This changes frequently

A quick tally of my 5 in 5 books so far

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:50:00 +1300

I’ll do proper write-ups eventually, maybe. ^^;

Fantasy: Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman; arguably Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Care; 3 to go

Classics: In A German Pension by Katherine Mansfield; 4 to go

Cyberpunk or Hard Sci-Fi: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow; 4 to go

Travelogues: Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain; The Best of Unbrave Girl by Sally Thelen; Hitch-22: A Memoire by Christopher Hitchens; The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie; 1 to go

History or Sociology: Superstition, Pirates, Ghosts and Folklore of Bocas del Toro, Panama by Malcolm Henderson; 4 to go

Wild cards: Child of the Northern Spring by Persia Woolley; xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe; Save Yourself, Mammal! and The Most Dangerous Game by Zach Weiner; Spell it Out by David Crystal; LEVEL COMPLETE!

Yay! I’m doing pretty well with the travelogues, considering I’m not traveling at the moment. I tried to settle down for a bit, which as it turns out is A TERRIBLE MISTAKE. It’s bad anywhere, but about a billion times worse in New Zealand, where all anyone wants to do is move to Melbourne.

Current reads: Accelerando by Charles Stross in cyberpunk and McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales edited by Michael Chabon in fantasy.

Hey, you know what is an excellent thing to do? Call your flatmates at work to haggle over trivial...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:36:35 +1300

Hey, you know what is an excellent thing to do? Call your flatmates at work to haggle over trivial amounts of money. That is fabulous.

>_<

Actually, calling your flatmates for any reason when you’re both at work and won’t be seeing each other for six more whole hours is a super thing to do. I definitely encourage it!

>.<

In fact, using your phone to make calls is just about the best thing ever! Combine the ambiguity of the spoken word with the lack of immediacy of texting for some amazingly unproductive communication! That’s what makes social interaction worthwhile.

x_x

"As he faced the firing squad, Ishmael, a single man in possession of a good fortune, was the color..."

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:57:39 +1300

“As he faced the firing squad, Ishmael, a single man in possession of a good fortune, was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

- Not actually my submission to Query Quagmire’s new game.

(From One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Neuromancer.)

Katherine Mansfield died in 1923

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 02:17:00 +1300

Actually, it’s really sad—I knew she lived a tragically short life, but I didn’t realize it was that tragically short. She was only 34 when she died. But even in our era of copyright ridiculousness, 2013-(1923+70)=plenty of time for this.

(Although I was hoping for her complete works. But that should do for now…)

I read “The Woman at the Store” and about half of In A German Pension the other day, and I’m starting to see why this country (and especially this city) are completely obsessed with her. Her birthplace is now a museum not too far from the CBD (downtown), which I totally need to check out, and there’s a play about her life on at Circa, which I would also totally check out if I could afford it. (I’ve been seeing ridiculous amounts of theater lately, including Tempest; it was, as predicted, AMAAAZZZIIINNGGGG!!!!!! Anyway, at this point my theater-going budget is shot…and three weeks ago, I didn’t even have a theater-going budget.)

From “The Woman at the Store”:

There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw.

Apparently Mansfield disowned a lot of her early work, and I haven’t gotten to her later stuff yet, but I think this is wonderful. It’s an honest-to-god horror story, too, even if there’s nothing speculative or otherworldly in it. (Or maybe everything in New Zealand is otherworldly.) And there’s something transgressive and a bit wonderful about the narrator in both these works—the young, pretty, provincial, Edwardian woman who is secretly bitingly cynical and not at all nice. The “not nice” thing may actually have crossed a line in Pension, which may be why Mansfield hated it so much later on. Still, it’s so much the opposite of what I’d expected! The narrator of “The Woman at the Store” discovers that her brother’s bedmate is a murderer and just…leaves. There has to be something special about the person who could write that in 1912.

This has been an incoherent 2am babble. Thank you very much.

A Tempest off Matiu-Somes Island

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:25:55 +1300

A Tempest off Matiu-Somes Island:

Mystical creatures and grotesque monsters - created by award-winning makeup artists and costume designers - will take audience members on a journey over turbulent seas and through the massive labyrinthine Animal Quarantine Station on Matiu-Somes Island.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SHAKESPEARE’S THE TEMPEST PERFORMED ON AN ISLAND YOU GUYS!!!

