You MUST look at the pictures of us troops torturing iraqis.

Torture is never justified. The people doing the torturing should be put to a military trial and shot if found guilty. pictures nytimes article

reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and C.I.A. agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."

According to the New Yorker article, the Army report offered accounts of rampant and gruesome abuse from October to December of 2003 that included the sexual assault of an Iraqi detainee with a chemical light stick or broomstick.

Prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks, witnesses told Army investigators, according to the report obtained by The New Yorker. Much of the abuse was sexual, with prisoners often kept naked and forced to perform simulated and real sex acts, witnesses testified. Mr. Hersh notes that such degradations, while deeply offensive in any culture, are particularly humiliating to Arabs because Islamic law and culture so strongly condemn nudity and homosexuality.

images below... First the american ones.

brit ones now

update - may 4th - there are some allegations that the british pictures are a hoax. however the US ones are still definitely true.
Sunday, May 2, 2004

link

In reversing the lower court decision, presiding Judge Toshinobu Akiyama of the high court said it was technically possible for Yanagi to snatch a bullet from a plastic bag placed on a table as evidence, when the two interrogators were not looking. The judge also said that Yanagi was accustomed to using a handgun and thus could load the weapon and shoot himself in the presence of one of the officers.

The japanese "Justice" system.

Let's see, you've got a guy in an interrogation room and he is shot. Ignoring the more usual "police shoot suspect" or "suspect shoots police" stories, the judge finds that the suspect grabbed a gun and bullets, loaded the gun, and shot himself. Oh yeah, and the officers aren't even held responsible for letting a prisoner snatch a gun and bullets from them either.

Pitiful. Keep putting up with it, suckers.
Saturday, May 1, 2004

Here are my stock holdings.

Symbol	Held	Bid	Ask	Lst	Description
Bush04	-313	53	55	53	GW Bush remains US Pres. '04	This is the lowest Bush has been in a while. I started selling at 60, now I'm buying back at 53 and making money. The more it goes down the more money I make.
CONG05	-117	83	86	86	GOP holds Congress in 2005	It's really high, so buying NO shares is cheap. I think there's at least a 15% chance dems take control of at least one house of congress... especially the senate.
Demo04	4	45	47	47	Democrat wins Presidency-2004	even though the polls have kerry and bush about even, dems have always traded lower than republicans.
Draft	50	30	31	31	US conscription before 2010	I bought into this at 32, then was losing money for a while. It's gone up recently.
GoCh	-68	37	41	38	Machine GO Champion by 2020	I am really confident that there won't be a machine go champ for a long, long time. The problem is that I don't want to wait until 2020 to collect. Otherwise I'd put all my money into it.
IraqED	-146	45	50	50	Free elections in Iraq < 3 yrs	A few weeks ago this one was trading in the 80s. I sold some then, and when things started to go bad over there, it dropped to 50. I made a bunch. This is one case where all the lefty blogs I read that said things were going terribly over there turned out to be right.
mdvw	-10	21	25	26	A device can view human mind
MJ06	126	50	58	57	Michael Jackson found guillty	I bought in at around 50. It was down for a while, but it's gone up recently as he's been indited and has split with his legal team. You never can tell with these legal cases though. I'll get out if it goes to 60 or 65.
NUKE	-12	47	49	49	Nuclear Weapon Used by 2010	I think this is unlikely.
OBLnov	77	38	41	38	Bin Laden gone before election	doh. I fell for those rumors that he was already caught and they were just waiting to pop him out right before the election. I bought in at 50, and now it's down. I will probably lose this money.
USAGeo	0	18	22	22	U.S. Geography changes	This claim is that at least 500 miles or 5% of a state's area will be lost or gained, or that a state will split into two other states, before 2008. I think it's really unlikely but I don't have the cash to get into it right now. Plus the max return would be just 25% over 4 years.
WarmSU	2	83	85	85	Pres Mentions Global Warming	I created this claim! I noticed that Clinton mentioned global warming in his last three SOTUs, but Bush hasn't mentioned it for 4 years running. If a dem wins, it'll almost definitely come true. Even if Bush wins, can he avoid talking about global warming for another 4 years? I wouldn't put it past him. I'm surprised this one is trading so high.
Yen	-1245	33	35	33	Dollar-Yen Exchange Rate below 80	This is my major investment. If the yen got so valuable (or dollar so worthless) it would indicate a really major change in the world. The yen's strongest value ever was 84, before it crashed. When I was in Japan it started at 105 and went up to 129. Now it's back to 107 or so. I think it's really really unlikely that it'll go below 80. Even going below 90 would amaze me.

