collected works

Best of Bob
(collected works)
Indonesia
My original plan to travel to the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi was changed on account of travel advisories issued by the United States, Australian and Canadian governments. According to them on going hostilities between the Christian and Muslim populations had made the area unsafe for travel. If I had it to do again I would probably ignore the advisory. Indonesians seem like nice enough people to me.

Day One - Arrive in Jakarta at 9PM after pop-overs in Hong Kong and Singapore. Head immediately to the "backpacker's" district which turns out to be more like a "red light" district filled as it were with all manner of nefarious and ill-disposed individuals. Am nevertheless caught up in a series of suprisingly innocent encounters until the 4AM call to prayer commences it's wailing forth. It doesn't put any of us in the mood for prayer exactly but it does bring the evenings festivities to a somehow strangely pleasant, if not entirely spiritual end.

Day Two - Arise after a full two hours sleep and take a short train journey to Bogor, a suburb on the outskirts of Jakarta. It is a singularly unpleasant location aside from the massive rainforest park at it's centre. Some of those trees are a universe unto themselves I swear.

Day Three - Am introduced to the fine art of highway travel as I bus it from Bogor to Bandung. Bandung is a prosperous city set in the mountains with half of it's streets and alleyways apparently designated pedestrian only. Beautiful place. At five o'clock I board the train for Yogyakarta. The train route is far from the highway so this makes for a lovely trip through the mountains with open windows and stops in dark, moist and mysterious locations. Am accompanied in my sojourn by a lovely young muslim lady who is eager to practice her English and long train ride Yoga. Arrive in Yogyakarta at about 2AM and check into the first hotel I stumble upon. Sit in the dark (Indonesians sit in the dark a lot) and chit chat with the staff until about 4AM. Am inspired to teach a "sit in the dark and speak English" class but as I am frequently inspired in one way or another this idea passes quickly only to re-emerge once again now as I relate the experience to you.

Hobbes wrote - Why do they sit in the dark a lot? Is it just a preference or does it have to do with the prevelance/cost of lights and electricity?

I'm looking forward to Chapter 2 already. There was a bit of foreshadowing in "Day 1", and I am a little worried that the nefarious and ill-disposed individuals may show up again later in the plot. Guess I'll have to wait for the next installment.

Day Four - Visit a Buddhist monument depicting the various stages of enlightenment. As you wind your way up and around the monument you are likely to observe, as mentioned, the various stages of enlightenment beginning with an abundance of large breasted women, elephants and other expressions of human longing and supplication. At the top you will notice a lot of men sitting around cross legged and with good posture. Apparently women do not achieve nirvana. Or perhaps they were born there. Whatever. All I know for sure is that it was hot as hell and I wound up with sun stroke and a migraine. I met some students on holiday from Borneo who took me to the local hospital where I begged, unenlightened one fashion, for a shot of the good stuff. Slept like a baby that night.

Day Five - To be honest I didn't see much of the rest of central Java. What I recall is a blur of highway maddness.

Day Six - East Java though is a cavalcade of swollen rivers, rice paddies and naked people bathing. Green is the color here and brown the flesh. If ever I saw anything quite so beautiful.....

Day Seven - The beginning of real illness. Nose running like a faucet and the swelling and pain in my throat make of life a painful endeavor indeed. The combination of high fever and third class Indonesian public transport begin to have a loosening effect on the mind's defenses. Demons are wrestled with and succumbed to until all that is left is an aching hole where thoughts and emotions once resided. It is, in all seriousness, extremely therapeautic. Like a brain enema.

Day Eight - Arrive in Bali where the body insists upon and recieves a full two days sleep. Emerge from my slumber only for sustenance and massage. Massage is a vital and regular part of bob's life while in Indonesia and he is in fact fairly certain that in his feverish delirium he often stumbled directly from one massage directly into another. This has the effect of accelerating the course of his illness and it is not long before he is on the road again. This time to the island of Lombok.....

