Back Lake in Beijing
This was taken in 2008. Beijing is such a pretty city… when the smog lifts and one can see it.
DAILY PHOTO: Back Lake Bridge in Beijing, China
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Author Archives: B Gourley
BOOK REVIEW: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A man answers an ad that says, “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.” Expecting to find a charlatan, the man is surprised to find his new teacher is, in fact, a gorilla.
Like Socrates, this gorilla, Ishmael, uses questions to guide his pupil toward crucial knowledge. Ismael teaches his student to challenge some of his most deep-seated beliefs such as, the world was made for humans, humans are the ultimate culmination of biology, humans are inherently separate from (and above) nature, and that humans are fundamentally flawed in such a way as to make ruination of the planet inevitable.
The core of the book differentiates two human cultures. The author calls them the “takers” and the “leavers,” but they correspond to what we might call “us” and the “aboriginal peoples.” Takers are specialized, agricultural, and technologically advanced (if you’re reading this review on a computer and not chiseled on a cave wall, you, my friend, are a taker.)
The lives of “Leavers” aren’t that different from those of humans 10,000 years ago. They are tribal as opposed to (to borrow Desmond Morris’s term) super-tribal. [In a tribe everyone knows everyone else. Morris suggests that things go to shit –re: war, crime, and deviant behavior– in super-tribal societies.] Leavers live like animals in that they tend towards equilibrium within their ecosystem. Takers do not.
If you long for thrillers or potboilers, this isn’t the book for you. It’s a thinking person’s book. The nice thing about Ishmael’s use of the Socratic method is that one can think through the questions in parallel to the narrator’s discovery. In this way, the reader can install himself or herself into the conversation.
At the most generic level, the book’s value is in showing one how much one takes for granted. We can’t see forests for trees.
One may agree or disagree with the author, but either way one will be subjected to powerful food for thought. Some of the discussion may evoke a visceral emotional reaction that one may have trouble reconciling with logic, such as the discussion of the morality of feeding the starving.
The downside of the book is that the dialogue can be strained in places and it can get a bit repetitive. The latter serves to reinforce key concepts, but some of them feel as though they are reinforced inordinately. In making the narrating protagonist struggle, Quinn creates a lead who seems a bit dense sometimes. Also, as I indicated, the journey is by-and-large in the mind, and so the tension is limited. There is some drama when the narrator shows up one day to find that Ishmael has been evicted. However, this is resolved without too great a difficulty and they resume lessons with Ishmael’s irritability being the only change to be seen. There is drama at the end that will remain unspoiled herein.
I’d recommend this book as a thought-provoking exercise for the mind.
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DAILY PHOTO: Grand Plaza, Tikal, Guatemala
Taken from Temple II
The Grand Plaza comprises two temples towers that face each other, Temples I and II, the manicured courtyard between them, and these buildings off to the side. This photo is taken from atop Temple II.
I like to visit Mayan sites. As with Angkor, I feel that this is a good way to mentally prepare myself for the day our own civilization collapses.
Tikal was one of my favorite Mayan sites, mostly because it was the only large-scale site we could visit in peace. When we were at Chichen Itza, the hawkers were ubiquitous and weren’t above following one around. I don’t recall being bothered at Tikal at all. Of course, it’s been a many years since I visited.
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TODAY’S RANT: Stupid is as Cupid Does
Attribution: Ricardo André Frantz
Nothing says lovin’ like a prepubescent archer.
This isn’t a generic rant about Valentine’s Day. I am not the curmudgeon of ardor or the Grinch of St. Valentine’s Day. All I’m saying is that nothing is less sexy than a naked baby archer.
I guarantee that if you polled paramedics who’ve responded to bow-hunting accidents, none would say that their patients reported sexual arousal as a symptom of arrows sticking out of thighs. How being impaled with a razor-sharp implement came to be associated with the transmission of love, I’ll never know. Yes, little boys have been known to sock a girl they like in the deltoid, but breaking out the device single-handedly responsible for Mongol hordes sweeping across Eurasia is taking that dysfunction up a notch.
I have no problem with nudity. Nudity and erotic love is like getting your chocolate in her peanut butter– so to speak. My problem is with prepubescent nudity. All that does is remind one of the end product of amour, and that’s terrifying, not arousing. No one needs that kind of pressure in a budding relationship.
