine revolutionary and founding Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, on criminal charges that make him out to be a terrorist--even after a European court recently overturned an EU decision to continue labeling him so.

Simultaneously, the Dutch government invaded and searched without warrants the homes of several Filipinos across the Netherlands. And subsequently, surprise surprise, the Phillpine government saluted these unjust actions by using clubs and shields to beat (back) the hundreds of outraged protestors marching on the Dutch Embassy in Manila.

The outrage these protestors expressed stems from the fact that after being imprisoned and tortured in the 70s and 80s under the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines, Sison fled to Europe where he hoped that he could find safety. Sison has been living (not exactly comfortably) in Europe for almost twenty years. Now he faces life imprisonment (literally) for what amount to nonsense allegations issued AFTER the Philippine Supreme Court had decades ago DISMISSED a number of similar and actual charges.

The Dutch Office of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines--also ransacked by the cops on the 28th--has reported the mistreatment of Sison noting that he has, since his arrest, been held in solitary confinement without access to visitors or even prescribed medicines.

In any case, Sison has never done anything even remotely close to even the most ridiculously expansive definition of "terrorism." His recent arrest evinces the reach of American imperialism--the real and lurking conductor to this deafening symphony of lies. It further demonstrates the increasingly difficult problem for people around the world of finding refuge when they speak out and take action against their governments.

Calling for the Resignation of Queen's Principal Karen Hitchcock

2007-08-25T09:22:00.000-05:00

School hasn't even started, and already Queen's has offered to speak falsely on my behalf.

Queen's (my school) 's Principal, Karen Hitchcock, has issued a political statement that renounces a proposed boycott of the systematically racist Israeli academic institutions. She placed this statement on the Queen's website falsely claiming that the boycott was "antithetical to the core value of academic freedom."

In my opinion, Principal Hitchcock has by her actions made Queen's U out to be a Zionist institution that doesn't care about the torture and murder of Palestinian students who attend Israeli schools. Hitchcock, as head of the university, has a responsibility to Queen's students and faculty. She has no right to issue overtly political statements that speak on behalf of an academic body not even offered the chance to debate this issue in an academic forum. In fact, recently a group of over 300 US college presidents signed an agreement NOT to issue statements siding one way or another on political matters without the faculty's consent. Moreover, her line is an essentially ironic one. Citing freedoms of inquiry to justify an inherently racist system that precludes such freedoms is abhorrent and ridiculous. And not only is her line ironic, it's bullshit.

Her point is that we should still listen to people even if we disagree with them. Alright, yes, granted: she is right to say that we ought to keep an open mind. But the people with whom we disagree--these institutions with whom we need to keep an open mind--are, in this case, oppressive institutions run by sycophant bureaucrats who regularly uphold and enforce racist policy. They are not only neglecting the rights of Palestinians students by denying them entrance, but they are looking the other way to Arab students' imprisonment, torture, and murder. At some point, imo, we need to stop listening to such people. The abuses sustained by Arab students are in many cases the result of such students' futile attempts at trying to speak out against their oppression--i.e. for the very freedoms Principal Hitchcock claims to cherish. And while this is true of many cases, it is admittedly not true of all cases. In a few cases, the Arab students are abused simply for being Arab students.

I was surprised to hear that a Queen's committee, QCRED (Queen's Coalition against Racial and Ethnic Discrimination) that has publicly issued a response to our dear President calling for the revocation of the President's statement and an apology. The response is nicely written in a careful yet firm tone that, when I read it, left me feeling both surprised and hopeful. Personally, I think the President ought not only to revoke and apologize but also to resign. Typically, I'm used to fucking nonsense like this. Arguments in support of the boycott (which, btw, is only a proposed boycott being considered by the UBU) are very hard to find. The internet is overwhelmed with Zionist websites devoted to the cause of kiboshing the proposal (e.g. Zionism On the Web, stoptheboycott.org, The Union of Jewish Students, and plenty more). QCRED has singled out our President even though she is but one of several Ontario universities (including Ryerson, York, and even the University of Toronto) who have similarly denounced the boycott.

I have just sent QCRED an email congratulating them and pushing for some further action on the matter. Further action is apparently necessary since President Hitchcock has now defended her right to issue the statement. The very first event I am "encouraged" to attend this year is the Principal's BBQ. Perhaps I can manage to stage a boycott of that. Come to think of it, it would be a boycott to the boycott of a boycott.

Bulls on Charade: update on Montebello scandal

2007-08-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

Update to the post immediately below:

Looks like the cops have admitted that the three "protestors" were actually undercover pigs. The Quebec Provincial Police (QPP) explain that these three plainclothes officers were planted there to seek out violent activists, and that they never engaged in any criminal behavior. In fact, they continue, the officers were only discovered because of the fact that they were NOT throwing any rocks.

Now, lets all use our critical thinking skills to figure this shit out. Fact #1: the video shows one of the Three carrying a rock which he refuses to drop. Claim #1: accd. to the QPP, the Three were there to find violence. Claim #2: QPP adds that the Three were spotted b/c they were the only ones not throwing shit. OK: Fact #1 doesn't make any fucking sense given Claim #1 + Claim #2. Also: Claim #1 is meaningless if we accept the implication in Claim #2 that shit was thrown.

It would be nice to go on with this chain of fallacies and then to show just how nicely coherent the facts become once just admit that YES, the cops were there to instigate violence. It would be nice but it's all too obvious what is going on here. These bullshit excuses by the cops are so common they're cliches.

The depressing thing about it all is that people still believe the cops. E.g. just click on the original CTV story and notice how the rhetoric casts doubt on the allegation. And notice that the vast majority of comments posted to this story can't see through this rhetoric.

Protest in Montebello, Quebec

2007-08-24T10:34:00.000-05:00

Protestors in Quebec peacefully demonstrating against the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership (there's a mouthful)--an organization made up of the leaders of Canada, US, and Mexico--were attacked, shot with rubber bullets, and teargassed after COPS POSING AS PROTESTORS provoked violence.

Normally, citing such agents provocateurs would be met with suspicion. But this time we have proof (see video below). Of course, even with this evidence the RCMP has denied the allegations. And yet, in total, only four people were actually arrested at the summit--none of them having anything to do with these guys. These three "protestors" mysteriously vanished soon after being "arrested."

Is the Alberta Right Getting Dumber?

2007-08-19T06:41:00.000-05:00

Came across this article from the Calgary Sun. It wins the Article With the Most Four-and-five-word Paragraphs Award. I do love a good early-morning ad hominem argument to expose me to the "Gore-Suzuki hysteria" which has "obviously taken possession of the Harper government."

The modern-day Moses referred to, Peter Lougheed--coming down from Mount Retirement and warning Albertans who are "too busy working hard, making good money, playing golf and playing the market" (irony mine, the article is unmistakably insipid) to notice what's happening before "Ottawa has made its move, and we're all out of work."--is to be believed on the exclusive grounds that the former premier "is a realist. He has run a government."

(Btw, I was one of several cooks hired to this realist's very own house to prepare a not-too-frugal meal for his guest Prince Andrew last summer when I lived in Calgary. Seems retirement has been good to this multi-millionaire.)

