if I were Bill Adama

My endgame, were I Admiral William Adama, would be this:

Given Galactica's structural weakness and the fact that it won't survive more than a few jumps, I'd jump the battlestar so that it was sitting just about on top of the Cylon colony, exactly opposite the black hole. Then I'd arm all nukes. If possible, I'd send out Vipers or Raptors to try and damage the colony's FTL.

This move ought to get the Cylons' attention. I'd be sure that the Galactica's nukes were rigged with some sort of dead man's switch, such that if any of the Galactica's crew were to be killed, the ship would go out in a blaze of glory.

Assuming we're able to execute this much of the plan successfully, I'd open a channel and start the negotiation process for Hera. Anything less than Hera's transfer-- unharmed-- to Galactica, would mean the activation of all nukes.

Because I'd have positioned Galactica opposite the black hole, I'd simply be letting Newton's Laws of Motion take over. Detonating Galactica would mean pushing the colony irreversibly into the black hole's gravity well; with no FTL drive, the colony would have no means of escape, and the Cylon homeworld would be lost, along with the Final Five and all knowledge of resurrection technology.

And that, I think, is about the best endgame I could muster under the circumstances. It wouldn't ensure the death of all Cylons everywhere, nor would it seal humanity's fate: the humans who hadn't volunteered for the mission would still be alive, as would the many millions (or billions) of Cylons who would have exactly one lifetime-- however long a Cylon lifetime is-- to try to reinvent resurrection technology or figure out sexual reproduction.

BSG geeks: what would your endgame be? What would it be from Cavil's point of view?


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BSG and "Terminator: Salvation"

The most recent episode of BSG, "Daybreak, Part One," played out in the most frustrating way possible. Now, at the end, it's become obvious that the series creators have wanted to play things close to the vest, revealing everything (or at least a few major secrets) at the very end. I'm not sure this was the best strategy, firstly because this means the final episode will feel overstuffed instead of like a true dénouement; and secondly, because this strategy sacrifices most of the episodes that come before it: those episodes are reduced to stringing us along, feeding us ambiguity after ambiguity with no deeper purpose than to get us to the end. It's an unfortunate narrative choice, given the sheer number of questions that have been left unanswered up to now, but which could have been answered along the way. A quick review of those questions, off the top of my head:

1. What is the ontological status of Baltar's Head Six? (This Head Six seems to be the strongest argument that the series will come to some sort of theistic conclusion, as she has proven capable of acting as an invisible force in front of witnesses.)

2. What is the significance of Hera?

3. What is the significance of the funky music that activated the Final Five?

4. Which planet is truly the planet of humanity's origins?

5. Who or what is Baltar?

6. Who or what is Kara Thrace?

7. Which religion is correct-- Cylon monotheism or Colonial polytheism?

8. Are there really any humans in this drama at all?

9. Will humanity survive? (Granted, this question is rightly left to the final episode.)

10. Are the twelve Cylon models somehow related to the Colonials' twelve major gods and the twelve colonies? I suppose the larger question here is: what significance, if any, does the number 12 have?

11. What is the significance of the opera house?

12. Will we really see an eternal return?

About the only major plot points that occurred in "Daybreak, Part One" were these: (1) Sam Anders revealed the location of the Cylon homeworld, which is actually a "colony." That term sounds significant to me. The colony hovers close to a rock-crushing black hole that seems to have only one gravitationally friendly window. (2) Volunteers from the Galactica will attempt a rescue of Hera, which will involve jumping into the space right next to the colony, where all the Cylon guns are already pointed.

Aside from that, little else occurred during the episode. We get some background on President Roslin, but we don't learn anything we couldn't have guessed: she lost her sisters and father even before the Cylon attack, but this simply puts her among the bereaved. We learn a bit about Baltar's loathing for his father, but this was already covered in the episode ("Dirty Hands") where Baltar and Tyrol talk about Baltar's childhood as an Arelonian farmer. Baltar confessed to Tyrol his wish to be a Caprican, and to change his accent to something that didn't reflect his low-class roots. (Of course, whether these memories are real, or whether we're looking at more Cylon memory-tweaking, is yet to be determined.) Perhaps the most touching moment was Laura Roslin's appearance on deck to volunteer for the suicide mission. The story has always done a good job of showing that she remains stout of heart despite being frail of body.

One interesting thing the episode does, though, is begin differently: not only do the opening credits lack the usual "preview" mashup segment, but the episode itself also begins more cosmically than normal, starting with what appears to be a god's-eye view of the galaxy before moving in to a 2001-esque shot of Caprica "before the Fall." Our first hint of the great deity? Or maybe our second: viewers will recall the way the final episode of the third season ended-- with a godlike camera leap from the fleet's position to a screeching halt at Earth's doorstep.

So at this point, we've gone through four seasons of BSG, which has been, in part, a long meditation on the questions "Who am I?" and "Who are we?" The question can be broken down into sub-questions, such as whether Cylons are really sentient and deserving of rights, which leads to the question of whether treating them as "frakkin' toasters" is a form of racism. These aren't new questions in sci-fi; they've been dealt with in other storylines, such as those found in "The Matrix" or in "Blade Runner."

Which brings me to "Terminator: Salvation," for which a truly amazing preview trailer has just come out (see Trailer 3 here; you need Quicktime to view it). The Terminator series has also dealt with the revolt of machines once they achieve sentience. It's enough to make you wonder whether the authors of such scenarios ultimately side with the machines, who by the authors' lights are sentient and therefore slaves in need of liberation. The Matrix series muddies this question by showing you machines that, with a ruthless sense of justice, enslave the humans who had enslaved them. BSG does something similar when it shows that the Cylons are, at least at first, mostly intent on eradicating the human race.

What worries me about the new "Terminator: Salvation" (hereinafter "TS" for short), though, is that a person who has just gone through four seasons of BSG is going to view TS as merely rehashing the same questions covered in BSG. You see, Trailer 3 of TS shows us an enfleshed Terminator that thinks it's human. Ever heard that scenario before? True: this is a departure from all the previous Terminator films, in which the good guys and bad guys were each clear about their respective roles. But it's not a departure from what's been happening on BSG since 2003, and it's a reminder of even older sci-fi scenarios that covered the same ground, such as Rachel's belief that she's human in 1982's "Blade Runner."

So my own anticipation of TS has little to do with whatever Big Questions it might (or might not) be trying to explore. Instead, I'm looking forward to a dizzying variety of killing machines that have been promised by the TS trailers: driverless motorbikes, house-crushing robots, sinister hovercraft, and yes, a Terminator that cries out in self-hatred when it looks down at its open torso and discovers it's not human.

I suppose one reason why we're constantly fascinated by the whole man/machine question is that the question arises and is sustained by multiple streams of thought. One stream questions whether there is, fundamentally, any difference between people and machines. Quite a few scientists openly contend that that's essentially what human beings are-- extremely complex, well-honed machines, operating according to purely natural laws of causation. By this reckoning, humans aren't perfect or perfectly efficient; they have no divine spark. They may be amazing in terms of processing power and creativity, but they remain machines.

A second stream of thought is occupied with the ethical question of what counts as real. If something isn't real to you, whatever "real" might mean, it's hard for you to care about it. Throughout the ages, warring factions have justified their wars by dehumanizing the other side, making them somehow less real and therefore easier to kill. BSG has tried to show how complicated this is by posing its version of the "zombie problem," since Cylons replicate humans down to the molecular level. If a Cylon is just a toaster, you can kill it and sleep well at night. If, however, it falls in love with you, you fall in love with it, and then you get it pregnant, what's your view of that same entity?

Humanity's creation of and dependence on technology represents an evolving relationship. Sci-fi is one of the ways in which we attempt to explore and anticipate how that evolution will progress. Perhaps because it's entertaining, or perhaps because it really does reflect our instincts, most sci-fi portrayals of that relationship seem overwhelmingly negative. Will BSG take the plunge and show us its version of that negativity? We've got a week to find out.


ADDENDUM: You might enjoy this essay at Conscious Entities about computers and minds.


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3.141592653...

3.141592653...

That's as far as I've ever memorized pi. Happy Pi Day.


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eyeball verdict

Well, folks, it turns out that I've got both an infection in my right and left eyes, and an abrasion on the surface of my right eye. We don't know the cause of the infection (or at least the doc didn't say), but the abrasion is the likely result of sleeping with the contacts in my eyes, and perhaps the pressure of my face on the pillow (I tend to sleep on my right side, and it's my right eye that's abraded).

I've got drops that I have to take every two hours, and an ointment that I have to goosh under my eyelids before sleeping. I'm to look for signs of improvement within 48 hours, and I've got a follow-up appointment on Tuesday.

So now you know as much as I do.


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the great Eye of Sauron

It appears that I'm suffering from some sort of eye infection or allergic reaction, which started yesterday (Friday) sometime while I was asleep. I woke up on the downstairs couch around 5PM after crashing about 7 hours; I had pulled a working all-nighter that had lasted from Thursday evening until about 6AM Friday morning. The Korean company had given me 11 articles to do, which is 3 times my normal load. By the time I was done, I was pooped, but was also too frazzled to sleep right away. I ended up staying up until 10AM before finally collapsing on the couch.