I know I said this wasn’t a blanket condemnation of the holiday, but I’ve got one more sub-rant. What is with flowers and chocolate as the iconic gifts of the holiday? Is it that nothing says everlasting love like a bouquet that will be shedding wilted petals by day’s end. And chocolate says, “I love you so much that I’ll even love you if you get fat. Furthermore, I’m willing to prove it by doing my damnedest to make you fat.”
I won’t even get into the jewelry ads. “Show her you love her by implying that you think she’s in it just for the swag.”
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TODAY’S RANT: Continuity Gaffes
For those unfamiliar, a continuity gaffe is a mistake in a movie in which something that shouldn’t change from one instant to the next does. They result from movies being shot over many days in an order unrelated to how the film unfurls before the viewer. Take an example, say a brawler is wearing a green shirt, they cut away to the other fighter, but when they flash back he’s an orangutan in a bikini. If it’s still not clear what I’m talking about, the YouTube clip below shows a horde of gaffes from the first Star Wars trilogy.
Now, from the title of this post, you probably think that I’m some sort of obsessive-compulsive nerd who catches every little niggling mistake in a movie. To this I say, I wish! I’m a not-the-least-bit-compulsive nerd. I don’t catch any movie continuity gaffes– not a single one. Sure, I can see them when they’re circled and the film is run in slow motion, but otherwise I’m clueless. This has made me wonder if there isn’t something defective with my brain. When they are pointed out they seem pretty glaring.
What really bothers me is not that I never catch a continuity gaffe in a movie, but rather that I catch them in my real life all the time. I’ll distinctly remember setting my keys down on the valet, but after a thorough search I’ll find them in the freezer. I’ll remember having written a paragraph, but when I come back to my laptop I find nothing but the cryptic message, “xzsawrwddd&&ppPPP.” I’ll put down Shakespeare’s Sonnets and when I pick the book back up, it’s a James Patterson novel.
I’ve developed two competing hypotheses to explain these gaffes. First, I’m in the Matrix, and Mr. Smith is corrupting the code. Second, my secretly super-intelligent cat is fucking with me.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Get Speechify to make any book an audiobook
Whatever the blurbs or critics might say, this book is about the raft of men left in the friend-zone after brief dalliances with Lady Brett Ashley. One may have been led to believe it’s about the life of Jake Barnes. Barnes is the lead character, but he’s not the most influential character.
Besides Barnes, the list of men who fall hard for Lady Brett Ashley include, boxer Robert Cohn, the bankrupt Michael Campbell, and the bullfighter Pedro Romero. Oddly enough, the physically toughest, Cohn, is the one who falls the hardest. Barnes may be the strongest in this sense; perhaps because his relationship with Ashley is over before the novel begins. Barnes comes off as likable with a pragmatic “live and let live” nature. (He can maintain a friendship with a woman that he loves, a feat that seems beyond Cohn’s ability. Campbell is used to having lost everything, and so seems to bob comfortably in Ashley’s wake. We don’t reliably learn about how Romero takes it.)
As the blurb says, The Sun Also Rises is about a journey from Paris to Pamplona. In Paris, the cast of Lost Generation friends hang out in cafés. In Pamplona they attend bullfights. In between, Barnes goes fishing with friends.
In a broader sense, the book is about dissatisfaction and restlessness, and not only within Ashley. This is summed up nicely by Cohn’s words to Jake, “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it?”
Of course, the book shines in its language. Hemingway’s lean buy meaty prose is readable and engrossing. The minimalist dialogue beautifully conveys the interaction of a group of intimate friends.
Here’s a great line that captures the character of Hemingway’s writing in this book, “The beer was not good and I had a worse cognac to take the taste out of my mouth.”
The book rises to crescendo with the Pamplona bullfights and Hemingway adeptly ends on a sad note apropos of the morning after a great party.
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DAILY PHOTO: Downtown Debrecen
The Aranybika (Golden Bull) Hotel is one of the most prominent landmarks of Debrecen, Hungary. The Golden Bull is alternatively an important edict of 1222 or a soccer team. The hotel was built in 1915 in the secessionist style.