The funny thing about all this specious reasoning is that it isn't necessary. While it is doubtless an article meant to swing that crucial Idgit Vote (see below), it actually smacks of underlying truths. The forthcoming regulations alluded to--though I must admit that I wasn't all that attentive what with that SUNshine Girl in the margins--will be used by the federal government to let them get their paws that great big cookie jar full of tarsand. This legislation, while perhaps dragged along by an environmentalist line, is rooted in a very real and very interesting power play between the east and west.

Not to say that such legislation isn't good. We really need to be a little hysterical about the Gore-Suzuki thing. The problem is that it the environmentalist line isn't strong enough to keep dragging this legislation along. Deals/threats will be made, and regulations will be lifted. The real problem with all of this shit is that the bandaid mentality of it all is NOT the product of sound ecology and objective long-term responsibility for future generations but rather lame rhetoric the locus of which extends no further than a four-year electoral cycle.

Nevertheless, the article perfectly illustrates the current Albertan psyche. I'll confirm it too: they really are that stupid.

Btw, trying to figure out exactly what the fuck this guy was talking about regarding the stereotypical Ukrainian--actually, I was trying to find out if it was supposed to be some kind of joke--I came across a neat little tool for uncovering stereotypes. Also, it turns out that the moronic sycophant just made it all up about the characteristic Ukrainian. Yep, just grabbed it out of thin air and put it in the (apparently fact-checkerless) newspaper.

ACK! And then there's this article, by a much better writer, who talks about a "Kyoto Kult" and "socialist experiments." How come liberals don't have this much colour in their writing?

The Idiot Vote: Take DAT James Surowiecki

2007-08-18T17:48:00.000-05:00

In The Know: Candidates Compete For Vital Idgit Vote

Invasion Review

2007-08-17T05:56:00.000-05:00

This week's Review of the Week goes to Rick Groen for his review of Invasion. It won't be up on the Globe's site for long, so read it now.

I don't know why Liam Lacey gets all the attention (and column inches). Groen has been writing better reviews now for a while. He wrote this about Picasso's Guernica in Children of Men.

The ensuing scene, which unfolds within the barricaded luxury of the city's equivalent to the Green Zone, is the film's only blatant venture into sci-fi territory, and you may find it off-putting. I thought it bizarre yet fascinating, especially the sight of a looted Picasso, Guernica no less, mounted proudly on the mansion's wall -- one war redeemed by art, only to become the booty of one more war.

That's one helluva sentence, and it's one I couldn't write. And that's why I'M not a reviewer.

2007-08-13T11:13:00.000-05:00

Dave Chappelle at Def Poetry Jam

More Dave Chappelle

book of the week

2007-08-10T22:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm a little bored here in Kingston, so I've been reading a lot. And this week the winner is without a doubt Laura Kipnis' The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, and Vulnerability. Well written, funny, interesting. It's one of the few works of feminism I've read. As soon as I get a library card, I'm ILLing her Against Love: A Polemic.

Two sentences from The Female Thing:

Don't fret [re impossibility of vaginal orgasms] as there's always something called an "emotional orgasm" which many women report experiencing according to The Hite Report queries: "an intense emotional peak" accompanied by feelings of closeness. There's a name for someone who would call that an orgasm: female.

Roger D. Hodge stole my life!

2007-08-09T12:13:00.000-05:00

How did some none-hit wonder from Texas manage to do what I'm about to do before I even get around to doing it? Roger D. Hodge, editor of Harper's:

Hodge, 38, was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas, ...[blah blah blah]... attended the University of ...[blah blah]... eventually made his way to New York City in pursuit of a Ph.D. in philosophy at The New School for Social Research [nice. what'd'yr daddy pay for that?]. Hodge received a master s degree but abandoned his dissertation to work at Harper s Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two sons.

He started out at Harper's as a 29-year-old intern. Eight years later he was Deputy Editor. Two years after that, fucking Editor. Just like that. Oh well, there's another one I need to kill.

Lauryn Hill done lost her mind

2007-08-09T06:17:00.000-05:00

Yep. Can't believe it.

Ultimate Cure for Acute Boredom: Google Video and Methaqualone

2007-08-08T18:24:00.000-05:00

Guess what, when you don't have TV this stuff isn't half bad.

Who wears short shorts? Kingston girls do.

2007-08-07T11:25:00.000-05:00

While I much appreciate going outside in the morning to get my mail and witnessing the more than occassional female jogger in short shorts, I'd like to remind the girls of Kingston that not just anyone can wear them--see commandment #1.

from David Mitchell, _Cloud Atlas_, 325-327.

2007-08-06T13:20:00.000-05:00

And how did Union aim to xtract these alleged "ills" of our state?
Revolution.
...
Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.
...
How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?
You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-status, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps."

-----------------

And a dollar to whoever tells me which 20th-c. statesmen said that.

Philosophy Football

2007-08-05T20:31:00.001-05:00

Hahahahaha, I can't believe I've never seen this before.
Monty Python's International Philosophy Football.

Jade

2007-08-05T16:01:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah, I forgot about this. This little piece from a shop in Beijing will set you back $50,000 USD.

Toronto is Spice City!

2007-08-03T19:47:00.001-05:00

Check it out. Guess who's totally psyched about b. Spice Girls tickets. And of course Toronto has more fans than ruddy Baghdad, QED, and thank Allah I don't have to go all the way there to see Baby and Ginger.

2007-08-01T13:13:00.001-05:00

Sweet, I think I'll go see Camera Obscura this month in Montreal (only 2.5 hrs. away). Such are the advantages of being equidistant from Toronto and Montreal.

So, today is garbage/recycling day. It's actually quite complicated. Talking to a neighbor about it, I discovered that only two bags of garbage will be accepted weekly. If I have more, then I must apply for a special permit which I attach to the extra bag(s).

Recycling is also picked up weekly. But there is a Grey Box and a Blue Box, picked up on alternating weeks. The Grey Box is for paper and plastic bags, and the Blue Box is for glass, plastic, and aluminum containers. Should one mistakenly place the wrong things in one's box, angry letters apparently ensue. These, I was informed, will be followed by official reprimands and even fines, if one's trashy behavior isn't corrected.

This explanation took a good 15 minutes. And no I did not ask her, gee what about next week's Civic Holiday? After she finished, my neighbor asked me how all this compared with Manitoba's "program." She actually used the word "program." I told her quite plainly, "In Manitoba, we just have dumpsters." She looked at me as if she were Mary Hunt and I a drunken Lindsay Lohan. And then she berated "well that's not very progressive, is it." I only shrugged.

Some pics of Kingston

2007-08-01T12:12:00.001-05:00

My House

Kingston Hall, Queen's
My Building at Queen's

Stauffer Library, Queen's

2007-07-31T15:18:00.000-05:00

I've accidentally stumbled across like a half dozen Cambodian restaurants here in Kingston. Kingston only has a population of just over 100,000. So, what up with all the Cambodian restaurants?

And honestly, what the fuck is Cambodian food anyway? When I was there, the only thing to eat was Happy Pizza (i.e. pizza + pot) and bugs. Yes, of all the bugs for eating in SE Asia and China, Cambodia was the only place where the bugs were not novelties. Every night in Phnom Pehn in the park on the way to the Happy Pizza district (seriously, there is a district) we walked past loads of homeless people cooking wok-heaping piles of cockroaches and other delights. And this wasn't a unique cultural thing, this was a poverty thing. Anyway, that's what I think of when I think of Cambodian food.

Also, click on this to see a synecdoche for Cambodian resourcefulness in the face of utter poverty.

