Dear local Kyoto-fu LDP candidate for the upcoming upper-house election:

True: I cannot cast a vote in this election and sway your chances either direction.

But let me assure you that, if you keep insisting on circling my block multiple times, every morning between 8 and 8:30, inane election slogans blaring from your van’s speakers at top volume, I will be more than happy to contribute to your historical legacy by setting post at the closest grassy knoll with whatever long-range weapon I can get my hands on.

Thanks.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Election Fatigue…

These “volunteers” will teach you English (and the Word of Jesus Christ Savior) for free, at three convenient locations around Kyoto.

Obviously, Japan is not doing enough to discourage missionaries these days…

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Learn English and Save Your Soul

Of course, for all the wishful thinking out there: Gaza is not some sort of plucky little nation bravely resisting a cruel barbaric invader. And Israel is not acting out of pure self-preservation to preserve its legitimate borders from impending invasions by neighbouring countries.

However, Israel is not the source of all oppression and abuse in Gaza. Gaza is currently ruled by a bunch of muslim extremists who have amply demonstrated their lack of concern for basic human rights and are not above propping up kids for their war, presumably because the adults are too busy stoning gays and impure women. Incidentally, hatred of gays and women: a point on which their conservative archenemies on the Israeli side seem to be in complete agreement.

Conversely, Israel has long slipped from its legitimate goal of ensuring its survival against hostile neighbours, toward appeasing a vocal ultra-orthodox minority, whose views on Arab-Israelis and their right to exist are only a couple degrees removed from what could be heard in the streets of 1930′s Berlin. It is no surprise that Israel has started alienating even its staunchest allies over the past decade: claiming to work toward peace while rushing to approve new settlements, like some schoolboy cramming as much as he can into his test sheet before the headmaster snatches it (or, for a more appropriate analogy: like victor nations of past World Wars, rushing to grab as much land as possible before calling in an armistice). There comes a point where no amount of denying the obvious and intellectual contortions can hide the fact that your policies are the exact opposite of what you claim them to be.

From there, whether Israel’s responses to Palestinian and Islamist acts of violence are justified (possibly), commensurate (probably not) or efficient (definitely not) is a moot point: they now revolve around the implementation and preservation of segregationist policies meant to ensure the support of the small bigoted minority that has been holding some iteration of the current rightwing coalition currently in power for the best of the past decade. While no modern nation can claim an unblemished record on Human Rights issues¹, Israel not only has a few serious blotches on theirs, but a history of barely acknowledging them, when not openly embracing the people responsible.

The crux of the problem is that, while Israel has its share of misbehaviours and questionable tactics, they have always been near-perfectly matched by the pro-Palestinian side: back when Israel was showing great friendliness and offering nuclear assistance to one of the most despicable government of the 20th century, Palestinian militants were joining forces with every AK47-equipped group of para-marxist loonies and mercenaries, to blow up random innocent school kids and passerbys, the world over. Nowadays: Gaza has become the flagship of every brand of bearded nutjobs the region has to offer, while Israel casually conducts its black ops assassinations in Dubai like the Cold War never ended.

Bottom line is: both sides have by now accumulated enough blood feuds and vendettas to fuel a few lifetimes of exaction and oppression on civilian populations that have little to do with it in the first place.

Yet a large part of the problem lies nowadays outside the two populations involved, amidst the legions of well-intentioned “friends” of either side. A mix of intellectual laziness, ulterior political motives and often just plain ignorance that results in people unquestioningly throwing their support behind one camp or the other, turning a blind eye to their fringe components and purposefully reducing the issues at hand to simplistic manichean narratives (“starving innocent Gaza children being vs. inhuman Israeli army” for one side, “millennia-oppressed peace-loving Jewish people vs. islamic terrorists” for the other). It takes very few jumps to link most pro-palestinian humanitarian organisations and rallies to all sorts of unsavoury characters, which is not to say that said organisations actually support these people, just that they often lack the good sense or moral integrity to distance themselves from them.

