to be cont'd...

ahoy

A couple of days ago someone sent me this photo to my phone. I don't know the person who sent it. But I think it might have been the pirate, sending out an S.O.S. I think he needs me.

the morning after

As is only befitting my currently nauseated and hungover condition, I poured half a bottle of fish sauce down my leg while semi-consciously muddling about in the kitchen. I'm hungover because yesterday was my birthday. And after an evening of dry martinis and some experimental moves on the dance floor, I finished off the night huddled around a tray of tacos at 2 am with some of my dearest friends. The causal effect of which is that I now smell horribly bad.

Having my birthday mid-holiday season used to really suck. When I was younger, no one was around to celebrate it and if they were, no one remembered or cared. The Christmas frenzy generally drove all other thoughts out of their yet undeveloped pea brains. Even my family had to struggle to pretend like they cared. There was always a ring of hollowness about the whole affair, the two-for-one gifting being only one of the many letdowns. But now if I had to choose I wouldn't have my birthday any other way. Mainly because it truly touches me when my friends do remember to call or write. You really know who your friends are at times like these. We are all busy and preoccupied with our own lives, our own families, and as we get older I think it gets harder to have the same emotional energy left over to think of someone else at this time of year.

It's difficult to pinpoint when this change takes place, but at a certain time, Christmas stops being Christmas and birthdays stop being birthdays. Instead you start to feel like they are just days like any other and the only thing that really differentiates them are as memories, memories of shared times. This makes it hard to live in the moment. Instead, the moment is already being thought as something that will later be remembered, sometimes even before it takes place.

This is not the way that I want to live. But it's hard to experience the holidays in any other way. It is just a time for the production of memory--good memories perhaps, but nonetheless based on a hyperconsciousness of time passing. We are constantly on the move, moving from producing one memory to the next, and if we're lucky we'll even remember them. How do you stop time and truly experience a moment? Can't we just learn to be content with right now?

As the new year quickly approaches I would like to suggest that we allow ourselves to get excited about things again like when we were little. Allow ourselves to look forward to the new year, the next step, the unknown, and stop second guessing ourselves, or preparing ourselves for disappointment. There's a lot that I expect or hope that will happen in the next year but I also resolve to try and appreciate things as they happen, not be afraid of the flow of time, and enjoy life as it is without trying to press everything into discrete memories when the clock clicks over.

(Behold, the magical 405 freeway in all its holiday glory.)

feeling the christmas spirit

Two turtle doves and a partridge in a palm tree.
Merry Kwanzukkahmas everyone.

no high impact gyrations

The elevator in my building smelled strongly of Goulden's mustard when I got on today. So much so that in that brief trip down to the parking garage, I was transported to a world of grilled ball park franks saturated with charcoal smoke and the sounds of summer fun. The unseasonably warm 80 degree L.A. weather did not detract from this feeling of going back in time, all of it making me appreciate how connected our olefactory senses are to our memory.

Things have finally settled down here. The frenzied grading has ceased. Christmas presents have been bought. And finally I have a chance to catch up on things, review my week, maybe even the year, and wonder where all the time has gone.

Whether it is related to the Christmas season or not, I have been running into a variety of Hollywood people, perhaps more than I have encountered since I first moved here seven years ago. Maybe it's my own circles of activity that have changed, which if that's the case, I really must be doing something horribly wrong. Though I'm uninterested in the Hollywood scene here and am even less impressed by the idea of celebrities, I frankly find it very difficult to stop staring when I see someone famous. What I usually do is the "pretend I'm not staring" stare. That usually results in a stiff neck and serious eye strain. But how can you not help it? Especially when you notice that most celebrities look like ass in real life.

First on my list of bad looking real life celebrities is David Alan Grier. Now you probably won't know who he is. It took me a while to figure out that he wasn't one of the Wayans brothers. This is how he normally appears on TV. He's an okay comedian. Nothing really remarkable one way or the other until I discovered that in person he looks noticably older. In fact, he reminds me of non-other than the late:




Redd Fox!







Then last week at a sample sale, I looked over at the register next to me at a gargantuan figure looming in my field of vision. Aside from my surprise that Marcia Cross, generally considered an "A-list" celebrity, was at a sale that I would be attending, in any case, I think that she's delightfully pretty on TV so I was in no way prepared for seeing her in her unadulterated state.

Which is as the spitting image of Skeletor. I am not exaggerating when I say that she must have been about six feet tall but weighed only a hundred pounds or so. Her face gives new meaning to the word "gaunt". Yet, despite her gauntness, her hair is very red and she has freckles, making her lovely still.


