Neolefty

We subscribed to NetFlix a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, I still get their popups while browsing. I am kind of disappointed at that (“Check this box if you have already subscribed, so that we can stop bugging you”), but it’s been a very effective service at getting movies to us. But I’ve had to learn to watch ’em at my own pace, and not as soon as they arrive so that I can send ’em back to get more.
Before I visited Tokyo, I saw Grave of the Fireflies; right now I’m watching Fog of War. The two movies show, among other things, two sides of the same event: the firebombing of Tokyo. In Fireflies, the story of the innocent, whose nation had ambitions of empire; in Fog, halting those ambitions by the most efficient means available, at the expense, to a great degree, of the innocent.
McNamara, on the subject of whether it was a fair decision to firebomb: “LeMay [the American general] said, if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right! He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” Should we, instead, have chosen a greater loss of our own lives, to reduce the casualties of our enemy? McNamara implies that we should have, and that he would have preferred it. But we rarely choose that.
Later, he asks, in the context of Vietnam, “What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment? Let me give you an example …”
I found both movies open and honest beyond the events that they depict. If you feel insufficiently urgent to be active in the salvation of humanity, I recommend them; if you are already pretty busy, then by all means keep on moving!

I spoke with Bahiyyih and the gang again this morning (which was their evening), and her instructions were that I was to bring back “adventures”. I have to admit to being a little bit intimidated with such an assignment when I only have a single free day to fit it in. So I’ll have to settle for little adventures for the moment. Suffice to say, choosing food based solely on a small photograph on a menu is a good recipe for small adventures, as I learned today at lunch. Fermented soybeans. ‘Nuf linked. At least it was only my appetizer.

Tune in next time when I choose a Bullet Train ticket based solely on photos of the destination.

P.S. You can try this at home.

So I’m in Tokyo for a conference for work. I had no
Internet connection for over a day while I travelled; in fact I don’t
have one right now, as I type this — I plan to post it later, once I
get to the conference center, where there’s a wireless connection.
[update: I posted it]

I’m sure that many people have written about this before. Having
no Internet connection made me feel like a lost cyborg, I have to
admit—I’m so used to looking things up, surfing when I get
bored, catching my daily news and comics—It was like the rushing
and murmur of humanity that surrounds me had gone silent, and my eyes
and ears had been cut off from the larger world. My horizon shrank
down to what I could physically see and hear, which for most of that
time was either an airport terminal or a small section of an airplane
cabin that faded out beyond the British engineer on my left and the
sleeping Japanese guy on my right. Plus in-flight entertainment.

It was meditative.

I was forced to deal with the noise and chaos in my mind myself,
rather than being able to look outward for stimulation and a sense of
order. At the time, it was unpleasant. Claustrophobic, itchy,
boring. When a clamor arose inside me, instead of turning to a louder
clamor from outside to drown it out, I had to listen. Now I’m glad
that I did it. I didn’t take a book, I didn’t read the in-flight
magazine. I did watch a movie, The
New World, an intense, scenic piece about Jamestown and
Capt. Smith and the Indian Princess whose name I can’t remember,
because I don’t have the Internet as I write this. It was actually
contemplative as well. And I peeked at the cartoons (The Family Guy,
for example) silently playing on DVD on the British Engineer’s laptop
to my left. I was grateful to not hear the soundtrack—he had on
headphones—it looked even noisier than I was interested
in hearing.

And I had a Japanese phrase book. While useful and interesting, it
didn’t hold my attention (sleepy and jet laggy) for more than a few
minutes at a time.

So I got to really think. It was good. We’re supposed to meditate, after all. Regularly. Which I suppose means more than once
every few months, in an ideal world.

Bring thyself to account each day, ere thou art
summoned to a reckoning. For death, unheralded, shall come upon thee,
and thou shalt be called to give account for thy
deeds.

—Bahá’u’lláh

Memorization: for when you don’t have the Internet.

I thought about my family, my children, my relationship with
Bahiyyih, my service to the Bahá’í community and to
humanity (or the lack of it), my daily habits and patterns. Basic
stuff.

I’ll have to remember to do it again.

So, during the Cold War, the Soviets and the Americans vied with each other in every field they could. If one side made an improvement in something—anything—the other side would escalate and try to outdo it.

One of the less-well-funded, but still energetically pursued fields was that of animal training for military and espionage purposes. For example, in the mid 70’s, the Soviet bomb-sniffing bears were answered with American mine-defusing dolphins. And Soviet trench-undermining hedgehogs, with American river-infiltrating beavers.

And as chronically-underfunded veterinary researchers exhausted the niches of special-interest grant programs, they were forced to become both more inventive and more optimistic in their grant-writing, and they found themselves turning to smaller animals, which were cheaper to maintain. Famously, a special Ukrainian unit of the KGB worked with parakeets, which they would give as gifts to American diplomats. Unbeknownst to the Americans, they had trained them to repeat, in response to Ukrainian trigger words, phrases they had overheard, which the KGB hoped would include bits of juicy embassy conversations. It is unknown how much actual intelligence was gathered by the program, but one of the parakeets became well-known in American diplomatic circles for helping its owner, a Department of State bureaucrat who spoke some Ukrainian, cheat at Bridge.