Conversely, it would be nice if people one day realised that acknowledging Israel’s right to exist, in no way necessitates putting up with the noxious rightwingers that make up its government and tend to direct current policies. The type of rhetoric that consist for some political factions to drape themselves in their national flag and brush off any personal criticisms as attacks directed at their entire country, is nothing new: Bush Jr. somewhat successfully wielded it to justify every single of his action during his 8-year tenure. And do not get me started on the similar habit of said factions and their partisans to sling accusations of anti-semitism at anyone who would dare emit a negative opinion of their policies. Not only is it some of the most infuriating form of self-serving intellectual dishonesty out there, it has also been so effective at cheapening the accusation, that actual antisemite scums now get away with infinitely more than they should.

Refusing any compromise with the fringe might sound like the naive stand here, but it is the exact opposite: a pragmatic one. It should be blindingly obvious to anyone that there is no chance of reaching any lasting agreement, as long as both sides cater to mutually exclusive factions with strictly irreconcilable agendas.

All this takes us to the flotilla debacle of last month: a couple boats, equal shares pure-hearted humanitarianism and brilliant publicity stunt, and the last milestone on the increasingly out of control downward spiral of a country’s military command that, for being no less ruthless in the past, used to be considerably better at covering its track. As usual, one could spend hours distributing the blame around: a rather thinly disguised act of political activism, a blatant breach of international law, the stupidity of letting openly violent islamic militants board a boat in the middle of your “peace” flotilla, the no less stupid decision to board said boat and start shooting at everything that looks at you the wrong way, and, under it all: the questionable strategy of inflicting collective punishment on starving civilian populations for the sins of the terrorist organisation that took over their land… the list goes on.

The only relevant aspect of this whole mess is that Israel just endured the most resounding PR defeat in its existence so far, drawing the worst possible parallels in history, to boot.

Golda Meir used to say that “Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us”. Forty years later, the postulate is reversed, many Palestinians have come to hate Israel because they love their children: standing on the rubbles of your house in a country where all foreseeable means of economic future are being smothered through vindictive military action, will tend to turn even the most moderate people into angry militants. Israel’s policies of the past 15 years are the ultimate proof, if one was ever needed, that means-to-an-end just does not work in the long term: even if the blow to your ethics could somehow be worth the results, you will just never win peace against a cornered people with nothing to lose and a justified sense of injustice.

Note: do I even need to mention that any potential comment to this entry that does not adhere to the strictest rules of courtesy, common sense and civilised discourse will be removed with great justice and no remorse? I didn’t think so either…

1. Find me a single nation with no lengthy history of being oppressee and oppressor, and win a beautiful autographed edition of Hegel’s complete work!

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Neverending wars and the idiots that cheer them on…

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
John Rogers

No particular reason, just felt in a Rand-bashing mood tonight.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Hey, let’s mock objectivism for a bit…

I am also holding a high-pressure water gun, carefully aimed at the neighbourhood pigeons, patiently waiting for them to get within range.

What?

Oh, me too: I used to have a real job, wearing ties and fine Italian suits every day, working some place where people would say things like “synergy”, “milestone” and “ballpark estimate”, while planning the next meeting on their Palm Pilot… You bet I did.

But you go ahead: judge me.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Cautionary Tale

1) A fairly decent interface. A newsfeed that was actually designed to intelligently filter stuff of interest to you while hiding the the rest automagically (instead of requiring you to constantly click through endless moronic application notifications, courtesy of your bored-friends-at-work).

2) Everybody was/is on Facebook. Even those kids you used to share your milk with, back in first grade… Facebook is the ultimate “where are they now” tool… If somebody born within your lifetime is not on Facebook, chances are they are either dead or building pipe bombs in a secluded cabin somewhere deep into the woods. All you need is a full name and/or school attendance year.

3) Advanced privacy features meant that people used their real names (a necessity to make point #2 worth anything), while allegedly keeping private stuff away from your boss/exes/crazy Google stalkers etc.

Here we are now, a couple years later and point #1 has died a long and painful death at the hands of a dozen asinine “interface redesigns” plagiarising any other Web 2.0 service with an ounce of popularity, all the while bringing server cost down (yes: turned out, all those great intelligent filtering tools were so intelligent they did not scale at all… oops).