"The Dream" from _Wild Strawberries_

2007-07-31T15:05:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen Wild Strawberries, then at least check this out.

The Baby Bump Project

2007-07-31T15:01:00.001-05:00

This is absolutely fascinating to me. And I have absolutely no interest in asking myself why.

2007-07-30T15:13:00.000-05:00

Bad news: Igmar Bergman has died. WTF. Shitty.

So Long Western Canada!

2007-07-30T14:27:00.000-05:00

I'm in Kingston, bitches! I've moved into a cramped basement apartment about 15 mins. away fr. the Queen's campus after spending way too much money on motel rooms (cheapest was $80/night) as I looked for a place.

I'm dirt poor and it isn't worth getting a job that I'll have to give up in a month anyway. Right now, I'm piggybacking wifi from the guys upstairs, and I'm sitting on a chair with paint all over it which I was lucky enough to find in the laundry room--lucky b/c without it I'd be right now sitting on the ground. And my laptop rests on a collection of boxes and dirty two-by-sixes I found outside. Yes it's true, but I imagine I'm not the first grad student to be caught awaiting his scholarship so he can eat something other than $0.27 No Name noodles three times a day.

But on the lighter side, my pneumonia is all gone and I'm feeling well enough to actually go out and get some sun. The weather here is great--not too humid, not too dry. The house I live in is just a block away from the Kingston Tennis Club (so many gorgeous courts!). And I bought a bunch of fake Lacoste stuff in China, so I think I might fit in there nicely--until, that is, I'm asked to actually play.

I'm going out now to take some pics of Lake Ontario and Kingston which I'll post when I return--because I'm bored and dirt poor and I don't know anyone and I have over a month before school starts.

Last Roll: these pics came out great (click to enlarge)

2007-07-25T08:50:00.001-05:00

Back Home

2007-07-22T08:53:00.000-05:00

Well, I've made it back home. I've been sick with pneumonia for the last eight days (pretty bad pneumonia too, since I wasn't able to get to a hospital until early yesterday morning). Because of that, my final week in Beijing was shit. I couldn't even see the fucking Great Wall!

But still, overall the trip was good. I can't even say I all that happy to be home. Same scenery, same weather, same crappy weekend-only activities, same food (sigh), same stupid festivals. It's much nicer than winter, but the richness of summer is definitely NOT in Manitoba. I've got a ton of mail to read and forms for school to fill out--not to mention moving and finding a place. Yes, it's back to good ol' imperialism, the land of expensive food and liquor laws and work. And I've got so many films and fast food to catch up on. Travel + pneumonia means I lost just over ten pounds of weight.

I will say one nice thing about returning home, however. It is fucking fantastic to be able to breathe in some fresh air. Pretty much every city we came to on this trip was severely polluted and after a while, you forget what air is supposed to smell like.

Well, I'll post some more pictures shortly and I guess that will be it for the that personal stuff y'all hate on Guttersnipery. It'll be back to my usual ranting about Hollywood scandals and music and quotation marks or whatever the hell I usual talk about. I guess it's because for the vast majority of the time, my life is completely uninteresting (and I do actually like to keep it somewhat private, believe it or not).

2007-07-15T22:02:00.000-05:00

Ultimate destination

2007-07-13T20:09:00.000-05:00

We've arrived in Beijing. And what a city. Pink lights :), punk-rock lounges that play Kubrick films, little roasted scorpions, and a zillion Cultural Revolution posters. Jimmy had a bust of himself made yesterday. I bought a giant jade cabbage that supposedly brings good luck and wealth. And Derek (seeing Jimmy's bust) is considering a bust of Joe Strummer to which he plans to make semi-serious offerings. Maybe we're all going a little nuts--strange, since we stopped taking malaria pills a long time ago--but whatever; in a week, we'll be back in the land of endless dredgery.

Yes, we're nearing the end of what has been a great trip. I can sense the nudge-nudge-wink-wink of grad school as I get more and more "Introductions" emails from future classmates. Sigh. I can't bring myself to write one yet. What would I say, hey everyone I think I'm the only one of you sad fucks who didn't spend all summer reading _Being and Nothingness_? How cruel.

Speaking of cruelty, several email recipients are complaining of my bitchy tone lately. Honestly, I think its China. Where you're endlessly steping over the crippled homeless and surrounded by chain-smoking coughing/spitting Han zombies whose umbrellas poke you and everyone in the eye, and who whistle to their Pavlovian crotchless-pants-wearing children for them to shit (in the middle of the street, mind you) and when you rarely eat anything but meals containing puppy-dogs and bird talons, WELL your sense of humanity does start to slip a little. China is a country where you need to literally fight off child beggars all the time, where half the people can't even speak proper Chinese anyway so why even bother w/ the Putonghua, and where the national passtime is abusing animals. When I first came to China I hated it. But the thing is, after a while you can understand it--even begin to like it. There's nothing like the excessively rude awakening and lost sense of humanity in the country where a fifth of humanity lives. Innocence gets replaced with guilt--it's more appropriate, more honest, more human.

Oh well. Oh btw, this is funny; apparently, I've been in northern Burma this whole time.

Shanghaied in Shanghai

2007-07-08T09:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm in Shanghai. This place puts New China to shame. Hell, some of these streets (e.g. Nanjing Road) put Vegas to shame--I not even joking.

I couldn't sleep a wink last night in Chengdu for fear of my wake-up call not coming through. And it was a good thing too: THERE WAS NO WAKE-UP CALL. WTF? I would've missed my flight. I also leared that domestic air travel in China is SNAFU as fuck. The travel agency in Lijiang misread my passport number (accd. to my limited understanding of the problem at the entirely non-English Chengdu International) costing me Y400 (c. $50).

And the trip into Shanghai from the airport (not incl. the not-even-Putonghua-at-all-!? taxi ride to the impossible-to-find hotel) took two hours! So now my hours are all messed up again (I woke an hour ago--9 p.m.). But whoa, this night life is begging to be explored. This is a pretty cool place from the looks of it (but what up wit the wikitravel page for Shanghai?).

Zaijian Bitches!

2007-07-03T00:18:00.000-05:00

Well, the trip is about to end. Today, we saw the historic bridge at Luding where the Long March nearly ended except for a handful of brave communists who scaled the dismanted bridge hand-over-hand with grenades ultimately defeating the Kuomintang forces.

It is nice to decend from the head-aching altitude-sickness of 5000m. The views were incredible, but it is nice to be able to breath (and smoke) once again.

We head to Chengdu this afternoon, and I head to Shanghai on the 8th. I'm going by myself as Jimmy and Derek continue the Long March. In Shanghai it'll be shopping shopping shopping. And then a week in Beijing before returning home (briefly, before heading off for a lonely year of grad school far away from everyone I know--yah yah, boo-hoo).

Once again, this net cafe has no CD-ROM. So, I can't post any pictures. Anyway, they'll be up soon enough.

Tibet

2007-07-01T01:13:00.000-05:00

Yah, Tibet's pretty cool. Better than Shangri-la.

I'm having incredibly bad luck uploading pictures. Now that I've finally found access to the internet (at 5000 m in the middle of nowhere, it's tricky), it turns out that the CDROM doesn't work.

