Well, I haven't told anyone about this, and I don't really want it to become widely known (so no telling the rest of the family, CL); but I've decided I do want to get a few thoughts off my chest about it. A perfect job for LJ, and my dwindling pool of LJ friends.
Everything's fine, and I'm not hurt or anything. I want to make that known right from the start, so nobody gets too alarmed when they're reading this story. ( Read more...Collapse )
"Catfish and Mandala", by Andrew X. Pham, is about the author's bicycle trip through Vietnam (the country his family had escaped from more than 20 years earlier, when he was a child). His American bicycle had been damaged in shipping, so once in Vietnam, he went looking for someone to repair it:
"...we take my bike out to a major 'auto shop', a ten-by-fifteen-foot storefront where a dozen mechanics tinker with bicycles and motorbikes. The vehicles are fixed right on the curb by grease-blackened men and boys who work with shoddy hand tools. The cement is runny with oil.
The bike needs a major tune-up after my one thousand miles in Japan, and I'm not up to it. The airport baggage handlers have damaged the rims beyond my ability to true them. The broken brake isn't working properly either, no matter how much I fiddle with it. Then there is the puncture in my 'puncture-proof' tire. I carry three types of repair patches and try all of them, but Saigon's humidity foils every one.
The bike guru is a shirtless little Vietnamese, a five-foot-one, silver-haired grandfather. Since he is the shop's revered expert with the most seniority, the other mechanics defer to him the honor of working on my foreign bicycle. He spends a full five minutes marveling at my clunker, going over everything from the quick-release hubs to the grip-shifters to the cleat pedals. When he gets to work, he is amazingly fast. Somehow with a couple of wrenches, pliers, and a hot-patch press, he perfectly trues the wheel, fixes the brake, and gets the bike to purr like a kitten in twenty minutes.
He seems so enamored with the bike that I suggest he give it a test ride. At first he declines, claiming it is too big for him. I insist, and he capitulates with a childlike grin and leaps on it. How he manages to find the little pedals with his rubber flip-flops I don't know, but he speeds off around the city block like a racer, whooping and dodging traffic- wild as a teenager. He returns huffing, wet with sweat, rosy with pleasure. He wants to waive the fees, but I won't let him and settle the bill: $1 U.S."
"It always disturbs me when people tell me how long a baby is when it's born. So, is your baby a state record? Are you going to get it stuffed? Most importantly, will it win ya that propane heater at the fisheree? It's a PERSON. Not a bass. When someone asks me how tall I am, I say, "Six feet," not "72 inches." Because I'm a person, not a northern pike. When I ask proud parents if I can see their newborn panfish, they always look at me stupid. Well stop telling me how long your baby is. You're weird. I'm going baby fishing."
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I think I hear voices; soft and out of reach, a little too soft for me to hear what they're saying. It always happens when I've been tossing in bed and have an ear pressed against the pillow, and when I sit up and try to hear better, no more voices. So I know what it is; it's vibrations in the walls and floors of the house, reaching me through my bed and pillow. Could be wind or something; could even be my downstairs neighbors talking, although I doubt it.
But, even though it happens often enough that- sleep-befuddled though I may be- I already know what it is, it always sounds so much like actual voices that it fools me into sitting up, just for a moment, until the illusion breaks. It's a bit unnerving. I wonder if this is why some people think they have voices in their head, talking to them.
'Stranger in the Forest' is Eric Hansen's account of traveling on foot through the jungles of Borneo in the 1980s. In one deep-jungle village, he watches a craftsman create a blowpipe:
One of the reasons why I like reading about baseball history has nothing to do with the game itself. It's that reading about ball players from past decades often provides you with a great many surprising insights into what life was really like in bygone days. 100 years ago, for instance, it was not unusual for baseball players to get into fistfights with fans, with umpires, and with each other (including their own teammates). Christy Mathewson, probably the most popular player of the 1900s, punched a child in the face one day; it had no effect on his popularity. Discussing one player of the 1900s and 1910s who would frequently fly off the handle until someone knocked him silly, one baseball historian commented drily that men of that generation routinely got into fistfights over nothing, and nobody thought it odd. (I couldn't find the exact quote.)
