Rhinocrisy

bang.^*

Late update: N. Korea appears to have flunked its test. Maybe less Song of Experience, more the last lines of The Hollow Men. Or, as the news networks delighted in reminding us today, like this.

^*I remember when George Bush was elected and I thought, `well, if we can just drift through the next four years without any major crises, how much harm can he do?’

I was torrenting the season premiere of Lost^*. My torrent client, KTorrent^†, is incredibly snazzy and has a nice info-widget where it shows all the peers you’re connected to, as well as (uselessly) where they are located. Check out this international festival:

Argentina	1
Australia	2
Austria	1
Belgium	3
Brazil	7
Canada	8
Colombia	1
Cyprus	1
Czech Republic	2
Finland	4
France	4
Germany	2
Greece	1
Hungary	1
Ireland	1
Israel	1
Italy	1
Kuwait	1
Malaysia	2
Malta	2
Netherlands	1
Norway	1
Poland	8
Romania	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Slovenia	1
Spain	2
Sweden	1
Switzerland	1
Thailand	1
Turkey	1
United Arab Emirates	2
United Kingdom	29
United States	17
Unknown	7

The Internet is definitely cool.

^* I know… the depth of my shame is great. I am hanging my head even now.

^† Only for KDE, chumps!

T to start random searches for bombs.

Now, let’s start off by saying that I recognize the obvious, OBVIOUS constitutional argument doesn’t really hold water, since the T is not a public place - you must pay for the privilege to ride on it, and it is technically private property. That said, it’s quasi-public and a quasi-governmental organisation, and there’s nothing quasi about random bag searches - they undisputably contradict the spirit of the fourth amendment. I imagine most Americans will accept the fear-driven logic that giving up liberties like the right to privacy are necessary in order to ensure public safety. Disproofs of this tomfoolery are difficult or impossible - might-have-beens can’t be demonstrated. All I can do is state my own preference: marginal deterrents to the miniscule risk of terrorism are not worth the sacrifice of very real personal rights. Especially as, being of brown hue and lately prone to sporting the facial hair, I’m disproportionately likely to be “randomly searched”. If this happens to me, I’m going to give someone the finger and get arrested, I think.

I’ve never believed in the expression “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” John Audubon was in his middle age before he became a naturalist and started work on Birds of North America. And it doesn’t even hold true for actual dogs. So I’m confident that it doesn’t apply to me, either. Even if I’m talking about adjusting something I learned at the age of eight months.

I was walking early. I’ve always been annoyingly precocious, and I started toddling around before my body was ready for it. My bones weren’t strong enough to support my weight yet, and the result was that I developed severe bow-leggedness. My mum used to call me “the McDonald’s Arch”, because I would wander around in a pair of yellow pajamas (which I presumably held up with one hand because I had no ass to do the job for me). I had to be fitted with a set of corrective orthopedic braces.^*

All of this is to say, I still have a slight bow-leg, and all my limbs have always hyperextended slightly at their full extension.

Lately I’ve been obsessing about my posture^†. I’ve slouched my whole life.^‡ As a habitual sloucher, I’ve gotten used to bending a certain way, too. I bend at the lower three lumbar vertebrae to do everything, including touching my toes, etc. Observation of other people indicates that this is definitely not the norm - most people bend at the hips. So I’m usually not in the habit of supporting my weight with my lower back, meaning those muscles are weaker.

This in turn affects the way I stand. Because I bow my back out all the time in order to slouch, I usually stand with my knees locked, flexed backwards. I can do this without using any muscles at all, exploiting my deformity and the strength of leg tendon to support me. I think this has left my knees weaker, as well.

I’m working on correcting these things, which mostly involves paying attention to how I walk, making sure I bend my knees instead of keeping them locked, and not standing with my legs flexed or my lower back bowed. This is really bizarre. It seems strange to be almost at the end of my third decade of life and still be working on fundamentals. Makes you pine for the opportunity to converse with your younger self and correct all these things. “Self,” I would say, “you really ought to stop slouching now. Otherwise, when you go insane in your mid-twenties, you’ll have a much harder time of it. It’s better to go insane about worthwhile things, self, like developing a crushing need to paint schizophrenic landscapes on the asphalt in traffic intersections, rather than boring things like walking. It’s unfortunate that you don’t realize how much there is to learn and grow, so you waste your life playing. Believe me, you’ll find it much more fulfilling to be able to play, with all you’ve learned, in your adulthood than it ever could be at your age.”

“Also, don’t spend so much time posting crap on Usenet in your teens,” I would add. “There’s this thing you’ve never heard of called Google Cache that will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“(Scream of terror),” I would reply, trying to punch myself ineffectually.