2007-06-27T00:31:00.000-05:00

Yah, the dog photo (q.v. sub. and see anon. comment ibid.). Personally, I think it's like only one of the greatest pictures ever taken ever in the history of the photographic world ever. It's funny, the woman pulled up with her dogs like that--through the supersaturated-motorcycle-crazy streets of Saigon--got off and did some shopping. She was gone more than 10 minutes. I waited for her to return b/c I wanted a picture of her driving away with the dogs like that, but she was taking too long. Anyway, the dogs stayed like that THE WHOLE TIME. I guess if you were a dog riding through the streets of Saigon on a motorcycle, you'd learn pretty quick not to move around too much.

More Pictures

2007-06-26T03:40:00.001-05:00

We're in China (where blogspot is blocked again)

2007-06-24T00:33:00.000-05:00

Well, we made it to China. Right now, we're in Kunming, Yunan. The weather is fantastic. We spent a night in Hekou. Five minutes after crossing the border into China, things got very weird. The first--and still, by far, most shocking--thing we witnessed was a guy who actually jumped out of his hotel room. He wasn't dead when we encountered him; he could still lift his bloody head around. But he had clearly broken his legs and arms, and he had probably severed his spinal cord. Within a few mintues (or, as soon as someone tried to move him) he would be dead. This happened within five minutes of crossing the border, right in front of us!

This excruciating thing about China, however, is the fact that NO ONE speaks English and you can't work out the written language. Instant illiteracy! This is making things very difficult for us, and we're reconsidering the Long March route through western China because of it. And not only do they not speak English, but their dialect is different from the Mandarin we've been practicing.

Nevertheless, the food is incomparable. It's fantastic. You've never tasted Chinese food until you've been to China. And cheap. And huge fucking portions. And spicy as hell. Yah, the food is great.

So, blogspot.com is blocked in China (or at least in Yunan), but I can reroute these posts fairly easily. I'm still trying to figure out how I can post pictures, so bear with me. Tomorrow, we head to Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Now, I'm headed off to look for a phrase book. I've just remembered: I've got to get back soon for school......Tube!

Pictures

2007-06-21T04:41:00.000-05:00

I know it's been a while, but to make up for it here are some pictures:
Each picture takes like five minutes to upload, so I'll add them slowly. These are from Angkor Wat.

Reporting from Nha Trang, Vietnam

2007-06-12T00:49:00.001-05:00

Well, Vietnam blocks blogspot.com, so y'all have to wait until I get to Laos.

2007-06-04T03:10:00.001-05:00

All I have to say is this: Saigon is the greatest city on earth!

Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh

2007-05-29T21:18:00.000-05:00

Since my last post, many strange things have happened. Later the night after the Khao Yui, we stumbled upon a bar/karaoke/brothel on one of the out-of-town roads to the Park. The singing was terrible, and the girls were clearly prostitutes, but they were singing their hearts out on stage. Jimmy sang _Imagine_ on stage which had to be the funniest thing to happen so far on this trip. The otherwise uninterested patrons of the bar suddenly stopped what they were doing and stared jaw-dropped at Jimmy's performance. The result was huge applause and the gift of a plate of hot peanuts (!?).

Crossing the border into Cambodia (at Poi Pet), we came into trouble. Our guide does not warn of the dangers of Poi Pet, a bandit town where immigration actually gets bribed by fake bandits who overcharge the visa price. But that wasn't what was so scary. After crossing the border, we were offered a "free" ride to Poi Pet's bus station. Stupidly, we climbed aboard this "free" bus as did the six bandits who had "assisted" us with our border crossing. It was already starting to get dark and the bus could've taken us anywhere as we were helplessly outnumbered. Finally we managed to convince them to let us off (arguing that we needed food), but making the long walk back to where the bus had first picked us up was terrifying. We were aggresively followed and pitched to by so many touts (one of which was actually wearing a fake police uniform) and every attempt to secure a taxi to Siem Reap (about 3 hours away, and the city closest to Angkor) failed. Eventually we discovered that all taxis needed to pay the bandits six dollars per trip to Siem Reap. We finally found an older driver who we sorta trusted and after negotiating a price, he took us to his car. Alas, the bandits found us before we took off. They told us we needed to switch cars and drivers! WTF! They dragged away our original driver and tried to persuade us to switch. I was almost certain that had we agreed, we would surely've been robbed. But we stubbornly remained in the taxi, and finally our original driver reappeared and took us to Siem Reap. Most terrifying was the fact that Poi Pet evidently has no police other than the fake officer/tout; our driver actually referred to the bandits as "police" when he told us he needed to "pay the police" to take us to Siem Reap). Later in Siem Reap this level of corruption was confirmed to us when a local told us plainly that in Cambodia you can bribe the police for anything. Asked about murder, we were told that the bribe was around $3,000. $3,000 to get away with murder! And no law against impersonating an officer! That's right, we're not in Thailand any more.

Anyway Angkor Wat was great. After a couple days relaxing and getting over the border crossing, we headed to the capital, Phnom Penh. It's not bad here. We saw the so-called Killing Fields and the notorious school/prison S-21 where Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed tens of thousands. Yes, yesterday was our Dark Tourism day of this trip. Thankfully the museums were careful about the evidence for their claims. While I agree that the Khmer Rouge committed horrible atrocities, I think there is a lot of misinformation out there. At the very least, American imperialism is to blame for many many deaths in Cambodia. It is still the most mined country on earth. You can't even safely walk off the road in many places for fear of mines. The Americans bombed the shit out of Cambodia, and many of the AmeriKan atrocities are blamed on the Khmer Rouge.

Anyway, the night life of Phnom Penh is awfully strange (stranger than a karaoke-brothel) but I'm out of time. In a couple days, we'll be headed to Saigon.

2007-05-25T23:22:00.000-05:00

Just a quick update. Yesterday we were in Pok Chang where we rented motorcycles to cruise through Khao Yui National Park. Pretty fucking cool. There are wild tigers and elephants in this massive park that cover five different types of rainforest (ocassionally you come across signs that read, Beware: Tiger Crossing, etc.; alas we didn't witness anything like that). We did see elephants, giant centipedes, waterfalls, scorpions, & c, & c. We swam in the same beautiful waterfall where they filmed _The Beach_. The greatest thing about it, however, is that we did it all for 20% of what they would've charged us for a tour.

Right now I'm in Saraburi waiting for a bus that will take us to Cambodia. We're headed first to the temple ruins of at Angkor Wat. It will surely be in the top three highlights of the trip. In like the 12th century, Angkor was by far the world's most populous city. I will definitely be stocking up on film.

Sunday-Tuesday: Muay-thai and more

2007-05-23T02:54:00.000-05:00

Well, it's my last day in Bangkok. Tomorrow we're taking a bus to Khao Yai National Park and then we're off to Angkor War.

Over the past couple days, we've actually done a lot. We went to a muay-thai fight on Sunday. We went to the big one at Lumphini Stadium. It's really just a scam though: it cost us 1000 baht (around $34) to see the fight from a distant nose bleed section chain-link fenced off from everyone else. There were only like a dozen foreigners and Thais get in for soemthing like 300 baht (~$10). The way they get away with this legally is by claiming that the Thais have memberships. However, we witnessed someone giving about 300 baht at the counter; so, I don't know, whatever.

Monday and Tuesday, we did quite a lot of partying and even more eating. I'm eating around five times a day (usually noodle soup--price, 75 cents). One interesting factoid about Bangkok is that the sports reports are--all of them and for every radio station--rapped. What we thought was a strange hip-hop-slash-spoken-word thing turned out to be the regular sports synopsis. Oh and regarding radio, the pop music scene is really great. I don't think they pay royalties for cover songs; there are zillions of these, and most of them are excellent. The big sensation right now in Thai Pop is the artist named Big Ass! I'm not kidding; that's his name.