You buy shares in various claims about the real world. If the claim comes true, people who bought YES shares get 100 for each share they bought. If you bought NO and it doesn't come true, then you also get 100. So you can make money by buying undervalued claims, or by selling overvalued claims. I have made the most money by selling "free election in iraq" claims. Now that that's looking much less likely, I've made lots of money off of it.

The interface leaves something to be desired, but it's as addictive as any other internet game, and you actually learn something. It originated as a way to keep track of all those pundits who make predictions. If you forced them to invest money based on their predictions, after a few years we'd see who was rich, and we could just listen to those guys.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004

I went to Rutgers University. A paper there that I used to read is in the new york times.

Interspersed with photos of nude women, close-ups of genitalia and explicit personals ads, were mock news stories like one about the "death" of a campus computer server unit.

The publication, The Medium - a journal of news and opinion that features humor, cultural items and sexual and scatological references - ran a cartoon depicting a bearded man wearing a hat and sitting on the edge of an open kitchen stove in a carnival setting. Under the heading "Holocaust Remembrance Week," the cartoon's caption reads: "Knock a Jew in the oven! Three throws for one dollar!"

They did do a good job making fun of the president of the university for his numerous questionable runins with the law - 1st getting mugged late one sunday night at a liquor store and 2nd accidentally bumping a cops car on his way home, getting followed home by the cop who let him off the hook despite noticing he was shaky and seemed drunk. I think there was one more too.
Monday, April 26, 2004

driving in china

1) Please identify all vehicles/obstacles in the road at any one given time:

__ Pedestrians (walking, sitting in the road or otherwise)
__ Bicycles, tricycles and other human powered transportation
__ Overloaded animal drawn carts (horse, donkey, cow, camel, etc)
__ Tractors, big and small with overloaded trailers
__ Motorcycles, motor scooters, tricycles and other under powered vehicles
__ Road workers (working or sitting)
__ Overloaded trucks or speeding empty trucks
__ Buses stopped to pick up passengers
__ Broken down vehicles and/or accidents
__ Goods waiting to be picked up
__ Oncoming traffic of any of the above
__ Oncoming traffic of any of the above in your lane

If you have checked all of the above you are in China.

Wow. How long would you last in china with this on your tshirt?


Month long vacation.





God and the ancient chinese


Every syllable has a tone, but sometimes it changes depending on the nearby tones. If there are a bunch of 3rd tones in a row, all of them but the last change to 2nd tone. I asked people here if there are strange sentences where every tone is 3rd tone, so they almost all have to change. But they said there weren't.

It's like if there's a dying man in bed and there is an apple and a banana on the bed next to him. Someone says "what fruit poisoned you??" and he says "It was an ... [dies]". In this case you'd know that he was going to say apple. In chinese there's the same thing, if someone dies in the middle of a word but his last syllable was strangely converted to 2nd tone, you know that his next word was going to start with third tone.
So pronunciation information flows backwards, but only a little.


When I first started learning mandarin (like a month ago) I didn't understand how tone works. I thought that the tone of every syllable was related to the previous one... so after a bunch of rising tones, you'd be really high. But actually it resets after every syllable. So if you say a bunch of falling tones, between them you have to go back up. You have to change the tone as you say the syllable, but you also have to go back to a baseline between them. That makes it a lot easier.

Learning tone is really interesting. I've heard that standard chinese has few tones compared to the other dialects... I think cantonese has 8. I heard thai has 5...

they've also got tons of vowels.

uh, yeah. linguistic mysticism


linguistics mysticism





sprial


dialect areas of china - I'm in the upper right of the Xiang area. Almost everybody speaks standard putonghua.


