Happy Weekend

CABOOSE THOUGHTS

It’s going to come out all right—do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass—they know.
They get along—and we’ll get along.
 
Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting
And the letter you wait for won’t come,
And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray
And the letter I wait for won’t come.
 
There will be ac-ci-dents.
I know ac-ci-dents are coming.
Smash-ups, signals wrong, washouts, trestles rotten,
Red and yellow ac-ci-dents.
But somehow and somewhere the end of the run
The train gets put together again
And the caboose and the green tail lights
Fade down the right of way like a new white hope.

I never heard a mockingbird in Kentucky
Spilling its heart in the morning.

I never saw the snow on Chimborazo.
It’s a high white Mexican hat, I hear.

I never had supper with Abe Lincoln.
Nor a dish of soup with Jim Hill.

But I’ve been around.
I know some of the boys here who can go a little.
I know girls good for a burst of speed any time.

I heard Williams and Walker
Before Walker died in the bughouse.

I knew a mandolin player
Working in a barber shop in an Indiana town,
And he thought he had a million dollars.

I knew a hotel girl in Des Moines.
She had eyes; I saw her and said to myself
The sun rises and the sun sets in her eyes.
I was her steady and her heart went pit-a-pat.
We took away the money for a prize waltz at a Brotherhood dance.
She had eyes; she was safe as the bridge over the Mississippi at Burlington; I married her.

Last summer we took the cushions going west.
Pike’s Peak is a big old stone, believe me.
It’s fastened down; something you can count on.

It’s going to come out all right—do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass—they know.
They get along—and we’ll get along.

-Carl Sandburg

Addendum

It might be that I'm feeling sensitive because Gen just requested transfer from being my permanent croquet teammate via my family email list serve (citing irreconcilable differences - aka my play at Thanksgiving), or maybe it's that I don't see the connection between twitter, the Kansas City Royals, Roger Ebert, and the Holocaust, but I have a few things to add to Gen's post.

First, Gen's whole theory about me being afraid of technology is utterly preposterous and unfair! Great - I don't know how to use our DVR, once I "slightly overstuffed" the DVD player, my blackberry troubles me, and I recently managed to set our sink's garbage disposal on fire. That doesn't make me afraid of the future or "an enemy of progress," it just means that we child proofed our apartment and Gen is allowed to feel big and important on a daily basis when I ask him to help me with things involving bandwidths and touch buttons. AND I would also point to a certain trip when our car broke down in the Shenandoah Mountains with nary a soul for miles around at a bend in the road where there were frequent angry mother bear sightings and we had no cell phone reception, and it wasn't Gen's I-Phone that saved us (despite all his efforts) but rather my wilderness instincts.

Regardless, my addendum is just to note that twitter's new found revolution inducing capabilities may have been somewhat conflated. Maybe I'm pulling a Malcolm Gladwell (See "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted"), but I just don't completely agree with how twitter and other forms of social media have been portrayed in the common narrative regarding the civil unrest sweeping the Arab world.

Little Nadia wanted to start an anarchic revolution. Unfortunately, twitter hadn't yet been invented.

Maybe I'm missing something. I think the phenomenon is... yes, mildly interesting. I don't find it fascinating - is it that surprising that this generation (and others) enjoys using something that allows them to overshare, reduce every complex thought to a sentence (in sum - arguably- : be lazy), and be easily in touch with their friends?

But I am bothered by the fact that the credit Twitter is getting for recent upheaval is often lacking in real analysis. Clearly, twitter is a positive development, has played a role in a number of large-scale events, and is a useful technology/service, with proven potential to enable communication and organization (good example in recent Nigerian elections). That said, several revolutions occurred without twitter. The Berlin wall didn't come down because a Gustav somewhere tweeted "let's take that bad boy down." and his friend Olga saw it and re-tweeted the call to arms, right below a link to her favorite siberian tiger zooborn. 1968 in Europe, 1979, 1848, the Prague Spring, etc. all happened prior to myspace creeps, Winkel-Vi, and @sillymoniker. As this article points out, the jury's still out on exactly how useful social media was to the Iran unrest of two summers ago.