Point #2 is more valid than ever: it is only a matter of time before even dead people have their Facebook page (never mind: they already do). But let’s be honest: once you’ve looked up all your friends from kindergarten and realised you did not share much beside reminisced fondness for crayon drawing and shared hatred of afternoon nap time, once you’ve made sure the asshole bully from Junior High is now assistant manager at Taco Bell and once you’ve found out that secret High School crush Susie now has three kids, two dogs and a suburban house, and is (according to her status) feeling bloated after that huge KFC meal they just all had at the mall… Once you have satisfied that bit of morbid curiosity about every single living soul you have ever interacted with during your life… You just want to go back to hanging out with people you actually chose to be friends with, preferably at an age where your common interests involved more than making watercolour handprints and trying not to pee your pants in public.

Do I even need to go over point #3?
By repeatedly telling its users to deal with the loss of privacy and shut up already, Facebook is only making official a situation that existed since the explosion of so-called Facebook “Applications”, a couple years ago. It is clear Facebook never seriously thought that the common low-lives that created these “applications” (and took over your newsfeed with invitations to become a vampire, check out friends’ cabbage patches or find out which cooking utensil best represented you) would ever respect the laughably unenforceable Terms of Service and politely stay away from your private data (and that of your friends, and your friends’ friends…), even though they were given full access. Rest assured that if you ever installed one of these waste-of-software on your Facebook profile (or, in most cases, if just one of your friends did), all your Facebook data has long been sold and re-sold to a thousand shady Russian “entrepreneurs” and sits on hundred of servers around the globe.

People like this guy (whose fastidious, nigh unreadable, yet mysteriously popular, prose nearly makes me feel good about the level of verbosity of this present rant) are either incredibly naive or very dimwitted, if they woke up today and realised that Facebook was not the best thing that could happen to privacy: “So we have this company who is in the business of gathering people’s private data without billing anything for the huge server cost… Gee, I wonder what they ever could sell to make money”…

And without these three points, what are you left with? A vaguely creepy mega-corporation that is trying to build their own subpar Internet ersatz, like so many before them (AOL, Microsoft, MySpace yadda yadda yadda, please take a ticket and a seat over there) and likely: many more after them.

Facebook wants to become the Internet for lazy people and computer-illiterate schoolkids, because they know that’s all it takes for the rest to follow: what are you gonna do once everybody you know uses Facebook to communicate? Tell them they are totally being played by the Man, delete your account, retire from the world and go back to reading books at home on your own? I didn’t think so either. By the way, when did it become normal to use Facebook messages to contact people whose email address you have known for years? Is it really more convenient to use a shitty webpage interface to send a message that results in an actual notification e-mail being sent to my inbox which I need to click in order to be taken to Facebook’s homepage where I finally get to see your message? Where is the added value or simplicity, beside the extra page-count for Facebook? Is your e-mail client so crappy that Facebook’s messaging interface is preferable?

It would be illusory to think you can “boycott” Facebook, even assuming such a boycott would really reach any sort of momentum: the kind of people who understand, let alone care about, such issues have all long spoken out… with the harsh consequences we’ve all seen on Facebook’s dwindling userbase of 400 million accounts…

To be honest: I don’t care enough… I do not like what Facebook is trying to do to the internet, but I have better things to fight for (and I still have some hope they will shoot themselves in the foot, like so many before).

But my calculated apathy has its limits: located somewhere around the point where every single detail of my curriculum vitae becomes marketing fodder at the hands of a shifty corporation headed by a morally bankrupt fratboyish entrepreneur…

Which is why as of today, my Facebook profile only contains the bare minimum in relevant and/or accurate information, and nothing that I would not feel comfortable publishing on any other public internet forum.

It is mostly a (useless) principled stand: the web never forgets anything and I have long lost my online anonymity anyway… But it only took me a couple minutes fiddling with my Facebook account settings, and I have always dreamt of people actually calling me Baron von Umlaut, so why the hell not.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Facebook and Me

Today is the 29th of March, sakuras are in full bloom and i am walking home under snow falling.
FML.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Neverending Winter

Last week, upon glancing at my message logs by chance, I realised it decided to send half a dozen empty messages to the first contact in my address book. It then topped that series with an audio SMS: 30 seconds of muffled sounds from whatever crowded bar I must have been in, that night.

