Free Rice

Just a quick post today. I decided to approach my thesis in a similar way to my National Novel Writing Month novel, and told myself that I had to increase my page count by six pages today, set myself a strict target. On five pages, and just started the sixth. Would be even more but I just don't feel like drawing diagrams today, so am stuck with working on text and maths.

(note: of course, the obvious distinction with the challenge of National Novel Writing Month is that I am trying to keep the quality of my writing high with writing my thesis)

Today all I want to publicise is a website called FreeRice, where rice is donated based on your knowledge of vocabulary (in this case, your knowledge of the meaning of a word). For every word you get right they donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program. Doesn't sound like much, right? In ten minutes I had "earned" nearly 2000 grains of rice, which according to a quick Google by my officemate is between 52 and 56 grams. That still doesn't sound like much...

The site does a daily combined total, tracking how much has been donated. The total for yesterday was close to 400 million grains of rice. If my sums are right, then even if 52 grams for 2000 grains is correct the total donated for yesterday is in the region of 10 thousand kilograms (or 22 thousand pounds for you non-metrics).

Much more is needed to help defeat the problem of hunger around the world, but this is something.

Putting Oneself Through Hell

In two weeks time I'm going to ask Mamiko's dad for his daughter's hand in marriage. When I proposed, about a year ago, she thought it would be best to just let him know then, but for some reason I decided it would be best to do it properly, meet the old guy face-to-face, and perform The Ritual. (In Japan, traditionally, a woman's young swain is supposed to approach the father, bow down, and ask if he can marry the daughter. He is then told to, basically, fuck off. He then has to leave the house and come back later, whereupon this time his proposal will be accepted.)

Now part of me is beginning to curse that decision. Why did I think it was a good idea? With each passing day I get more and more terrified. I don't know why, you see, but Mamiko's dad is scary.

Okay, I'm lying, I do know why he's scary. Partly it's because he's the foreman of an entire fishing port, which gives him this sense of authority and confidence which leaves the position of 'alpha male' in no dispute. Partly it's because he barely every speaks, but spends most of the time glaring moodily at people. Partly it's because girlfriends' dads are just innately a little frightening - I always worry that, at any second, they're going to accuse me of being a feckless young layabout who's tempting their darling daughter into a life of penury and unhappiness - before gathering their mates together into a lynch mob and running me out of town.

But mostly it's because he has a black belt in judo, and could probably dislocate my spine or something with just a flick of the wrist. That's the kind of guy you shouldn't do anything to piss off.

On Annie Hall

Last night whilst playing Scrabble, noisms and I watched Annie Hall, which is my favourite Woody Allen film, and the more I've thought about it today, the more I wonder if it really is "perfect" in some sense. From start to finish, nothing that happens seems out of place, or unbelievable, but maybe this is because Alvy Singer starts the film by breaking the fourth wall.

I love the opening address that he gives the camera, and I was quite amazed to see that it is on Youtube (but then I thought, of course it's on YouTube, what isn't?).

I just showed one of my officemates that clip, and he didn't laugh at the "two old ladies" joke. Not at all. He just stood there. He said he didn't get it. I'm wondering if there is something wrong with him. The punchline for that just kills me, kills me every time.

Another great moment is when he is in line at the movies, and the boorish guy behind him is giving his opinions, and then Alvy starts to talk to the camera about him. The guy overhears and tries to defend himself, and then Alvy ends the discussion by bringing out a critic who tells the man, "You know nothing of my work." The boor and the critic look at each other, and Alvy looks at the camera and sort of shrugs, and ends the scene saying, "If only life were more like this."

Indeed.

Scrabble Game #1

zero_zero_one:
wined, cornered, slum, ace, median, mope, vine, after, van, art, race, dough, pin, nab, rafter

noisms:
wail, it, li, tilt, entwined, yays, my, fines, finesse, bee, wove, house, axe, hip, jut, gazer, gut, grace, kite

Final Score:
zero_zero_one, 272
noisms, 299

I got a fifty point bonus on my second turn, and kept a good lead for a while... And then it all started to go wrong... Sigh. Next time noisms, next time!