I'm all for what twitter can do. I don't disagree with the idea that Twitter deserves play in the dialogue about recent events but I think it's going a bit far to call something a "twitter revolution" and I would love to see a bit more discussion taking into account social media's other characteristics, their tangible impact, and for the media and Americans generally to be as excited about other factors at play as a revolution unfolds (e.g. the impact of civil society organizations, the dynamics of formerly rival group cooperation, the economic effects when people drop what they're doing and take to the streets, etc). These tools foster rapid coordination and give people windows into someone's activities oceans away but they're not the sole force/impetus/structure/link/what have you behind a political movement and certainly don't make for regime change by virtue of existing.

Twitter lets someone say something quickly, in soundbites, to one's "followers," and link to further information with immediacy. But it doesn't prompt debate in the way that in-person discussion does. It allows for anonymity which can cut both ways. It's also worth pointing out that it's not just citizens that benefit from twitter - it can also be authoritarian regimes who know what they're doing. Further, such technologies mean an inundation of information, some of it meaningless, which has real possibility but can also lead to what I'm not really sure how to term as anything else but internet buzz fatigue. Not to mention that Twitter won't write constitutions in new democracies, it won't train people to step into new business sector roles to replace a former dictator's cronies, and its word limit mean that it will never be long enough to be this beautiful.... and apparently it's bad for your sex life.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet, that is the 21st Century Question

Twitter is fascinating. Regardless of what you think about the value of expressing thoughts in 140 characters or less, how superficial it is to build your TweetDeck, you just cannot deny that the technology has been at the center of the most interesting, cosmic events of our time.

Think about it. Twitter broke the Japanese earthquake. Twitter keeps us updated on the most recent gossip of what Prince William and Kate Perry Bosworth Middleton are going to wear to the GREATEST WEDDING OF ALL TIME...OF ALL TIME! A lot of people care about this a great deal, I find it kind of disgusting that in such times of financial trouble, a country that is already broke and cutting benefits to the lower-middle class is willing to spend some ungodly amount of British pounds on a freaking wedding. However, I do appreciate the royal wedding for giving us no shortage of ecard ideas, like this:

So politically incorrect. IT WAS A SS UNIFORM, YOU DOLT! And yes, that kid is like third in line to the throne. This is the karmatic product of centuries of Royal Family inbreeding.

But I digress...Twitter fomented uprisings throughout the Middle East, the likes of which have not been seen in the region in hundreds of years. Revolutions used to take years to build. Now they take 140 characters, lobbed out into cyberspace. Some of you may think I'm being facetious here, but I'm not. When the government moves to shut down Twitter access in your country, here here and here, I think it is safe to say that we are seing a trend. Namely, Twitter is really pissing off despotic, iron-fisted authoritarian rulers.

RT@Angry_Disenfranchised_Egyptian: So you say you wanna revolution....?


Who wouldn't find this Twitter-mania fascinating? You have be a truly sour, out-of-touch with technology, and ignorant of progress person to not be intrigued by what is going on here. No, Nadia, I am not calling you out specifically here*, though sometimes I suspect that you fall in this group. In any case, I know you're skeptical. If you want to open your mind a bit (not just you, Nadia, but all the Twitter skeptics out there, I suggest you read Roger Ebert's column about his conversion: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/06/tweet_tweet_tweet.html).

*Nadia called me after I posted to tell me that she was offended by this comment. Like, seriously offended. SO, like a fine print legal disclaimer let me put on my lawyering hat and say JUST TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, Nadia is not an enemy of progress. Repeat. JUST TO BE CLEAR.

For those of you familiar with my relatively inactive Twitter account, you may know that I follow the accounts of my favorite Kansas City athletes...(I swear this has a point, keep reading):

The night of August 3, 2009, current Kansas City Royals' shortstop Alcides Escobar twittered: "Just got Swept By Isotopes.....i'm out later guys"

And that, my friends, was the end of Alcides Escobar, #12 rated prospect in the nation, professional athlete, on Twitter. Finished. He left Twitter, and never came back. He is following no one.