Days eight nine and ten or something - On the way to the Gilis (Gili is indonesian for island and is, I believe, etymologicaly related to the giligan of giligan's island fame) bob meets a film studies professor from England who lost an arm in a diving accident and who would have lost his very life if not for the courage of his fearless son who happened to be accompanying him that day. I proceed to lecture him on the merits of the Dogme95 school of filmaking philosophy over the next few days and admit to all manner of things both various and sundry. In any case such was the case in this case with both this "and" that coming into play and becoming factors worthy of consideration each in their own right. The snorkling at this location is a major disappointment but the snorkel surfing (body surfing with mask finns and snorkel) are spectacular. Take a short poop over to Gili Air where (Gili air where? anyway...) I am once again overwhelmed by the exquisite magnificance of nature's splendor. Some places really are too beautiful to be described and it was for this reason that cameras were invented. Unfortunately the pictures I took failed somewhere in the development process and this fact is one that I will regret in a sincere, if not particularly desperate, way for some time to come. Suffice it to say that the waters surrounding the island had that azure thing going on and there were many yes we have coconut trees scattered about amongst the fungai of notorious repute.

Day Fifteen - Travel back through Lombok but with a pause in the rain forest and a short consultation with the monkee population there. They assure me that despite how things might appear to me now the universe is no doubt unfolding as it should. Far be it from me to dispute monkeee wisdom but I am not entirely certain that this is true and have been plagued for some decades now by the notion that I should attempt to intervene in some way with the universe and it's unfolding.

Day Sixteen - Back to Bali and more massaging. There may be other things to do in Bali but I would be the wrong person to ask about that. Getting massages in Bali however is something that I do know something about, or rather two somethings about: 1) It is delightfully affordable. 2) The people who practice this exquisite profession are seriously under paid.

Day Seventeen - Back in Jakarta just in time for diarrhoea. Nearing the collapse of capital reserves at this point so am forced to negotiate Jakartinian public transit with a rear end fit for fire fighting duty. Not a pleasant experience but a memorable one and there is perhaps something to be said for that; although it was a rather a disapointment that I was unable to visit the nightspots of the Glodok district, one of which, Tanamur, is described thusly in lonely planet: Jakarta's most infamous disco. This institution is jammed with gyrating revelers of every race, creed and sexual proclivity. It is unbelievably crowded after midnight. Wear what you like …. I had planned to wear my new sarong. Oh well.

Day Eighteen - Am awoken at 4AM once again by the call to prayer which, as it turns out, was a good thing as otherwise I would have mised my flight home.

A Little Something about ESL
For me, last year's ESL Bible was "Teaching collocation - Further Developments in the Lexical Approach." Interesting enough book alright but I'll admit it encouraged me to pile on a little too much vocab.

This years ESL bible is called "Memory Meaning and Method." It was published in 1996 by a man nemed Earl W. Stevick. He graduated with some applied linguistics degree or other in 1950. And the way he describes it he has achieved at least temporary conversatioanl fluency in Armenian, French, German, Portugese, Shona, Spanish, Swahili and Turkish. He can also do "something or other" in four other languages and has reading ability in another four. He has been actively "teaching" English for close to fifty years and studies things like the neurology of second language learning as "hobbies."

If someone like him talks about language teaching or learning, I, for one, listen. I would like to provide you with a few quotes that I think might help if you are finding yourself becoming a bit stuck in your approach to this delicate enterprise of ours.

From the preface - "If one believes (as I do not) that the human race is becoming better or wiser as the years pass, then assumptions I made years ago can no longer be of interest. If, on the other hand one believes (as I also do not) that the human race is progessively going down hill then any point of view held now is of less value than those that went before it. What I do believe is that goodness and wisdom, where they exist, come into our lives only as creations both delicate and ephemral."

In later chapters he goes on to describe how he actually both learned and taught other languages using the systems that many practitioners today mainly just scoff at: grammar translation, the audio lingual approach etc. He comes to some suprising conclusions. For example he says that he can't imagine anyone for whom a strict grammar translation approach would be advisable; however he admits it did work well for him and he enjoyed it tremendously. What he suggests is that we take elements of each approach and use them as required. He uses the word "flexible" a lot.

He asks the following question "In the field of language teaching, Method A is the logical contradiction of Method B: if the assumptions from which A claims to be derived are correct , then B cannot work, and vice versa. Yet one colleague is getting excellent results with A and another is getting excellent results with B. How is this possible?"

His answer to this question is a bit long winded but I think it could be accurately summarized as "therein lies the mystery"

Further along he says ".....just as our choice of methods depends on what has worked in the past and on the personal investments that flow from those experiences, so these choices and these investments are related to - are an expression of - our deeper values. And if these relationships - if these values - are not clearly recognized, then they can give rise to reactions that are expressed not in logical propositions, but in epithets.

If that doesn't quite do it for you he goes on a little latter to say "I fear the Annie Oakley whose early success by any method - Grammar Translation or Natural approach or anything in between leads her (or him) to squat sequestered in the fastness" of that particular brand of pedantary...."

