Entries from February 2006 ↓

I’m mortified to say that I’ve been watching a lot of olympic ice skating lately. Not the cool short-track kind, or even the boring time-trial kind with the funny-looking people in gumby suits, but the dancing kind, where there’s nothing actually happening except for skating around and jumping and twirling. It’s mind-numbingly dull: everyone does basically the same stuff to basically the same music, and the only real suspense is whose costume will out-ridiculous everyone else’s. My vote for these games goes to the ice dancer lady with the tasseled boob-pasties layered on top of a flesh-covered bodysuit, but the Russians’ red and yellow ketchup-and-mustard-explosion-wear comes in a close second.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that a few of the female skaters are just amazing to watch. The best of them seem almost otherworldly when they perform, more spirits than women, ice dryads moving along a delicate incorporeal plane that just happens to touch our own, briefly, every four years.

So it’s really weird to hear the names that the skating establishment, in its questionable wisdom, has given some of the standard maneuvers. One of them in particular: the Salchow. It’s named after the Swedish skater who invented it, which is fine, but it’s pronounced sow-cow, which isn’t. When I see these diaphanous goddesses twirling gracefully through the air, I don’t want to think about pigs and cows. I really don’t. But some broadcaster always squeals triple sow-cow!, and suddenly these lovely women are transformed into whirling lowing oinking sides of pig-beef.

Couple that unlovely image with the lutz, which sounds a lot like klutz, and the axel, which brings to mind garage-metal and grease, and you have a pretty good case for a complete overhaul of skating nomenclature. Maybe using more latinate roots this time. All these germanic names have too many hard consonants, too many throaty unpleasant syllables.

Or, someone could hire me to do it. I’d be quite happy to change things around a bit.

Announcer 1: Ok, now Yvette Foreskaya is about to execute a triple lutz followed by a quadruple sow-cow. And there she goes! Oh, perfect! Perfect!

Announcer 2: I don’t think I’ve seen anything so lovely since Irena Trantitritoff’s quintuple corkscrew farty-plop in the 2002 games at … OH MY GOD, was that a double-triple snotcramp?!!

Announcer 1: Yes it was! Absolutely lovely, George. And now she’s getting ready for her signature jump, the quadruple skunkpoop-stinkbladder. There she goes … OH NO! She’d down!

Announcer 2: Tragic, just tragic. I think that pretty much does it for Foreskaya. As she picks herself off the ice, you have to wonder, Melanie, whether she overreached here. No one’s attempted the stinkbladder since Olga Drankalangle dislocated her pelvis attempting it in the 1988 Olympics Games. …

Yeah. I’d take that contract in a second. And after I’m done with that, I’ll move on to ballroom dancing. Waltz? Box-step? Please.

Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who commissioned the cartoons that have set the Muslim world on fire, speaks out:

Has Jyllands-Posten [the newspaper in which the cartoons were published] insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn’t intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

Yes, exactly. The problem here is that the parties condemning the Danish cartoons (including, alas, our own government) are conflating two concerns: the propriety of saying controversial/offensive/sacriligious things, and our absolute right to say them. The first is up for debate. The second is not.

One thing we’ve learned from Vice President Cheney’s unfortunate hunting accident is that there’s lots of ways to introduce high-velocity metal projectiles into a person’s body, some of them not so serious. Generally, when I think of the chain of events that begins with someone pulling a trigger and ends with a bullet penetrating another person’s epidermis, I think that person was “shot”. Not so.

Cheney’s hunting companion, for example, didn’t get shot. According to many reports, he was peppered with birdshot. This is an entirely different class of getting shot, one that’s far less serious than your normal assault with a deadly weapon. Sure, it put the guy in the ICU for several days and gave him a heart attack and left as many as two hundred little pellets embedded in his body, but, really, it’s not that big a deal. I mean the guy was only peppered.

My guess is that Karl Rove carries around a little satchel of descriptive phrases to release into the wild whenever a Cheney Incident occurs. You don’t have to be on the other end of the Terrifying Vice Presidential Sneer more than once to know that a peppering could occur at any moment, and one of the functions of political operatives like Rove is to assign the right terminology to such events. I picture him at his desk in the wee hours of Sunday night, with his steaming minions arrayed around him, sorting through the list of possibilities. Was the guy sprinkled with pellets? Stippled with slugs? Dusted with dots? Showered with shavings? Spattered with stipples? Rove probably settled on “peppered” because pepper makes food taste better, and it also makes you sneeze. Tasting better is good, and sneezing is funny. Crisis averted!