I fell asleep without removing my contacts. Having done this many times before, I'm hesitant to say that the contacts were a factor in my present predicament. However, I now wear disposables as opposed to the tougher daily-wear lenses that I used to sport, so that might have something to do with the way things are now. The symptoms include extreme redness in both eyes, but mostly the right; blinking is painful because it feels as though the eye and eyelid are scraping each other. Lots of tears and mucus, and a pronounced sensitivity to light, which is currently making it hard to type. I tried ice packs on my eyes yesterday to reduce the redness through vasoconstriction, but that seems not to have helped.

Got a clinic appointment at 4PM today. We'll know more later. Meanwhile, have a look:




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do it

I hope Japan does shoot down North Korea's missile. No one else seems to have the cojones to make the move. If you think my position is insane, I'm all for a discussion in the comments. This is a subject on which I've thought long and hard, and in the end, I can't see NK departing this earth in any way but the hard way. Better sooner than later, whatever the initial carnage.


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techno-telepathy through better clothing

A recent article notes that science continues to inch ever closer to true "mind-reading."

A machine to read the mind came a step closer on Thursday, when scientists at University College London released the results of an experiment in which brain scans revealed the location of people moving around a virtual reality environment.

Demis Hassabis, co-author of the study, said it was “a small step towards the idea of mind reading, because just by looking at neural activity we were able to say what someone was thinking”.

I foresee a convergence of this tech with nanotech. Imagine wearing a tee shirt composed of a reactive nanoweave that, because it's in contact with your skin, is sensitive to your neural activity. Imagine that this same shirt incorporates an advanced nanotech version of a cephalopod's ability to change color, such that high-definition images of one's thoughts can be reproduced on the shirt's surface.

Now imagine thousands or millions of people wearing such tee shirts on a busy street during a gorgeous summer's day.

What would be flashing across people's chests and backs? Would we see words as well as images? How fleeting or lasting would any given image be? Would the images be layered, reflecting the simultaneous existence of both persistent, nagging thoughts and brief, random thoughts? Would we begin to see how those images varied according to people's personalities and levels of mental discipline? Would the thoughts of a soldier prove to have anything in common with those of a monk? Would there be commonalities and differences between the thoughts of the very intelligent and the very stupid? Between men and women? Young people and old people? Would cultural differences affect what images would appear, and how they appeared? Would people in a choir or on the same sports team project images that possessed some group-oriented theme?

And what if we found a feral child and made him wear such a tee shirt? How would the images be affected by such factors as religion, political leanings, sports preferences, hobbies, or sexuality? Would feelings be rendered in some way as images? What about smells and tastes and sounds that impinge on our consciousness? What about the memories of those sense impressions? What would the shirts show when a person was shopping or meditating or taking drugs or having sex (well, the shirt might be on the floor for that last activity)? How would the shirt depict metacognition? What would it show after the wearer had committed a crime like theft or murder? How different would the shirt's images be depending on whether one was talking or listening-- lying or telling the truth? What images would we see on someone who was being tortured, or mauled by a shark, or struck by a car?

And what might such a shirt show at the very moment of one's death?

Fascinating stuff. Feel free to speculate in the comments.


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what I need for my walk

A mobile phone battery than can be charged in just ten seconds? Hell, yeah!

Too bad it won't be ready for two or three years.


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don't fellate the pandas

Joshua opines on Charles Freeman's recent crash-and-burn.

Shortly before Freeman withdrew, the well-connected pro-appeasement graybeard Chris Nelson alleged that Freeman’s words were taken “out of context” and that it was “a lie ... no other word for it” to suggest that Freeman had defended the massacre. Well, then, let’s have some more context:

For myself, I side on this — if not on numerous other issues — with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ “Bonus Army” or a “student uprising” on behalf of “the goddess of democracy” should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. [The Weekly Standard]

It’s one thing to hug pandas, but it’s downright unnatural to fellate them.

Classic. All the current Neville Chamberlains in high places should take heed.


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many thanks

I seem, bizarrely, to have stopped thanking my readership for the different ways in which they have helped and continue to help me, even during this strange, sedentary period of the walk. The membership for my Facebook group "Kevin's Walk" has reached 20 members plus me, which is quite cool, and most of those members joined within the past week. My humble thanks to all of you. Here's hoping that you'll look through the post topics and leave advice (and, I hope, offers of help) in them. The walk truly does depend on your activism, but if my buddy Mike wins big on the lottery, he's promised to bankroll me, in which case you all can just drive by me and chuck beer cans at my head while I'm trudging along.


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from a reader

Reader and friend Mark T. offers this link to a Catholic priest practicing his own form of Vatican 2-style aggiornamento. Mark's comment:

Here's a man of the cloth I suspect you would like. He loves food, martial arts, and theology. No word on if he is a BSG fan.

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a "Lie to Me" question

The American version of a British TV show about a profiler-- the US version was titled "Cracker," like the British original-- fell flat in the ratings, so what makes us think that a show like "Lie to Me," which also purports to show us the power of psychology as a predictive and interpretive method, will do any better?

My suspicion is that "Lie to Me" is motivated by the school of thought that contends that interrogation techniques need only be minimally coercive, i.e., a person with needed information simply has to be detained and questioned, not tortured. A skillful interrogator, such as the character played by Tim Roth, needs nothing more than his own eyes to determine whether a subject is telling the truth. From there, the interrogator can shape the interview to reveal whatever his interlocutor is hiding. "Lie to Me" exists, then, as a response to the torture-happy "24."

In a scene deleted from the final cut of "Pulp Fiction," Uma Thurman's character, Mia Wallace, asks John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, whether he's an "Elvis man" or a "Beatles man," asserting that you can learn a lot about a person's character from that answer. I suspect the same could be said when examining people's political leanings: "Are you a '24' man or a 'Lie to Me' man?"

Interesting note: Wikipedia says this about the British version of "Cracker":

Cracker's conception was also in some ways a reaction against the police procedural approach of fellow Granada crime serial Prime Suspect, placing more emphasis on emotional and psychological truth than on correct police procedure. In an interview with the NME, McGovern dismissed Prime Suspect, noting that "Good TV writing has narrative simplicity and emotional complexity," and characterising the series as "A narratively complex story going up its own arse." Gub Neal, who produced the first season of Cracker, is quoted as saying, "That we had adopted the right approach was confirmed for me when Jacky Malton, the senior woman police officer who advised on Prime Suspect, said that although the way things happened in Cracker was sometimes highly improbable, the relationships between the police were in many ways much more credible than they had been in Prime Suspect."

So I might not be reaching to think that "Lie to Me" is in some ways a response to "24." Both shows are, by the way, on Fox.


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swamped

Tons of work to do. What's painful is that, thanks to the deteriorating won-dollar relationship, I'm earning peanuts now.


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BSG heads-up

BSG fans should note that there are four hours of BSG left.

1. "Daybreak, Part 1" is an hour long.

2. "The Last Frakkin' Special," a show that brings everyone up to speed on the major issues in BSG, is also an hour long.

3. "Daybreak, Part 2" is, as rumored, 2 hours long.

Check your local cable guide for details.


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...and we're back

I'm back in northern Virginia after a brief stint at the Villainschloss, where the babysitting went quite well. The kiddies were well-behaved, and as far as I can tell, no diseases were transmitted in either direction (them to me, or me to them). Much of the time was spent in front of the big-screen TV, watching "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith." The four-year-old, a Star Wars fan, knew exactly when to cover his eyes (kissing scenes, lightsaber amputations, Anakin's lava-induced makeover). The eleven-year-old, my lovely goddaughter, is now old enough to think that kissing might not be so icky after all, her protestations about Anakin and Padmé notwithstanding. The eight-year-old was tickled by the fact that her big sis is in love with Edward Cullen, the vampiric protagonist of the Twilight series of children's books.

Much fun was had by all, and I was treated to two excellent restaurant meals for my efforts.


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alone with three sick kiddies

Peace reigns at the Maximum Leader's house. Three sick children are upstairs. Two are watching a Wallace and Gromit video; one is reading whatever it is that 11-year-old girls read. Of the three kids, two are old enough to be missing school. I remember such days from my own youth.

I'm in the bedroom directly below the bedroom currently being shared by two of the children; the faint sounds of a claymation adventure are seeping through the floor. All is otherwise quiet.

They say the sage accomplishes everything by doing nothing. We'll see how long that holds true.

I look at my forearms. No purple blotches. The kids might be sick, but their leprosy hasn't spread to me yet. When it does, after my fingers fall off, I might be reduced to knuckling or tonguing the keyboard. Won't that be nice.

Should violence break out, I'll do my best to type out a final message here.


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"tea party" protests

"Tea parties," essentially protests that target the stimulus and bailout packages, are becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon these days. I think the whole thing is premature-- the president hasn't even had his first 100 days yet-- but hey, more power to the protesters, if that's their thing. I'm not much of a joiner, so I've never seen the utility of gathering en masse and shouting oversimplified sound bites, but freedom of assembly is something we cherish in this country, and even I can't discount the role of protest in consciousness-raising.

It wasn't long ago that certain smug conservatives, referring to anti-Bush protesters, claimed that "conservatives don't engage in useless protests" and "protesters tend to be ugly losers with nothing better to do" (this was aimed primarily at liberal women). It warms my heart to see that many conservatives have either seen the light and embraced protesting as something anyone can do, or have never bought into that rhetoric. Good for them.