"I fear teachers who focus more on teaching languages than on teaching people"

He sums up with "I know that the kind of teaching I have called for makes heavy demands on the teacher - demands on time and skill of course, but also on "flexibility" and commitment. I hope that in the future we will find a growing public appreciation not only for the value of our product, but also for the special intricacy and delicacy of the process we are guiding."

What If Nothing Existed?
I mean nothing at all. No earth, no moon, no universe.... nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zippity doo dah day. What then? And what if I hit your big toe with a hammer? How about that? I bet you wouldn't think you were so smart then. And why do some people have such warm silky smooth saliva while others have saliva the consistency of ice coffee? And why why? Why not what? Hello?

fred smith wrote - bob, step back from the ledge and put the gun down.

bob wrote - Maoman has informed me yet again that posting stupidity is a form of spamming and against forum rules so I guess I'll go trim my fingernails or something before I say something stupid again. Of course there was no really good reason for me to inform you of my intention to trim my fingernails and I could in fact be lying about that. I could be back up on the roof adjusting the sights on my rifle as we converse through this strange and somehow vaguely profound medium of the written word which, in it's apparent simplicity, actually represents the highest art form owing to the fact that it is a representation of the spoken word and hence may draw forth from the soul of man a vocalization of these insights at some far distant date or location, and while one might still wonder about what it would be like if there were nothing, no earth no moon no nothing Nada Ziich Zippity Doo Dah Day this question somehow no longer occupies your consciousness in such a persistant way and in the end just going with the flow, hanging on, and enjoying the ride seems perhaps to be the preferable option unless of course....

Tainan cowboy wrote - Bob, can you repost this in Norgie, Finnish, Latvian and add some sexual innuendo to it? Thanks

truant wrote - Don't forget.

Sandman wrote - Better yet, go away and write some more about your trip to Bali. That's interesting, fun, informative and IMO very well written -- much better than the twaddle you've posted in this thread. Wink

bob wrote - OK. What day are we on again? Or Or should I tell one of the same days again only differently and in Latvian and with sexual innuendo. It's your call.

Yellow Cartman wrote - Yes, bob.

What If Nothing Existed? (part two)

bob wrote - And yet I feel compelled to continue along in this vein since it is so EASY to write this way with nothing in particular to say but rather just twaddling along hither and tither in whatever direction the brain blows next. It is wondeful really this writer centered writing, which cares not a dam about it's reader, but just ambles about in keeping with the rhythm of itself. I would write about it but somehow that seems like what I am doing already after a fashion and since the fever and third class transport loosened sometime ago the defenses of my mind....

Hatch wrote - What if bob didn't exist?

bob - In high school we used to buy a lot of peyote buttons and they came with a sort of introductory essay describing the role of peyote in traditional Latin American aboriginie society, the pharmacology of hallucinagens in general, proper preperation of peyote and the effects we could expect upon consumption. There was no mention however of what it would be like if there was nothing and while I suspect it might be somewhat comparable to what it is like when everything is melting there is, of course, no way that I can be certain about this. It does help to soothe the soul somewhat the realization that there are others out there with similar concerns as myself, and while that soothing sensation might not be much like nothing either, it is, I suspect, a lot like love and there is something to be said about that too.

fred smith wrote - Since we are beings and our knowledge of our existence is predicated on our becoming while being in relation with existence which is also a being of becoming, we cannot truly understand what true nothingness would be like since the very absence of everything would not be nothing but a negation of everything which in itself would be something.

Bob - oh.

Quiting Cigarettes
Kicking any sort of addiction can be viewed as a triumph of the will. A very dangerous person once put it to me this way "You got yourself into this mess. Now be a man and get yourself out." Worked for me. It is basically a question of making up your mind that you are willing to accept a certain amount of pain for tremendous long term gain. Make it as easy as you can for yourself but do it. Trust that your bodies ability to repair itself is a slow but reliable process. Say yes to health, and the discipline that it requires. People have done a lot more difficult things than quiting cigarettes.