Debrecen is the second largest Hungarian city at 200,000+ residents. In 2002, I attended an intensive language course affiliated with the University of Debrecen. The building in which I was taught was near this square, across and down the street.
If you are interested in learning Hungarian, I’d highly recommend the school I attended, the Debreceni Nyári Egyetemen.
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A Dude’s Attempt to Master Pad Thai
On a trip to Thailand last fall, my wife and I did a one-day cooking class in Chiang Mai. That day I made the perfect batch of pad thai. (For the uninitiated, Pad Thai is “noodles Thai-style.” It’s one of the more popular dishes at your local Thai restaurant. If you don’t believe me, go check. I’ll wait.)
Anyway, I preceded at home to make 35 batches of pad thai that bore little resemblance to food. That’s not true. Only the first five dishes were fundamentally inedible, the next thirty were tasty enough– they just didn’t taste like pad Thai. A poor cook might blame the difference on the variation in ingredients between Thailand and home. However, I have a sneaking suspicion the cooking school staff was slipping good cooking into my dish while I wasn’t looking. They’d say, “Godzilla” and point, and I’d turn (because one can’t take a chance that close to the Pacific), and when I turned back around the contents of my wok would look and/or smell better.
If making mac-n-cheese from a box, microwaving a HotPocket, or grilling a burger aren’t counted as cooking, then you might say that my experience with cooking was nothing. However through an extensive process of error and error, I arrived at delectable pad thai.
Below is what you’ll need.
Ingredients
First, for the anal retentive types who’ve noticed that I took this picture on top of the washing machine, that was solely for lighting purposes. This process in no way involves use of the washing machine. It’s not one of those clever recipes like cooking fish in the dishwasher. I’m serious, under no circumstances are you to attempt to use your washer in the making of pad thai.
In list form, what you’ll need is:
– 2 Tablespoons of oil (anything but olive)
– 4-ish cloves of garlic (more if you have a vampire-infestation problem)
– shrimp (several to many)
– chicken (one to two tenders’s worth; like the size of tender they give you at Applebees or Chilis– NOT McDonalds, i.e. a swanky tender)
(substitute tofu if you’re one of those quasi-vegetarians who count chicken as animal but don’t count shrimp/fish.)
– egg (1)
– 2 Tablespoons fish sauce
– 1-1/2 teaspoons sugar
– rice noodles (about 2 ramen packets worth, not that you should buy it that way)
– crushed peanuts (3 heaping Tablespoons)
– spouts (1 cup-ish. Normally this is soy or mung bean sprouts, but I’ve substituted Alfalfa sprouts because they work fine and last longer in the fridge.)
– spring onions or chives or something green and oniony (1-cup-ish)
– 1/2 a lime
Step 1: Heat your oil in a wok. Get it hot enough so that when you throw the garlic in, it’ll sizzle. This will make you feel more chef-like.
sizzling garlic
Step 2: Add the animal stuff. Put the chicken in first, it takes longer than the prawns. If you’re using tofu, put it in after the shrimp (tofu won’t cause you severe debilitating diarrhea if it’s under-cooked. [I don’t think, but I have no idea what I’m talking about. Although I do suspect one shouldn’t refer to diarrhea at any point in a food blog post.])
chicken and shrimp (lamest superhero duo ever.)
Step 3: Add the egg, fish sauce, and sugar. Scramble the egg up good, and mix everything together.
egg, fish sauce, and sugar
prawn scramble
Step 4: Add the noodles. This is the trickiest part of all. First, they make a lot of different types of rice noodles in different dimensions and colors, and they all cook differently. I prefer thin noodles. I must admit the noodles are the weak part of my game. In the batch I’m showing, the noodles are overcooked, but I have done them just right. (You’ll have to take my word.) It’s preferable to have them slightly under-cooked when they’re mixed with the prawn scramble (There’s usually enough moisture that they’ll continue cooking.)