As yesterday’s hard-hitting interview with Brit Hume demonstrated, Vice President Cheney is just a regular guy who happened to pepper an acquaintance with birdshot and then not tell anyone about it for 24 hours. What’s the big deal? I mean, the local sheriff was even granted an audience with him, eventually, after the standard 14-hour cooling off and evidence-sorting period.

So, really, I don’t understand why the media are so intent on wasting their time on a simple peppering. I mean, there’s people actually getting shot out there. You need to get your priorities straight, guys.

So apparently Dick Cheney shot someone in a hunting accident this weekend. We didn’t hear it from his office, though. We heard it from the woman who owns the ranch he was hunting on. She called a local newspaper and spilled the beans.

The line from the White House is that they decided not to tell anyone that the Vice President of the United States had shot someone in the face with a shotgun because they wanted to let the owner of the ranch do it for them … because she was an eyewitness. First of all: is this the best you people can do? Is your lying machine broken, or overtaxed, or just not capable of spinning out falsehoods fat enough to cover this one? Second: since when is the White House press office outsourcing its job to civilian ranchers?

If nothing else this incident tells us a little something about our Vice President’s hunting preferences. Apparently what passes for “hunting” in his world is: (1) raising a bunch of birds in captivity; (2) releasing them; and (3) immediately fucking shooting them. I’ve never really understood the appeal of hunting (which is no more a “sport” than basketball is a hamster), but really I can’t think of anything more demented than this. Imagine living in a cage for your entire life, until one day someone opens the gate … and you shuffle up out of the darkness and sniff the air and peek out at the world … and then suddenly realize that you’re finally, at long last, free … and you surge up out of captivity beating towards the first unbarred blue sky you’ve ever seen … and are promptly blown into a cloud of meat and feathers by a pasty old white guy with a shotgun. Is this what passes for honor and fairness in the upper echelons of the Bush administration?

Yes, of course it is.

If you want proof positive that the doctrine of Creationism is a bunch of hooey, check out this story about a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. Toxoplasma has a fairly complex lifecycle. It lives in the digestive system of cats, but lays eggs that get crapped out and then consumed by rats. Once inside the rat, the eggs hatch and form cysts and hang out until the rat is in turn consumed by another cat. And so on.

The problem with this strategy is that rats tend to avoid cats, because of the difficulty inherent in surviving an eaten-by-cat event; in particular, they avoid areas that reek of cat urine. That is, most sane, healthy rats do. But not the Toxoplasma-infected:

Oxford scientists discovered that the minds of the infected rats have been subtly altered. In a series of experiments, they demonstrated that healthy rats will prudently avoid areas that have been doused with cat urine. In fact, when scientists test anti-anxiety drugs on rats, they use a whiff of cat urine to induce neurochemical panic.

However, it turns out that Toxoplasma-ridden rats show no such reaction. In fact, some of the infected rats actually seek out the cat urine-marked areas again and again. The parasite alters the mind (and thus the behavior) of the rat for its own benefit.

Now I suppose this is just as valid a way of life as any other: setting up shop in a cat’s guts, sampling streams of partially-digested edibles from the smorgasbord of waste that passes by, funneling your progeny through an intermediate rat or two. We all want our children to see the world. It’s valid. But it’s also crazy.

Think about it: if I was designing creation, and I decided that I needed just one more parasite to round things out, and I said hmm, I think I’ll call it Toxoplasma and, ok, I think Toxoplasma should live in a cat’s intestines, and also, yeah, their eggs should get crapped out and eaten by rats and then grow into little mind control cysts that make the rats easier to catch and eat … you’d probably think I was either joking or insane.

But all of that stuff makes perfect sense if you look at it from an evolutionary standpoint: it smacks not of design but of expediency, of one little thing leading to another little thing, on and on down the maze until you finally get to the end. The crazy circuitous route you took to get there might not make much in the way of sense, but it works, and from the evolutionary perspective that’s the only real criterion. Biological market forces are all about the effectiveness of your design, not its elegance.