Anyway, it's too hot to keep typing. I'll update soon.

Sunday: Muay Thai!!

2007-05-21T00:24:00.000-05:00

Saturday: The Masses and the Monarch

2007-05-19T08:07:00.000-05:00

Still in Bangkok. Last night we went cruising around Patpong District witnessing some of the more unmentionable marvels unique to the city. Waking up early, we grabbed a quick noodle-soup and headed out to see the Grand Palace. I've never seen so much gold in my life! Inside another temple we were awestruck by the (second) biggest lying-down Buddha I've ever seen. It must've been like 80 metres long and 40 metres high and made entirely of gold.

We took a taxi down to Little Lebanon for some hummus, a delicious shwarma, and some hookahed apple-tobacco. On our way to a muay-thai boxing match we ran into some teenagers playing some kind of feet-only volleyball under a bridge. The muay-thai match was too expensive at Lumpini Stadium, but the informal sub-bridge game was quite a lot of fun. Tomorrow we're set up for a free (though, lesser quality) match at some bus station just outside town.

Derek and Jimmy got the sudden urge for some Chinese beetlenut (i.e. the mildly toxic red fruit you see Chinese chewing and spitting bright red all the time) so we headed toward Chinatown. On the way there--in the Financial District--we were stopped by a policeman (in pristine white gloves) at a busy intersection. We quickly realized that ALL the traffic had been stopped in every direction. The hundreds of pedestrians on all four corners were completely silent. Suddenly the cop on our corner shouted The King Is Coming, The King Is Coming. And around a dozen brand new SUVs flew down (the wrong way of) the street sandwiching a beautiful Mercedes that (ostensibly) carried the King.

After we unsuccessfully hunted for beetlenut in Chinatown and checked out a few more temples, we took a taxi back to Khao San Road. On the way, we found ourselves in a massive traffic jam the cause of which was a massive anti-government protest (prolly 5000 strong). Thailand is currently under a military coup and the cabbie told us that these protests are common. In fact, the cabbie was actually nervous about apparently common and violent clashes with police.

Back in Khao San, we grabbed a quick banana pancake (mmmmm) and came home to shower. The others are presently napping--we were walking pretty much non-stop all morning and afternoon--and tonight we decided to stay in Khao San and party with fellow backpackers.

The plan (finally agreed upon) in basically to head out of Bangkok Tuesday morning--after picking up our Vietnamese passports--and into Thailand's poverty-stricken northeast. From there, we'll cross into Cambodia, check out Angkor Wat and the southern beaches and Phnom Penh. After that, we'll be travelling to Vietnam, where we'll spend at least a couple weeks, followed by Laos. Finally we'll either reenter Thailand to see Chiang Mai and return, or we'll head straight up to China through Kunming. From there we've agreed to pretty much re-do the Long March to Beijing, deciding at that time whether it's worth it to make the trip into Mongolia.

Thursday-Friday: Touchdown in Bangkok

2007-05-18T02:40:00.001-05:00

Last night, we finally made it to Bangkok. It was a very long flight--first from Winnipeg to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to Hong Kong. Flying west through so many timezones, we kept going back in time until--crossing over the Date Line--it was suddenly tomorrow.

Before trying to sleep (the jetlag was considerable; it was 9 a.m. in the biological morning and 11 p.m. in physical Thailand) we ate some incredible noodle soup on Khao San Road. We're staying at the Green House; it's pretty clean and there's hot water. This morning we took a trip to the Shopping District to find the Vietnamese Embassy. Thing is, in Thailand you're legally required to carry your actual passport at all times. It's going to be 30,000 baht (around $90 USD) to get a visa for Vietnam in one day. If we want to wait around (w/o passport) for a week in Bangkok, we can get one for much cheaper.

Bangkok is an interesting city. It's a little strange to have Buddhist monks talking on cell phones outside a 7-11 that is overlooked by a massive poster of the Thai King. Tonight I think we're gonna check out a Muay Thai fight. Also, we're thinking of perhaps accepting one of the innumerable offers to witness an infamous Ping-Pong Show (don't ask).

We'll be in Bangkok until at least Monday, at which time we'll opt for the half-rushed overprised Vietnamese visa. I think it's going to be an interesting weekend.

Eight Days Until Travelogue

2007-05-08T08:58:00.000-05:00

On two things, I think I will disagree with the majority:

Dumb Dubya yesterday fucked up a date at the Welcome to the Queen Address. Saying, "you helped our nation to celebrate our bicentennial in 17...er 1976," Bush misspoke his way to the front pages of innumerable newspapers. Yes, we all know that the Queen--while old enough to prolly be always wearing Depends (Royal Ed.) incontinence underwear--is not quite old enough to have celebrated anything in 1776, but I believe the mistake is understandable. He was speaking about Independence, which was in 1776.

I just don't think it is helpful to keep focusing on Bush's stupidity. I can just imagine that this will play some role in how Amerikans later justify the atrocities in Iraq (and elsewhere) were neo-Nuremberg trials advanced: oh...well yes it was terrible, but Bush was a stubborn moron; what could we do? Also, I'm not sure we should really care so much about a bunch of syncopants going ga-ga over the Queen. You will find that almost no major newspaper today ran the story that 68 people were murdered yesterday in Iraq.

Oh, and the second thing: Am I the only person who thinks Paris Hilton's 45-day jail sentence is harsh? I mean, the whole DUI thing astonishes me to begin with. The offense is criminal which means that there needs to be mens rea (i.e. a criminal needs to have a criminal mind). However, no DUI would be successfully prosecuted if the mental element in such cases involved proving that the accused intended to drink and drive. So, guess was the mental element actually is for DUI: that you intended to drink! Since when has it been suddenly okay for the law to find intentional drinking criminal? Ever heard of the Separation Thesis? Anyway the point is that jailing anyone for merely immoral behavior is totally wrong. Why should it be any different for Paris? I suspect that where we might most of us agree that placing the average Punchclock Eddy in jail when he hasn't hurt anyone is judicially dubious, we subject celebrities to a different standard. There is a discernibly near-sadistic polarity of obsession when it comes to Paris. We worship her with compulsive love and attention, yet we're more than happy to see her suffer for our entertainment.

Anyway, enough of that. In only eight days, I'll be leaving to Asia. I'm gonna try to figure out some way to post pictures regularly (I'm not taking a digital camera this time). So if you're looking for a wicked vicarious adventure, check in over the summer at Guttersnipery.

2007-04-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

If only this had been at the bar a couple years ago.

School's Out Bitches!

2007-04-27T13:12:00.000-05:00

I've finished my degree! Holy fuck, I'm done. I submitted my last essay this morning. Given that this comes back with an A+, my final year will be perfect. Perfect, hahahaha. Actually, my transcript looks really good like this, because I got a couple Ds and a C+ in my first year and then you can see a smooth progression of B+s and A-s culminating with perfection. Hahahaha, suckers.

So, now I need to concentrate on my two Reasearch Assistantships. I still owe close to a hundred hours. And the library, fucking library. And the windows in the library. And the sun shining through. And the women rollerblading around below in tight tanktops and short shorts. And me alone deep in the Stacks reading about pedarasty in ancient Greece. Whatever. After that, I'll never step foot in a library again. Reading is for losers.