Rattled Brain Syndrome
My thoughts processes seem to be becoming more and more disorganized. I wonder if it is my schedule.
11AM - Stagger out of bed.
11:05 - Turn on computer. Wade through a pile of poorly composed but oh so dreadfully important business letters. Attempt to render them into comprehensible English.
11:45 - Turn on CD player. To the accompaniment of loud rock and roll music rattle my head about the apartment trying to impose some sort of order on my cramped living arrangement.
12:15 - Lunch. I pretend to understand what people say to me but actually I am just flirting. This frequently leaves me feeling somewhat agitated.
12:45 - Bus ride. This usually involves a review of vocabulary and an attempt to remember anything of what I said last class.
1:00 - Teach the day's first class. Usually an ill conceived affair involving a lot of experimentation and attempts at profound comments in a language that I don't really speak.
3:00 - Headache.
3:05 - Another bus ride. More review of vocabulary and waiting for the bus to quit rattling so I can underline things. Headache worsens.
3:10 - An attempt is made at exercise.
3:15 - Attempt at exercise is abandoned due to worries about the evenings class.
3:15 - 4:00 - Snooze.
4:00 - 6:00 - Searching through linguistics textbooks looking for some confirmation that the language learning system I am developing makes any sort of sense.
6:30 - Another bus ride.
7:00 - 9:00 - Evening class. More experimentation. Experience a strange mixture of fear, confusion and boredom. Nobody seems to know what to do but everyone seems happy when I leave.
9:05 - Another bus ride. Vague sensation of unreality settles in as I ask myself "How did I get here?" "How do I work this?" The only answers I can think of are "That is not my large beautiful house." "That is not my fancy automobile." "That IS however my beautiful wife." Some consolation is found in this.
9:30 - Attempt to recollect whatever epiphanies I might have had over the preceding 24 hours in order that they might be rendered into yet another brilliant essay. Simultaneous attempt at translating one or the other of said essays into Pinyin. Things are really getting hectic upstairs by now.
10:00 - Wife awakens from after diner snooze. At first she appears to be among the living dead but gradually becomes more animated. Marital duties are attended to.
10:05 - Somehow feeling more relaxed but with much work left to do I decide it is time for beer.
12:30 - The beer was good but I can't figure out why those guys at UfC keep interrupting the best fights with those god dam tele-slut commercials.

Carnival
Wierdness for wierdness sake isn't really wierd and it isn't very interesting either.

Kick in the Pants Counseling
Francis you may want to admit that your problems are not purely geographical and that a geographical cure then is not likely to work very well. You should ask yourself what compelled you to live in a place you say you hate and to not develop anything while you were here, not even an exit strategy. It sounds to me like your orientation to your own life is extremely passive. You didn't even engage with this place enough to learn some conversational Mandarin. That would have made a world of difference. If you go home with no goals or plans or contacts, what makes you think that your orientation will somehow become more proactive? I'm guessing that you have been making a lot of descions based on insecurity for a long time and each time you have done that your faith in yourself has suffered. Your range of options has narrowed. This has made you feel even more depressed and anxious and so you have made even more decisions based on fear. It has gotten so that fear and avoidance and dark thoughts are the very stuff of your mind. Your feel good chemicals have packed it in and your despair chemicals have taken over. Time for prozac. Time for a more active oriention to life. Time to stop avoiding contact with other people. Time to look outward and see the difficulties and joys that other people experience. Time to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Time for excercise and creative activity. And especially, time to stop taking so many depressants. They are generally contraindicated in cases of depression.

Ever Have an Yunshi?
bob wrote – “Yun4shi4 A romantic incident of an intellectual which smacks of refined taste and elegant style.” Far East Pinyin Dictionary. This confuses me you see as my incidents tend to be either/or in nature, either romantic or intellectual in other words. The romantic incidents sometimes smack of refined taste and elegant style, as do the intellectual incidents, but I don't think I have ever had an experience that smacked of all these qualities at once. Perhaps I am just not romantic, intellectual, refined or elegant enough. Is there some sort of class I can take? I desperately want to experience an Yun4shi4. Thank you.

bababa wrote - What on earth are you talking about?

bob wrote - I'm not sure bababa but thanks for asking. I was looking up yun4 (rhyme) in my pinyin dictionary and found yun4shi4 - "a romantic incident of an intellectual which smacks of refined taste and elegant style." I thought maybe somebody here might know more about it. Last night my wife and I tried it with Beijing Opera playing on the CD player but to be honest it didn't feel very yunshi at all. Maybe it is just a Chinese thing. I mean my romantic experiences have always tended to be more barbarian in nature than refined, elegant and intellectual. I would conduct a poll but I don't think anybody would answer.

Neo wrote - Which shi4 is it?

bob wrote - It is yun4shi4. Right after yun4mu3 and right before yun4wen2, on page 717 of the Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary. To the right of it are a bunch of squiggles that some people seem to regard as a language but look like chicken scratches to me. I don't know if it will help at all but they look like quite complicated chicken scratches. Find it yet?