"percent correct"











orbital trajectories


pascal's triangle


spiral of music


i love this chart





graph theory


the social justice message of the bible





Macho japanese


GETT!

if you don't have anything interesting to say, don't say anything at all!
Thursday, April 8, 2004

procedure for playing basketball

china;
1. get a ball
2. walk to the court
3. make teams
4. play

japan
1. call the court, make a reservation for a certain time
2. get an "inside ball" which you have never used outside.
3. get there
4. change clothes, but keep your old shoes on
5. when entering the "inside shoes zone" around the court, slip into your "inside shoes", which you have supposedly never work outside
6. stretch
7. warm up
8. make teams
9. appoint a scorekeeper, and get an official scoring board with the flip numbers
10. play
11. after the game do full court passing running and layup drills.
12. sweet up the sweat

when you eat here you can just take food directly from the public plates and put it into your mouth. there's not this annoying step of transferring it to your plate first.
Sunday, April 4, 2004

I have heard that frozen patches of spit are a major cause of winter injury in China.

machiavelli game:
a fun game I play with students make groups of 3 people. the group has 10 dollars. if any two of them agree no how to split the money, it's finished. so first one person says to another, how about I get 5 and you get 5? if they shake hands, it's over. so of course the third one says no no, I will take 4 and give you 6! to one of them. Then the one left out can make a counter offer. It's hard to explain to them, but they get it after one example. And then they start yelling and pushing each other, grabbing hands etc.

I got it from a psychology article about people trying to develop a paper test to see if they could predict who was likely to get more money. i.e. detecting machiavellianism.

learning chinese
I found a chinese teacher. I have had 6 hours of lessons so far. chinese is hard in a totally different way than japanese. the grammar seems to be easy, but there are just some sounds I can't hear or say right. there's another vowel, u with an umlat, that's not in english. there's are two versions of sh zh ch. and of course tones.

I've never felt so helpless because of language before. I know like 30 words now and two sentence patterns... for ppl who were in japan with me, I'm sorry I never understood before how hard it could be to go to a restaurant and order. now I understand.

I've recently gotten confident enough to say thank you in chinese when I buy something.

Another funny game: make pairs. take one person outside and say they're the husband and they just won 10000 dollars, and they want to use it to take a trip to New York. Then tell the other one seperately that they're the wife and they've always dreamed of going to Tokyo. Put them together and have them go at it. They really, really get into it, they can go on for 10 minutes.

I find that some element of acting and conflict, done in small groups, gets almost every student to start talking and yelling like crazy, grabbing each other, pushing, shouting. It's fun when I find a good conversation that really gets them going.

When I first got here someone said "which state are you from?", but I didn't understand. So they said "you know, which of the 56 states are you from?" They were referring to puerto rico, the virgin islands etc I guess. So strange... I forgot those elements of the american empire.

I'm reading "The People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn now. I'm only up to around 1800. It's really interesting. It's easy to forget the incredible amount of suffering that's gone on.

It talks a lot about class issues, and how the tiny ruling elite gives crumbs to the middle class to make them a buffer against the poor. One really interesting part was how in the 1600s there were lots of slaves who would run away with white indentured servants, since they understood each other's problems. The owners were so afraid of this that they started to give more benefits to servants and poor whites, to make them feel superior to blacks. It drove a wedge between two groups that should have been allies. And that division has persisted to this day. It also talks about how during the american revolution there were various other small scale revolutions, farmers getting together and shutting down courts or trashing rich people's houses. The anger was definitely not directed only at the british.

The other day I went to a teacher's house for lunch. We got there, ate a bunch of pistachios, and watched part of 21 grams, master and commander, the last 10 seconds of an NBA game with Yao Ming, and lord of the rings. Then lunch. The law teacher and her husband cooked. He had on his fireman's uniform, military style, green with lots of medals and orange shoulder stripes. During lunch they laughed, drank beer and got red, yelled about their different accents. Apparently "girl" in one dialect means "hand" in another. Then after, we tried to pick out a movie to watch. we looked through them, yelled, stamped our feet, tossed movies around and watched the first 5 minutes of a bunch of them. There was so much laughter and mock anger. I couldn't imagine it happening in japan. I know there are some great people in japan... but lots of too serious people too. Here I imagine there's more recognition of human nature... in this internet cafe, the person behind the desk who checks you in is now sitting next to me, watching a movie. When someone comes in she runs over and meets them... but there's no point in just sitting there, she's human after all and that's boring! Of course it's probably really terrible working in factories here, just like everywhere else...