Nope, after that its all about Thai prostitutes and opiates for me. I hear you can buy a great big bag full of diazepam for like five bucks in Bangkok. Shit, for that price I'll get two. I'm so pumped for all the shopping I'll be doing over there. The other day, I saw this guy wearing a t-shirt that said "Same Same But Different." I've gotta get me one of those. In case you don't know, Same Same But Different is the key phrase of Thai merchants. As in, Q: Are those really RayBans? A: Same same, but different. Q: Is this really the exchange rate? A: SSBD. Q: Are you sure this is chicken? A: Same same. Q: Are they even female? Q: Didn't you promise me 14-year-olds? A: SSBD.

Did I Call it or What?

2007-04-24T12:17:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I wrote about the new "Globe Life" section. My polemic made the exaggerated claim that it would be all about kittens. Well, today on the front page of "Globe Life," I see that there is actually a kitten story. Unbelievable. And there's such a cute picture too.

New _Globe_

2007-04-23T10:10:00.000-05:00

I don't know about you, but I think the new Globe and Mail is terrible. It stinks; it stinks; it stinks!

And what about the new "Globe Life"? WTF'n hell? Essentially, it one of those lifestyle sections that deals in all seriousness with life-pressing issues like lost kittens and kittens who've climbed too high in trees and who need firemen to save them and the linguistic dimensions to your kitten's meowing, and how many kittens are too many kittens, etc. I HATE KITTENS! And even if I didn't hate kittens, I would still hate reading about them every morning in a "Monday-to-Friday section devoted to you in your personal [sic.] lives, your health, your families, your workplace, your gastronomic [sic.] choices--those matters that shape [sic.] your quality of life."

I think I'll cancel my subscription and start reading the Killarney Guide.

Queen's it is.

2007-04-22T17:13:00.000-05:00

So, I decided on Queen's. Overall, Queen's is a better school. I Google Earthed the trip from York to downtown TO, and it's just too far. And the TTC fare for the GTA is like $43/wk. Not that any of that had to do with my decision; I made my decision last week and the Google Earthing and TTC-pricing was just a just-to-see sorta thing. No, actually my decision resulted from a friend who'd recently graduated from Queen's Philosophy MA programme and who highly recommended it. Plus York didn't seem as eager to have me accept what with not returning emails & c.

Strange though: Google Earth Kingston to see that it's like the only place in southern ON that you can't zoom into. Because of the Royal Military College?

And I spent like three hours Google Earthing my trip to Asia last night. There are some spectacular pictures uploaded there (esp. in Laos and Cambodia). I'm getting very excited. Also, I'm considering another Guttersnipery Travelogue for this trip, if anyone's interested. Yes, just 24 more days before I leave.

I realize that I really should be writing about Alec Baldwin and his daughter, or Joe Pesci and Robbie Williams, or Va. Tech and Simon Cowell, & c. & c. But lately I've been extremely self-engrossed. I'm so close to finally graduating, I can taste it. And it tastes like...well I don't know what it tastes like; all I know is that I'm about to graduate. I wrote my last exam (EVER!) on Friday. And I have but one more essay to write. However, this essay is a daunting one: my Honours thesis--30-40 pp. of quasi-original scholarship; certainly not your usual borderline-plagiarized write-it-furiously-all-in-one-sitting type essay. I've procrastinated long enough (e.g. today I was suddenly overcome with the most acute phantasmal interest in reading about typefaces, esp. Garamond). And Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I'd been saving for the trip, is now entirely consumed (excellent, btw). And (for fear of a case of terminal nerdiness) because having sold my car I yesterday purchased a bicycle (for one whole dollar, mind you), I've been taking it on absurdly lengthy rides all over the city. It is as if I can't quite manage to do the one thing left in order to graduate--like I'm stuck in one of Beckett's plays, unable to exeunt. Anyway, fuck it. The one thing that will ultimately motivate writing this thing will be the dreadful thought of spending any more time in this chemical toilet of a city. I'll invoke the goddamned Muses if I have to. But seriously, I'm not worried at all. I'll soon be done everything. I'm looking forward to a fucking wicked summer, and I wish my 4.3 readers/day the same.

Queen's or York????

2007-04-12T19:41:00.000-05:00

So, York matched Queen's offer exactly. WTF!?

Deadline to decide is tomorrow.

Queen's or York...arrrrgh!?!?!?!??!?!?!?

I have no idea. Queen's is a better school, but it's in Kingston. York is in Toronto, but the school isn't as good (it's pretty close).

Fuck.

I actually picked up two bottles of cheap red wine to help me decide. I'm so fucking frustrated right now. Yesterday I wrote two exams (one was interrupted by a bomb threat), and I was up all fucking night marking forty ten-page essays; I have eleven more before I'm finished, but I can't even concentrate any more.

Dear God: No!

2007-04-07T11:57:00.000-05:00

Is Britney Spears going in for liposuction? Moooooo. (Oh, that's terrible.) Nothing escapes the watchful and moralistic eyes of The Sun.

_TLS_ reviews a new translation of _History of Madness_

2007-04-07T11:37:00.000-05:00

This review of Foucault's History of Madness is astonishing. TLS reviewer Andrew Scull has really cut Foucault down to size. Previous translations of Madness were incomplete, omitting most of the evidential footnotes. Scull has gone through them, finally, to reveal that Foucault is often making weak claims based on limited, archaic, or non-existent evidence. Thus:

Foucault alleges, for example, that the 1815-16 House of Commons inquiry into the state of England's madhouse revealed that Bedlam (Bethlam) placed its imates on public display every Sunday, and charged a penny a time for the privilege of viewing them to some 96,000 sightseers a year. In reality, the reports of the inquiry contain no such claims.

Well, at least Foucault has invented a entertaining book. I certainly don't mean to put down Foucault; I think he's a very important thinker. But, this review confirms that he does have a tendency to drift away from careful social history toward a kind of guided imaginative murmur.

2007-04-04T18:18:00.000-05:00

Hahahaha, this is brilliant. It's an Alanis Morissette version of "My Humps." Fucking great.

Looks like Queen's

2007-04-04T17:19:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks as though I'm going to accept Queen's offer. They've offered me a shitload of $$. I mean, the offer is actually incredible. Other schools have relatively niggardly offers.

And Queen's is decent from what I hear. The programme is just thirteen months and they treat grad students very well (like junior member of the faculty). Trouble is, Queen's is pretty posh (unlike me), and conservative (very unlike me). I guess there are innumerable dinner parties I'll be expected to attend (this part was presented to me as a good thing). And I doubt I'll fall in love with Kingston. The Royal Military College is across the harbour, and the city's population stands at a mere 100,000.

But Queen's is one of Canada's prominent universities, and I'll be able to make all the connections needed. And it's going to be nice not to have to worry about money for a change.

Goddamn Essays!

2007-04-04T17:04:00.001-05:00

Fuuuuuuck.

The Year Ahead

2007-03-28T10:41:00.000-05:00

Well, I've officially been awarded a SSHRC for next year's graduate studies. I received the notice this morning.

Yesterday, I officially sold my car. I needed the $$ to finance Asia: The Trip. From now on, I'm a pedestrian threatened by motorists rather than vice versa.

And two days ago, I officially purchased my plane ticket to Asia. In to Bangkok, May 16. Out from Beijing, late July.