All that while using a throwaway number on a prepaid German SIM card (thus unknown from most of the people in my address book).

Meanwhile in Europe, my friend Abigail is probably ever so slightly worried by that mysterious German caller who sent her all these creepy empty messages.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

My Cellphone is a Creepy Stalker…

When it comes to services and subscriptions (cellphone, ISP, banks, heroin dealer…), I am a company’s wet dream customer: one that never leaves for a competitor. Not that I develop any particularly fuzzy feeling for whatever nameless corporation happened to have a branch on the right street-corner on the right day, but when it comes to going through endless paperwork again, moving my account data, updating everything: I just. can’t. be. arsed.

Which is why I have been a faithful customer of AU for over 5 years: not because they are great (Docomo is cheaper, Softbank has better phones…) but because I will always endure a sizable share of customer abuse and groundless fees, rather than having to track all my friends and acquaintances to send them my new contact info (and when you think of it: these things have a price too, so I am not doing it all out of pure apathy).

Why won’t I be a customer of theirs for another 5 years, then? Well, read on and learn how a company loses a customer without even noticing it.

This morning, I landed in KIX after a three months research stay abroad, coming home to a mailbox stuffed with a dozen increasingly angry bill payment reminders from KDDI.

Now, as you can imagine, I did not just leave the country in December, hoping my keitai bills would just take care of themselves during my absence: back then, I dutifully went to the AU shop and sat through yet another endless paperwork session to set up automatic bill payment through my bank account. I also informed them I would be out of the country until March (no way to put my account on hold, of course) and made sure there were ample funds on my bank account.

Just around the time I did that and probably while I was busy getting on my way to the airport, AU decided to send me my monthly bill for December. Which arrived a few days after I had left for the Winter, and sat in my mailbox until my return.

To be honest, I had suspected this would happen. Even envisioned the possibility that, by some unfathomably dysfunctional bureaucracy, it would take a while (and perhaps a few sent reminders) for a human at KDDI to check my account and realise that they had all the info needed. Meanwhile, the prompt automatic payment of all further bills would show even the most stubborn software program that I wasn’t on the lam.

This, of course, is not what happened.

When I showed up at the local KDDI AU shop, holding a dozen reminders for my unpaid December bill and two mail receipts confirming that the money for January and February had been successfully charged to my account, I was informed by a very apologetic – yet unmoved – employee, that the line had been closed and the phone number released. No amount of pointing out the ridicule of the situation and expressing polite indignation at the fact that my account was still being charged for two extra months of a line they terminated (with fees, of course) did get me anything more than a few look of deep embarrassment.

And just like that, I was on my way to the Softbank store.

Not complaining here: while perfectly content with my two year-old keitai, I can certainly find a use for a brand new iPhone. You would just think that AU, as a company, would kinda try to keep their customers (its stagnating line of phones sure won’t).

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au KDDI: Bureaucracy FAIL

1. You get shocked, touching your own desk.
2. You get shocked, touching the metal doorknob to your office.
3. You get shocked, washing your hands (not touching the faucet, mind you).
4. All of the above.
5. All of the above, over a 20 minute timespan.

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Electrostatic Research

It was… MURDER!

The things you learn, chatting with your elderly neighbours, stark-naked and soaking in boiling hot water…

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Sentō Gossiping

Translators working on closely related language pairs such as French and English (as opposed to more distant ones, like Japanese and English) have a tendency to be writers first, translators second. Their actual mastery of the source language is sometimes surprisingly low, but (for good or bad reasons) editors seem to think that the quality of their written production in the target language can make up for their weakness. This is an especially common occurrence in English to French translations, where French speakers barely English-fluent have been known to translate major English literary works (not a new practice either: Baudelaire‘s famous translation of Edgar Allan Poe, while delightfully written, is so incredibly riddled with errors that it could be a new work in its own right).