On his own, he roams the Earth scratching out a post-Albuquerque Isotopes-sweep existence. I eagerly await "The Road 2", starring Alcides Escobar in place of Viggo.

During Europe's dark 20th century, there was a tradition fomented during the Holocaust and other continued massive displacements and genocides of ethic peoples, of scribbling notes on scraps of paper and throwing them out of trains, automobiles, anything moving. A kind of land-based message in a bottle, notifying the world of the current state of existence or your hopeful destination. Surprisingly, a good number of these notes were saved, even if they did not make it to their intended recipient. May Alcdies's note find its mark.

I feel kind of stupid using an athlete's twittering to segway into my final thought on this, namely, that I cannot help but think of all the Twitter messages sent from Libya, Yemen, Japan, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Bahrain in the past few months, either that never made it to their recipient, or that still exist online but belong to a dead or missing sender. It's sad, but it is also comfortable thinking about how their intentions to record the craziness around them will be preserved for posterity online, or at least until Twitter's servers are destroyed.

At this point, I feel like I have been rambling on and on without a point. But my general point is that Twitter is here to stay and it adds a tremendous amount of value, both of the democratic and historical. Sure, there are a lot of shit Tweets out there, but they are perfectly avoidable. No different than spending your day at a Philadelphia professional sporting event: 38,000 of the 45,000 people there are legitimately terrible, terrible enough to vomit on little girls.** But those brave 7,000, well they are people who think deeply about the game around them. They are people who have interesting opinions that should, for the sake of humanity, be shared with the rest of the world. And if you multiply that fraction of people to include the billions of people who live on this planet, well then I think 140 characters is a perfectly reasonable capacity limitation for us to process the information provided by such people. One of the classic complaints about the internet has been that there is too much data for any reasonable person to sift through, that people, ahem, have to read entire 3,000 word blog entries to get the information they need. Twitter takes care of that problem with its text limitations and creative ways of referring people to other sources of information through retweets and links.

Twitter is our new record of our efforts, our triumphs and tribulations, our thoughts come to life. It is our new history, and we should embrace that.

That being said, Twitter is not perfect. Not even close. Imagine trying to distill a classic piece of literature to 140 words. Can't work. Twitter instead provides us with fragments of code that we have to piece together. I like this. As an undergraduate history major, I discovered that often my historical research only led to the discovery of fragments of stories. Those fragments provide more questions than answers, questions that usually cannot be answered unless you make a bucketload of assumptions to support a particular answer. That has not changed, but it's nice to know that those fragments are now part of an online community. Long live Twitter.

Respectfully,

Someone who is only capable of posting in >=3,000 characters



**Speaking of Philadelphia, I have a blog entry solely on the handful of virtues and trunkloads full of drawbacks of that city. For the sake of retaining my girlfriend, I have refrained from publishing it.

"A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament." -Oscar Wilde

I am beginning my painting class this evening! I don't know what to expect from this promising experience apart from finding out that my acquaintances fall into two camps - those who mock my artistic venture ceaselessly and those who encourage it enthusiastically. The latter camp is much smaller. It includes only my grandmother and Watson.

Nadia, lost amidst the art world.

Introducing... He Who Wears the Suit Ironically

My bestie Max just started his own blog. He's amusing and informed and once saved me from phantom Lyme disease.

Check it out:

http://marliehk.tumblr.com/

And if you've ever asked yourself what sort of person serves as the conductor (wearing a silly hat, handkerchief, and striped overalls) of a sightseeing mini train in a tourist trap... well, then his blog might be a starting point for resolving that inquiry.

Max and I gazing out philosophically at the Prague architecture, likely pondering social justice and arguing over whether or not Treme is actually a great show

Local Couple Enjoys Local News. Blogs About It.

Early on in our relationship, Gen and I discovered that in addition to a love of early nineties Travis Tritt, we shared an appreciation for the joys of local news headlines.

We agreed that browsing local news headlines occasionally reveals an instance of the awesomely bizarre in la vie quotidian (e.g. the whole Caboodle Ranch thing in Florida that Colbert picked up on or something like this) and also makes big news of the trivial in sort of a quaint, Norman Rockwell's America kinda way (e.g. "71st Annual Vermontville Syrup Festival may attract 30,000 visitors to village.")