At the cooking school, we put pushed the prawn scramble up to the top of the wok and tilted the wok over and put dry noodles and a cup of water in the bottom of the wok. We then cooked the noodles, and then mixed them with the prawn scramble. If you’re an octopus or a ninja, that method works great. I, however, pour boiling water over bowled noodles when I’m putting the chicken in the wok, then I tong them into the wok and mix them right together with the prawn scramble.
overcooked noodles this time, so sad
Step 5: Add the vegetable stuff. First, throw in the crushed peanuts. Then stir in the sprouts and the spring onion. (These are all done last, because you want them to provide a bit of crunch. i.e. You don’t want them thoroughly cooked.)
with the veges in
The penultimate step is to squeeze on the lime. This can be done into the wok after it’s removed from the heat or directly on top of one’s bowl.
Step 6: Eat. I’ve included the following picture as proof that this was, in fact, edible.
last few bites
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5 Minefields of Armageddon for 2013
National Land Image Information, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation & Tourism, Japan
1.) Ever heard of the Senkakus? What about Diaoyus? If not, you should look them up. When you’ve been wearing a gas mask for the 33rd day straight, you may want to know about the chunks of rock in the East China Sea that we tripped into nuclear winter over. Simmering tensions between Japan and China have been flaring up over these islands of late. So you’re probably wondering who lives there who’s so important that it’s worth wandering through a minefield that could trigger World War III. If you answered, “absolutely no one,” give yourself a prize. They’re uninhabited. It’s not the islands themselves that anyone gives a rat’s as about, it’s the ramification they have for underwater drilling rights.
The reader may accuse me of hyperbole. (Shh! Dont tell anyone, but– of course– that’s what I do.) After all, China has a boldly stated “No First Use” policy. That is, they claim they will not use nukes in a first strike. Given that Japan isn’t a nuclear weapons state (NWS), there doesn’t seem to be much risk. Except that a.) Japan lives under the U.S. nuclear umbrella; b.) Japan is the non-NWS that could develop nuclear weapons in the shortest time imaginable — they have the material, infrastructure, and technical know-how (okay, Germany is in the same bag); and c.) see #2
2.) North Korea conducted its third nuclear test. This presents a risk because: a.) it provides an incentive for Japan to build its own nukes (particularly if faith in the US umbrella wanes.) b.) [and more importantly] Kim Jong Un has too many yes-men, and no one to slap him in his chubby face and say, “are you smoking powdered unicorn horn?” In other words, he doesn’t have a good idea of what he can get away with before the world unleashes a crate of whoop-ass on his sad country. So he wanders in the minefield.
3.) Europe is getting depressed. Fat and happy Europeans are productive and polite. Downtrodden Europeans have been known to swallow some pretty despicable narratives, and– in doing so– drag the world into war. At the moment this seems really far-fetched. These political movements are at best in the political fringe of countries on Europe’s fringe, right? Maybe so. Time will tell.
4.) If America’s economy is crash-landed, everyone is going to be hit by the debris. This will be depressing, see #3 and then multiply globally. Times like these echo Churchill’s comment, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Any person, company, or government that sees the train coming in the distance but can’t find its way off the tracks can’t be expected to thrive for long.
5.) India and Pakistan, enough said…
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BOOK REVIEW: Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Vagabonding is a book about how to make the leap from a cubicle-dwelling company-man (or woman) to a wandering free-spirit.
This book serves two functions. The first is to answer questions about how one goes about seeing the world if one is not independently wealthy or a recent lotto winner. In this role it provides information such as how one can fund one’s travel time, and, perhaps more importantly, how one can get a job after one has an 18 month void in one’s resume.
The second function is to psyche one up to take the leap. In this role it is more persuasive than informative. In both roles it succeeds, but it is in this second role that it is most useful. The Introduction title is “How to Win and Influence Yourself” and Chapter 1 is entitled “Declare your Independence.”
Each chapter has a list of tips and/or references, quotes from those who have done it, and a profile of a famous person associated with the lifestyle, including: Thoreau, Whitman, Muir, and Annie Dillard. The quotes show you that mere mortals have made this leap. The profiles show that you that you will be in excellent company if you do it.
One of the most important themes in this book is simplified living. If one isn’t independently wealthy, one will have to make “sacrifices” to adopt this lifestyle. However, if one learns to live lean, one will be able to make do with much less. One must also live lean during one’s travels. Potts’s advice is to travel light, and leave the electronics at home. (The latter may seem impossible these days, but as a person who recently lost a laptop in a travel accident, I respect the logic.)
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is ready to take the leap, but only if you’re serious.