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le baby-sitteur

Looks as though I'll be babysitting a sick brood tomorrow morning. My buddy Mike is coming over this evening to fetch me, then, tomorrow morning, he's throwing me into a dank pit with his pestilential offspring (they all have leprosy or necrotizing fasciitis or something) while he and the Missus head off to work, and I'm apparently supposed to spend a few hours in the pit, running in circles and trying to keep his afflicted progeny from eating my brain. Luckily, I work off my laptop, so doing work while babysitting won't be a problem. Mike says he'll be back home for lunch break. I imagine he'll throw some food into the pit, cackle at our predicament, then leave.

I think the Missus will be home in the early afternoon, as she's a teacher. If I still have my brain by then, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

More later.


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well, that's one correct

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: this is my first-ever blog post written while sitting on the toilet. Not to worry-- no pictures will accompany this post.

I wanted to announce that, at long last, one of my TV predictions finally came true, and in a most unambiguous way (WARNING: SPOILER FOR THOSE TRYING TO CATCH UP ON THEIR VIEWING OF "24"): one of my all-time favorite characters, the very cool Bill Buchanan, bit the big one in tonight's episode. He went out in style, to be sure, saving the life of President Taylor and allowing Jack (plus the assault team that eventually stormed the White House) to control the situation by taking down General Juma and most of his men. Buchanan died the way I want to go: in a huge explosion.

But there was no time to mourn Buchanan's passing. Hodges (Jon Voight) is the bad guy who was in cahoots with General Juma, so we're after him now. In the meantime, poor Agent Walker is beginning to feel a true tug-of-war of the spirit as she begins to realize that her boss and possible love interest, Agent Moss, might actually be congenitally stupid. Jack is brutal but efficient, and brutal efficiency is sexy for a tough cookie like Walker, who merely needs to give in to her dark side to feel true bliss with Jack. Moss seems like a good fellow; his heart is in the right place, but his instincts are all wrong and his insistence on going by the book is making him look like a fool. So for Walker, it's a choice between the dumb bureaucrat and the ruthless killing machine. Choose wisely, Special Agent!

It's too bad that "24" will be continuing after I restart the walk, but at least BSG will be finished in a couple weeks. I'll have some closure.

[NB: Somewhere during the latter half of the post, I left the porcelain throne.]


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here's one for the "Get Religion" crowd

Get Religion is a "meta" website that covers religious coverage. Here's something the GR folks might find interesting-- mainly thanks to the provocative headline:

Police: Ill. pastor deflected gunshot with Bible

Without even reading the article, you might be led to think two things:

1. The pastor somehow did this intentionally, and

2. The pastor "miraculously" survived the gunman's attack, thanks to his bullet-deflecting Bible.

The headline makes you think a miracle occurred, and many people, especially those who aren't religious, might sense a bit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink mockery on the part of whoever crafted the title (keep in mind that journalists don't always get to title their own articles).

When you take the time to read the article, however, you learn the headline is tastelessly glib, and what actually occurred was heart-wrenching:

A pastor shot and killed during his Sunday sermon deflected the first of the gunman's four rounds with a Bible, sending a confetti-like spray of paper into the air in a horrifying scene that congregants initially thought was a skit, police said.

The gunman strode down the aisle of the sprawling First Baptist Church shortly after 8 a.m. and briefly spoke with The Rev. Fred Winters, then pulled out a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and began firing until it jammed, Illinois State Police Director Larry Trent said. Churchgoers wrestled the gunman to the ground as he waved a knife, slashing himself and two other people, Trent said.

None of the about 150 congregants seemed to recognize the gunman and investigators do not know details of Winters' conversation with him, but they planned to review an audio recording of the service, Trent said. The service was not videotaped.

"We thought it was part of a drama skit ... when he shot, what you saw was confetti," said congregant Linda Cunningham, whose husband is a minister of adult education at the church. "We just sat there waiting for what comes next, not realizing that he had wounded the pastor."

Winters had stood on an elevated platform to deliver his sermon about finding happiness in the workplace and managed to run halfway down the sanctuary's side aisle before collapsing, Cunningham said.

Two congregants tackled the gunman as he pulled the 4-inch knife, and all three were stabbed, police said. The gunman suffered "a pretty serious wound to the neck" while one congregant had lower back wounds, Trent said.

Were we to confront the editor of this piece about the tastelessness of the article's title, I imagine he'd feign wide-eyed innocence and note that the first bullet was deflected by the pastor's Bible. But given the events described in the article, does "Pastor deflected gunshot with Bible" really sound like an appropriate title for this article? Does the title really capture what the article's about, or does it manufacture a miracle and inject sly mockery in the process-- all for the marketing-related purpose of attracting the reader to the article?

I'm not sure why this particular article incenses me so much, but it does. Let me back up: the article's fine. The title isn't.


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wanted: an intrepid chase car driver!

If you've joined the group "Kevin's Walk" on Facebook, you've seen that I've plotted out the route to Salt Lake City. The route requires about 40 days of walking, but if we add in the anticipated breaks (I've given myself periodic breaks), the number is closer to 50 or so days.

The route takes me out of Walla Walla and back into Oregon, where I'll be following my old faithful, I-84, for a goodly part of the journey. Once I hit Salt Lake City, however, I'll be switching to I-80, which runs eastward across the country and gets me close to one of my major destinations: Chicago.

But my journey on I-80 takes me into the verge of the Rockies and leads me through southern Wyoming. This promises to be an arduous trek: there is-- as many, many readers have warned me-- literally nothing along the way. True: it's not nothing if you're a biologist or geologist or a dedicated photographer, but from the practical stance of the long-distance walker, "nothing" refers to the lack of towns at which a weary traveler might seek rest and the replenishment of his supplies.

It will be nearly impossible to survive this portion of the walk without some sort of help, either from passersby or from a committed chase car driver. I need to plot out the exact length of the I-80 jaunt, but any potential chase car driver should know that it's going to mean a long distance and a long time. A very rough plot on Google Earth shows the stretch to be more than 400 miles. If I average about 15 miles per day, we're talking about a time commitment of at least 27 days. The actual length of the trip will be closer to 430 miles, I think, so we're really looking at a minimum of 30 days-- a whole calendar month to cross the great expanse.

I keep getting comments from people about "why not bike the distance?", but I determined long ago that I didn't want to do this. One reason is admittedly ego-related: the fraternity of trans-America walkers is much smaller than that of trans-America bikers who are-- no offense-- a dime a dozen these days. Once you adjust your mind to the scale of long-distance travel, you quickly see that biking across the country is no big shakes. A second reason I haven't wanted to bike across the country is that I'd have to have a very good bike, and would need to be able to maintain it. A big guy like me will put a lot of strain on any bike, no matter how well-made it is. I'd be stopping for repairs two or three times per state. So No, thanks to all you good folks who've suggested biking. I know you've been thinking about my knees, but my knees are a lot better; I've been ready to walk for months.

So I'll be crossing Wyoming on foot, just as I've done to get to Walla Walla, WA, and just as I'll do to get from Walla Walla to Salt Lake City.

After Wyoming, things look substantially easier. Nebraska has its open spaces, but it's got more towns along the western portion of I-80 than Wyoming does along its western portion of I-80.

Think you can chase-car me through Wyoming? Know somebody who might be able to do such a thing? Give me a comment, send me an email, TALK TO ME!

ADDENDUM: I should mention that another major problem with walking through nothing is that I can't recharge my laptop or my BlackBerry by plugging cords into a buffalo's butt. A chase car driver would have to help me out with that issue, somehow.


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oh, please

If this pastor's wild-eyed prediction comes true, it'll only be because he's somehow in on the action.

Do any of my readers buy into this sort of thing? You can already see where my bias lies; don't be afraid to show yours.


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making use of Facebook for the rest of the walk

Longtime readers of this blog are well aware of my hatred of and derision for Facebook. I did, however, sign up for the service and have decided, finally, to make it work for me.

I've been quietly plotting my route out of Walla Walla and across the country, using a "group" I created on Facebook as a place to leave route-related topics. Specifically, what I've done is to create topics that cover each day of the journey, and my hope is that people will post replies to those topics, offering help in the form of suggestions or actual aid: a chase car, a place to stay, etc.

The object of the game is to avoid expenses in all the areas that killed me over the first 600 miles: paying for campsites, paying for motels, and paying for food. While I doubt I'll be able to emulate Hakim's feat (of course, I don't really know the details of his journey, so I don't know whether he really did the whole thing on 200-plus dollars), I hope to get by with a minimum of expenditures.

As always, you can help out either by sending me a donation, or by buying products from my CafePress shop (all links are on the sidebar). You can also join my Facebook group, "Kevin's Walk," and start reacting to what you see there. In fact, I'm hoping you will join that group, as it shows my itinerary.


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never more meta

YouTube allows you to be as meta as you want, picking up pieces of other pieces and creating your own piece. Justin Yoshida, in this post, links to an amazing musical example of this. Imagine scouring the Web for musical pieces, then editing them together into a coherent funk soundtrack.

In a sense, something like this has been happening since the beginning. Why are old comedies often less funny or witty than newer ones? Because newer ones contain jokes that riff off our knowledge of the older jokes. The result is an archaeology of references and meta-references, with those of us alive today riding that constantly self-updating referential wavefront (we do this for as long as we can before dropping off, settling into a particular groove, and losing touch with that front). Steve Martin's version of "The Pink Panther" would have been hilarious back in the 1960s, but because Martin did little more than recycle Peter Sellers's old jokes, the movie (and its recent sequel) fell flat for 21st-century audiences.*

Of course, we often lose track of the original datum to which all the later references refer. Just today, I watched the original "The Day the Earth Stood Still" for the first time, and saw where the Cylon centurion got its face: right from Gort the robot! Wish I'd known this earlier.