The smug pleasure of pointing out errors in the work of so-called professional translators can only be beat by one thing: the even smugger pleasure of pointing out errors in said corrections…

In a recent Guardian article, Germaine Greer plays on a rather trite cultural tropism: “Why do people gush over Proust? I’d rather visit a demented relative“.

Yes, we get it: Proust’s writing is long, convoluted and not exactly packed with action. I am far from his greatest fan and would not even put him in my personal top ten of French authors, but criticising his style on length and paragraph count is about as subtle as calling Picasso’s paintings a bunch of kid scribbles by a guy who couldn’t draw a normal face.

The translation comment, however, is what grabbed my attention. Ms Greer chose to illustrate the poor quality of Proust’s English translations with a sentence drawn from the fifth volume (La Prisonnière, aka The Captive):

Tirant d’un flûtiau, d’une cornemuse, des airs de son pays méridional, dont la lumière s’accordait bien avec les beaux jours, un homme en blouse, tenant à la main un nerf de boeuf, et coiffé d’un béret basque, s’arrêtait devant les maisons.

Then goes to quote the two main translations in turn:

This Scott Moncrieff hilariously renders as: “Drawing from a penny whistle, from a bagpipe, airs of his own southern country whose sunlight harmonised well with these fine days, a man in a blouse, wielding a bull’s pizzle in his hand and wearing a Basque beret on his head, stopped before each house in turn.”

In Carol Clark’s version for Penguin we read: “Drawing from a penny-whistle or bagpipes melodies from his southern homeland, whose light the fine morning recalled, a man in a smock with a bludgeon in his hand, and wearing a beret, stopped in front of the houses.”

Upon reading these, I was confused as to what either translator may have done to deserve Ms. Greer’s hilarity: both translations seem to convey, in a reasonably faithful tone and language, the admittedly obscure meaning of the original.

Her ire stems from one “mistranslated” word in particular:

The translators’ manifest difficulties stem at first from Proust’s own imprecision, and are then compounded by their ignorance. The Pyrenean goatherd carried neither a dried bull’s penis nor a bludgeon – what would he be doing with either? He is going to milk his goats and he needs something with which to restrain them: a hobble made of dried bull sinew.

There are just two small problems with this interesting — and indeed creative — approach to the original meaning:

1. A “nerf-de-boeuf” (literally “bull sinew”) is not actually made of dried bull sinew. It is merely one of these delightful euphemistic idiom people have come to use, in order to avoid having to say “bull penis” in proper company. As such, translating “nerf-de-boeuf” by “bull’s pizzle” is not only correct, but perfectly renders the euphemistic idiom (the old English word “pizzle” is used both for “non-human penis” and a whip made from such).

2. I have very limited first-hand experience as a mountain goat-herder, but I can very easily imagine how a sort of whip or flogging instrument (say… a pizzle) could come handy to herd a pack of goats. While “bludgeon” might stray a bit far from the original (and fail to reflect the actual material used), it still sounds considerably less far-fetched than a hobble. There too, I cannot claim much experience, but a cursory web search showed absolutely no trace of a “nerf-de-boeuf” ever being used as a hobble (which would seem to be made of much softer, more flexible materials).

In the end, it is pretty obvious that, of all three translations, Ms. Greer’s is the least accurate, bordering on a mistranslation, while the professional translators had, for once, done an adequate job.

I could probably go on the importance of double-checking before going about correcting others, but then I am not sure what this would imply on the present entry… So let’s just agree to say that Proust’s work, while certainly daunting from the outlook, is worth a read; and the people taking on the thankless task of translating his humongous body of work should at least get credit and benefit of the doubt for trying.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Mistranslations and Miscorrections…

And now it’s already the 6th of November in Japan.

Maybe it’s not too late to go buy some gunpowder and have a celebration on my balcony tonight.

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Talking about remembrance…

Much to my surprise, I not only still remember a sizable chunk of German despite over 10 years with zero practice, but my level has in fact improved since then. That is to say, I am nowhere near fluent, nor able to remember half the vocabulary I once knew. However: turns of phrases and idiomatic expressions that I know would have me staring painfully for minutes on end back in high school, now seem perfectly natural to me… Most phrases hit the comprehension part of my brain directly, without going through the lengthy “decoding word-by-word and digging up through memory for idiomatic equivalent” phase. In some way I have magically become more “fluent” than I was, when last I studied ten years ago.