Tetsuo wrote - It's 'shi4' as in 'thing, event, incident.' And my Chinese monolingual dictionary just lists it as meaning 'a refined and sophisticated event/occurence'.

bob wrote - What no romance? Drats.

Grasshopper wrote - Well, bob...it depends on what you want to add in front of your yunshi. The word specifically means 'matter' or 'affair'. You can add more squiggles and strokes to extend your yunshi to mean anything from 'business matter' or 'torrid love affair' as in 風流韻事. Enjoy.

bob wrote - I can get an yunshi extension then? Better check with the wife first...

xp+10K wrote - bob, I personally ain't seeking no yun4shi4 because it might destroy my few remaining brain cells. But that's no reason for you to miss out, so I'm going to reveal a secret I discovered right here on Forumosa! It's called qi4 fen1 气氛 . Qi4 fen1 气氛 ! When I first read those magical words, I got a tingling sensation, but I was of two minds about whether they were the real key. So I took the matter to a psychic, the same guy who told my boss to move my co-workers and me out of our old housing and then told my boss to change the name of the buxiban and lower the buxiban's fence by about one meter. I figured he was an expert on this sort of thing. Sure, the buxiban went out of business, but we all had some great times while it lasted! Anyways, this psychic guy said that qi4 fen1 气氛 is an absolute prerequisite to the full yun4shi4 experience.

Dog Paddle
Is 1,600,000,000,000 one trillion six hundred billion, or one thousand six hundred billions? The reason I am wondering is because that is a conservative estimate of the number of words of English spoken EVERY DAY. A word like “race” is used hundreds of thousands of times a day. The people who write dictionaries do an absolutely awesome job of guessing at what people mean and the associations that they make when they use or hear words. And I am sure that some of you will go on thinking that you know what race "really" means because you can open a dictionary and find "each of the major divisions of humankind, each having distinct physical characteristics." Others will be willing to accept that someone from the middle east is frequently distinct in apperance from someone from China but will then be wondering things like - "Gee how many races are there anyway?" -and - "If I look Dutch but have an aboriginie forfather what am I really?" - and - "How come northern "Chinese" look so different from southern "Chinese" - and - "Why is it that geneticists are saying the whole concept of race is nonsense when even my dictionary defines it...." Using a language is like swimming in mystery. If you never figure that out you'll be doing the dog paddle the rest of your life.

An Impoverished Thing
A C I will prove myself to be something of an exception here and admit that I generally enjoy your posts. I am sure that I could study Chinese history and culture steady for the next few years and still not be able to hold a candle to your erudition on the subject. However - and this is a big however - I wonder exactly what it is that motivates you. Correct me if I am wrong but the impression I get it is that you are very much interested in preserving the distinctiveness of your race and your culture. It seems a little late for that no? Given a chance to inform themselves on the matter most "Chinese" (still not clear on what that means) would undoubtably opt for a democratic form of government. It would be difficult to imagine a deeper, more positive influence that Western society could have. Following that there are the myriad of smaller ways that the west has influenced this culture. Especially the culture of Taiwan. Music, television, leisure, technology, medicine.... With more and more Taiwanese studying English and travelling abroad and more and more people coming to live here from other countries this influence will undoubtably grow. Sometimes this will be a good, sometimes a bad, and sometimes a neutral thing. The only thing that is certain is that it will happen.
I have been around other cultures on and off most of my adult life. Among the list of cultures or peoples or ethnicities or whatever that have left a mark on my soul I would include: Aboriginal, French, Italian, German, British, Spanish, Hindu, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Filiphino and of course Chinese. Likely somebody will pop their head up and say that my terminology doesn't make sense, that Indonesian isn't an ethnicity, that there are different races and languages inside China and Thailand. That there are different aboriginal groups within Canada etc. Of course they would be correct but it is also correct that I am aware of learning things from all of these people. And it is also correct that without those people, who I cannot in fact define very well, my life would be a very much impoverished thing in every sense of the word. I am also very much aware that many of those peoples lives would be much less full without the influence my culture, whatever that is. Races have been mixing for so long and cultures have influenced each other so profoundly that it just seems like foolishness to think that anything separate even exists. A lot of the world seems to be rallying around some core values such as democracy and equal rights. Why is that I sense these things are far from the top on your list of priorities?