That a current phenomenon is the result of other, preceding phenomena is a central tenet of Buddhist metaphysics. All phenomena are dependently co-arisen; it's not just music that works this way. And if we follow this line of thinking a bit further, we begin to see that there was no original datum, because even that datum arose from antecedent causes.

In any case, enjoy your meta-funk. Thanks, Justin, for the link.

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*At the same time, many forms of physical comedy retain their humor even today. The classic Mr. Creosote scene in "Monthy Python's The Meaning of Life" is a good example, and the long-ago international success of the traveling Commedia dell'Arte is another example of comedy with wide and long-standing appeal.


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spring forward

Yanks who read this blog are reminded that tomorrow is the day we turn our clocks forward to mark the return to Daylight Savings Time. The implication for me is that DC will once again find itself only 13 hours behind Seoul instead of 14.

I think it's time we got rid of this nonsense. The history of DST throughout the world was and is linked to technological issues: it affects the energy use of farmers, retailers, and homeowners.

You might be interested to know that Korea doesn't change its clocks twice a year. I lived with that fact for eight years and found it perfectly fine. So what if the mornings are darker or brighter according to the season? For most of us, office-bound as we are, this means little. And farmers can certainly adjust their own schedules to adapt to the changing lighting (they probably do this already!). What's the point of making such a twice-yearly change these days? I find it archaic.

I've often mused about going further and switching us to one single "Global Standard Time." This would put everyone on the planet on exactly the same page, though it would render an expression like "working 9 to 5" irrelevant for most of the world. It would also appear counterintuitive that some people would look at their clocks and read "12AM" at midday, and "12PM" at midnight.

But travelers would never again have to worry about "local time." Historians would have a more objective metric by which to chronicle events. "The incident occurred at 10:20PM" would mean the same thing to everyone, no matter their location on the globe. Of course, historians would be further tasked with mentioning the time of day: "The incident occurred at 10:20PM, a bright summer's morning in Chesterville."

What are your thoughts on upending the status quo?


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BSG musings: still room for my theory?

"Islanded in a Stream of Stars"

So Kara Thrace confessed to Baltar about the body she'd found on Earth. She gave Baltar her corpse's dog tags and asked him to perform tests on it. The result? "Necrotic flesh," says Baltar, in a rather tasteless coda to a funeral for humans and Cylons who died during a hull breach. The implication, at least as Baltar sees it (unless he's actually lying), is that humans, too, can somehow be reborn. This still doesn't explain the pristine Viper that Kara flew back to the fleet... but everything does make sense if we once again come back to the "they're all Cylons" theory, i.e., the colonists think of themselves as human, but they've been Cylon since forever. Perhaps it's true that, in the BSG universe, humanity left the building long, long ago, but the Cylon technology that creates exact replicas of things still exists.

The reason I find this theory so attractive is its explanatory power. How else to explain the similarity in language and culture between Earth of 2000 years ago and the modern Twelve Colonies-- a similarity that has somehow obtained over distance and time? Such rigid faithfulness only makes sense when everyone's a machine-- dressing the same, acting the same, thinking the same-- from generation to generation, and from solar system to solar system. And the theory also explains the various instances of telepathy, the spooky coincidences, the visions, and the prophecies-- all of which make perfect sense if we view BSG's overall story arc as the preordained unfolding of some massive computer program. The only alternative is to do what Ellen Tigh and others are doing: to invoke a higher power.

Eternal return is a myth for actual humans, as I've discussed before. Not even Hindus see history as perfectly cyclical: there's repetition, but it's imperfectly realized, giving us more of a spiral notion of history than a circular notion.

One might counterargue that, even in BSG, there's no reason not to believe in spiral time. Perhaps there are humans who play out and replay their history imperfectly, or perhaps it's nothing but Cylons, but they're replaying their history imperfectly. I lean toward discounting the first possibility, for the reasons I've stated: humans don't repeat their history this perfectly, whereas machines would be capable of such a feat. The second possibility, though, strikes me as plausible, and would be consistent with the Cylon view of history, especially as laid out by Leoben long ago, when he told Kara that the same story would unfold again, but with the actors switching roles.

We've got two episodes left to find out what's what. I have a feeling that most of the big questions will be left unresolved, with the writers deliberately keeping the question of the theistic universe ambiguous. However, I should balance that by noting that the final episode is rumored to be a long one-- maybe 2 or 3 hours. A lot might get settled during that time.

One final note: the final two episodes are titled "Daybreak, Part I and II." That would seem to signify some sort of new beginning.


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no dice

I didn't go see "Watchmen" today. I might try to see it on Monday-- an early showing, to avoid the noisy geek crowd. My brother saw it last night, the bum. He thought it was pretty good. The reviews I've been reading have been mixed, and some of them note the conspicuous absence of the giant "sacrificial squid" that makes its appearance at the end of the graphic novel. That's sort of disappointing, but if whatever has replaced the squid isn't lame, I'll forgive this rather major change to the story.

Tonight, I comfort myself with some BSG.


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choices, choices

I still haven't been out to see "Gran Torino" or "Doubt," both of which linger in one or two local theaters. But just as cells in your body die and make way for newer cells, a new crop of movies is out this month, with two in particular grabbing my attention. The first is "Race to Witch Mountain," a remake of a film I remember seeing when I was a kid in the 1970s. The second is Zack Snyder's version of the classic 1980s-era graphic novel "Watchmen," which apparently has a 2:40:00 running time but looks-- if the trailers don't lie-- like it might be worth emptying my wallet for.

Of the two, "Watchmen" looks to be the surer bet.


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unstable Asians and the insanity defense

We of Asian ethnicity have heard the stereotypes: Asians are neurotic slaves to parental pressure, manic overachievers, and generally nerdy as hell. You don't normally see an Asian leading man in an American movie unless he's proficient at one or more martial arts-- also part of the Asian stereotype. Asians are paradoxically viewed as overly passionate and expressive, but also overly stoic and detached. What's strange, though, is that the phrase "emotionally unstable" is almost never a part of the stereotype.

That might change, what with the Cho Seung Hui massacre, the recent stabbing of a Kiwi teacher by a Korean teen, and the horrifying beheading of a Greyhound Bus passenger by a Chinese immigrant.

The above-linked article notes the clemency of Canadian justice: the murderer was adjudged insane, and will have no criminal record. That's too bad; I'm not a fan of the insanity defense. I understand the rationale behind it ("can you blame an angry bear for acting like an angry bear?"), but don't accept it as sufficient to obviate the need for some sort of punitive or severely restrictive measure. Travis the chimpanzee might also have been considered "not responsible for his actions," but his shooting death was condign: had he not been stopped, he would have done far worse damage than he'd already done.

I've mentioned Herbert Fingarette before, but just to remind you: Fingarette, in his book Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, notes that responsibility breaks down two ways: (1) it refers to one's being the locus of some action (e.g., "Who ate the hiker? That bear did."), and (2) it refers to moral agency (e.g., the difference between accidentally and deliberately injuring someone). While sense (2) might not apply to an insane person, sense (1) assuredly does, so it is within bounds to say that an insane person is responsible for his deeds. Punishment might not be the answer if the person in question is truly unable to process the gravity of what he's done, which is why I also mentioned severely restrictive measures. I'm not convinced that rehabilitation and eventual release into the community (which is what the above-linked article says is a possibility for Vince Li, the crazy Chinese immigrant) are the best solutions when dealing with the criminally insane.

Then there's this example of Asian insanity...


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religious notes

1. Interreligious relations in Bali aren't always positive, such as when the Muslim authorities issue silly fatwas against certain aspects of yoga practice.

...the Indonesian Council of Ulemas, the top religious body in the mainly Muslim country, issued a fatwa in January banning Indonesian Muslims from all forms of yoga that involve Hindu religious rituals such as chanting mantras.

It said performing yoga purely for the physical benefits was however acceptable.

The move raised the hackles of religious moderates and civil libertarian groups who accused the council of meddling in affairs over which it had no authority.

Religious edicts issued by the ulemas are not legally binding on Muslims but it is considered sinful to ignore them.

Andrini said organisers were not afraid to hold the festival at the Bajrasandi Bali Monument in Denpasar -- the capital of the Hindu-majority island of Bali -- despite the fatwa.

"I'm a Muslim myself. Our kind of yoga, which is called Patanjali, involves movement and breathing. People may recite their own mantra or prayer according to their faith," she said.

2. Brian notes an ongoing problem in Korea with Buddhist temples that charge hikers a fee to hike through land owned by the local temple. Jesus might have been on to something when he wanred about the linkage of God and Mammon, but historically speaking, religion and money have always gone hand in hand.

On the academic front, students of Korean religious history will see that the current problem is a continuation of a long and bitter conflict involving Buddhist temples, land use rights, and the local authorities.