Anyway back to the teacher's house... I left, then came back for dinner, after we went out to sing karaoke. I sang country roads to a 70s background video. They sang songs which had two sets of subtitles, one mandarin, one cantonese. The fireman sung some songs in his local dialect.


Sunday, March 28, 2004

I watched some of that show 24... The ridiculously unrealistic terrorists love complicated plans involving hundreds of people and seem to have all sorts of abilities such as buggins CIA offices, smuggling bombs onto planes etc, yet are unable to take out a presidential candidate. In his pursuit of the terrorists, the main character seizes private property, takes a hostage, threatens her life, kidnaps another man, threatens to torture him, and withholds his medicine. There are also a lot of situations where it's like "look, I know you're guilty, and if it weren't for that darn constitution and justice process we could torture you and get some valuable information". Yes, why don't we just get rid of that "no cruel and unusual punishment" garbage once and for all...
Sunday, March 28, 2004

Kerry McCain 04!!!!!! I would be so happy!
Friday, March 26, 2004

I downloaded this chinese chat client called "qq" to chat with my students. It has tons of options i don't understand, and I clicked on one by accident. Pretty soon the student I was talking to said he could hear music! i'd clicked the button that transmits the sound playing on my computer to his also! It wasn't a microphone, just the sound across the sound card. amazing!!!!
Saturday, March 20, 2004

Children of the future Age / Reading this indignant page, / Know that in a former time / Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.

William Blake
Friday, March 19, 2004

great

indeed

asahara sonshi point card - points accumulate death sentence GET

that's right

slacktivist slacktivist is so awesome. political commentary. recently:

Canada says that they didn't support the war because the us never showed them the "secret evidence". despite the fact that normally the us shares all kinds of secrets with them. Since the US refused to give them anything more than the standard "we have secret evidence" line, they concluded that there wasn't any real evidence of WMD, so they didn't support the war. Seems pretty obvious they were right!
Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Today at the beginning of my first class two really old wrinkled men opened the door and shuffled in. They made an announcement to the class, and people assembled some change, some 6 cent bills and some 12 cent coins, and gave it to them. When I asked the class who they'd been, at first they said beggars, but then one person said that they weren't beggars, that they'd just lost all their money.

At the end of class I was trying to get them to vote on the best presentation. The rules were simple - one person one vote, and you can't vote for yourself. Also, you must vote.

These rules are necessary, otherwise everyone votes for themself, people vote multiple times, or nobody votes. I have to reinforce the idea that you can't vote twice. Also when you're voting you don't need to raise both hands while hiding your head behind the person in front of you.

I got internet at home, and I managed to figure out how to install "QQ" which is a chinese version of aim or icq instant messaging. It's nice, but rather hard to figure out, hundreds of buttons, windows popping up everywhere.

The students always asked me what my number is, so one of them (A quiet, smart boy named Romeo) made an account for me and I gave it out. A bunch of students added me to their list.

This afternoon my go playing friend called me and said that a man I'd played go with in her class wanted to play me, so could she come over in 5 minutes? They came over and I played him and lost a couple times. Afterwards we went over the games and he chatted about the moves in chinese while she sent messages on her phone. We got as far as "good", "bad", and I also had a use for the one go term I know in chinese, "jie" = japanese "ko".

This is my first time living in a country where I have no spoken language. It's been almost a month now and I still don't know the numbers beyond 3... I'm asking around for a teacher though.

I love the lifestyle here, bumping into people you know when you're out, going out to eat with different people every day.

Today for lunch a teacher friend of go girl (from here on qiao ting) invited me over for lunch. So I went and we ate off two chairs with newspaper which had been used for calligraphy pactice as a placemat. It was good. When I walked in she handed me a book open to a chapter about "substantive due process" and the rachner era of the supreme court, and a copy of the constitution, and asked if I knew anything about it. She is an international law teacher. I was also asked "do you know Chairman Mao?"

Tomorrow I'm going to visit her bilingual international law class.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004

1. i watched "bridge on the river kwai" the other day. one amusing moment was when they gave the security number of a soldier - 1234567. nobody batted an eye. it was just like how everyone in a movie has a phone number starting with 555.

is there actually a law about that, or just tradition? I wish they'd picked something less obvious, hearing 555 always distracts me.