I've got a couple more weeks of school, but after that I can kick back and let the good times roll. Well at least the good times will roll until September at which time they will be stolen away for ever. But that's ok, I will learn from whatever cult I join that a graduate degree affords me a much higher form of pleasure and I will surely join the others in mocking and laughing at my primitive hedonic rovings. But until then....

Decemberists

2007-03-24T00:13:00.000-05:00

Wow, I just got The Decemberists' The Crane Wife. Fucking great! Check out "The Island"--wow. I just really love this whole album.

It's like Procol Harum meets Lou Reed meets the post-9/11 prog rock scene. ...hmm Reading that sentence I realize that it means absolutely nothing and that I'd make a terrible music critic.

Unreadable Books

2007-03-23T23:26:00.000-05:00

Check out this Guardian story about books people never finish. Yah yah, you know them already: Ulysses, Bill Clinton's My Life, etc.

But the funny thing is what Lynn Truss' publisher said about why Eats, Shoots, & Leaves came up fourth in the list: "These people must have the intelligence of plankton not to be able to get through 204 pages of a comic, readable book."

Well, I bought Eats, Shoots, & Leaves and stopped after reading less than a third of it. The book is unbearable. If Lynn Truss were in the vicinity when I was reading this, I would've made an effort to track her down and forcibly stick a giant "Panda Says No" sticker directly over her moralizing cake hole.

Oh, and notice that the "Grauniad" has been living up to its reputation as the most mistake-ridden publication since movable type, correcting in this version the anachronous year of Ulysses.

2007-03-23T22:56:00.000-05:00

This is really funny. It's from Pink is the New Blog. I've never seen 24, but I'm well aware of its ideological tendencies.

Conservapedia

2007-03-15T09:28:00.000-05:00

Just in case you want to ensure misinformation, Andy Schlafly has created the anti-Wikipedia site, Conservapedia. They should've given this guy the Templeton Prize.

WTF: A Canadian Philosopher Wins a $1.8-million Religion Prize??

2007-03-14T22:31:00.000-05:00

Charles Taylor, a Canadian communitarian philosopher, today won a whole shitload of money.

The Templeton Prize is the over $1.8-million award "for progress [sic.] toward research or discoveries [sic.] about spiritual realities [sic.]" (I know that this makes absolutely no sense--I mean "SPIRITUAL REALITY"...huh?!--but this is actually the long title of the prize). It's the biggest monetary prize out there, self-adjusting to be always just a little more than the Nobel Prize.

Some billionaire misanthrope (who thought he was a philanthropist) named John Templeton started it. It was intended for spiritual leaders. It was first given to Mother Teresa. But I guess for the simple reason that there aren't very many of those any more, they started giving it out to bigots. Billy Graham got one, for instance. Lately, however, it's been reserved for so-called scientists who open up the cosmological door to the Big Guy up in the clouds; you know, the One with a long white beard and the omnipotent magic to move immovable mountains and so on. This is what got Dawkins so pissed off about it. The Templeton Prize is effectively the Nobel Prize for pseudo-science.

Thing is, I don't think Charles Taylor has done any such research. Apparently he's a catholic, but from his moral philosophy you'd never know. He's made some important breakthroughs in moral philosophy. He's one of the first (and truly one of the only) Canadians to bring analytic and continental philosophy together. Analytic philosophy has been rather hostile to ethics, focusing on booting out normative (prescriptive) language from logical analysis. Most attempts at realist moral philosophy can be said to commit the notorious Naturalistic Fallacy of confusing "is" with "ought." You can't use science to talk about what "ought" to be. But Taylor worked to show that we do have (somewhat universal) shared registers of value. And because continental philosophy has only recently been translated and entered into English-speaking scholarship, Taylor was able to grab hold of some of the fundamental insights of e.g. Heidegger et al. Not to pretend that I could really sum of Heidegger's fundamental insight, it suffices to say that Heidegger showed that we live in a kind of "life-world" of multiple truths. Hans Jonas showed that this life-world is one where facts are value-charged. We don't see objects as they are and then attach value to them. Phenomena are already normative. We are moral agents before we are scientists (see Iris Murdoch on this point). Within this life-world is an artificially constructed world of science. Basically, there are many constructed worlds like this. They are culturally public (i.e. accountable, communicable, "logical"); there are multiple publicities. What Taylor does (a la Hans Jonas) is to show that modern theory (specifically, instrumental rationality) strips facts of their normative value.

To make a very long and complicated story short and simple, Taylor points out that we do have shared registers of value (e.g. freedom of thought). Moral ideals are authentic only if they are able to be defended publicly. "My" moral ideal needs a public account and it is authentic only if it is able to be publicly recognized. Some individualistic thinkers take this too far (to absolute free-choice as an absolute right--a sort of democratic right) and that actually undermines things like freedom of thought. Taylor rightly calls these guys neo-Nietzscheans (they take Nietzsche's moral philosophy too far, further than Nietzsche). Only with reference to shared--and hence somewhat objective--horizons of meaning can we find a way to speak rationally about ethics. I can't just will my morality to whatever I want (pace existentialism); I need to account for it. This insight is hardly spiritual, but I guess you might say he's a big freedom-of-religion booster. What is important is that Taylor is not like all the other moral philosophers (e.g. Alistair MacIntyre) who talk about a return to medieval times.

Anyway, I apologize for the political and philosophical stuff here on Guttersnipery lately. I promise to keep more to the gossipy Hollywood stuff in the future. Like this:

John Waters is making a children's film called Fruitcake.

Jean Baudrillard: dies at 77

2007-03-07T23:13:00.000-06:00

One of the greatest critics ever, Jean Baudrillard, has died. He's the reason why I repeatedly use the term simulacrum, even without knowing exactly what it means. By far my favoriteest post-structuralists and one of the best cultural critics, Baudrillard was the cause of much head scratching and summer neglect. Here's what he had to say about the Abu Ghraid photos:

C'est tout l'Occident dont la mauvaise conscience cristallise dans ces images, c'est tout l'Occident qui est là dans l'éclat de rire sadique des soldats américains, comme c'est tout l'Occident qui est derrière la construction du mur israélien. Là est la vérité de ces images, ce dont elles sont chargées : la démesure d'une puissance se désignant elle-même comme abjecte et pornographique. ("Pornagraphie de la Guerre," Liberation, May19, 2004)

[{and my pitiful translation:}

It's the entire West whose bad conscience is crystallized in these images, it's the entire West that is there within the sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, just like it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. Therein lies the truth of these images, this is what they are charged full of: the excess of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.]

The News that Doesn't Make it To Your Doorstep

2007-03-05T21:41:00.000-06:00

NATO forces are killing Afghan civilians nearly every day now. Yesterday, thousands of protesters took to the streets shouting "death to America" after American marines opened fire killing 16 civilians. One of the dozens injured described what exactly the US forces did: "They opened fire on everybody." This is a huge story that got no mention in North American newspapers.

In a separate incident today, NATO forces dropped a 900-kilogram bomb on a mud-brick home killing nine members of a single family, including several children. Because this atrocity occurred today, it remains to be seen whether it will appear in newspapers.

In both cases, US forces confiscated footage and denied involvement. In the former case, freelance journalists reported that troops seized their equipment and erased all photos and video.

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Other stories you never hear about:

In Copenhagen, riots resulted in some 650 arrests. Anti-terror forces and armored vehicles were required to assist riot police in trying to control a four-day-long uprising.