Personally, I find it obnoxious (and hypocritical) when religious sites won't allow anyone in without paying first, but in Korea, the problem is often that temples, especially the famous ones, are as much tourist attractions as places of practice. The relevant orders (mostly Jogyae, the order that administrates the majority of Buddhist activity in South Korea, encompassing Zen [Seon], Hua Yen [Hwa Eom], Pure Land, and other strains) might have concluded that asking for a small fee is a good, practical, middle-way solution, but I'd rather that the temples moved toward a more European model, where tourists are allowed to enter the grounds for free, but are also not discouraged from leaving free-will offerings. This works well enough in Europe (Notre Dame, Chartres, and the cathedral in Fribourg, Switzerland come to mind from my own experience; you pay only to see special areas), and can also be seen here in DC: the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is free to all comers, and so is the National Cathedral.

As I mentioned, not all Korean Buddhist temples charge a fee to visit their grounds. In fact a majority don't, and to be fair, even some of the most famous temples will allow you on the grounds free of charge-- Jogyae-sa in downtown Seoul is one example; Hwagyae-sa in the northern part of Seoul is another. But you're not getting into temples like Haein-sa or Bulguk-sa without paying, and as my friend Sperwer and I discovered, the only way to avoid paying for the climb up some of Bukhan-san's trails (the mountain features several Buddhist outposts) is to start very early in the day-- before the old ajeossi gets to the ticket office and sees you stepping quietly over the chain barrier at the trailhead.


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back!

We're back from Snowshoe, which is a very beautiful, very well-organized resort. Many thanks to my brother David, who sponsored the trip. Thanks as well to the parents for bringing way too much food for two nights.

I didn't get too involved with the snowings-on; the parents, however, went all over the place and enjoyed some "tubing," a variant of the old activity in which you throw yourself down a snowy slope while atop a fat inner tube. The tubes used at Snowshoe have long fabric handles, allowing people to latch onto each other, descending the slope in pairs (or, illegally, in threes) like clustered leukocytes whooshing through an artery.

Last night, we had dinner at the Foxfire Grille, which serves generous portions of good food at fairly reasonable prices. We all shared a Philly Cheesesteak Nachos appetizer; Mom and Dad dug in to a barbecue combo platter; David had a sausage-broccolini ravioli that made me wish I hadn't ordered my gyro. But the gyro was good (I'd been craving one for a while), and the dessert afterward was fantastic: it was a layered, multi-berry cheesecake done up in a quasi-tiramisu style. Nicely executed, and admittedly unexpected in a place that doesn't have a haughty, high-rent vibe.

Two highlights: (1) we had bacon for breakfast yesterday morning; the smoke set off our fire alarm, which wasn't connected to 911, thank Jeebus; and (2) Dad hurt his ribs while pushing Mom off during one of their tubing sessions on the slopes. Dad's a lot better today; we had worried that he might have cracked or broken a rib or two. Mom razzed him about not being young anymore, but that's not going to stop Dad.

The view from our third-floor window was gorgeous the morning after we arrived; Snowshoe is located at an altitude of 4848 feet in the Alleghenies (there's even a store named 4848). The drive back today was equally gorgeous; we took a scenic route recommended by David.

Now we're home, settling back into our routine, and I've got a mess of proofing to finish in the next 75 minutes.


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Snowshoe, West Virginia: afternoon view from the 3rd-floor room/balcony

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snowy in Snowshoe

We're up in the West Virginia mountains, huddled in our "studio" and prepping for sleep. We watched the two-hour "24" special as a family and had fun scoffing at the idea that General Juma could storm the White House with a mere handful of not-very-well-armed commandos. I've been thinking for a while, now, that the White House is essentially a surrogate for CTU HQ, which was also routinely full of moles and easily breached.

Mom, who was new to "24," wasn't following the action so well (around that time of night, she's usually off watching her Korean programs on a different TV), but she did ask us whether "24" was some sort of sci-fi program. Why? "Jack Bauer talks like an alien," she said. (She was referring to Jack's sustained, growly whisper when he was confined and talking to Bill Buchanan about the upcoming assault.) That gave me a new perspective on the show, and now that I think of it, "24" does have a lot in common with a series like BSG, which also features sleeper agents, conflicted loyalties, torture, confinement, and treachery.

The weather in Snowshoe was windy and snowy earlier this evening; my brother David says this pretty much marks the end of the snow. I might spend part of tomorrow just tromping around the compound. Dad and Mom are thinking about going tubing and snowmobiling; David is going snowboarding, and might also do some skiing. Whatever we do tomorrow, I might come back with pictures.

Night.


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morning snow on deck

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snowy outing

We're supposed to be heading out to Snowshoe, West Virginia on Monday morning, courtesy of my brother David. A snowstorm is on its way here right now, and the weather gurus are predicting significant dumpage. I'll be curious to see how the drive goes tomorrow.


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samil-jeol

While not exactly a happy day for Koreans, I still wish Korea a Happy March First.


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"Needful Things"

Stephen King's novel Needful Things is a morality tale about the Devil's visit to the small Maine town of Castle Rock, and the mayhem that ensues. I thought it was a great story, so I was interested when "Needful Things," the movie, popped up on cable, uncut, on the HDNet Movies channel. I was pleased to see Ed Harris as the main good guy, Bonnie Bedelia as his squeeze (you may remember her as John McClane's wife Holly Gennaro/McClane in the first two Die Hard films), and the always-awesome Max von Sydow in the role of Satan-- here named, as he is in the novel, Mr. Leland Gaunt. It's an interesting switch for von Sydow, who battled Satan (or his demons) in 1973's "The Exorcist."

Alas, despite a fine cast, the filmic "Needful Things" was a huge disappointment, as so many film adaptations of novels are. Poor Ed Harris is forced by the script to give a long, pious speech to the townies at the end, and instead of King's very visual confrontation between Ed Harris's town sheriff and Mr. Gaunt-- during which Gaunt's true form is revealed-- we are given a cop-out.

What was most distasteful was that the movie ended up making exactly the opposite point of the novel. In the novel, it's clear that the Devil preys upon humanity's inherent sinfulness. Everything bad that happens in the town is, ultimately, the result of the free choices made by all the characters, which makes them all morally culpable, despite Gaunt's various methods of subtle compulsion. But the devil himself needs to be expelled, and Sheriff Pangborn's confrontation with Leland gaunt at the end of the novel serves as a sort of exorcism. In the movie version, however, Pangborn's speech makes clear that the townies aren't at fault at all: the blame rests squarely on Gaunt. And Gaunt, instead of being expelled from the town, leaves it under his own power. It's an ill-advised switch of the loci of responsibility.

It must be a painful thing for a novelist to watch his work get chopped to ribbons for the big screen. Perhaps King has grown used to this by now; the adaptations of his horror stories are almost all notoriously bad, while his non-horror short stories ("The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" come to mind) tend to turn out well. King might be richer than I can even dream of becoming, but he still has my sympathies. "Needful Things," the movie, was a waste of time. Needful Things, the novel, is worth your while.


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whoa

I should write about BSG all the time! The post I wrote earlier has nearly doubled my traffic because so many people are doing Google searches on "Dreilide Thrace," Kara Thrace's father. (We see Dreilide Thrace's face in profile on the cover of the album that Helo gives to Kara; does it resemble the face of the nameless musician Kara talks to?)

Let's assume Kara is some sort of Cylon. It's possible that she had a mother and a father (her mother was the subject of an episode in Season 3-- the same episode in which Kara "dies," if I'm not mistaken), if Kara is a Cylon similar to the Final Five, who appear to have achieved biological reproduction.

But Kara's memories of her mother may include false elements, because those memories all pertain to life on the Twelve Colonies. If Kara is a Final Five-type Cylon, she's not really from the Colonies: she's a plant, with implanted memories. Unless her military mother and pianist father-- both also presumably Cylon, and possibly unaware of their own natures-- were actually born or sent to the Colonies, it's unlikely that Kara is herself a true-born Colonial.

With only three episodes to go, we've got an interesting ride ahead of us.


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guesses, guesses

What we know (or think we know) as of tonight's BSG episode:

1. The Galactica is on its way out. Even the Cylon goop isn't helping. No deus ex machina solution here.

2. Boomer is bad news, but she seems to love Tyrol. Or maybe she was just using him. Remember how Boomer seemed to be the Cylon most in command at the very end of the 2003 miniseries? There's a case to be made that she's more evil than Cavil, quite unlike her good sibling Athena, the Abel in this feminine Abel/Cain pairing.

3. Boomer may or may not have gotten away with Hera when she attempted the jump in her damaged Raptor. Whether Hera was actually in the small cargo container is debatable, but Roslin's fainting spell, just as the Raptor jumps away, leads us once again to believe there's a connection between Roslin and Hera (through Hera's Cylon blood?), and that that connection might have been weakened or severed by the jump (which I assume was toward Cavil's fleet).

4. Hera drew a star pattern that turned out to be a series of musical notes that clued Kara in to a piano tune she remembered from childhood, supposedly taught by her father, Dreilide Thrace (Helo gives Kara a copy of her father's album, "Live at the [Helice?] Opera House"-- aha, the Opera House!).

5. That tune seems to be the same one that activated four of the Final Five back in the nebula. It's unclear whether Ellen Tigh recognized the tune.

6. Kirk and Spock might not have been able to engage in a mind meld when separated by a thin layer of glass, but Tyrol was able to receive Boomer's Cylon projection, which seems to be a form of inter-Cylon radiotelepathy.