2. the other day i asked my students to make up skits. 20 minutes to prepare for a 2 minute skit, in groups.

here's the best one: 3 boys standing on the stage (in front of the chalk board there's a stage about 1 foot high that the teacher stands on). another boy introduces them as saddam hussein, george bush, and osama bin laden. they are in a WC.
saddam: hi, bush
bush: hi, saddam.
saddam: you are so wonderful
bush: thanks
saddam: can you help me?
bush: what?
saddam: can you give me a paper?
bush: what? no, no way
saddam: please
bush: i will give it to you if you tell me where osama is.
saddam: ok, if you give me a paper.
bush: [gives him TP]
saddam: you know, he's right behind you
bush: you!
[exit]

another one by 3 girls. two girls arm in arm, another walks up: who are you? he is my husband! what? you're married? yes! who are you? i'm her boyfriend!! go away, just leave! don't you love me? no! fuck you, get out of here! what?? but i love you truly! hey do you want me to fight you? do you love him? no, go away! oh

etc

they are so great, this was a quiet class and they just made these skits up out of the blue after i taught them these phrases: no way, geez, wow, uh-uh and uh-huh.

here's anothing thing I did with them:

i say "china has a population problem: here are some ideas to fix it"
a. man-made islands
b. underground cities
c. over 60? move to the country
d. get paid for having no kids
e. 5 years in the city, 2 years in the country
f. buy land from other countries.

they pick the ideas from a hat and discuss.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Hi

Here's some considerably more boring stories about stuff that's happened to me china.

Last night I went roller skating with some students, sophmores and freshmen Pizza, Crystal, Casey, Terry, Leo, and a few more. It turned out to be a very small 70s style rink with blinking lights, wood tile floors, and lots of young sweaty gay men. My students didn't seem to notice, but they did remark quite a few times how people there are "very crazy". I couldn't tell what that referred to.

Although everyone was facing counterclockwise, about half of them were skating backwards, twice as fast. A bunch of the guys would occasionally get together in this huge mass and careen around knocking people down or dragging them along, all while smoking, doing splits, and dodging the karaoke singers. The most noticable one was a short stocky chinese man in a green sleeveless tshirt and baseball cap, really good skater, about 35, who'd skate around spinning and accidentally bumping into people. Luckily I had my students to defend me.

It was interesting. As we were leaving, turns out one of the boys with us had lost his cell phone. Someone there came forward and said they'd found it, but that someone else had come up and claimed it. However, he couldn't remember who'd claimed the phone. Lots of people clustered around, watching the discussion. Not like in Japan where everyone would have acted like they couldn't hear you. Eventually it appeared and we left. Apparently the thief was afraid of the two police who'd walked in and were standing around smoking. We found that the main door was locked, so we went to get the owner to open it. Fire trap...

The other day I as walking around this huge department store in Zhuzhou. There were these lily-pad like glass things that had dry ice fog coming of of them. Right behind them there was a product advertised by a fat weathered chinese man. It turned out he was Nie Weiping, famous chinese professional go player. The product was a white noise producer.

5 minutes later we were walking by some machine stitched pictures. One had little kids playing go, below some chinese calligraphy. Turns out one of the kids was supposed to be Nie Weiping as a child. Weird.

Imagine walking through a department store and seeing two Bobby Fischer endorsed products.

Everything else was extremely normal, they had fake coin chocolate, lots of chips etc. The huge amount of exposed smoked meat was a little strange. And the pigs heads were weird.

I was surprised to find that a book I just finished, Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone, mentions the book I finished right before it - Life and Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng.

Last weekend I went up to "the highest mountain in hunan" with a couple students, one named "michael gordan" and two of his female friends. We met his friend "bobo" who lives near the mountain.

It was a lot like a walking day in japan, walk up concrete paths, look at temples and old kanji etched into stone, look at the garbage people have thrown everywhere. There's a slight pollution fog in the distance, it looks very oriental. At a little gazebo on the way up you could barely sit down, orange peels and sunflower seeds everywhere, napkins, empty cups etc. I love how americans don't litter like that.

Three kind of theories for garbage
China - no garbage cans, just throw it anywhere eventually someone'll clean it up
Japan - no garbage cans, it's your duty as a good japanese to clean up after yourself and preserve your wonderful nature and monuments to your great culture, while showing your good character that is unlike everywhere else in the world
US - garbage cans everywhere
how do these strategies work?
China - really dirty
Japan - really dirty
US - clean
The walk up was nice though, there were almost no signs. I didn't see any "keep on the path", "don't litter", "don't smoke" etc signs. There'd have been hundreds of them in japan.