Wanna Learn to Speak Chinese?
Here's how I did it. For the first five years or so I said "Ni hao" to everybody that I saw who looked Asian. Sometimes they would say "Ni hao" back and sometimes they would say "Konichiwa" or "Anyohasayo" and sometimes they would say "huh?" Whatever. Anyway after that I moved to Taiwan and discovered that "Ni hao" was actually not nearly enough vocabulary to get by on. Still if someone asked I would say "Sure I speak Chinese everyday..." Having come to the late realization that "Ni hao" was actually a pretty small vocabulary I made an attempt to expand upon the range of common phrases and expresions at my disposal. It wasn't long before I was saying "xie xie" and "jie guo" all over the place. Fortified by my success at this I decided to go at vocabulary study full on and started making lists of things that I might want to say and translated those lists into pinyin when I got a chance. This was about three years ago. I put vocabulary and sentence lists up all over my house and reviewed them whenever I had the time. I think this list is up to around 3 thousand words, phrases and sentences. I try to focus on the stuff that I will actually use. This means that I am getting fairly good at talking about grammar and engaging in light chit chat with excitable young women. If someone asked me for the wrench we used last week to fix the timing mechanism on the automatic bean sorter however I think I would be stumped as would most of the other contributors to this forum I suspect. If you are looking for a way to become reasonably fluent in day to day life I would say review the heck out of the common vocab and patterns and then try to use that stuff as much as possible. Ask someone to correct your grammar and pronunciation. Continue with this approach only with more and more advanced material for the rest of your life and if you are lucky you might scratch the surface. P.S. PinYin is a godsend. The secrets to language learning are in context listening practice, vocabulary study and attempts at communication regarding things that are actually of some interest and use to you.

My Cat Craps Too Much
Sometimes I feel like farting but can't. God I hate that. And sometimes when I'm teaching I get so bored...I have strange thoughts..

True Story - I was at Fulong about two years ago swimming at the south end by the jetty. The waves were rolling in pretty heavy that day and beside the jetty there was an outrageous rip. It was like a small river that carried you straight back out into the waves past all the wash. Basically you could ride a wave in and then catch the rip back out. It was a bit hairy where the rip hit the incoming waves but anyway... I spent about two hours swimmg there with dozens of people watching from the jetty. I couldn't figure out why 1) There was nobody else in the water. 2) Why there were helicopters all over the place. When I got out somebody told me that the helicopters were looking for the bodies of 3/4? people who had most likely drowned. They found the bodies later that day.

Primordial Saga
Somebody wrote - I caught a movie tonight in Keelung (Jilong) called "The Sweetest Thing", an innocuous silly more or less stupid American comedy, with lots of breast jokes and penis jokes, I think the target audience was 13 year old males ... but all that side, there was one joke in the movie that I didn't get, and wonder if others can help.

The scene is: in a clothing store, the boss (who was supposed to be out all weekend on his sailboat in San Francisco Bay) unexpectedly comes back early and the sales clerk who is supposed to working the front desk is upstairs f***ing her boyfriend. When the boss comes in, he says to the assistant sales girl : "where's the main salesgirl, it feels like Indonesia in here!"

What the heck does THAT mean?

is this some new American slang slur against Indonesians? What could it even possibly mean?

{The film was made and released long before Bali blew its lid off.} ...

Anybody hazard a guess? Are Indonesians known for poor service at stores?

daltongang wrote - It's a subtle allusion to ancient Indonesian culture. Note that the boyfriend was wearing an elephant costume at the time. Sex involving humans and pachyderms is a theme of the Ganesa origin story from the Ramayana, as well as the birth of Buddha (whose mother dreams of a white elephant--see the Bertolucci movie "Little Buddha" for a disturbing Freudian depiction of this--both of which are important elements of Indonesia's pre-Islamic culture.

The filmmakers probably wanted to include an explanation making this clear, but then threw up their hands saying, "It'll NEVER fit in HERE!"


Peewee Herman wrote - Nor is it an insult. Coitus pachydermus is not an uncommon practice throughout some parts of the Indian subcontinent. Whereas maharajas gathered elephants for use in war and religious festivals years ago, today ownership of an elephant is often seen as a sign of prestige. In Rajneespuran, years ago, I learned of a mahout who's eldest daughter, initially assigned the task of bathing an elephant calf in the muddy river, discovered the extraordinary carnal pleasures that her charge could provide. Rather than dismay, her father was filled with joy that his daughter could reenact the ancient saga of Ganesh, writhing in a sensual display of spiritual and earthly extasy in the mud, coupled with the creature of myth, bringing incalculable good fortune upon his household. The father boasted proudly of the matter and neighbors gathered beside the river to witness the extraordinary feat. Later, in another village, outside of Gujranwala, I heard similar tales, and then in Sargodha I witnessed a couple of young Lolitas clinging firmly and writhing in sensual bliss, attached to the phallus of a young pachyderm, reenacting the primordial saga.