EDIT: I meant to say, those words were not recorded in order. My phone doesn't have a camera, otherwise I would have taken a picture of the board afterwards. We played a "speed Scrabble" game afterwards with a strict 30 second time limit for each turn, which I won but was much less satisfying as a game.

Done!

As of about 8:30pm last night I am a two-time winner of National Novel Writing Month. It's a good feeling, and yet for some reason this year I feel less satisfied with the end result. I think, in some ways, it's because I went in to it this year with more expectations on myself. Last year wasn't easy, but I went in to it with just one idea really and everything else came out over the course of the month. While that was true to an extent this time, there was a lot more in the way of stylistic things that I wanted to include and so when I felt like I wasn't getting that right it kind of got be down a little.

Still, I figured out the ending that I wanted, and how to get there, and I didn't have to call on the zombies or the dream sequence once in the whole month! I'm debating whether or not to put the rough (and oh my goodness is it rough...) manuscript online, but I think I will leave it for a day or two, sleep on it for a bit before deciding one way or the other.

Trying to decide on my next artistic challenge. Matt has made me realise that perhaps 1000 haiku in a month is a bit on the extreme side (though from a purely quantitative point of view it is nothing next to NaNoWriMo). I'm tempted to do a 24 Hour Comic. Script Frenzy is something I will do next year provided that I am free. In the mean time I think I am going to try and get in on lolsecretz, just for a bit of fun.

I was going to go and see the re-release of Blade Runner tonight, but my friend cancelled, so I'm playing Scrabble with noisms again (so no challenge there then, haha).

More soon!

American Hero

I've just finished reading In the Lake of the Woods, a novel by Tim O'Brien, better known for his Pulitzer-nominated The Things They Carried. It's a great book, by the way - a definite recommend. But incidental to that, I did some research into the My Lai Massacre, an event we studied in GCSE History when I was 15, and which plays an important role in the book. As part of that research I came across the figure of Hugh Thompson Jr., a man I'd never heard of before, but who for one day, in the face of mankind at its most brutal and grotesque, stood out for the qualities of honour, integrity and compassion, and who I think can honestly be labelled a true hero.

Thompson was a helicopter pilot who arrived at My Lai when the massacre was almost over. (For those who don't know about it in detail, the event took place on March 16, 1968, when men of a US Army company collectively murdered somewhere between 300 and 500 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children.) He immediately began doing what he could to help the victims. From Wikipedia:

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., a 24-year-old helicopter pilot from an aero-scout team, witnessed a large number of dead and dying civilians as he began flying over the village - all of them infants, children, women and old men, with no signs of draft-age men or weapons anywhere. He and his crew witnessed an unarmed passive woman kicked and shot at point-blank range by Captain Medina (Medina later claimed that he thought she had a grenade.) The crew made several attempts to radio for help for the wounded. They landed their helicopter by a ditch, which they noted was full of bodies and in which there was movement. Thompson asked a Sergeant he encountered there if the Sergeant could help get the people out of the ditch, and the Sergeant replied that he would "help them out of their misery". Thompson was shocked and confused but took it as some kind of a joke. The helicopter took off - then one of the crew said "My God, he's firing into the ditch".

Thompson then saw a group of civilians (again consisting of children, women and old men) at a bunker being approached by ground personnel. He landed and told his crew that if the U.S. soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers. Thompson later testified that he spoke with a Lieutenant and told him there were women and children in the bunker, and asked if the Lieutenant would help get them out. According to Thompson, "he [the Lieutenant] said the only way to get them out was with a hand grenade". Thompson testified he then told [the man] to "just hold your men right where they are, and I'll get the kids out". He found 12-16 people in the bunker, coaxed them out and led them to the helicopter, standing with them while they were flown out in two groups.