Then I got my palm read by an annoying man who tricked me into it and promised it would be free. Then he grimaced his way from .36$ to .61 $ Turns out I'm going to be rich and get married within a year.

We walked through burned tea-fields to this big house in the middle of the mountains. Around it were hundreds of middle aged men and women, sitting eating or playing mah-jongg. Every once in a while a bus'd come and take them back to town.

I've been getting lucky with food so far... I am not always lucky. That day we ate 1 inch cubes of pig bone with a little meat on them, fish with thousands of tiny bones, beef heart mixed with peppers, and beef fat/skin cubes. ugh.

On the way back one of the girls broke off a branch from every blooming plum tree we passed. She ended up with about 10 white ones and one pink and one purple. I thought about branch breaking theory:


China: if someone's house is near, ask for permission and break it off
Japan: there'll be a sign saying not to break it off.
US: we must leave nature as it is.

It was obvious to her that as a nature lover, she should break off lots of branches...

Anyway yeah so this email has been really boring. Sorry. Now some more boring stuff.

In class to have fun, I get them in pairs and get out to go outside. I tell him this story: You are american, and you went shopping but realize you forgot your wallet and keys. You go home and the door's locked, but you remember the window's open. So you're climbing in the window when you hear "STOP!"

Then I go inside and tell the other one: "You're an american policeman, you're walking and see a thief climbing in someone's window!! stop them!"

Then I have them talk. Usually about half the pairs arrest the person, and the other pairs think of some way to prove themselves.

It's amazing how the same activity can come out differently depending on slight variations in how I explain it. Yesterday I told them that a new island had been discovered in the south of china, filled with animals and plants. They had a debate, "should we build anything on the island?" In the first class it was all about whether we should use those resources or not. But in the other class they started talking about how if we develop it, it'll become like another taiwan, or how taiwan might fight to control it. They also wondered why I'd said that it was china's property. All because in the second class I drew a map of the island and I hadn't in the first one.

Finally, I recorded more announcements for the radio. Pizza (radio station guy) really admires "NBA voice".

So the summary of this china update is that I still really like it. I've made friends with more students. They're pretty fun to hang out with, although they tend not to realize that japanese people use chopsticks too, and I lived there 3 years so...

The food is good as long as I manage not to order entrails.
Saturday, March 13, 2004

I live in china now and i'm wondering where the other foreigners are. I think there might only be two of us in Zhuzhou, but there are probably more in Changsha. This is for all the search engines out there- I live in China. I Live in hunan province. I live in Zhuzhou city.
Tuesday, March 2, 2004

hi

some stuff i forgot to say before.

when i got to beijing, i stayed 1 night in a hotel. what movie was on tv? the amy fischer story, with drew barrymore. in english! later i saw a movie "chasing girl" about a cool 70s chinese guy in nyc who goes to hong kong to get married and has various cultural hijinks. with subtitles in english. a classic.

yesterday, a student named "pizza" asked me to record some announcements for the student radio station. i recorded some in english, then he wanted me to do some in chinese. he wrote it down, about 12 syllables, with accents. the tone had for each syllable was rising, falling, down-up, or high. then we practiced about 100 times. i could repeat it really well right aftre he'd said it. but if you waited like 5 seconds, i completely forgot and couldn't do it. it was a weird experience, i could do something and then a second later i couldn't do it again. eventually i got so i could say it, and they said it was passable. it was fun.

it was funny seeing pizza write down the english for what i'd say, he'd write the letters like "zhe li shi" and then he'd have to say the words out loud and listen to himself to figure out what tone they were. even though he obviously knows. there is no direct connection between the tone knowing part of his brain and his conscious mind, so he has to pipe the output through the real world and pick it up again through observation. i wonder what other things are like that...

tones are weird... i guess if there is a genetic basis for language, they will be part of it. even in english, how many different ways can you think of to say the word "hello"? and you'd know what each of them means, too. so crazy. how come that stuff is not in a dictionary?

that was my first chinese lesson.

yesterday i went to town, to a big book market. upstairs was the dvd section, about 30 stores each 6 feet wide selling genuine looking dvds for .85usd. i got platoon, apocalypse now redux, and abolute power (since i liked mystic river so much, i thought this might be good, but it sucked. i'm so tired of "kindly old thief who sneaks into his children's apartments and kisses their eyelids as they sleep" movies). when i got home i noticed that the blurbs on the back were all misspelled, things like substituting a ! for an l. i guess they scanned in the back with optical character recognition and printed it, with no english readers in between. the packaging is really nice, it looks real...