My enjoyment may have begun following my infamous cougar sighting of 2005 when I went through a scour-the-local-news-for-fellow-sightings-to-back-me-up and Gen, being from a small town in Kansas, had some experience early on with the hilarity of mundane local news stories (and the awful) but of course, now that we're together, we like to think of it as more of a high brow informal ethnographic study (Duh). Regardless, I'll never forget reading the Ithaca Journal one summer at my parents and seeing the front page report about a rabid beaver's attack in Danby, NY (although, it wasn't this exciting) alongside a story about what local inmates are eating for breakfast.

Any how, all this to introduce today's gem in the Post (even if itpertains to a metropolitan area) - "Large snake causes power outage"

This is a snake we actually saw and photographed while strolling through Rock Creek Park by Cleveland Heights... it was GINORMOUS

DC Recommendation

Last year we saw the play Clybourne Park at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theater and really enjoyed it.  

[Don't judge the venue based on it's excessively silly name... it's a great place to see a performance - a relatively small community theater (not a la Party Down variety... fortunately?  unfortunately?) that makes for a pretty intimate experience while managing to attract real thespian talent (which I'm obviously a seasoned critic of as a result of my days as a Shakespearian actor) and hosts timely, insightful pieces.  Further, WMT makes a real effort to offer affordable prices particularly for students and "young professional."]  

Recently, Clybourne Park won a Pulitzer and it has now returned to the area for another run with the same cast and director - I recommend seeing it while you can.

Set in Chicago and alternating between the present and the late fifties, the play speaks skillfully to the ever charged topic of race in America and examines the neighbhorhood tensions arising from demographic shifts.  Clybourne riffs off of Raisin in the Sun and - via several extended domestic scenes which essentially serve as platforms of debate between various characters - concludes (while eloquently raising a lot of unanswered questions) recalling the old adage - the more things change, the more they remain the same.  Here is somewhat of a synopsis from a Brit critic's take.  

We found the play both very funny (it has some great comedy-of-errors type slap stick scenes), thought-provoking, and some portions moved me to tears (although, I've also been known to tear up during Kid Rock music videos). All in all - it kept us discussing throughout the remainder of the evening (assisted by some nearby Matchbox pizzas and Chimays).

More personally, I think the questions the play raises about a family's link to property (and essentially, to a "place in time") and how those sentiments/affiliations both expand (sometimes based on false collective memories) and diminish as the property passes down to the next generation, often engendering conflict and/or the revival of old hurts will ring movingly familiar to anyone who's ever addressed decisions as to inheritance and the issue of a family home that both everyone wants and yet no one wants.

draft

We are not porn stars.

It has come to our attention that when our masses of loyal readers googled "Gen and Nadia" in search of our blog, all of the first results pertain to a Bulgarian porn site featuring an adventurous couple who happen to share our same names.

Therefore, I felt the need to clarify that ...

WE ARE NOT THOSE PORN STARS.

Nor are we Bulgarian for that matter.

Boogie Nights

Although, Daniela has made me Bulgarian food and introduced me to Bulgarian tea and it was quite delicious.


Speaking of porn stars - article sent by my Mom this morning..."Le penis de Titan" Very impressive.

.

Act Two. Kings do not fold.

Solid This American Life piece on NPR - Know When To Fold 'Em.

I particularly liked Pod 3 - Kings do not fold ... Producer Nancy Updike shares a pattern that she's noticed recently: eleven steps that Middle Eastern dictators have been taking on the path to losing power. (7 minutes)

1. Shut down the internet

2. Send thugs (on foot or horseback)

3. Attack and arrest journalists

4. Shoot people

5. Promise to investigate who shot people

6. Do a meaningless political reshuffle

7. Blame Al Jazeera

8. Organize paid demonstrations in favor of your regime

9. Make a condescending speech about how much you love the youth

10. Threaten that the country will fall into chaos without you

11. Blame foreign agitators

Stage 12 which remains unspoken is simply 'Leave - get out'.