The season sold out…so they extended it…and the extension sold out…but there’s a waitlist…with 30 people on it. And me.

The woman I spoke to at the box office kept telling me how unlikely it was that I’d actually get a ticket, but I had to at least be able to say I tried! You have no idea how ridiculously much I want to see this.

Matiu-Somes is also supposed to be a pretty cool place in general—the Department of Conservation apparently limits the number of people who can go there and keeps it as some sort of reserve? I don’t know the details exactly, but I’ve been told it’s worth checking out. Maybe I’ll make a day trip of it sometime.

But…Shakespeeeeaaarrre………….

"Life of Pi"

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:11:00 +1300

It’s so beautiful.

Of course, everyone knew it was going to be beautiful, but that isn’t necessarily the same thing as good. So is it good? Yes! Of course, YMMV depending on your opinion of the book. I liked the book, so there you go. That said, I found the theosophical aspects of it to be silly rather than inspiring, and it certainly didn’t make me believe in god. What it did was let me feel Pi’s euphoria and most of all his terror at least as intensely as the book did, using every cinematic trick to show a world where beauty and danger are two sides of the same coin. You don’t need faith to love that kind of emotional experience.

That said, I’m getting kind of burnt out on 3D. Theatres here in New Zealand seem to favor really chunky 3D glasses that don’t sit right over my hipster frames, so I always end up leaving the movie with a sore nose and a headache. If you see this movie in 2D, I wouldn’t say you’re missing anything. I’m also kind of disappointed that I saw this at a chain cinema rather than an indie thinking it would be cheaper, and it turned out not to be. Obviously not a complaint against this movie—just something for any future Wellington moviegoers to keep in mind.

As a Brazilian Jew I should probably say something patriotic about Max and the Cats at this point, except that I haven’t actually read it. So, um, yeah.

And I’m sure someone a lot better qualified than me has already done a great job explaining why the argument put forward at the end of Life of Pi (both the book and movie) for why the story should make you believe in god doesn’t, um, hold water. But I’ll do a quick version here. I’ll have to paraphrase the argument, since my copy of the book is in a box somewhere in Texas, but it’s basically this:

You have two stories. Neither of them explains why the ship sank. Both of them explain what happened afterward. You can choose to believe either of them. Why not believe the one you prefer, even if it seems more unlikely?

So, Yann Martel and his mouthpiece Pi have set up a situation where both stories are tragic, but only one is leavened with beauty and adventure—the “atheistic” story, where the castaways are a group of humans who murder and eat each other, is just unremittingly dark and horrible. Of course, that’s not how atheists see the story of reality at all! For me, the beauty and majesty of life are on my side, part of nature, godless. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be repulsed by in the religious stories, like the idea of an omnipotent god who allows human suffering, and then insists on being worshiped as just and loving or he’ll condemn you to hell. Even if the evidence could go either way, I’d chose atheism!

But the evidence can not go either way. Many people who understand science (and I’m not claiming to be any sort of expert here) feel that science gives a much more complete and satisfying explanation of the universe than religion. It does, actually, answer the question of “why are we here”—the answer is “for no particular reason,” and there are plenty of people who are totally okay with that. I certainly am—I could go on a whole tangent about why, but I did say I’d keep this short. (I’m kinda failing already, but hey.)

Lastly, this is a work of fiction! Martel might as well say, believe in god if you prefer Star Trek: The Next Generation to the original series. Except for the occasional ~~asshole~~ person who refuses to read any kind of fantasy under any circumstances, most people have no problem “believing” all kinds of obvious nonsense for a few hundred pages and then coming back to reality with their beliefs unchanged. A while ago I read an article somewhere (crediting fail, I know—sorry) about M. Night Shyamalan that made a brilliant point—an author or a director, for the purpose of their novel or film, is god; they control everything, and can perform miracles or not according to their own will. Believing that Richard Parker the tiger was Pi’s companion in the lifeboat doesn’t imply belief in god; it implies belief in Yann Martel and/or Ang Lee. And you don’t need faith for that.