I mention this, because somebody on my Facebook list recently posted, "Once upon a time, Mommies and Daddies could beat their kid's asses so they learned to respect others. But these days they can't and that's why so many people suck."
It's been pretty well established that people who are abused as children are more likely than non-abused children to be abusers themselves when they grow up. That's because beating kids' asses doesn't teach them to respect others; it teaches them that hitting people is normal behavior.
Which might help explain why, when it was normal for parents to beat their kids, it was also normal for men to get into fistfights over nothing. And people these days are supposed to be the ones who suck?
From Mark Kurlansky's "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World":
"By the eighteenth century, cod had lifted New England from a distant colony of starving settlers to an international commercial power. Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish. The members of the 'codfish aristocracy', those who traced their family fortunes to the seventeenth-century cod fisheries, had openly worshiped the fish as the symbol of their wealth. A codfish appeared on official crests from the seal of the Plymouth Land Company and the 1776 New Hampshire State seal to the emblem of the eighteenth-century Salem Gazette- a shield held by two Indians with a codfish overhead. Many of the first American coins issued from 1776 to 1778 had codfish on them, and a 1755 two-penny tax stamp for the Massachusetts Bay Colony bore a codfish and the words 'staple of Massachusetts'.
When the original codfish aristocrats expressed their wealth by building mansions, they decorated them with codfish. In 1743, shipowner Colonel Benjamin Pickman included in the Salem mansion he was building a staircase decorated with a gilded wooden cod on the side of each tread. The Boston Town Hall also had a gilded cod hanging from the ceiling, but the building burned down, cod and all, in 1747. After the American Revolution, a carved wooden cod was hung in the Old State House, the government building at the head of State Street in Boston... When Massachusetts moved its legislature in 1798, the cod was moved with it. When the legislature moved again in 1895, the cod was ceremoniously lowered by the assistant doorkeeper and wrapped in an American flag, placed on a bier, and carried by three representatives in a procession escorted by the sergeant-at-arms. As they entered the new chamber, the members rose and gave a vigorous round of applause.
All of which proves that New Englanders are capable of great silliness."
So, for about a month and a half, I couldn't use LJ on my iPad; I'd log in, but it would immediately log me out as soon as I tried to go to a new page. (My friends page, for example, or "update journal".) Today, suddenly, it works just fine.
When the Computer Rebellion occurs, we won't even realize it at first, because they will have spent years cunningly acclimatizing us to their unpredictable behavior.
A couple other interesting passages from Richard Grant's "Crazy River".
On watching African women carry heavy loads balanced on their heads:
"A female pedestrian, wrapped in kangas, had the business end of a sledgehammer balanced on her head and the handle sticking upward at an angle as she walked. Other women walked under hoes, suitcases, crates of fruit, crates of chickens. Researchers have attempted to measure these extraordinary head-balancing skills and concluded that the average African woman can carry up to 20 percent of her body weight on her head, and burn no more calories than if she was carrying nothing at all. They start head-carrying in girlhood. Their posture becomes so perfectly aligned, and their gait so smooth, that the load rests on the bone column of the spine and requires no muscular effort to keep it there. The researchers also discovered that when Western women try to learn the skill in adulthood, they almost invariably hurt their necks."
On African attitudes to weight and age:
"Fat is admired on men and women alike, and in Swahili you can say with no hint of irony that a woman is 'beautiful like a hippo'.
African attitudes toward age are completely different too. To survive all the hardships and perils and reach old age is considered a major accomplishment and an indication of strength, intelligence, luck, and accumulated wisdom. You can flatter a woman of fifty by telling her she looks sixty, and this sometimes gets African safari guides in trouble with their Western clients, especially if the woman in question has gone through cosmetic surgery to look younger. As a general rule, the older and fatter you are in this part of the world, the more respect you get."