“Cut that out, self,” I would say, deflecting my strikes off-handedly. “I’ve learned kung-fu in the interim.”

I suppose this is why people have kids.

^* Which were apparently very painful as they readjusted my bones; I would wake up nights screaming and crying.

^‡ Being tall is inconvenient in many ways. For example, eating is much more difficult for tall people. The journey from the plate to your mouth can begin to feel like a transatlantic shipping route if you don’t lean over. And greater height means more splatter if you accidentally drop a bit of food. These sorts of pressures add up and subtly encourage you to correct your height towards the median, usually by slouching or self-mutilation.

I feel like practically everyone I meet in the educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class, white-or-hoping-to-be-white America where I live is “agnostic” about god. They don’t make strong statements one way or the other. There might be a god, they say. There might not.

Happily, such wishy-washiness seems to fade under the glare of a theocracy. In Mexico, where the Roman church continues to have power that approaches that of the semi-elected government, you don’t hear half-way statements. You’re either with god or you’re against him.

A few notes from Chiapas:
- I had a Spanish teacher who, after I said I was an atheist, broke into a big smile and said how great it was to hear that, as he was too. He said it was scary to admit in a city like San Cristobal de las Casas, a very religious town.
- A flyer, in English, arguing for the existence of god, hanging at the Spanish school.
- On the stone exterior of the city cathedral, the spraypainted words, “Ni amor ni dios,” or “Neither love nor god.”

It could be that principled stands against the superstitious version of god are gaining traction. Current Amazon bestsellers (subject to change!) include, at No. 10, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and at No. 5, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. And then at no. 2 is Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death by Gary Renard (about something he calls quantum forgiveness), which may be related in some mysterious way to No. 1, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward.

Note: I admire religious traditions for their maintenance of cultural values and arts over the centuries. I just have no interest in the superstitious notion of omniscient creators and such.

OMG i hav 2 tell u abt this thing i found out its a nu way to talk!!! seems like every 1 on da internet is doing it lol lmao. actually u no it is not ez it is like a dialect even! altho i havnt dun any kindof linguistic analises(sp??) so i dunno if its rely tru… probably its just a pidgin(?). ne way wut do u think??? i used 2 thnk since kidz were online all day they wud b reeding more n also riting bt seems like they dont lmao!!! i mean did u eva see ne1’s my space page no 4 real they are so gay i mean no 1 can spell its like they neva red ne books or ne thing. makes me sad o well cud just be im old and its like youth culture?? but then y is it so dumb?? cud b now ne 1 can rite online even if u r an idiot so we get more idiots riting?? i dont think thats it i think it is anti-intelectualism cuz if u dont spell rite and form complete sentences no 1 will think u r a nerd lol!!! 2 bad u wud think ppl wud want 2 b smarter n rite gud bt seems like frivolity is da rule 2day. goddamn i hope wen i hav kids they can rite gud cuz i wud be ashamed if they rote like an illiterate person… yo where is da pride??? ^_^ ne way l8rz much luv!!!!

Occupying streets is for losers. Occupying Wal-Mart? Now you’re talking. Or hablando, as the case may be.

If you can’t deal with the lengthy and tough-to-comprehend Spanish chanting, just jump 10 minutes into the video. It gets better and better.

And in case you haven’t been closely tracking Mexican politics, they had an election this summer in which the lefty was narrowly beaten by the rightist in an election marked with many irregularities. Voto x Voto, or Voto por voto, or vote by vote, has become the slogan of the lefty’s demonstrators, who occupied the financial core of the nation’s capital for more than a month in August and September.

According to Chris of Attitude Adjustor, such demonstrations took place at 22 Wal-Marts around Mexico City in one afternoon. I don’t know — I was in Mexico at the time and unsurprisingly heard nothing about it on the national news. Maybe this explains why the security at the Wal-Mart near the Refineria metro station got so nervous when I started shooting photos two days ago. (Yes, there’s a subway station for the refinery. I went there just cause I loved its name. The area was dismal, with WalMart sharing space with a mall called “Suburbia” that reminded me mostly of the movie Suburbia.)

Strange, I have so much to write about Mexico and here I am starting by writing about something I see on the Internet rather than all that I saw and recorded with my eyes, pen, recorder and camera.

I’m pretty excited about the Halo movie, which is being produced by Peter Jackson. In an interview with “Aint It Cool News” he insists that the movie is not getting made until he’s satisfied it has a really good script. Right on.

Anyway, the director he chose for the film is a dude named Neill Blomkamp, who has never directed a feature-length film before. The only thing he has directed is a 6-minute short called Alive in Joburg, which “depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa.”