Just to make it clear—the ideas in the last 3 paragraphs are not original to me, and could be fleshed out a lot more. I just wanted to give a quick overview in case anyone was interested. If I remember any specific piece I need to credit, (like the Shyamalan thing) I’ll come back and add the link. For more information on atheist/humanist philosophy, check out…well, just about any atheist blog or book ever. Greta Christina, Hemant Mehta, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell…with the number of unbelievably talented writers who’ve already made these arguments over, and over, and over, and over, I’m going to try not to get into it too much.

Faith, in my view, isn’t necessary for anything. But the important point here is that it isn’t necessary for the enjoyment of this movie. You can sit back and be awed by the beauty of nature, by the human capacity to be inspired by it and the talent it took to convey this powerful story, first in print and now on screen. You can marvel at the technology that made all this possible, and see how far that technology still needs to go. You can spend two hours believing in a boy who shared a lifeboat with a tiger. You don’t need faith for that.

The other side of the world: Where are my togs, mate? D:

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:21:40 +1300

The other side of the world: Where are my togs, mate? D::

wazup-kiwis:

How is it going?^^
I know, I know I’ve already posted a link to a website about the kiwi-slang, but today in school (NZ-experience) we had this theme again. So sorry guys :D
Here’s a little glossary for the ones who plan to come to New Zealand in the next time:
barbie = Barbecue
cuppa = Cup of…

Bach or crib?

Cool post!

À Francesa – The French Way

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:13:00 +1300

À Francesa – The French Way:

The second instance of the term was when someone at a get-together told me later on that I had left the party the French way… all I did was to just sneak out.

A while back my Brazilian dad and my cousin’s French husband were discussing this term, which led to my dad producing this gem:

Quand on part en France, on doit baiser tout le monde.

When you leave in France, you have to kiss everyone.

Same as in Brazil, right? Except that in colloquial French, “baiser” doesn’t mean “kiss.” “Faire des bisous” means “kiss.” “Baiser” means “fuck.”

…which would mean that a proper “saída à francesa” (“French leave-taking”) would end up taking a lot longer than a Brazilian one. ;)

The square-cut pizza thing is also interesting—I didn’t know that. Actually, I don’t even know if there’s a word for that in English. I need to eat more pizza.

Happy Waitangi Day! The Treaty of Waitangi was an agreement...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:57:44 +1300

Waitangi Day festivities from Civic Square footbridge

Outrigger canoe

Waka (Maori boat)

The waka's figurehead--the whole boat was covered in beautiful carvings.

Another waka, with decorations.

Maori cultural performers twirling poi and singing.

Titi torea (stick game) played with ti rakau (sticks)

Two long poi in each hand!

Men in the group performing a haka.

Happy Waitangi Day!

The Treaty of Waitangi was an agreement between the Crown and a group of Maori chiefs. It offered the Maori the rights of British subjects in exchange for recognizing the Queen’s sovereignty in New Zealand. Since it is considered the founding document of New Zealand, you’d think people would have taken it seriously, but judging by the historical treatment of the Maori people by European settlers…apparently not. The treaty’s interpretation, consequences, and even its wording are still being contested, but the date of its signing is a national holiday. Go figure.

So at the moment there’s a fair going on by the waterfront, with a stage for cultural performances. Pictures can’t capture how cool this group was—they twirled their poi in perfect time while singing and dancing! My experiments with poi usually end in bashing myself in the face. They also did some action songs (dances), hakas, and a titi torea—a game where they hit sticks together and tossed them back and forth in time to music. There’s also a musical performance of some kind going on in Te Papa—I can hear drumming and possibly someone playing a conch? It’s all really neat!

“Malaria”, directed by Edson Oda, via Eyes on...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:30:22 +1300

“Malaria”, directed by Edson Oda, via Eyes on Brazil.

Wow.

Be Reasonable – Episode #001: Anita Ikonen New Hayley Stevens...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:48:00 +1300

Be Reasonable – Episode #001: Anita Ikonen

New Hayley Stevens podcast! It’s too bad that her Talk About Strange podcast didn’t go anywhere, although the website is really cool. In her podcasts and on her blog, Hayley comes across as the most amazingly patient, kind person, which makes this interview pleasant listening. It also helps that for their first subject, she and Marsh found a smart, ethical woman who understands what skeptics are trying to do, even if she disagrees with our conclusions in her case. Oh, and Marsh! Marsh seems to be one of those people who does everything, brilliantly, even if this so-called “Merseyside” isn’t actually a real place.