Borutesu_Faibu wrote - I don't get it formosa. Maybe I need to see the movie first to get a better picture. The Ramayana Story is not really that popular in Indonesia, Vincent and Peewee even know the story/ancient culture in much greater detail than I do. Well, maybe I'm just ignorant.., Anton, what do you think?

Ramayana is not from Indonesia, but from the Indian subcontinent. Is it possible that the movie intended to say "India" instead of "Indonesia"?

Guest wrote - You are worried about a little "slight" made in a movie about "Indonesia" when about 5 years ago all of Indonesia went up in arms killing, looting, gang raping ethnic Chinese living there. Hmmmm, something is out of whack. It was absolutely HORRIBLE what the Indonesians did and PATHETIC that the Indonesian government failed to stop it (even government soldiers did some of the raping) and apologize for it. This is a wrong that continues to be unredressed until this very day and you are "upset" about a stupid remark made in a stupid movie about Indonesia? The entire country should be ashamed of what happened.


Borutesu_Faibu wrote - I believe the whole nation deeply regret what happened back in May 98. I was there, and was also categorized as one of the victims. However, I am taught to forgive as they knew not what they did.


ax wrote - I didn't watch the movie. I couldn't catch the allusion from here. As far as Indonesia is concerned, it's a very hospitable country as taught in our history book. If there were killings, lootings, rapings or whatsoever, it must be engineered by foreign media:)

somebody else wrote - Indonesia has long received cultural influence from India--Hinduism and Buddhism, later Islam. The Ramayana is loved there, much like the Monkey story here. While not directly cited in the movie, it is very much present as subtext.

To Sir With Love
"I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge, nor help out anyone who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject to anyone, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson." - Confucius, The Analects VII viii

The Old Red White n Blue
Police in Germany are hunting pranksters who have been sticking miniature US flags into piles of dog poo in public parks.

Josef Oettl, parks administrator for Bayreuth, said: "This has been going on for about a year now, and there must be 2,000 to 3,000 piles of excrement that have been claimed during that time."

The series of incidents was originally thought to be some sort of protest against the US-led invasion of Iraq.

And then when it continued it was thought to be a protest against President George W. Bush's campaign for re-election.

But it is still going on and the police say they are completely baffled as to who is to blame.

"We have sent out extra patrols to try to catch whoever is doing this in the act," said police spokesman Reiner Kuechler.

"But frankly, we don't know what we would do if we caught them red handed."

Legal experts say there is no law against using faeces as a flag stand and the federal constitution is vague on the issue.

The Fart of Crappiness
For about two weeks after I read "The Art of Happiness" by the Dali Lama I walked around completely overwhwelmed by how similar people are and how they all want a bit of respect and affection in their lives and how they will all die and are afraid of that.... One time I was standing in a check out line and was suddenly filled with compassion for this poor, dumpy girl behind the counter. I wondered what her life was like and whether she ever had good sex and if she believed in herself etc. Finally she intervened in my little reverie in no uncertain terms. I hope I wasn't salivating or something.

He Left Right?
Tired of telling the same old stories? Perhaps you should consider joining us here at the "He left right? brain film studio and language school". This place is filled with self absorbed ego maniacs looking to explore, create, get rich and make their mark in life in a big, bold way. Owing to creative differences and mixed messages participants have each begun work on their own productions. I am just finishing up the script on "Introduction to Bob's Penis." Naturally you would have all the freedom you want to work on anything you choose and the day hell freezes over you may even get someone to co-operate with you. I hope this was more helpful.