My last celebrity sighting is one that makes me truly marvel at the magic of TV makeup. How is it possible that this actress, Christine Elise, most notable for her appearances as bad girl "Emily" on Beverly Hills 90210 (which I swear I hardly ever watched), someone who I only remember because of this weird thing she had going on with her jaw, would in actuality look uncannily like...

Gary Busey.

In fact, I was working out right next to her at my kickboxing class this morning and I nearly fell on the floor a couple of times because I was transfixed by her sandpaper-like skin and the deep crevasses lining her face. She looked to me like she might be a hundred years old.

Well, thank god I got that out of my system. Now I can move on to contemplating other less important things like when I'm going to finally hand in my chapter to my advisor and whether I'll get hired in the coming year... For the time being, I think I may have to go back to the elevator, breathe deeply and think of summer barbecues.

in the shop

For those of you wondering about my spotty postings of late, it's because my flux capacitor is on the fritz and needs to be taken into the shop. Actually I've been busy as it's the end of the quarter but hope to be back to writing soon.

for huck's sake

This day isn't starting well. I'm staring at a brown spot the shape of Australia on my once creamy carpet. I was walking across the floor with a cup brimming full of coffee and sneezed just as I reached my desk. But damn if the coffee wasn't worth it. I was going to write about something totally different today after my brief post-Thanksgiving hiatus, that is before I started checking my email and realized that today is the "For Huck's Sake" benefit party. Even if you're not going to be in San Francisco you should rouse your weary fingers from your keypad and take a look at this story about Huck Gee, an artist who is being deported by U.S. Homeland Security for a crime he was convicted of as an 18 year old that involved a $5 bag of marijuana. It makes you want to pull your hair out.

And for those of my friends who never got around to getting your citizenship (you know who you are) you might want to do something about it before you guys get the boot too. Who knows what is in store for you if you don't. I don't know if they get the internet in North Korea. Will write more as soon as I get that damn spot off the floor.

(Photo from Huck's website.)

the bird is the word

Q: What did the mama turkey say to the baby turkey?


A: 까불지마! (nyuknyuknyuk)

Happy Thanksgiving!

bestill my heart

It's official. I am madly in love with Barack Obama. Democratic Senator of Illinois. That disarming smile. The twinkling eyes. And holding his own against Jon Stewart, oh how he makes me swoon. Take a look at his interview on Comedy Central.

kankokujin wa...

Every now and then the Japanese simply freak out and start some bizarre popular trend like wearing pubic hairpieces or dressing like hawaiian surfer kids. Well, the most recent Japanese craze over Korean entertainers has apparently spawned a newer uglier reactionary wave of racism, setting back race relations in East Asia by one hundred years. I guess the Japanese just never got over losing the Pacific War. A friend just sent me this NY Times article which I'm posting here in full for you to read:

Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

TOKYO, Nov. 14 - A young Japanese woman in the comic book "Hating the Korean Wave" exclaims, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of today!" In another passage the book states that "there is nothing at all in Korean culture to be proud of."

In another comic book, "Introduction to China," which portrays the Chinese as a depraved people obsessed with cannibalism, a woman of Japanese origin says: "Take the China of today, its principles, thought, literature, art, science, institutions. There's nothing attractive."

The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months.

In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles, the books reveal some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening relations with the rest of Asia.

They also point to Japan's longstanding unease with the rest of Asia and its own sense of identity, which is akin to Britain's apartness from the Continent. Much of Japan's history in the last century and a half has been guided by the goal of becoming more like the West and less like Asia. Today, China and South Korea's rise to challenge Japan's position as Asia's economic, diplomatic and cultural leader is inspiring renewed xenophobia against them here.

Kanji Nishio, a scholar of German literature, is honorary chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the nationalist organization that has pushed to have references to the country's wartime atrocities eliminated from junior high school textbooks.

Mr. Nishio is blunt about how Japan should deal with its neighbors, saying nothing has changed since 1885, when one of modern Japan's most influential intellectuals, Yukichi Fukuzawa, said Japan should emulate the advanced nations of the West and leave Asia by dissociating itself from its backward neighbors, especially China and Korea.

"I wonder why they haven't grown up at all," Mr. Nishio said. "They don't change. I wonder why China and Korea haven't learned anything."