*ahem* Yes, this interview may have inspired in me an uncharacteristic feeling that everyone is nice and there’s hope for the future if we can just all cooperate. It’ll pass soon. In the meantime, hugs and compliments all round!

(See, I was expecting to spend this whole episode banging my head against the wall, but I didn’t need to, and now I don’t understand what is happening! Help!!!)

(Mine may be “apparently.” Or “awesome.” I’m not yet fit company for...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 01:03:00 +1300

(Mine may be “apparently.” Or “awesome.” I’m not yet fit company for the writers mentioned in the last post…apparently.)

New addition to my growing collection of writers' ridiculous favorite words!

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 01:02:00 +1300

China Mieville’s is “pugnaciously.”

Mark Twain’s is “picturesque.”

And now—Steven Novella’s is “therefore.”

I love it!

Apparently Christopher Hitchens’ is “perhaps,” although I didn’t really get that from reading his stuff. Also this list is based on nothing other than me being silly.

Adulting: A pre-trip checklist

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 15:04:00 +1300

Adulting: A pre-trip checklist:

adulting:

Have you …

1.) Made a packing list, and then packed all of it?

2.) Put up an out-of-office email message, and sent a brief note to people who regularly contact you (read: your mom) to let them know you’re away?

3.) Made sure you’ve done everything necessary at work and/or laid out ground…

Responsible pre-travel preparations? What nonsense is this? (Okay, these are good things to do, although I probably wouldn’t bother.)

Re: liquids on planes. They do have to go in bags, because they leak, which is horrible. They’re more likely to leak in checked luggage, so I prefer to put them in my carryon. The 3oz limit isn’t very strongly enforced, in my experience—I’ve gotten away with bringing oversized bottles of shampoo and things in my carryon plenty of times. If you’re searched for other reasons and the TSA find it, they’ll make you throw it out, but unless you get searched every time*, I’d say the cost-benefit analysis says risk it. I mean, provided you’re a cheap-shampoo person.

*In that case: you poor thing. That sucks beyond belief, and may be grounds for a lawsuit?

Bikram – is it too hot to handle? - Telegraph

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 14:12:00 +1300

Bikram – is it too hot to handle? - Telegraph:

Just when you thought yoga couldn’t get any hotter – because it seems everyone is doing it – here comes a New York insider’s guide to the practice that is causing devotees to think again. In his investigation into Bikram, the most fashionable and extreme form of yoga…writer Benjamin Lorr warns that potential followers must go into it with eyes open[. … I]f you do as he did and follow the regime to its limit you are entering a world of almost addictive pain and taking huge risks with your body.

Interesting article, by which I mean EEEEEEEKKKKK! I may be biased, in that I hate all forms of exercise, but Bikram sounds unbelievably horrible. Just reading about the poses made me ill.

Anyway, a while back I had a conversation about yoga with a fellow skeptic of Indian descent, who pointed out that yoga is traditionally a spiritual practice, and said she wasn’t a fan. It’s a bit of a catch-22—if we Westerners practice yoga in the just-for-exercise form, is it appropriationist? I don’t think most of us would be into yoga at all if we had to buy into all the religion that traditionally goes with it. (My own guess, based on my observation that there are about a gazillion times more non-Hindus who take yoga classes than who convert to Hinduism.)* So are the health benefits of gentler forms of yoga worth the taint of colonialism and/or religion? Can we get those benefits any other way? I honestly don’t know.

Anyway anyway, whatever you do to get/stay in shape, please keep it to a reasonable level and don’t hurt yourself, okay?

*Just a note: yoga is traditionally associated with a few different Indian religions, but the association with Hinduism is, I think, the strongest.

Cognitive dissonance re:weather

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:50:02 +1300

New Zealand is cold. Not warm. Cold. As a traveler, if you come here without sweaters and jackets and long pants, you are not going to have fun. (Or rather, you’ll have proportionally less fun after blowing a chunk of your budget on overpriced overcoats.) Luckily, I’m awesome and on-the-ball* enough to know this and pack accordingly. However, I’m also gullible enough to leave most of my bulkier items in Christchurch and come to Wellington with only a cardigan and a raincoat to protect me from the howling antarctic wind. Which means that, sometime before the season changes (tomorrow) I need to find a way to get back down to the ~~postapocalyptic hellscape~~ Garden City and rescue my stuff.