Sunday, February 29, 2004

hi everybody,

i got to zhuzhou a couple days ago. it's really great.

the place they put me up in is nice and big.

the university is way bigger than i thought.

the students are great too, really enthusiastic. i have 14 hours of class a week. all my classes are oral english classes, so most of the time i am just trying to think of ways to get them to talk. it's been pretty easy so far. today i taught them 20 questions and they played that for a while, then i split them into groups and gave each group a picture, then had 3 people from each group describe the picture to one person who couldn't see it. that person had to draw it as best they can.

i'm also trying to do some debate type things. it's really great, since they actually have opinions and really want to talk about ideas.

i keep comparing everything i see here to japan.

the way buildings feel here is nice. the streets are wide, and there are tons of stores set back from the street. the streets are filled with a crazy mix of bicyclists, motorcycles, huge trucks, and taxis, all driving like mad. they drive on the right here, but it doesn't really matter; if you're driving and come to a division in the middle of the road and the left is clearer, why not slip down that way? intersections are a chaotic mass of cars and bikes parked in the middle of the road, huge trucks blasting their horns, and people wandering around the roads. it only works because everyone drives pretty slowly. if you see someone coming, just honk.

the school buildings are really nice; they feel really different than the cramped buildings in japan. things are more dirty and crowded, but there seems to be enough space here to make sidewalks. also, there aren't huge things sticking out of the sidewalk everywhere. part of it could be because it's a university, but there is definitely a lot more human space here, there is actually grass, and statues with people standing around talking to their friends, etc. over the last two days there's been a big picture exhibition on the student walkway near my house, with stands of pictures set up showing beautiful places in china, famous people, china's achievements, and stuff about the upcoming 2008 olympics.

my apartment is so big, i feel guilty. i saw a student dormitory and was shocked - there were 4 bunk beds, 8 people in a room about 3 meters square, with a table down the middle covered with computers. there were no desks or places to stand, barely any place to sit. the hall was full of clothes hanging to dry, so you could barely see, and full of litter.

they've got a couple students helping me, one guy named "beacon (of agency)" who is a computer major who always skips his classes. there's also a girl named sophie. they have helped me get a cell phone and start to set up my internet connection.

it turns out that beacon also happens to know this professional go playing girl named qaio ting. he introduced me and we became friends. she is a law student who also teaches some go classes; she invited me to some of them and had me play a game on a big board with the director of the athletic program. it was fun.

she and beacon also take me out for lunch and dinner every day.

hunan food is amazingly great. we've had a different thing each time, but it's almost all been good. yesterday we had a big plate of beef and onions, with a huge amount of peppers. we also had this amazing thing like little slivers of sweet potato with liquid sugar on the outside that tasted like marshmallows. when you'd pick one up, it'd leave streamers of crystallized sugar a couple feet long.

everything is really really spicy here. i havn't found anything that's too spicy yet, but it's been close. almost every dish has chili in it. i like it.

i'm in an internet cafe now, it's full of kids playing a game that looks like diablo, or doing chinese aim. it costs 15 cents per hour.

yesterday i spent 1/3 of a month's salary on a cell phone...

i'm a couple miles from the center of the city. it's even more crowded and crazy there.

one other funny thinhg about here is how nice everyone dresses. apparently zhuhou is famous for clothes. everyone's at least as dressed up as they were in japan. even the bicycle taxi drivers wear suit jackets.
Sunday, February 29, 2004

I am leaving for china tomorrow!