7. At one point, the nameless pianist plays a tune that comes from the old BSG series. I laughed because I recognized it at once. The ways in which the new series sometimes refers to the old one are often amusing.

Theories:

1. Boomer made it safely in her jump (I need to watch the episode again to see if this is possible, or if the Raptor was destroyed during the jump), which puts Hera in Cavil's hands. Cavil is likely to use Hera to figure out the problem of reliable Cylon reproduction.

2. Kara says her dad taught her the tune she picks out on the piano. Might this mean that her father is the lost, artsy-fartsy Daniel, making Kara a second-generation Cylon?

3. Saul and Ellen Tigh talk over whether a higher power is manipulating events, which once again puts the theism question to the fore. The BSG writers have, in my opinion, done a great job of postponing the answer to the question of whether the BSG universe is theistic. It occurs to me, though, that there's a third way, one suggested by Intelligent Design Theory: the power or powers manipulating events (if they exist) might have godlike attributes, but not be gods (just as Intelligent Design Theory* doesn't imply the existence of a Judeo-Christian God).

4. We seem to have resolved a nagging question: has the fleet jumped away from Earth? Last I had heard, Adama had ordered people to look for viable planets, but many episodes after he had given that order, we viewers were left with no sense of whether the fleet was still in Earth's solar system. (This being a universe with an alternate Earth, why not have a terraformed Mars nearby?)

5. It'd be nice if the Galactica went out in a blaze of glory, fighting Cavil's (presumably massive) fleet, but there's no guarantee of this. The Galactica's fate could be more whimper than bang. The poor ship's been through a lot, after all, so a simple implosion is as likely a death as any other alternative.

6. One site offers the theory that Dreilide Thrace is a projection, like Head Six. I find this plausible. How do others react to the man's presence, if at all?

UPDATE: Upon second viewing, I'd say the mysterious pianist is almost certainly a projection. He vanishes the moment Tigh grabs Kara's shoulder to ask her where/how she learned to play that piece (the funkified version of "All Along the Watchtower" that ended Season 3).

7. I remember that old BSG tune well (the one Kara says was actually composed by some dude named Nomian-- Third Sonata, Second Movement), but can't remember what character(s) it announced. Count Iblis, the satanic figure from the old BSG, comes to mind. This might be in keeping with Thrace being the "harbinger of death," who will "lead the human race to its end." Sinister stuff.

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*I don't subscribe to Intelligent Design Theory.


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cause for a Snoopy dance

Skyrockets in flight!
"Galactica" tonight!
Oh-ho, "Galactica" tonight!


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one step away from nothing

Reusable toilet wipes, anyone? Might as well use your bare hand, as they do in some countries (often the same countries in which one eats with one's hands). By the way, aren't there studies showing that disposable diapers are, ultimately, greener than cloth diapers? Wouldn't the same logic apply here?

In Seoul, toilet paper is a major issue. Many public restrooms have signs declaring that all toilet paper should be tossed in the wastebasket next to the toilet instead of inside the toilet itself, a practice that most Westerners find filthy, but which does make a certain amount of sense in a city of 12 million. Not all restrooms make this demand, though: Korea University comes immediately to mind. Their restrooms have stickers encouraging people to throw the paper into the toilet, claiming that the paper will "melt in water" (...mul-ae nogeuni byeon-gi-ae beoryeo-jushipshi-o).

I keep wondering when people will invent a massive grinder that churns all waste into some sort of powder. Such powder would be easy to store, and might even be useful as fuel for an energy plant that could be built to run on the stuff, whatever the powder's composition. With a minimum of sorting to prevent soil-harming chemicals from being included in the powder, you could end up with fertilizer, or with landfills that actually biodegrade faster than current ones do (current landfills apparently don't degrade much at all).

Perhaps the best solution would be something along the lines of that "Mr. Fusion" device from "Back to the Future," a power plant that eats just about anything and converts it all to energy through nuclear fusion. Oh, that would be sweet. A tiny Mr. Fusion in your bathroom to gobble used toilet paper would be a godsend: power your house through your butt! If that device were linked to others throughout the property-- in the kitchen and the bedrooms, and out in the back yard, for instance-- you'd be generating quite a bit of energy.

Of course, the culture would change radically, especially for criminals (and politicians), who would finally have an Orwellian "memory hole" in which to dump all incriminating evidence forever. Future students would be able to get away with some version of "the dog ate my homework," blaming their Mr. Fusion-powered artificial sandworm for consuming their 50,000-word pinhead nano-etching. Book-burnings would be a snap. Still, despite such potential pitfalls, I'd say a Mr. Fusion is the way to go.

And I'd still rather wipe my bum with toilet paper than with a reusable cloth.


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ho-hum

We may have five different ways to respond to a North Korean missile launch, but I'm betting we won't respond at all, except with the usual hot air. Neither the GOP nor the Dems have taken any real initiative regarding the Korean situation. Many of us have been ranting for years about the need to do so.

If Obama does order our military to shoot the NK missile down, I'll call up some friends, get drunk, and allow my friends to film me while I'm plastered.* I'm that confident that Obama won't pull the trigger. Instead, we'll see a lot of post-launch finger-wagging and hear that the US administration is "very disappointed" at the turn US-NK relations have taken.

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*For those who don't know: I don't drink, though I have been known to add wine to certain sauces, and don't mind eating several slices of rum cake. I've never been drunk in my life.


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measuring up

For no particular reason, I just revisited a site called RateMyProfessors.com and looked at reviews for a couple of my college prof friends. It was uplifting to see that the student comments were mostly positive, and quite positive, at that; only a small fraction of students used the format to make stupid comments, and those students' poor grasp of grammar and punctuation made it evident that their comments weren't worth much. The nightmare for us teachers is receiving a negative review from students whose opinions we respect.

Student flak is just part of the job. I imagine this is what celebrities endure, though on a far greater scale as every aspect of their lives is picked apart by the paparazzi and the tabloids. Teachers might not be stars, but they're only human, and they can be stressed by student evals. One colleague of mine at Sookmyung Women's University referred to the Rate My Professors site, years ago, as the Teacher Suicide Generator. She must have seen a lot of vicious reviews. I've seen a few nasty comments on the site, too, but the students who wrote such comments displayed their own worth in doing so.

My own experience with student ratings at Sookmyung was quite positive, but I also felt the ratings sheets were poorly designed, often conflating the teacher with the course (sometimes, course structure is partially or completely mandated by the department, not the prof; one infamous semester involving a twisted form of Content-based Instruction comes to mind). In some cases, the student comments for other teachers (some of us were open about sharing student reviews with each other; others of us were too nervous and insecure to reveal our ratings) were so far off the mark-- one very nice, very competent teacher was referred to as "scary" by some students-- that I wondered whether those students had been huffing glue in class.

I get the same impression while reading the Rate My Professors site. The ratings are divided into four categories: easiness, helpfulness, clarity, and rater interest. I have problems with the first and fourth criteria. What does a low "rater interest" score mean? If I give a low rating, does this imply that I don't have a dog in this fight? If so, then why bother rating the prof if he's not worth the bother to rate? The problem with "easiness" is that the rating can be interpreted in completely opposite ways. If a prof is "easy," is this a good thing or a bad thing? If I get an "A" in an easy prof's class, did I earn the "A"? It's not obvious what "easy" means or implies.

Helpfulness and clarity are good criteria, but here, too, there is room for ambiguity: a student might rate a teacher as "not very helpful," but for this rating to mean anything, it's important to know whether a student actually attended class consistently and bothered to take advantage of the prof's offers of help by visiting during office hours, writing emails, etc. At Sookmyung, one of the rating criteria was "teacher acts for the benefit of student understanding," a criterion that might be similar to-- and just as vague as-- "helpfulness." My rating in this area was always in the high 90s (written comments every semester almost always included notes about my detailed explanations), but the students who gave me lower ratings made me wonder whether they had (1) actually listened in class, or (2) sought help from me while I was at the office (which was all the time; I practically lived there).

As I told one person, I'm planning to write a book for Korean students of English that discusses how students should evaluate their teachers. For cultural and personal reasons, many Korean students fail to look for the essential qualities of a good teacher, rating them primarily on whether class was fun-- not on whether they felt challenged or had learned much during the semester. College students in particular need to shed their childish mental criteria and view teachers through the lens of mental and emotional maturity. Based on what I've seen at Rate My Professors, the same may be true for a small slice of American undergrads as well.


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be careful out there

Eminent Sinologist Victor Mair, whom I know mainly through his excellent rendition of the Tao Te Ching (for him, it's the Te Tao Ching), wrote an essay long ago that debunks the supposedly Chinese notion that "crisis = danger + opportunity."

In a time of economic crisis, when people will be tempted to rely on this maxim, it might be a good idea to go back to Mair's essay and reread it thoroughly. As Mair notes:

Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his/her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis.

Maybe the Koreans took the original Chinese and ran with it, but based on a hanja search of the Yahoo! Korean dictionary, the two Chinese characters that form the Sino-Korean word for "crisis" (wi-gi) are indeed the characters found in the expressions for danger (wi-heom) and opportunity (gi-hwae).

Is Mair's school of thought fairly prominent? I don't know, but his argument hinges on this:

It is absolutely crucial to observe that jī possesses these secondary meanings only in the multisyllabic terms into which it enters. To be specific in the matter under investigation, jī added to huì ("occasion") creates the Mandarin word for "opportunity" (jīhuì), but by itself jī does not mean "opportunity."