The KGB’s American counterparts, equally under-funded yet zealous, began combining grants from the Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency. They ended up mixing endangered species captive breeding programs with classified training (slogan: “make love and war”), hoping that they would, as a happy side effect, increase military sympathy for threatened animals.

It was discovered that President Carter, an environmental enthusiast, was keeping a rare Maryland Spotted Woodpecker, named Peter, as a pet. He had been found injured, at a private construction site, and was rescued by the Montgomery County (Maryland) Humane Society. The Baltimore Zoo bird department, which was conducting a combined EPA/DOD project, asked President Carter if he would mind if Peter participated. Since the bird was male, he was only needed occasionally for the captive breeding program. And since he was a favorite pet in the Carter White House, he was chosen to be both trained and deployed there.

Now, along with lesser-known research and development programs, the superpowers also had more obscure, low-budget, and low-key spying programs. In particular, the Kremlin would send groups of “tourists” who were especially adept at “getting lost”, cameras in hand, while on tour in D. C. To give themselves an excuse for getting lost, they were notorious for indulging in late-night vodka-drinking binges before “innocently” wandering the halls of government.

Meanwhile, Peter the woodpecker was discovered to have a relatively sensitive sense of smell for rotting wood, which translated, at least in the relatively sterile confines of the White House, into a sensitivity to the smell of alcohol. His handlers, when they suspected that a gaggle of spying tourists was in the building, would “accidentally” let him escape from his cage. He was trained to follow the smell of alcohol and, when he was close to the source, peck on a wall. In response, he would be given a tasty grub or two. The more intense the smell, the faster he would peck. To everybody’s astonishment, the program was actually relatively effective.

One day, when a particularly smelly group had escaped its tour guide with the cunning of Siberian foxes, Peter was set to the chase. He flew around the White House for about ten minutes before staffers heard the sound of pecking in a second basement on the north side. Peter’s handlers were called, and they set off to recover him, with Secret Service agents in tow, disguised as zoo volunteers.

When they found him, he was pecking madly away at a scratched-up wooden post. They searched and searched for lost “tourists”, and even though they could smell stale vodka even with their puny human noses, they could find absolutely no other sign of the suspicious Russian group.

But because Peter had been so reliable in the past, they suspected that the spies were present but had found some place to hide. So they called in an FBI search team. And the question for the FBI was, if Peter Pecker pecked to pick a pack of pickled peepers, where’s the pack of pickled peepers Peter Pecker picked?

Our basement has moved. I mean the stuff on a server in our basement has moved. I’m not sure exactly where it is located, but it might be in Atlanta. You’ll have to ask these guys.

Thanks to the magic of virtualization (specifically, Xen), we have rented a little slice of a machine out there on the Internet. It’s cheaper than renting a whole machine, but it still acts like it’s an independent piece of hardware. Anyway, for slightly less than $20 a month, we can stop having the sites go down every few days due to DSL glitches. And pages should load a lot faster now, too!

But mainly, I feel like a new homeowner. I’ve got a home out there, on the big Internet, with real bandwidth. Well, for $20 you don’t get a whole ton of bandwidth, but it’s better than our 384 kbps DSL connection. Time to start experimenting. I’ve already set up a test mail list server, for example, which wouldn’t really have worked at home.

Maya’s been singing her way through daily activities lately — walking to the bathroom (“going toooo the bath-rooom”), playing with Georgia, eating. It’s very cute; I always claim she’s got a good sense of melody. Sometimes it’s kind of operatic, other times cute and musical.

This evening, we went out for a late-night grocery run, and she found her missing sheep-baby (it’s a round stuffed sheep that has been imbued with sentimental value and baby-ness.

Maya is in the back seat, strapped into her carseat, playing with her sheep. Daddy starts the car and begins driving.

Maya: [singing] Sheepy Sheepy She-eepy

[some time later]

Daddy: [singing] Sheepy Sheepy She-eepy

Maya: [firmly] Daddy, don’t sing that song.

Daddy: Okay.

[some time later]

Daddy: Sheepy Sheepy She-eepy

Maya: Daddy, stop singing that song.

Daddy: Sorry. I won’t sing it anymore. [pause] I like that song, though. I heard you singing it. You know how you get a song stuck in your head? [silence] Do you ever get a song stuck in your head, Maya?

Maya: No. I have a song in my tummy.

Daddy: In your tummy?

Maya: Yes, in my tummy.

Daddy tries to imagine having a song in his tummy.

I had to think about it for a little while, and envision a song circulating around in my stomach, and I have to admit that I like the idea. I think it makes much more sense than having a song in your head — after all, if it comes out your mouth, where must it originate?