Mr. Nishio, who wrote a chapter in the comic book about South Korea, said Japan should try to cut itself off from China and South Korea, as Fukuzawa advocated. "Currently we cannot ignore South Korea and China," Mr. Nishio said. "Economically, it's difficult. But in our hearts, psychologically, we should remain composed and keep that attitude."

The reality that South Korea had emerged as a rival hit many Japanese with full force in 2002, when the countries were co-hosts of soccer's World Cup and South Korea advanced further than Japan. At the same time, the so-called Korean Wave - television dramas, movies and music from South Korea - swept Japan and the rest of Asia, often displacing Japanese pop cultural exports.

The wave, though popular among Japanese women, gave rise to a countermovement, especially on the Internet. Sharin Yamano, the young cartoonist behind "Hating the Korean Wave," began his strip on his own Web site then.

"The 'Hate Korea' feelings have spread explosively since the World Cup," said Akihide Tange, an editor at Shinyusha, the publisher of the comic book. Still, the number of sales, 360,000 so far, surprised the book's editors, suggesting that the Hate Korea movement was far larger than they had believed.

"We weren't expecting there'd be so many," said Susumu Yamanaka, another editor at Shinyusha. "But when the lid was actually taken off, we found a tremendous number of people feeling this way."

So far the two books, each running about 300 pages and costing around $10, have drawn little criticism from public officials, intellectuals or the mainstream news media. For example, Japan's most conservative national daily, Sankei Shimbun, said the Korea book described issues between the countries "extremely rationally, without losing its balance."

As nationalists and revisionists have come to dominate the public debate in Japan, figures advocating an honest view of history are being silenced, said Yutaka Yoshida, a historian at Hitotsubashi University here. Mr. Yoshida said the growing movement to deny history, like the Rape of Nanjing, was a sort of "religion" for an increasingly insecure nation.

"Lacking confidence, they need a story of healing," Mr. Yoshida said. "Even if we say that story is different from facts, it doesn't mean anything to them."

The Korea book's cartoonist, who is working on a sequel, has turned down interview requests. The book centers on a Japanese teenager, Kaname, who attains a "correct" understanding of Korea. It begins with a chapter on how South Korea's soccer team supposedly cheated to advance in the 2002 Word Cup; later chapters show how Kaname realizes that South Korea owes its current success to Japanese colonialism.

"It is Japan who made it possible for Koreans to join the ranks of major nations, not themselves," Mr. Nishio said of colonial Korea.

But the comic book, perhaps inadvertently, also betrays Japan's conflicted identity, its longstanding feelings of superiority toward Asia and of inferiority toward the West. The Japanese characters in the book are drawn with big eyes, blond hair and Caucasian features; the Koreans are drawn with black hair, narrow eyes and very Asian features.

That peculiar aesthetic, so entrenched in pop culture that most Japanese are unaware of it, has its roots in the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century, when Japanese leaders decided that the best way to stop Western imperialists from reaching here was to emulate them.

In 1885, Fukuzawa - who is revered to this day as the intellectual father of modern Japan and adorns the 10,000 yen bill (the rough equivalent of a $100 bill) - wrote "Leaving Asia," the essay that many scholars believe provided the intellectual underpinning of Japan's subsequent invasion and colonization of Asian nations.

Fukuzawa bemoaned the fact that Japan's neighbors were hopelessly backward.

Writing that "those with bad companions cannot avoid bad reputations," Fukuzawa said Japan should depart from Asia and "cast our lot with the civilized countries of the West." He wrote of Japan's Asian neighbors, "We should deal with them exactly as the Westerners do."

As those sentiments took root, the Japanese began acquiring Caucasian features in popular drawing. The biggest change occurred during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905, when drawings of the war showed Japanese standing taller than Russians, with straight noses and other features that made them look more European than their European enemies.

"The Japanese had to look more handsome than the enemy," said Mr. Nagayama.

Many of the same influences are at work in the other new comic book, "An Introduction to China," which depicts the Chinese as obsessed with cannibalism and prostitution, and has sold 180,000 copies.

The book describes China as the "world's prostitution superpower" and says, without offering evidence, that prostitution accounts for 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product. It describes China as a source of disease and depicts Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi saying, "I hear that most of the epidemics that broke out in Japan on a large scale are from China."

The book waves away Japan's worst wartime atrocities in China. It dismisses the Rape of Nanjing, in which historians say 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese soldiers in 1937-38, as a fabrication of the Chinese government devised to spread anti-Japanese sentiment.

The book also says the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 - which researched biological warfare and conducted vivisections, amputations and other experiments on thousands of Chinese and other prisoners - was actually formed to defend Japanese soldiers against the Chinese.