If I understand Mair correctly, he's saying that, just because a Chinese character has a given semantic field, this doesn't mean that that character can mean a specific thing outside a specific context. In other words, Mair might respond to me by noting that the gi in gi-hwae might indeed mean "opportunity," but the character has that valence only in that disyllabic context. In wi-gi, the character gi no longer refers to "opportunity."

So if you're in a crisis, don't get too optimistic. Treat the crisis with respect.


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paradigm shifts

The walk, when it starts again in a few weeks, will be undergoing some changes. Some of these will seem obvious to sideline commentators; some might be unexpected.

1. The primary goal is now to get the walk done, preferably on or before my 40th birthday (August 31 this year). This will mean moving rapidly, lingering only a minimal amount of time in each place I visit, and sacrificing the chance to sweep through large population centers, which had never been a primary goal, anyway. Had I wanted to sweep through the largest possible range of religions, I would have continued down the west coast, ending my journey somewhere in the cauldron of southern California. That would have been a worthwhile trip, but it would have netted me insights exclusively from the west coast, and wouldn't have felt like much of a cross-section of the country (sorry: that's my east coast prejudice talking).

2. Inspired by BJ Hill's example, I'm going to invite people to come to me, to meet me as I'm walking. Hill did this to excellent effect; it allowed him to maintain a steady pace. The immediate corollary is that, in order to attract people to me wherever I am, I'll be needing signage (something that many commenters had recommended before, during the walk's prep stages). I'm working on that.

3. I'm opening myself to the prospect of speaking for pay. This feels dirty, but if I take the hated Facebook and make it work for me by using its event-organizing features, I can create events at which I request donations. If someone on site is willing to aid me as a volunteer event organizer-- locking down the event's location and gathering people for the event-- I'll happily give 50% of the donations to that person. Such events might also be an opportunity to hawk my book on the road-- something I haven't done up to now, mainly because I have no head for business and suck at marketing. (I'm one of those people who felt filthy while writing college admission essays about myself. I've always hated the notion of selling myself, which seems as nasty as it sounds.)

Speaking for pay may, on occasion, include open-mike nights at local bars, if people can stand a combination of raunchiness and irreverent religious humor.

4. I'm also planning to follow readers' advice to slap audio up on the blog. With a laptop at my side, this ought to be much easier to do. Be aware, though, that some people might balk at being heard. If I interview such people, I'll have little choice but to transcribe the conversation instead of offering you the audio.

5. During the first three months of my walk, I was at great pains to avoid trouble with the law. This often meant that I avoided actions performed by other trans-America walkers, such as sleeping illegally in parks, camping on someone's private property without their knowledge, camping beside the freeway (OK, I did do this once, but it was more like a 90-minute nap than an attempt at camping), and so on. The result was predictable: my walk became very expensive. When I did camp, it was almost always at a paying campground-- a state or national park. That ran me anywhere from $8 to $16 per night. If I didn't have any CouchSurfing dates, I dropped into a motel, and occasionally into a bona fide hotel. These are major cash drains, even when the stay is a comparatively cheap $45 per night.

I'm going to spend the next (and, we hope, final) part of the walk avoiding hotels and motels as assiduously as possible. This may mean doing something illegal, like sleeping by the roadside or in woods that belong to somebody. I don't really want to do this, but don't seem to have much choice.

Digression: thinking about my own walk prompts me to think about long-distance walking in general. It seems to be something of a fad at the moment, or it might be an incipient trend. Whether it's a fad or a trend, long-distance walking isn't particularly safe. I've walked along roads with almost no shoulder, forcing me to do a deadly dance with traffic while (1) being fat, and (2) carrying a heavy backpack-- two factors not conducive to nimbleness. Ironically, traffic-heavy I-84, on the south side of the Columbia River, has been safer than many smaller roads because of its wide shoulders. Then again, I-84's shoulders have shrunk to nearly nothing when crossing bridges or rounding cliffs, sometimes forcing me to chug along at a slow jog to minimize my time on the dangerous patches. Even the freeways have their problems.

One conviction that has grown in me since my walk began is that America needs to become a far more walker-friendly country than it is. Establishing safe walking routes that lead across the country should become a priority. I'm not saying such routes should be nationally funded, but this might be something for state governments and private concerns to think about. The conviction has reached almost write-your-congressman levels in me, and it's a cause I might pursue once the walk is done. The need for walking routes along the lines of Swiss Wanderwege is paramount... though I suppose we won't see any action on this if there's no general interest.

Anyway, the above are a few paradigm shifts. I had thought about turning this walk toward more of a "religion and humor" vein, but have decided that that might be a subject for a different walk... if I survive this experience with both knees still functional.


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me, too

I have trouble with the easily offended.


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the shortest walk

The shortest walk from Whitman College in Walla Walla to my parents' house in northern Virginia is, according to Google Maps, 2524 miles, which Google laughably renders as 33 days, 17 hours-- a pace I can maintain as long as I don't eat, sleep, or otherwise stop for any reason (it's about 75 miles per day).

The route passes through Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. It crosses-- impossibly-- Lake Michigan, leads through Michigan to Ohio, and continues through Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and then Virginia.

I'm not planning on ending the walk at my parents' home, mainly for privacy's sake. I'm planning to end it by the water in New York City (with thanks to Malcolm for his kind invitation), which effectively puts me on the coast, and therefore at the Atlantic. It's going to take me considerably longer than 33 days to do this, and my actual route probably won't hang too far north, as I'm hoping to encounter more people (then again, who knew that I'd find such worthwhile folks while walking the high desert?).

I'll be talking later about some of the paradigm shifts that will be affecting the second-- and much longer-- phase of the walk. Much cogitating done, and yet to be done. As so many gyopos like to say: Laters.


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lift up your shirts!

In the spirit of Mardi Gras, which is today, I tried without success to find a Latin version of "Lift up your shirts!", my twisting of the Latin sursum corda ("Lift up your hearts!"), a liturgical exhortation familiar to Catholics and to a wide swath of Protestants (it's sometimes part of the Presbyterian liturgy). I have my buddy Mike to thank for reminding me that the Lenten period begins this Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. For those of you planning to celebrate Mardi Gras, the final bacchanal before the discipline of Lent, Happy Mardi Gras!

And if you're a lady, I've got beads to throw you.


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yet another reason to hate Facebook

Are social networking sites literally warping the minds of the young?

...while the sites are popular - and extremely profitable - a growing number of psychologists and neuroscientists believe they may be doing more harm than good.

Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure could effectively 'rewire' the brain.

Computer games and fast-paced TV shows were also a factor, she said.

'We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist,' she told the Mail yesterday.

'My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.'

Her comments echoed those she made during a House of Lords debate earlier this month. Then she argued that exposure to computer games, instant messaging, chat rooms and social networking sites could leave a generation with poor attention spans.

I don't think children are the only ones in danger. I feel it in myself: prolonged mental focus has become a lot more difficult, and it's largely because, in recent years, I've logged more man-hours on the computer than with my nose in a book. Grad school might have been its own form of brainwashing in some ways, but it did have the virtue of disciplining my mind, forcing me to absorb large volumes of information in slow, deliberate, protracted doses: to grasp the subject matter, there was simply no substitute for reading.

This has always been the danger posed by cyberspace: it's a universe governed by few rules and open to the whims of all who visit it. If cyberspace has one advantage over TV, it's that TV demands almost total passivity (a fact cleverly satirized in the recent spate of Hulu.com commercials starring Alec Baldwin and Elisha Dushku), whereas cyberspace requires some proactivity on the user's part. But this doesn't absolve cyberspace: the user navigates it from roughly the same "market" perspective as the channel surfer: if you don't like where you are, navigate away and find something more entertaining.

Reading a novel requires more than passivity; it requires the reader's imagination to fill in the visual details, to generate empathy for the characters (a book has no musical score to manipulate your emotions), and even to speculate on how the plot will unfold based on what one already knows. It also requires patience and focus, virtues that have little bearing in cyberspace, which is increasingly becoming a visual medium, like TV.

At the same time, inculcation in the cyberspatial way of thinking does grant a user certain advantages, including the ability to think on one's feet, to adapt to new situations and resolve problems with puzzle-solving swiftness, and to search quickly for data at need. But this comes at a cost. As the above-linked article notes:

Psychologists have also argued that digital technology is changing the way we think. They point out that students no longer need to plan essays before starting to write - thanks to word processors they can edit as they go along. Satellite navigation systems have negated the need to decipher maps.

I fully sympathize with this sentiment, even as I participate in the downward spiral. My own map-reading skills could use a kickstart, and because I've spent a large chunk of my life interacting with some sort of word processor, I'm guilty of editing on the fly instead of planning as deliberately as I should. But according to the article, it's worse for kids:

A study by the Broadcaster Audience Research Board found teenagers now spend seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen.

Educational psychologist Jane Healy believes children should be kept away from computer games until they are seven. Most games only trigger the 'flight or fight' region of the brain, rather than the vital areas responsible for reasoning.

Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, said: 'We are seeing children's brain development damaged because they don't engage in the activity they have engaged in for millennia.

'I'm not against technology and computers. But before they start social networking, they need to learn to make real relationships with people.'

