Sorry for the blog being down (not that anyone except for Adam noticed) — I forgot to renew my domain name. All that seems to be fixed now.
I’m in Anchorage, AK right now. The sun rises here at around 4:30 and sets at around 11:30 these days, so it’s still pretty bright out. Fortunately, the hotel has heavy drapes to block out the near-midnight sun. I may later spruce up this post with some photos.
Even the NY Times had an article in the Friday issue about it, but the new focuses on the main business point, which is that Verizon and AT&T basically snapped up the lion’s share. Hopefully it won’t be “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” but I’m a little less sanguine. Floating under the radar was an attachment from Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, who said:
It’s appalling that women and minorities were virtually shut out of this monumental auction. It’s an outrage that we’ve failed to counter the legacy of discrimination that has kept women and minorities from owning their fair share of the spectrum. Here we had an enormous opportunity to open the airwaves to a new generation that reflects the diversity of America, and instead we just made a bad situation even worse. This gives whole new meaning to “white spaces” in the spectrum.
I usually think of Commissioners as a little less fiery, but I guess that’s just a stereotype. Maybe he was inspired to speak out by Obama’s call for more dialogue about race, but after looking at his record it seems totally consistent. Personally, I think that he’s just the kind of guy we need at the FCC!
Via Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy, here is a link to a legal blog’s interview and discussion of some of the legal aspects of the show.
For the record, I was dubious at first, but Bobak’s evangelizing convinced me to start watching. BSG is one of those few shows that opens some good hard questions in a way that doesn’t grate horribly on my aesthetic nerves (c.f. Joss Whedon, for me). I don’t agree with the politics or aesthetics always, but there is good fodder for debate, to my mind.
Via Lifehacker, I learned about Furoshiki, a traditional Japanese cloth wrapping. You’re less likely to get paper cuts than with origami, but you still get the fun schematic diagrams.
Apparently the Japanese Environment minister (they have an environment minister? Is that essentially the Dept. of the Interior?) wants to promote the use of them. Although you can buy them from vendors, it’s the sort of thing that screams “DIY.”
I went to the keynote for the Global Conversations conference, sponsored by the UC Irvine International Center for Writing and Translation, this morning. It was given by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose books I have always meant to read but never have. The theme of the conference is how to address marginalized languages, and his keynote made a number of points that I thought were interesting.
Firstly, he had to address the issue of the rich body of literature, especially postcolonial literature, that is written in the langugage of the colonizers. It’s not just a colonial issue, so the appropriate binary here is dominant/marginalized. The overarching point was that writing in the language of the dominant impoverishes the local — it enables the access to the world stage but disables the home culture by taking away new cultural products. “Visibility in the dominant becomes invisibility in the marginalized,” he said. What then, is the place of conversation between different marginalized communities? While not outright calling for an activism or solidarity movement, he posed a goal of the conference as to kickstart the interactions that might initiate.
A second smaller point had to do with paralleling the language of technology transfer from industrialized to developing nations to more general knowledge and cultural production. While it’s true that strategies for preservation and revitalization can be transferred, the “working together” is what’s really interesting. Can different marginalized linguistic communities work together without losing something?
Salon’s interview with Barry Glassner is really interesting. What’s nice is that he brings up the way in which the organic/healthy/no-trans-fat/etc food movement ignores the glaring issues of class (and race, reading between the lines) that are the real problem in our society. While it would be nice if we ate healthier, these healthy meals have to be affordable and efficient to those with the fewest resources (time and money) to spend on meals. I might get his book (from the library) to get more of the details.
(via Winnie’s post at get in my belly.)
“The Posse Comitatus.” Or maybe “John Wayne and the Posse Comitatus.” Or whoever’s fronting the band. The only question is what kind of music would the play? Country? Rockabilly Punk? Super indie rock?
Hair barred from internationals.
Seriously though, what went down in the England/Pakistan test match was pretty inexcusable. The British can’t stand to be bested at their own sport by their ex-colonies…
If you’ll forgive the Seinfeldism, what’s the deal with “amusingly named” coffeeshops?
Is it that people are more willing to take the terrible puns before they’ve had their coffee?
Ok, that’s not the best anagram for Opal Mehta, but it’s the best I could do on short notice. I’ve watched the story unfold over the past weeks, starting with the original Harvard Crimson article, and then all the collective handwringing and schadenfreude. On the one hand, I think she’s a dumb kid who was caught and should pay for it, but not for the rest of her life. On the other, she’s 18, and officially an adult, so I guess she should have expected this. But maybe we should spread the blame around to her money-grubbing producers and the “packaging company” that shares the copyright.
I have to admit that I’m baffled by this essay from Sandip Roy. He, tongue in cheek, thanks Viswanathan for proving “that finally we can fail, that we can screw up spectacularly and live to tell the tale.” He then goes into a lengthy standard complaint about upper middle class Indians in the US, the model minority thing, and overachieving and pushy parents. It’s about the system from within the system, and says nothing about class disparity within the South Asian community in the US, the differences between recent versus established immigrants, the Hindu/Muslim gap, or any of that.
In pointing out how Kaavya-gate (as some are calling it) helps disprove the model minority myth by proving that South Asians aren’t all superhuman superachievers, Roy can be seen to reify that stereotype. Implicit in his “not superhuman” claim we can find “but still high-achievers.” That’s too much, I think. His point is that these pushy parents need to find some perspective. But does the Opal Mehta debacle really point that out? I don’t think so — this lacks the kind of Aristotelian tragic ending that would really send the message home. Roy wants to indict the parents with the child. But to do that we would need some anagnoresis (the tragic hero’s recognition of their own flaw) that comes from them. Instead we have some crap about photographic memories and unintentional internalization. No amount of media spectacle will affect the hordes of pushy parents unless the pushiness itself can be unambiguously blamed.
So Roy’s essay seems off-mark to me. But maybe if I have mo phat ale I’ll start to think differently.
An Ergodic Walk 