At first, I just assumed my memories were being overly modest and that, maybe, I was not the teutonic classroom failure I remembered being. Then I thought back of the long evenings laboriously spent stringing together 20 lines of homework, endless hours of classroom procrastination, barely coasting by, year after year, and the extremely mediocre A-level — or French equivalent thereof — grade that ensued. There is ample objective evidence that I really sucked as a high school student of German and it appears that I suck ever so slightly less, now that I am resuming ten years later… Which goes squarely against the widely accepted notion that foreign language acquisition skills decrease with age.

In proper logic-obsessed OCD fashion, I tortured my brain for days, trying to come up with a rational explanation for this, which did not involve being abducted, probed and experimented on, by German-speaking aliens.

And I think I found it…

The better half of the years spent studying German, were when I lived in Paris. I therefore studied in French. Grammar explanations, bilingual vocabulary lists, chatting with classmates, thinking about the ongoing lesson, were all done in French.

Nowadays: I live in Kyoto and there is very little French language in my life. Lots of Japanese, of course, but I would venture that well over 90% of my thoughts and interactions occur in English. When I read up a text in German, that voice in the back of my head, trying to make sense of what I am reading, is speaking English, not French.

If you have spent any time looking at all three languages, you have noticed how close English and German are, especially compared to French: English is essentially a Germanic language (with lots of Romance language forms subsequently introduced by the Norman French conquests), whereas French is, well, as Romance a language as you can get. Linguistically speaking, there is practically no bridge between French and German (the closest common ancestor being Indo-European, which takes us way back), whereas English is German’s twin brotha’ from another motha’.

Closing the pedantic aside: what I find really cool, is that this does not have to do with knowing one language or the other, but with which language you are more-or-less consciously using while learning another one.

The pathetic part is that, over the course of my entire senior high school years, it never occurred to me to make that switch myself: I was taught in French and never suspected that it might be easier, thinking about it in English. That’s what you get for being a lazy teenager.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Erinnerung

It is all about sex.

Sex and sexual desires, are solely to blame for every single one of those nights you spent attending overpriced, underwhelming, “art” performances. You know the kind: some friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance, half naked, banging on pots, ululating while playing the electric guitar with an egg beater and a 2000W amp or just exploring the relation between art, space and materialistic consumerism by slithering in a kiddy pool filled with mashed potatoes while their partner sprays them (and the first two rows of the public) with milk and coke.

To be fair, most art is about sex, great art included. When masterpieces do not straight up depict sex, they are most often about their author hoping to get laid, or consistently failing to.

On the other hand, mediocre art is all about keeping your existing sexual partner(s) happy. Sex is the glue that keeps together delusional twenty-something “experimental” artists, long after the last of their friends have faced up to their talentlessness.

Behind every over-affected improv actress, is a bored but madly in love partner. Behind every shitty garage rock band, is a dedicated girlfriend ensuring none of her friends ever miss a gig. Behind every pointless expressive dancer’s performance, is a poor sap playing a detuned violin with a hammer, too busy checking her ass to wonder if it really was worth enduring 15 years of classical training for this. The fecund fields of experimental artistry are littered with people who would have long given up inflicting their fumbling on a sine-wave generator to the public at large, were it not for a support base, spinelessly ready to dish out all sort of undeserved praise and support, as long as it grants them VIP pants access.