Returning to My Lai, he and other air crew noticed several large groups of bodies. Spotting some survivors in the ditch he landed again and one of the crew entered the ditch and returned with a bloodied but apparently unharmed child who was flown to safety. The child was thought to be a boy, but later investigation found that it was a 4 year old girl. Thompson then reported what he had seen to his company commander, Major Watke, using terms such as "murder" and "needless and unnecessary killings". His reports were confirmed by other pilots and air crew.

One of his crew, Lawrence Colburn, later recalled the dialogue between Thompson and the Lieutenant (sometimes identified as a Mr. Calley, at other times a Mr. Brooks) as follows:

Thompson: Let's get these people out of this bunker and get 'em out of here.

Brooks: We'll get 'em out with hand grenades.

Thompson: I can do better than that. Keep your people in place. My guns are on you.

How perfect a reply - one is tempted to call it noble even: I can do better than that. The measure of the man, you might say. Willing to risk his own life, and to risk being responsible for the killing of men on his own side, in order to save those who were innocent - in order to do better than all the other soldiers around him.

The truly apalling thing, of course, is that it fell to this 24-year-old junior officer (inferior in rank to the Army Lieutenants who were responsible for the massacre) to do anything decent at all that day. We'd all probably like to assume that, put in his position or one similar, we would be brave, sensible and good enough to do the same thing. However, given that he was the only one out of over a hundred perpetrators and witnesses to do anything significant to stop the massacre, the horrible truth is that the chances are not high that any given one of us would.

I know quite a bit about humanitarian law - that is, the laws regulating armed conflict - certainly enough to have an awareness of how rare and heroic people like Thompson are. Men who find themselves caught up in such events most commonly either blindly obey orders or, at best, remain passive bystanders. The annals of war criminal case law are testimony to it. I can do better than that is a motto that I think ought to be more widely followed; the unfortunate fact is that more often people are content with I can't do anything about this or, worse, Best to just go with the flow.

It's a corny way to finish this entry, perhaps, but I'll say it anyway: think about the implications of Thompson's story, and examine how you usually behave when you see something happening that shouldn't be. I certainly have today, while reading about him, and will continue to.

Here We Go Again

It's in the news again today: Israel-Palestine peace talks. So Channel 4 News naturally seized the opportunity with both hands to make an in-depth report into how evil Israel is last night. It's amazing that a major, well respected source like that can get away with such plainly biased reporting. But then again most aspects of modern journalism are completely baffling to me.

Anyway, that isn't what I wanted to talk about. What I really wanted to talk about was the saddest aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict: namely the fact that ordinary Palestinians are as much victims of their own leaders as they are Israel's - and probably much more so. The Gaza situation at the moment is the classic example: all Hamas has to do is to recognise that Israel has a right to exist in peace, and then the people of Gaza can have normal lives again. But they won't, and keep clinging obstinately to their pledge that the Jews should be kicked out of the Middle East by the most violent means available. No matter that this goal will never be achieved and their sheer bloodymindedness is hurting the innocent people they're supposed to be protecting. (This is, of course, to leave aside Israel's own behaviour.)




This cycle - whereby Palestinian and Arab leaders routinely abuse the civilian population of Palestine, but never get the blame for it - has a long history. Back in 1948, of course, there could have been an independent Palestine, if only the Arab countries nearby hadn't tried to destroy Israel and hadn't then gobbled up what should have been the new Palestinian state for themselves. In 2000 Yasser Arafat threw away the chance for peace and walked out of negotiations when he refused an offer from Israel without even making a reply, an event which effectively launched the Second Intifada. The terrible conditions in which most Palestinians live are mostly the result of the neglect shown by the Egyptian and Jordanian governments when the refugee camps were first set up in Gaza and the West Bank after 1948. Then, of course, there is the common practice by Hamas of launching rocket attacks against Israel from the most densely populated areas of the strip, using their own civilians as human shields.