Either way I wouldn't know "when to fold em" because my family plays poker with matchsticks which means no one ever folds em. Which sort of sounds like some kind of parable for the banking crisis...

My Belgian ancestors playing Strip Poker

The worse part about the Greg Mortenson scandal...

.... is the sudden newsreel prevalence of awful "Three Cups of Tea" inspired puns.

 Mortenson and Nicholas Kristof, circa 2008

[ok I do know it's not the WORSE part.]

She's On Fire, Put Her Out.

Yes, I'm quoting Lil Wayne.

Mildly in relation to the fact that it's supposed to be a blazin hot day in DC with severe weather rolling through ... crazy photos of wildfire near McDonald Observatory in Austin, Texas.

With my luck, it's going to begin pouring right as I leave to walk back to work from this and my copious notes will be soaked (thank you jerkface who stole my umbrella at Bar Pilar on Saturday night).

"I wish Foggy Bottom would flood instead"

Title stemming from a disgruntled grad student who shall remain nameless. Per my well placed sources (J interns at a G-Town marketing firm) and confirmed by TBD...

the waterfront is underwater!

Que loco. Oh my heavens!








It's clearly unfortunate and costly but on an inappropriate/meaningless/self-obsessed note (aren't those fundamental blogger characteristics?), I couldn't think of anything in Georgetown I'd miss. There isn't much in the commercial area that I value. While G and I have taken Watson for some nice walks by the now submerged waterfront



Unrelated photo of Watson looking like a banshee following a short walk. The lil Rapscallion.

and Dumbarton Oaks, the University, and the residential areas are - without a doubt - lovely. BUT the bars themselves are full of people who's definition of a cool bar is fundamentally opposed to mine (and feel overwhelmingly of the indefensible conservative persuasion) and stumbling co-eds and I have yet to find a restaurant in Georgetown with legitimately good food that I can afford (although admittedly I have heard good things about Tackle Box).

Ok now that I've sounded like a grumpy, old man ...

I'm getting back to work/stata (The below is kinda how I feel about my data right now)



which for the five minutes before my rant was actually reading this (This Tech Bubble is Different - Bloomberg BusinessWeek) which I found interesting. It's always intriguing what a generation's "best and brightest" want to do with their careers and why.

All in all, I wish more of them would go on to do things like this Gal - http://xkcd.com/ and create such works of art as this...

"Winter is Coming", or How I learned to Stop Criticizing and Love the Ridiculous Fantasy of Game of Thrones

Bibliomancy is the practice of gaining an answer by turning to a random page in a book and seeing what turns up. It's a pretty universal practice across history, especially in a religious context. Sometimes there's a conscious decision to employ the practice: "wondering what to do, I pulled open the Bible and began reading", etc., though it is also quite common for the book to already be open, with the answer already there, waiting. As a graduate business student, I am somewhat dismayed/ashamed that one could never do a statistical analysis of a matter like this, but as a former early American History scholar back in my days of pure humanities undergraduate education, I can attest that the practice was certainly talked about quite a bit in seventeenth-nineteenth century America. Think about it - If you did not have the internet, or television, or news, or any "modern" infrastructure for its time, you would probably be trying to put your education to use to get some answers, too. Obviously, prior devotees of bibliomancy were serverely handicapped through the religious prism. Trust me...bibliomancy is definitely a standard trope of conversion narratives. However, the practice isn't exclusively Protestant, or even Christian. The book isn't always the Bible, or even a Holy Book of any faith. Fate or God or Allah or The Universe or whatever might be speaking to you through anything, because obviously, at the point at which they're speaking to you at all, they've got whatever they want at their disposal. This is God we are talking about, after all.

So anyway, enough of all that. I'm going to do this from time to time with books I have lying around, and I'm going to begin with Nadia's favorite and recently blogged about epic fantasy series, "Game of Thrones". You'll just have to have faith in me that going forward my choices will be truly random. And this is me speaking below, not God. Just want to be clear on that.

The Lesson from Above: 4/17/2011, spoken through the vehicle of A Game of Thrones, 1453-1517 B.W. (Before Winter), the TOTALLY AWESOME ALTERNATIVE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSE OF WESTEROS by George R.R. Martin. Pages 99-101.