And please do not come telling me this is a victimless crime: my eardrums and psyche, battered by hours of uninspired pseudo-stream-of-consciousness drivel recited to the sound of glass rim music, beg to differ.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Mediocre Art: a Theory

A beach where the sand plays koto with the crashing waves for backup singing, you could be meeting up at the front gate of Kyoto Estación with your icebox, your sun hats, enough ice to build an igloo and bags upon bags of useless 100en beach toys, you could be riding a train small enough to fit in your childhood railway model kit, diving through mountains and popping out along the coast, you could be walking a deserted country trail down to your very own 10 acres of pristine white sand, swimming the warm waters of the Sea of Japan in August, you could be preparing fresh guacamole in the sunset with a piña colada in your hand, you could be barbecuing tandoori chicken in the dark, you could call on to your cro-magnon roots and be the Master of Fire for a night, you could sit around a bonfire, burning your fingers trying to melt marshmallows on chopsticks, you could be laying back on a beach, sand in your hair, skies in your eyes, noticing the Great Starry River for the first time since you started living on an island of neons and streetlights: for every late Summer shooting star you catch out of the corner of your eye, drink your tequila and bite a lemon, if you missed it: drink anyway because it is damn good stuff and made from cactus so it can’t be bad for you, you could start running along the beach, throw your underwear at random and dive headfirst into the sea for midnight skinny dipping, you could light up the sky and wake up the fishes with fireworks until you run out of lighters or energy, whichever comes first, you could be playing poker with a flashlight and a stash of one-yen coin and realise that beachwear makes for very quick rounds of strip poker, you could be falling asleep with the sound of waves crashing at your feet, you could be eating chocolate on bread for breakfast with an aftertaste of salt on your lips, you could be making fresh yakisoba with grilled slices of pumpkin for dessert, you could be spending your day playing in the waves or napping in the shadow, you could be listening to the sand singing under your feet, you could be doing a thousand other things under the sun…

Of course, you could.

Happy birthday to me. Another year of backward aging and waning maturity on the way back to infantile bliss.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

You Could…

Never congratulate yourself too much on where you are in life.

More often than not, where you are, has more to do with where you come from than who you are.

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Your Daily Dose of Canned Wisdom

Damn internet age.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

If Tintin had tried that nowadays…

In fact, 1992 was no particularly bad year unless you were a male heir to the throne of Britain with marital problems or minor royalty with a taste for topless frolicking…

In 1992, the world at large was not doing much worse than usual. Western Europe was entering a decade of economic prosperity, things were starting to look up on the eastern side and the US was taking a breather in between two Bushes. Bloody coups, genocides and paramilitary dictatorship seemed to be ever so slowly becoming less of a common occurrence in South America and Asia, and while Africa was not doing so great, one could at least hope that, with old age, an entire generation of Western-backed dictators would eventually come to pass. Not such a bad era for music either: in 1992, Nirvana had just released Nevermind and Black Eyed Peas had not yet been spawned from the darkest recess of stale junk pop marketing.

It is nigh-impossible for one person to give an objective appraisal for such a scale as the entire world, particularly without the hindsight of a couple decades: the year Sally broke your heart or you lost your pinkie to a freak juice-blending accident will always overshadow that earthquake where 10,000 people died in some remote country you have never heard of.

Yet, I cannot help but feel rather depressed by what seems to be happening in the world these days. And I am not talking about broad general issues and the no-doubt very fucked-up things in store for the future, 40ºC English Winter days included. I am talking about today’s factual state of the world.

Let’s Have a Look, Shall We?

Even after filtering out the usual event-starved media angle, there is little to rejoice about in world news these days:

We are finally seeing the result of the past 10 years of aggressively stupid Western policies toward the Middle-East (following countless decades of thoughtless meddling) blooming into a thousand potential islamic revolutions in countries ravaged by war, endemic corruption and self-serving Western interventions. Quite a success, this “War on Terror” has been.

Iran, a country that was once helmed by a democratically elected reformist president when the US had theirs handed down to them by a Supreme Court, is now looking at a slow descent back into a military dictatorship. At its helm, a diminutive puppet of a fundamentalist leader who owes much of the relative success of his populist diatribes to the fertile ground left to him by a century of Western meddling (equally populist “axis of evil” rhetoric included).

Meanwhile, Middle-East’s one and only truly democratic state, Israel, decided to do away completely with the underdog image of a surviving nation amongst mortal ennemies, in favour of the much less appealing status of minority-oppressing bully. What should have been a parenthesis in conservative national politics is now extending to a quasi-perpetual state of belligerent populism, more concerned with pleasing a strident fundamentalist minority at home and focusing on their equally hateful counterparts on the other side, rather than really trying to solve things. As an aside, those people who drape themselves in the memory of the Holocaust and call “antisemitism” on any hint of distaste toward current Israeli politics deserve to be stoned: they are a shame to the memory of the millions actual victims of nazi barbary.