In Japan near Tokyo, the Revolutionary Army protested the forthcoming Dick Cheney visit by blowing up the US military base, Camp Zama. There were no casualties nor injuries.

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What were the top stories?

#1--The possibility of gov.'t regulation on ATM fees.
#2--Few cellphone owners (58%) in Canada relative to the "even" Turkey and Botswana.
#3--The Victoria Cross Plan (i.e. Canada's Purple Heart) for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (ha!)

I couldn't make this up if I tried. Honestly, these are Canada's top three stories.

-------------------

I've been trying to find some explanation for the cynicism I observe in Canadian students and youth. A couple weeks ago, I realized the scary fact that students believe that radical change is unrealistic. Marking Environmental Ethics papers where students were supposed to rank the various plans for environmentalism and provide reasons for their choice, I recognized a disheartening trend. Where the worldview called for drastic change, a common reason given to justify their rejection was that these kinds of changes are "unrealistic." So, e.g., even when they agreed that the change would be good, they rejected it for the reason that it was radical. They don't understand that in some cases radical change is necessary. They don't believe that radical change is possible. I think the problem extends far beyond the mere illogic of providing this as a reason. It speaks to some deep cynicism that I just don't understand.

In the news: Canada's Parliament Votes Against Renewing _Anti-terrorism Act_

2007-02-28T19:43:00.000-06:00

A professor: "... a fine day in the history of Canadian civil liberty."

Is it? Let's break it down:

We in Canada have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that supposedly guarantees our rights as citizens... UNLESS (and here we can hear in the background that song by The Clash, "Know Your Rights") a violation of those rights can be "saved" under s. 1 of the Charter.

In plain English, s. 1 of the Charter is the loophole that legitimates certain Charter violations. At the same time, ironically, it is the section without which all the other sections would be just nice little suggestions. Section 1 is both the Salt Peter and the Viagra for a 25-year-old occasionally laudable yet homely and ignorable hermit who pops up every now and then to fight for our perceived formal liberties. In legalese, the Charter's s. 1 "guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society" (emphasis mine). Leaving aside the doubtless confusing terms "free" and "democratic," we need to understand this in order to unravel Canada's weapons in the so-called "So-Called Fight Against Terrorism."

The Anti-terrorist Act (ATA) allowed for Charter violations (lots of 'em, brutal and fascist and evil oh my). But the ATA had a sunset clause which ensured its self-destruction without a successful vote for its continuance. Last night's vote for its renewal was unsuccessful. So thus i.e. that means therefore ergo the ATA will self-destruct.

Whether or not these violations could have been "saved" under s. 1 we can't know because the ATA was never implemented (fortunately, though I'm not clear on how we would know if it had), and hence it was never given a chance to be challenged in the Supreme Court. Had it been challenged, it is doubtful that the Court would've been able to find a way to justify the violations. The controlling case, R. v. Oakes, set forth a Proportionality Test which the ATA would fail in practice. It is an immensely important case in Canadian law (although Canadian Law itself is pretty fucking NOT immensely important). Nonetheless, prudent potheads across Canada know it by heart.

Now, not all of the ruling elite is dumb. This means that they didn't enact the ATA for no reason. They will know that there is another section in the Charter which is useful for them and which they can use to ignore all those whiny Philosophy-drop-out Supreme Court Judges' decisions on rights abuses. This is the funny little s. 33. If s. 1 is a kind of Salt Peter for the Charter then s. 33 is a rusty pair of scissors the hermit carries around with him ready at any moment to hand them over to Parliament that it may castrate the fucker. In this case the Charter-cum-Skoptsi will just retire to the forest of inapplicability while we bend over as catamites to the fascist oppression of our dear Big Brother.

But they voted NOT to renew it, you're thinking. Isn't that a victory for our civil liberties? I don't think so. I think the vote was really about intra-partisan politics. I don't think this was about the relationship between security and freedom, nor about Liberals and Conservatives. It was, imo, actually about exposing factions within the Liberal party. It don't want to get into an analysis of this (I don't really care, nor should you), but sufficed to say that this is not a historic day for civil liberty. The Parliament can reenact another refined Act at any time. In the mean time, the cops can return to making illegally unjust arrests, not having to worry about all the bullshit paperwork required to make a legally unjust one.

A more interesting recent decision is the IRPA ruling. The Supreme Court found several things about Security Certificates unconstitutional. Isn't that great? I wonder. It is of much greater interest what wasn't found unconstitutional. Security Certificates were originally intended to speed up deportation. But because when the detainee potentially faces torture in being deported he is stuck here, the IRPA had allowed for a way to detain without charge just about anyone native to a country on Canada's Scary Places list. The irony here is that legislation purportedly designed to prevent torture (read, liability for torture) are being used to practice it. The Court did not find anything wrong in general with this practice. There merely found it wrong that such a person be held in such a way without knowing why. The Court did not seem to think that there was anything wrong with placing someone in solitary confinement for indefinite (i.e. unlimited) periods of time and for no evincible reason. Moreover, they were kind enough to offer a whole year before their decision takes any effect. My oh my, what a wonderful country.

Don't We All Miss Anna Nicole?

2007-02-13T11:15:00.000-06:00

With my new thirteen-inch bunny-ear-weilding $10 TV, I've finally found brutally snowy access to CKND. So, that means I get Entertainment Tonight. Barring something bigger, ET will be dedicating huge chunks of its show to the Anna Nicole saga. But the coroner's report isn't expected for weeks, and we wonder whether ADD-prone American audiences can sustain their interest. I know I can.

Similarly, Obama will need to keep America's attention (for much longer)--and with fewer "resources." Staying "clean" and "articulate" are insufficient to a c. 600-day campaign. But that's a whole different post.

One of my favorite columnists, Lynn Crosbie--writing with her usual acumen--noted in today's Globe about Anna Nicole that "if the media were capable of self-reflexivity, they might understand that the flood of stories about the latest victim of the Bernie Taupin/Elton John curse [referring to "Candle in the Wind"] is occuring because we all are grieving, as we do, the loss of someone we enjoyed, who shocked and delighted us." And Crosbie is right. The public is a confused mess of conflicting emotions right now. Some are pretending not to care by trying to believe that they don't care, and by telling people that they shouldn't care either. But this is as revealing of latent grief as a homophobe of catamitus.

As a public character, Anna Nicole had rare depth. She was a tragic character from the beginning. By tragic, I mean she (her character, not her "self" about which none of us ought to speculate) was authentically human and unique to stardom. Crosbie has a way of saying what I'm trying to get with imagery and talent I cannot approach:

While I can easily imagine an Anna Nicole impersonator, who would pay good money to see a Nicole Kidman impersonator, barking into a BlackBerry and arranging a suitable marriage? If being a gorgeous mess is the equivalent of public incontinence, then I wish more celebrities would wear NASA-issue diapers, and tell us, now and then, that life can be hard, and unfair; that we should without question, care when a spectacular, messy, painfully mortal woman dies.

Just read that last sentence again. This is a tragedy folks. Tragedy is designed to demonstrate the difficulty and contingency of life. There is nothing you can do (pace Plato) to protect yourself from bad luck. Tragedy is supposed to be powerful. What would Aristotle say of us if he observed the social infancy of our postmodern time and noted that we are incapable of catharsis. He would say, "wtf? well, those guys are headed for trouble. yep."