I don’t think anyone would call Toxoplasma’s crazy lifecycle elegant, or even rational: but it works, and apparently it works well, and in the end everyone’s happy. Except the rats, of course.

I hate shaving, not just because it’s boring and a pain in the ass but also because I’m very bad at it. You may wonder how one could be bad at scraping hair off of one’s face using a razor with a moveable head and three blades and a little aloe healing aloe strip along the top. I often wonder the same thing myself. But the sad fact is that I usually come out of the bathroom looking like an extra from a slasher move crossed with a werewolf in mid-transformation, little tufts of hair growing out between the bloody furrows carved down my cheeks. It’s pathetic.

I’m old enough now to know that it’s pointless to try to conquer my deficiencies: it’s much easier, and more effective, to outsmart them. In this particular case, I’ve begun to realize that half of my problem is that my lying eyes just won’t show me what I’m doing wrong. I could finish shaving and stare at the mirror for a good five minutes and still not see the strip of missed beard winding its way down along my jawline and curling around my mouth and then striking off across the opposite cheek, like a column of army ants marching out of my left ear toward my right.

So here’s what I do. It’s simple really. I turn my head ninety degrees, and look in the mirror on the face of my medicine cabinet; and, quite suddenly, I see everything I missed. It’s uncanny, the equivalent of opening my eyes, or at least those semi-opaque membranes of my eyes that filter out facial hair. But I’m no closer to the mirror on my right that I am to the mirror in front of me, the light’s no better or worse, there’s absolutely no difference between the first view and the second except that they’re different views.

I think there’s a message here about the importance of changing your perspective every so often. I don’t know whether it’s the world or our senses that are so unreliable, but you can’t trust anything you see if you’re seeing it from just one angle. There may be be three material dimensions but there are at least a billion perceptual ones, and you need to shift your sightlines along as many of their axes as you possibly can, if you’re at all interested in the real story.

Last week sucked. It sucked in three different ways:

1. I was attacked by a pernicious virus that rendered me deflated and ensnotted and sinus-blocked and intellectually worthless
2. I got hit by a shitstorm of problems at work that sucked away most of my time and left me drained and googly-eyed by the end of each day
3. I found it necessary to convince my cable company that they were responsible for certain technical difficulties I was experiencing, possibly one of the most frustrating and time-consuming and futile endeavors in all of creation

The end-result of which was a week pretty much bereft of the stuff I usually do when I’m not working. I read nothing, I wrote nothing, and I exercised nothing but my eyelids and my sneeze muscles. By Friday, my head was like a long-abandoned building with broken windows and peeling wallpaper and empty pitted hallways reeking of piss and ammonia, the ghosts of its former occupants visible in unemptied trashcans and wire hangers in bare closets and faded handprints on dirty walls.

All of which reminds me of the First Law of Spiritual Health: you have to feed your mind, or it withers and dies. Spiritual death is pernicious. You can waste away inside and still appear to be a fully functional carbon-based entity. You wake up in the morning and consume foodstuffs and void your bowels and climb into your conveyance and arrive at work and work all day and climb back into your conveyance etc, but you’re just working off a script. The spiritually deceased are squishy automata executing old programs in an endless loop.

Spiritual death isn’t dramatic or sudden, it’s not drawn out or agonizing, it’s not really even perceptible except as slight twinges of regret or nostalgia or uneasiness, as a kind of miasmatic discontent that settles imperceptibly over the empty places where your dreams used to live.

But the good news is that it’s possible to reverse this kind of death. If you take the view that your spirit lives in the context and confines of your body, that your corporeal body contains your spiritual body, then as long as the meat is around the mind can always come back. Your body is your mind’s universe, and so it gets to make the rules. If you want to be a purely atheist/materialist universe, then the death of your soul is the end of all life in the universe; all that’s left is waiting for time to consume the empty vessel that remains. If you want to be a Christian universe, then your spirit is not gone but simply elsewhere, and you can live the rest of your life in a state of perpetual nostalgia and quiet contemplation of what used to be. But if you want to be a Buddhist universe, if you want to yoke your soul to the eternal turning of the wheel of karma, then your spirit never really dies: it comes back over and over again in different forms, striving through every cycle of death and life toward perfection.