I agree: computers and cyberspace pose dangers on several fronts, including the areas of social skills and intellectual development. Parents will have to be watchful of their children (and adults will have to become more self-aware as well). But despite a need for circumspection, we also need to face the fact that cyberspace is here to stay, and is not merely the sum of its disadvantages.


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alarming the neighborhood

I had the brilliant idea of cooking sam-gyeop-sal downstairs this evening; Mom had bought some high-grade pork for the occasion, so we prepped a Korean-style meal with pan-chan and ssam ingredients, and took the whole mess downstairs so we could eat and watch the news, as has become our ritual since the renovation began to wind down (we have no dining room furniture; all the old stuff is gone).

I fired up the gas stove and we got to cooking... but barely a few minutes into our repast the new fire alarm went off. All I can say this thank God it's not wired to dial 911 automatically; that would have been embarrassing. I should have realized that grilling pork would produce a lot of smoke, and sure enough, it tripped the alarm. The problem is that the downstairs alarm is connected to all the other alarms in the house (we now have one in every major room, bringing our house up to county code), so they all went off, too. What started out as a very tasty dinner quickly degenerated into piercing madness. My brother's dog Maqz is still in residence; I can only imagine how horrible this experience was to his enormous, sensitive ears.

Eventually, Dad and I ventilated the downstairs, clicked off the circuit breaker that feeds the alarms (they also have their own batteries, so we're not completely sure that this move actually worked), and pressed the "hush mode" button on the alarm to quiet things down. But for about 20 minutes or so, we must have been quite entertaining to the neighbors.

Nerves settling back down, we continued our meal in a more low-key manner, with Mom frying up the pork, mushrooms, and onions in the kitchen, where we have access to an over-the-range fan, then bringing the whole thing downstairs. I apologized to the parents for having suggested such a dinner; they promised not to behead me.

Whew.


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moles!

Tonight's "24" revealed that there were two moles in that FBI office: squirrelly agent Sean Hillinger (we learned he was a mole last week) and his office squeeze Erika, the blonde with whom he's been cheating on his wife. Well, Sean killed Erika and then got caught, which goes to show that crime doesn't pay! I anticipate a scene in which Jack gets to work Sean over, but it might be more satisfying to watch Sean's wife work him over, once she finds out he's been cheating on her.

"24" is often simplistic in its morality, but it also shows good people doing bad things because of the enemy they're fighting. This takes an emotional toll on some characters, and in tonight's episode, Agent Walker has the breakdown that we know has been coming. It occurs not long after the death of Marika, an innocent who had been dating the bad guy, Iké Dubaku, without knowing who he was. Marika is, sadly, another in a long line of sacrificial lambs on "24," and Agent Walker has had her fill of killing and ruthlessness. When she confronts Jack with this, demanding to know whether Jack feels the same pain she does, Jack coldly tells her, "Then quit." He then warns her that, if she ever draws her gun on him again (she did so earlier, when Jack tried to stop Walker from rescuing Marika from the burning SUV), she had better be prepared to use it. Agent Walker responds that she was prepared to shoot Jack, but the tear rolling down her face after Jack leaves belies her expressed conviction.

It's enough to make one wonder whether Jack is eventually going to kill Agent Walker, depriving beleaguered Larry Moss of his lady love. I somehow doubt this will occur, but it's at least possible at this point. Were I a betting man, I'd say that Agent Moss's name is on the dead pool.

Next week's "24" features a storming of the White House by African commandos. It's enough to make me think that the White House is now the surrogate CTU-- just as mole-ridden and just as accessible to all the baddies. It's a vision of our nation's capital that's a far cry from that of "The West Wing."


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who can tell the dancer from the dance?

I note with amusement that the number of "Followers" for this blog goes up and down like a tide, varying somewhere in the 12-18 range. How fickle some Followers can be.*

It does make me wonder what prompts a person to Follow this blog, and what prompts some to un-Follow it after a time. If I were to ask someone who had recently un-Followed this blog their reasons for doing so, I can immediately imagine two responses: (1) they had begun following the blog because they were intrigued by its content, and have become disappointed because the content no longer seems to be there; and (2) they began following this blog because of a kindred interest in religion and/or travel (etc.), but have soured on me personally, given my love of off-color humor (or whatever unsavory personal traits they think they see).

The above division separates people into two camps: those who follow the blog for its content, and those who feel/felt some connection with me personally. The people who latch on to the content will inevitably be less loyal that those who take more of an interest in me personally. Imagine that you're a fan of a particular sports commentator, and one day that person suddenly refuses to talk sports and instead talks about movies or the weather. You'd probably drop that person quickly, because you were never there to hear about movies or the weather; you were there to hear about sports. Now imagine the same situation, but change it so that you're a fan of the commentator, whose engaging, affable manner is what keeps you coming back. If this commentator suddenly jumps the track, you won't mind so much because you're already hooked: you'll be interested in this person's career trajectory, wherever it might lead.

With a blog like mine, the reader's perception and worldview count. This blog is primarily about me and my personal project-- a walk across America to learn something about American religious diversity. But what does that entail in terms of content?

Because I've taken a break since last September, I obviously haven't been blogging anything about walking, though I have written quite a few posts related to religion, philosophy, etc. during my down time. Because I've spent many months busy either with my family renovation project or my two current jobs as proofreader for two Korean establishments, I haven't slapped up as much overtly religion-related content as some might expect, especially if they were expecting daily doses of it.

But as one of the members of the Red Cedar Zen Center pointed out while he and I were talking about mundane matters, how is it not religious to speak of mundane things? That's why I say the reader's worldview matters: if, in your mind, you've created an unscalable wall that separates "religion" from everything else, then of course you'll think this blog has wandered from its primary purpose. What this blog is depends on how you view it, especially if your focus is on a narrow notion of what sort of content should appear here.

The other school, the folks who hang here less for content-related reasons than for personal reasons, won't have this sort of trouble, which is why they stick around. Their loyalty is assured, and they won't drop away unless I start doing something truly ugly online (I'll leave the meaning of "ugly" to your imagination).

None of which is to say that I resent the stupid bastards who un-Follow this blog. Verily I say: they have their reward.

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*The "Follow this blog" function is a Blogger gadget, which is why I've capitalized "Follower" in this context, to distinguish such people from regular readers who follow the blog simply by reading it more or less routinely, without e-subscribing to it.


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"la vedette du petit écran"

Over at the Marmot's Hole, Koreablogging deity Robert Koehler notes that Korean TV star Ida Daussy-- a Frenchwoman who became a naturalized Korean-- is getting divorced. Knowing nothing about Mme. Daussy apart from her divorce, I looked her up on YouTube and found this very interesting French-language interview between her and two very metro French dudes. If you speak French, you might enjoy it. If you want a summary (or even a translation), please tell me in the comments. If you'd like to be the one to do the summary or translation, feel free to go ahead and do so in the comments.

(Pronounce her name "Ee-dah Doh-see.")


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with thanks

I'm back from a fun weekend with my buddy Mike and his son, whom Mike calls "the Wee Villain" over his fine blog. I had a brief chance to see the ladies (Mike's wife and two daughters, one of whom is my goddaughter) when they returned from their weekend outing earlier today.

As Mike noted, the weekend could have been spent chopping wood, but we opted to just hang, which turned out to be the perfect thing to do. Mike's family has a Wii, which I was able to try for the first time ever: I've been a Wii virgin* since the console came out. The Wee Villain, all of four years old, beat my ass at several games... but I knocked him out at boxing in the very first round, which made me feel like a child batterer when the fight was over. Luckily, the Wee Villain was having a blast the entire time, so he was a good sport about his loss. Along with the Wii, we played a few video games on the family's Xbox 360; here, too, the Wee Villain beat me at a few different games, though I did manage to win one racing game against him, mainly because he was more interested in driving his car in drunken arcs than in actually following the course.

Much of Saturday was also spent thumb-wrestling and tickle-fighting; the Wee Villain was a bit nauseous this morning, and I guiltily wondered whether the tickling might have had something to do with the boy's matinal distress. One form of tickling, prevalent in my own home when I and my brothers were young, involves having the victim lie on his back while you place your foot on their stomach and vibrate it violently enough to shake any blood clots loose. I passed this tradition on to the Wee Villain yesterday, and am thankful I didn't cause any poop or snot to shoot out (of him, I mean).

Mike and I hung out in the downstairs family room when his son was put to bed. We caught the most recent BSG episode (Mike wondered aloud whether BSG has jumped the shark), watched that dude on "Man Versus Food" eat the hottest curry in America, and cast aspersions on the movie "Forrest Gump" while watching the last half of it on cable.

Mike's family has a beautiful dog named Maia, whom I adore. Maia is half whippet and half black Labrador, which turns out to be a gorgeous combination for a dog. Alas, I'm slightly allergic to pet dander, so I spent some of my time sneezing or blowing my nose or rubbing dried muck out of my eyes. When I got home this evening and helped Mom prepare a chicken-and-couscous dinner, I ended up sneezing yet again because Mom had been transferring ground black pepper from one bottle to another. I'm very sneeze-prone, and I just know that, one day, I'm going to sneeze hard enough to expel one or both brain lobes.

But not yet. I survived my trip-- and tonight's dinner back at home-- with my brain more or less inside my skull. A good time was had by all. Thanks, Mike and Family, for the books, the Kierkegaard mug, and the always-appreciated Nutella. I'll be walking over to your place at some point before I head back west.

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*Good Lord, that sounds bad when you say it out loud.


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