So much of the current suffering is down to poor leadership. But the enemy is only ever Israel. Of course, Israel has treated ordinary Palestinians grossly unfairly. But life for them would have been so much different if they had been blessed with a set of leaders who didn't use them as political pawns and who had their best interests at heart.

False Advertising

There's a new poster up on the Liverpool Loop Line for "Hearts On Fire" diamonds. I've not heard of them before, but based on their posters they must be *really* good.

The standout feature of the poster is the slogan "(monogamy)^100" - you see, Hearts On Fire diamonds are cut at 100 times magnification and are "the most perfect cut diamonds in the world." In the background are a slightly blurred but obviously happy couple.

It's great - they're monogamous, no affairs on either part because HE bought HER a Hearts On Fire diamond (set in a ring I'm guessing)! Wow! All because they use a superior magnification to cut their diamonds... But wait, some pesky thoughts are getting in the way of my enjoyment:

#1: why do they both stay faithful because of him buying her a diamond? Does she have to get him a set of Hearts On Fire cufflinks to ensure his fidelity?

#2: will the follow up poster show what happens if you buy Brand X diamonds, i.e., a messy and painful divorce since Brand X just doesn't have enough "monogamosity" in their diamonds?

#3: "(monogamy)^100"????? Seriously, what is the world coming to?

EDIT: Here's their website...

Last Days

The end of NaNoWriMo is in sight: fourteen chapters and 47,500 words done. I was originally aiming for seventeen chapters due to some kind of theme that I was running with, but I've got a point and I really don't know how I would fill three more chapters (or at least fill them with the sense of pace that I think I need), and so I have decided, "Oh well, this is what rewriting is for, if I ever decide to rewrite it," and so I have two chapters left to do.

I'm hoping that I will get the penultimate chapter written tonight, and then the last chapter done tomorrow - if I do, as a reward for myself I'm going to go and see Blade Runner: The Final Cut at FACT on Wednesday night.

This will be my second year of real NaNoWriMo success, as it will be the second time I have reached the fifty thousand word mark and completed the story. I don't know if I have really learned anything new in the process. In some ways I like last year's novel better than this year's, it felt like something really personal and like something I needed to get out of me last year, whereas this year it was more to show myself that last year wasn't a fluke.

Last year I was completely focused on writing my story about the relationship between Billy (a regular guy) and Erin (a dream), and what happened when Erin left the universe of dreams to escape from Lord Malice, the Prince of Nightmares. Even though at the start I had no idea of the ending, I was totally hooked on writing the story, and knew that it would all tie together.

This year, I kind of had some ideas in place, but all along I have had to fight off other ideas for other stories that have been coming in (most involve a story/novel whose front cover would be like a poster for a band, with the tagline "Post-Apocalypse. Post-Human. Post-Punk." I don't know what it means, but it means something); one NaNoWriMo school of thought is that you should just include everything no matter what, but as rough as my novel might be I want it to make some kind of sense...

Still. Almost done. What next? I've thought about doing 24 Hour Comic Day at some point, and I was too busy to do Script Frenzy! this year, but who knows, maybe next year... We could start our own writing/creative challenge...

Anyone fancy writing a thousand haiku in December?

Circles

It's funny. I really don't find supermodels attractive. And I'm not just saying that to try to appear like a 'new man'. I just think there's a point at which being beautiful becomes something ugly in itself; we can picture beauty as a circle, where if you follow the curve too far around it lurches back into unattractiveness. Most supermodels cross that barrier - their height becomes clumsy looking, their slenderness becomes skinny, their body lines ungainly.

It's a bit like Eddie Izzard's idea of the circle of coolness. At the beginning, there is 'looking like a dickhead', and as you follow the circle round the coolness increases...until finally it reaches the end of the circle and goes back to 'looking like a dickhead' again.

Quite a few fashions have crossed the barrier between uber-cool and looking-like-a-dickhead. Baggy jeans sliding halfway down the backside, for instance.