"The North went on forever. Tyrion Lannister knew the maps as well as anyone, but a fortnight on the wild track that passed for the kingsroad up here had brought home the lesson that the map was one thing and the land quite another"

I'll say. This book goes on forever. At least a fortnight of my night reading. But I was initially too willing to dismiss this book primarily due to the laughable fact that when you open the front cover, there is a map of Westeros, the alternate universe medieval land where the book takes place, and this "map"...well, let's jus be kind and say that it is is basically a map of the British Isles with names of cities changed. How silly, and also predictable. At this point in the book (the beginning), I'm thinking that the line for an over/under on King Arthur rip-offs is at at least +6.5. That said after 570 pages of reading I will admit that the fiction is truly entertaining. So this excerpt is telling me that no fantasy can be judged on a silly map alone, as the land (so to speak) may be captivating.

Westeros' Edinburgh? Or Scotland's Winterfell? Someone call J.K. Rowling we need a final verdict.

Five men, three boys, a direwolf, twenty horses, and a cage of ravens given over to Benjen Stark by Maester Luwin. No doubt they made a curious fellowship for the kingsroad, or any road.

Interesting. Why does every fantasy novel need to make a big deal about how much fantasy company you can keep in one group? Whether it be a fellowship led by Gandalf or just simply a huge motley crew of animals and humans here, houses divined by a sorting hat, the secret goal of fantasy novels seems to be to expand your group of "friends" to include as many people and animals as possible, regardless of what language they speak or whether you would actually enjoy hanging out with them. How would you feel if you had to walk for months with a midget carrying a ring that is going to destroy the world? Not great, I presume. I guess the lesson is that you can never have too much company in fantasy. But I digress from bibliomancing... what of the cage of ravens? An ill-omen perhaps? No doubt. By the way, a direwolf is apparently just a fictional name for a really big wolf. I know because I Google-imaged it and came up with this fantasy playing card describing what it is and what it does.

Let's roll the die and give it more powers!

Dragonbone is black because of its high iron content, the book told him. It is strong as steel, yet lighter and far more flexible, and of course utterly impervious to fire. Dragonbone bows are greatly prized by the Dothraki, and small wonder. An archer so armed can outrange any wooden bow.

Oh, yeah. F**K, yeah. This is how I pictured this book before I picked it up...hardcore descriptions of fictional stuff. Curious that this is included in the chapter I picked though, because most of the book is dialogue rather than outlining the properties of fantasy raw materials. So what is this telling me? Dragonbone...high iron content. Light, but flexible...can outrange any wooden bow. Eureka! Somehow I need to find this material and manufacture dragonbone golf clubs - high iron, but lighter. Great range. Callaway, I'm coming for you. Although considering that this action takes place in Westeros' foil for Scotland, perhaps the House of Stark has already invented fantasy golf with dragonbone clubs. This book is missing the Quidditch element. Too much political intrigue and not enough play.

AP File Photo - A view of the Dothraki Champion teeing off on the 8th hole of the Tortoise of the Western Aisles, Septon (Saint) Andrews Golf Course, Birthplace of Gowlf, Home of the Westeros (British) Open.

After this, there's discussion of the mysterious... let me make sure I've got this right...The Night Watch. They swear an oath to guard the 700 foot tall Wall which blocks of the Seven Kingdoms from the Haunted Forest, and they do this by patrolling the Northern wilds. Also, they do this for the rest of their life with no chance of coming home. Sounds like Afghanistan. And the Night Watchmen come from House Stark, which serves House Baratheon. The motto of the first is Winter is Coming, that of the latter is Ours is the Fury. So maybe this is about the deficit hawks pulling off a miracle and eclipsing the moderate Republicans? Or maybe the noun is irrelevant. The next paragraph down starts with "the beginnings were slow."

Perhaps that is a final call from above for patience and hope, or a sign to not drop the new HBO miniseries of "Game of Thrones" at the first sign of boredom.

Nadia, I will finish the statement for you..."There is NO MIDDLE GROUND". God, the TV producers have obviously edited out all the good parts.