"The only attractive thing that China has to offer is Chinese food," said Ko Bunyu, a Taiwan-born writer who provided the script for the comic book. Mr. Ko, 66, has written more than 50 books on China, some on cannibalism and others arguing that Japanese were the real victims of their wartime atrocities in China. The book's main author and cartoonist, a Japanese named George Akiyama, declined to be interviewed.

Like many in Taiwan who are virulently anti-China, Mr. Ko is fiercely pro-Japanese and has lived here for four decades. A longtime favorite of the Japanese right, Mr. Ko said anti-Japan demonstrations in China early this year had earned him a wider audience. Sales of his books surged this year, to one million.

"I have to thank China, really," Mr. Ko said. "But I'm disappointed that the sales of my books could have been more than one or two million if they had continued the demonstrations."

(From The New York Times, November 19, 2005)

i know where you peed last summer

I pride myself, if anything, on being able to admit when I'm wrong. But even at my wrongest, there is usually an important lesson to be learned. This particular one should be resoundingly clear. Be careful where you pee.

After a heated debate I had with a guy recently, over whether the rumor is true, whether it is dangerous for men to pee off a boat in the Amazon because parasites will swim up your "member", I was forced to engage in a furious bout of googling producing the following results which I feel it is my hallowed duty to share with the rest of you. If you're squeamish, I forewarn you to stop reading now.

It is a documented fact that there is a parasite native to the Amazon river called the Candiru (Vandellia cirrhosa), affectionately known as the "vampire catfish", which will swim up a stream of pee. According to medical science, firsthand accounts, and urban legend, all of which I weigh equally seriously when determining anything worth repeating, this fish is an agressive urinophilic fish, meaning that it is attracted to the smell of urine. This fish will then locate the source of this smell and swim vigorously up the openings of any human or animal cavity.

If this isn't enough to shiver your timbers, let me add this gruesome detail. After the fish swims up your organ, it spreads its spines, yes that's right spines, and begins to feed off of your tissues and blood.

It was also said that even if one caught the fish by the tail, once in the urethra it could not be pulled out because it would spread itself like an umbrella.

Because the fish spreads its gill covers in trying to get oxygen, the sharp spinous processes on the ends of the opercula engage the urethral wall making extraction from the urethra almost impossible or at least most traumatic.

From “Candiru: Urinophilic Catfish Its Gift to Urology,” John R. Herman, M.D.

An umbrella gentlemen! Spinous opercula! I don't even know what that means but I know it's bad. Apparently, the fish is so difficult to remove, that the most common solution has been penile amputation. Let's venture further shall we?

When candirus parasitize humans, it is usually only when they are skinny-dipping while urinating in the water. The candiru tastes the urine stream and follows it back to the human. It then swims up the anus and lodges itself somewhere in the urinary tract with its spines. Blood is drawn, and the candiru gorges itself on both the blood and body tissue, its body sometimes expanding due to the amount of blood. This is all said to be very painful for the poor person who has this happen to him or her. Unfortunately, they are almost impossible to remove due to the spines. Amputation of the private areas is the cheapest, and most life-changing, way to remove the fish. Actual surgery is extremely expensive and involves inserting the Xagua plant and the Buitach apple up the urethra. These two plants kill and even dissolve the parasitic fish. If surgery is not done in time, the blockage of the urinary tract will prove fatal. The candiru is the only known vertebrate to parasitize humans. (link)

Oo. Ouch. Ew.

While the jury still appears to be out regarding whether this fish may actually be able to swim up a stream of piss belonging to a guy on a boat, it should be clear that it is not totally impossible. And when in doubt? Cross your legs or pee in a cup. But all humans appear to be fair game, as the Candiru will swim up male and female genitalia alike, and appears to enjoy the anus as well! Clearly a hearty fish. Too bad it's so small or I fancy it may be good eating in the same way that bottom feeders and certain shellfish are particularly tasty. I wonder what the Prophet Mohammed might have to say about this.

For further reading, feel free to look up E. W. Gudger's "On the alleged penetration of the human urethra by an Amazonian catfish called candiru with a review of the allied habits of other members of the family pygidiidae part I" Americal Journal of Surgery 8(1) pp. 170-188.

I myself am moving onto another promising article found while browsing: Heinrich L. Wehrbein's "Cytological study of gonorrheal pus" Americal Journal of Surgery 8(1). 75-80.
Who knew medical journals would be so fascinating.