After twenty years of steadily building what could have been a pretty impressive form of federation, ensuring both cultural identity and socio-economical prosperity of its members, European nations are seizing the opportunity of the last few crises to retreat to their old isolationist, nationalistic ways (nothing to the point of the US yet, but slowly heading there). This rollback is in large part fuelled by a wave of political populism across the continent. France has got the ever-yapping Sarkozy, UK Labour is about to get a well-deserved kick out of power that will lead to yet another era of backward people-crushing Tory policies, Italy has long stopped trying and voted Berlusconi back in last year…

Eastern Europe is busy molding its new post-communist brand of putrid nationalism, with dashes of populism and healthy doses of religious zealotry thrown in for good measure, while preparing the next regional conflict and mandatory ensuing genocides through “ethnic cleansing”.

Quickly closing a tentative experiment in democracy, Russia is heading back toward its old totalitarian ways, with a twist: this time it’s military nationalism with ethnic undertones, soft totalitarism with ultra-liberal leanings and McDonald’s on every street corner to appease the masses. At this, they are in a close race with China for smallest compounded period of democratic history. Things haven’t changed much since the 60′s, but who cares: now, they support free trade… In fact, they are more than happy to purchase all the censorship technologies and crowd-pacifying junk culture that the West will obligingly sell them. Sure, China is not as scary a country as it may have been in the past: lifetime imprisonment is often favoured over bullet in the back of the head as a way to deal with political dissent… But that regime is also much closer to becoming your new economic overlord as it ever was before.

Thanks to the threatening shadows of Soviets Russia and People’s China, the rest of Asia has always looked quaintly peaceful, with its bunch of quietly self-contained authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Outside of nutty North Korea and its convenient straw man appeal to nationalists on both side of the Sino-Japanese sea riff, I bet your news outlets do not bother you too often with tales of uneventful sham elections routinely taking place and unsurprisingly backing up whatever local military junta or conservative elite has been in power so far…

I guess something could be said for South America enduring much less bloody civil wars and rightwing CIA-backed dictatorships than during the glorious Carter-Reagan years… hell there has even been a couple democratically-elected leaders with apparently genuine intent to help their people. Things could be worse. Let’s just not look too closely toward Honduras or Venezuela.

And as for the US of A? Well, it is probably not a good sign that the most (and possibly only) positive thing going for it nowadays is that it is no longer headed by a bunch of religious nutjobs and war criminals.

Feel Free To Go Hang Yourself Now…

Pessimistic and biased, you say? Most definitely. Also: I am no Nostradamus and world politics have a knack for going in erratic directions and suddenly picking up speed, so I lay no claims on what the current situation might lead to, as soon as next year. I just can’t help thinking that it is not a lot better than 10 or 20 years ago.

PS: and you know what the funny thing is? Despite this incredibly gloomy outlook on world events, my personal current mood is not particularly bad. In fact, I am pretty happy and content with where I am with my life at this moment.
Just imagine how upbeat I must be when I am truly depressed.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Tempora horribilia

Only a dozen kilometers on bike, walk and train between the two.

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Had to be that day…

Under all the math formulae, the slide featured a small box with Pearson’s full name, photography, dates and, in an even smaller font, this sole additional comment:

He was a marxist.

Only in Japan.

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Half-statistician, half-subversive…

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When I finally rule Earth…

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Slightly Heavy

My shirts look like they’ve been gang-raped by a pack of fluffy teddy bears.

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The Laundry Chronicles Vol. 2

Mother, should I run for President? Roger Waters

Hearing this album for perhaps the billionth time since I turned 12, I just realised tonight that this particular piece of lyrics just doesn’t make any sense, being sung by an Englishman.

[...]

Class president, maybe?

[...]

I have way too much free time (not really).

Post originally published on: Dave's Blog (please leave your comments over there)

Rock Technicality