hi I got a job teaching english at ZHUZHOU INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, in Zhuzhou city, Hunan province, China. My city is near the capital city, Changsha. I'm leaving next week, for 6 months. I'll be teaching freshmen and sophomores in college, 15 converstational english classes per week. an apartment is provided for me and I will make 3 or 4 times what the average chinese teacher makes. I don't know that much about china, but I've wanted to go for a while. I've read a few books, etc. Now would be a good time to say what I think it's going to be like: 1. it's going to be super dirty and gross, but I won't mind that much 2. people will do gross stuff in public like spit, pick their noses, etc, and i will mind some 3. people will be really rude, pushing in front of you and yelling, and bureaucracy will be really slow and rude, and i will mind a lot 3a. i will get stared at a lot, and will hear people yell "helllllooooooooooo" at me 100 times per day, but I won't mind that much. 3b. it will be really ugly, all the buildings will be concrete and cold and dirty and badly designed and stained, and i will mind a lot 3c. there might be some nice parks in the cities, they can't help being nicer than japanese city parks... 4. it'll be really crowded everywhere, and i will mind a little, but i'll also find it interested to occasionally go to super crowded places. 5a. i will learn some mandarin, but will spend most of my study time trying to convert japanese knowledge to chinese knowledge, and learning how to read a bunch of stuff i could never pronounce. it will be fun to communicate by writing. 5. even if i learn some mandarin, most people on the street where i am will not speak it, or speak it with a terrible accent, since the local language is different. i won't mind that much. 6. my students will be shy at first, but will open up after a while and be great, and i will be happy with them. 7. some people in the office will be nicer than they were in japan, since it'd be impossible for them to be colder, and i'll be happy about that. 8. people in general will actually have personal interests and hobbies beyond drinking and looking really busy in the office. 9. teachers at the uni might actually be interested in what they teach, rather than viewing it as just a method of exerting control over and training the students. 10. if i go into the countryside it'll be a lot prettier than in japan, since there will be less concrete. but it'll still have some glaringly ugly elements. 11. i will be able to meet some go players, but like in japan, the local chess variant will be more popular. 12. food will be really spicy and i will find a few simple dishes that i will eat all the time and love so much. 13. chinese alcohol will suck as much as sake does, and i will prefer beer. 14. there will be super annoying public announcement systems everywhere at all hours, and i will grow to hate them even more than i do now. 15. there will be advertising everywhere but i won't mind much since it'll be fun to look at the characters. 16. i will meet the other foreigners there and they will mostly be cool. 17. i will know every westerner in the town, or at least some gossip about them. Here's what lonely planet china has to say about hunan province: capital: changsha population: 70.3 million area: 210,000 square km Hunan has many notable attractions. The province occupies some of china's richest land. Between the 8th and 11th centuries the population increased fivefold. ... It's also where the Taiping rebellion started, this chinese guy believed he was a new messiah and the brother of jesus and took over a huge area of central China and almost took over Shanghai in the 1840s. He was the emperor of the "celestial heavenly kingdom" and god's representative on earth. Millions of people died as he tried to take over china. Eventually he lost. Never heard of it, right? Me neither. Mao Zedong was also from Hunan. here is a link to the my job offer at the zhuzhou institute of technology: link here's where hunan province is in china: here's a closer up map of hunan: here's one that shows my city: changsha: population 5,700,000 zhuzhou: population 3,600,000 here is all the book has to say about my town of over 3 million people: Formerly a small market town, zhuzhou underwent rapid industrialization following the completion of that guangzhou-wuhan railway line in 1937. As a major railway junction and port city on Xiang Jiang, Zhuzhou developed into an important coal and freight reloading point and manufaturing centre. Most travellers stop here to change trains, but the city has some pleasant areas. ... So yeah, if you've made it this far you are a true friend. Before i go i'm going to send out a bunch more CDs. I have a big list of my friends addresses, and I send out cds to them occasionally, everybody gets the same one. So if you want to get one, you should send me your address. It costs nothing for you, and almost nothing for me, and it's fun to hear what you think of the music i like. So, you should send me your address. Here are the people whose addresses I have so far: juancy, kamal, kitto, mara, matt, rich, sam, todd, adam, brent, eric, justin, john, justine, peter, dahlia, rupa, nikki, ben, tram, raoul, adam, maria, deanna, indira. there are a bunch of you not on this list. my email is the LETTER o, followed by 314159 followed by the "AT" symbol, followed by yahoo.com also, maybe i'll send you stuff from china. anyway yeah. I am trying to set it up so i can be back for burning man this year... late august, middle of the desert nevada............ and then who knows. byeeeee Ernie