This is all highly unlikely…best-case scenario, I might be able to score a cheap JetStar flight at 5am in June. Hopefully I’ll manage to keep all my extremities for that long.

Anyway, I talked to my parents this afternoon and this all came up. My dad burst out laughing and said, “yeah, New Zealand isn’t really the tropical paradise they bill it as.”

“No one bills it as a tropical paradise,” my mom protested, which was news to me and to every other traveler I’ve met while I was here.

So, fellow travelers, take heart: you may die of hypothermia, but it’s not because Kiwis lied to you—they were genuinely self-deluded. Pity them! And anyway, your fallen-off fingers and toes will make delicious popsicles for the kea.

*I’ve been here before.

Today I moved into a flat. Well, not really a flat. One of those casual, furnished, communal kitchen...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:05:06 +1300

Today I moved into a flat.

Well, not really a flat. One of those casual, furnished, communal kitchen long-stay-ish places. I got here, I looked around, and then I realized something. I have this dream. It’s a very humble dream, but it’s a dream, and I have it. My dream is that someday I’ll live in a place where I can leave my toothbrush in the bathroom.

Like I said, it’s a humble dream, but it’s been guiding me these past few weeks…and by taking this place, even though it’s cheap and I get my own room, I’ve let that dream fade. But no longer! I have returned to the internet with renewed vigor, hunting down new ads, sending new emails, and basically doing all the same horrible stressful bullshit I was so sick of three days ago.

In the meantime, this job I supposedly have is moving glacially towards starting, I think. I made the transition from tourist to bored-and-unemployed within about five days of getting to Wellington. Looking for a flat is sort of like entertainment, but it’s mostly like putting my face through a meat grinder, so it’ll be nice to be able to afford fun again.

Under the Influence: Radio Is Dead. Long Live Radio. Many...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:02:07 +1300

Under the Influence: Radio Is Dead. Long Live Radio.

Many advertisers think radio is yesterday’s medium, but judging by the work being done today, the opposite is true. We’ll tell the story of a German music school that used radio to recruit top music students by making their email address invisible to all but those with perfect pitch, how an entire country’s radio stations switched formats one morning to sell a chocolate bar and how the country of Columbia used radio to send a coded message of hope out to kidnapped soldiers.

Such a cool episode! Of course, it’s important to remember that just because a medium changes formats, that isn’t the “death” of it: an ebook and a codex are both novels, and you’re still literate whether you read one or the other. I don’t listen to FM or AM or even satellite, but here I am posting about the CBC and how fantastic it is because—you may have noticed—I love radio. I just consume it in podcast format…so what?

Anyway, whether they’re using twentieth or twenty-first century tech, apparently people are doing some amazing things with the medium! My favorite was definitely the German drunk-driving PSA, which was also the most sci-fi. Really neat stuff.

Here’s a link to the full version of the Colombian Morse Code song. In the episode, they cranked up the volume of the code so we would notice it, which left me wondering how the FARC didn’t—in the actual song, it’s much more subtle, although still kind of annoying. It’s not a song that I’d listen to for pleasure, but since that goes for most radio hits, I guess it blended in pretty well.

And here’s the video for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You”. O’Reilly talks about it right at the beginning of the episode, but that bit’s left out of the transcript for some reason. His point is that “Praise You” is a completely original, awesome song made completely out of samples, which can be seen as analogous to the way advertisers are reinventing their approach to radio…if you squint really hard…

…well, trying to paraphrase the intro makes me think that the song doesn’t relate to the rest of the episode at all. But it is a good song.

I am lying on my headphones: A modern retelling of "The Princess and the Pea"

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:23:34 +1300

…right?

MonsterTalk: WITCH YOU TALKIN’ ABOUT? According to...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:30:43 +1300

MonsterTalk: WITCH YOU TALKIN’ ABOUT?

According to legend, in the early 1800s the farm of John Bell of Tennessee was terrorized by a supernatural assailant who came to be known as The Bell Witch. MonsterTalk hosts Blake Smith, Ben Radford and Dr. Karen Stollznow discuss the case, following a visit to the site of the haunting by Ben and Blake.

I listened to this on the night bus back from Rotorua, and it was awesomely spooky!