What Does It Mean To Be Taiwanese?
Nobody knows the answers to this question and it doesn't matter anyway but since I can't sleep again I'll bore you with my untutored take on the situation. Being Taiwanese I think is very much similar to being a human being generally only a lot sillier. Cuteness is very important as are displays of embarasment over the very fact of existence. Taiwanese are a sensitive and soulful people with, paradoxicaly, a strong grounding in the elemental apects of life. The result of this is that they are always flirting but in ways so subtle that this may pass unnoticed by westerners. Taiwanese are unbelievably loyal if they believe that YOU love THEM. This is an essential point. Taiwanese people geneneraly look kind of like Chinese people but with a bit of Aoriginee, Portugese, Dutch and Japanese mixed in. After being here awhile here everyone starts looking European only with less body hair. Most Taiwanese people speak Chinese after a fashion and have had a long history of exposure to bad English instruction. The result is generally not pleasant but there are exceptions to this. Taiwanese eat a lot of rice and noodles but are increasingly coming to prefer mcdonalds. On special occassions, which occur four to ten times a week, Taiwanese will prepare a feast fit for a king. For the Taiwanese the weather is something that you complain about. It serves no other function. Nature is a mystery best viewed on television. Taiwanese sit at home with their parents a lot. They like to buy a lot of "stuff" that they keep for a while and then send off to be incinerated. Taiwanese can not smell air pollution or if they can they think it smells like money or is a part of nature or something. Taiwanese are polite, shy and friendly. Most are dying to experience something new. They are good friends and even better lovers. That is about it I think. If these things describe you at all I suppose you might be more or less Taiwanese which, although it doesn't actually make much difference, is still a pretty nice thing to be.

humility
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies
The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

From Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday (Sino-Platonic Papers No. 27, August 1991), edited by Victor H. Mair If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all, any foreign language is hard for a non-native, right? Well, sort of. Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people.1

If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) Maybe all Chinese people deserve a medal just for being born Chinese. At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes.

Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have the expression "C'est du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible". Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn tiānshū yíyàng 跟天书一样 meaning "It's like heavenly script."

There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves "Why in the world am I doing this?" Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say "I've come this far -- I can't stop now" will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.

Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard?

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.
Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.

The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear that these ideograms were sort of like bound feet -- some fetishists may have liked the way they looked, but they weren't too practical for daily use.

For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask "Hard in comparison to what?" And the answer is easy: Hard in comparison to Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane, "normal" language that requires at most a few dozen symbols to write anything in the language. John DeFrancis, in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, reports that his Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters, whereas his French and Spanish colleagues estimate that students in their respective countries achieve comparable levels in half that time.2 Naturally, this estimate is rather crude and impressionistic (it's unclear what "comparable levels" means here), but the overall implications are obvious: the Chinese writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms, than an alphabetic writing system.3 Even Chinese kids, whose minds are at their peak absorptive power, have more trouble with Chinese characters than their little counterparts in other countries have with their respective scripts. Just imagine the difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent foreign learners such as myself.

Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)

This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4 But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts.5 In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".

The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels -- La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire's Candide, L'étranger by Camus -- plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.

This kind of "sink or swim" approach just doesn't work in Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I'm still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult. (By "read it", I mean, of course, "read it for pleasure". I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, "The difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative."6 This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end.

As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the People's Republic of China in the late 1950's and early 60's. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This linguistic camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese people themselves are never equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.
To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun intended) why that of English is so easy. Imagine the kind of task faced by the average Chinese adult who decides to study English. What skills are needed to master the writing system? That's easy: 26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes, dashes, parentheses, etc. -- all things the Chinese use in their own writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries. Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling and actually making words out of these letters, how long does it take this Chinese learner of English to master the various components of the English writing system? Maybe a day or two.

Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese. What does it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" (strokes? radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it to say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible. And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.

Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how long does it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system so that when confronted with any new character they at least know how to move the pen around in order to produce a reasonable facsimile of that character? Again, hard to say, but I would estimate that it takes the average learner several months of hard work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more if they're a klutz who was never very good in art class. Meanwhile, their Chinese counterpart learning English has zoomed ahead to learn cursive script, with time left over to read Moby Dick, or at least Strunk & White.

This is not exactly big news, I know; the alphabet really is a breeze to learn. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters alone would put it in the rogues' gallery of hard-to-learn languages.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.
So much for the physical process of writing the characters themselves. What about the sheer task of memorizing so many characters? Again, a comparison of English and Chinese is instructive. Suppose a Chinese person has just the previous day learned the English word "president", and now wants to write it from memory. How to start? Anyone with a year or two of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The word really couldn't start with anything but "pr", and after that a little guesswork aided by visual memory ("Could a 'z' be in there? That's an unusual letter, I would have noticed it, I think. Must be an 's'...") should produce something close to the target. Not every foreigner (or native speaker for that matter) has noted or internalized the various flawed spelling heuristics of English, of course, but they are at least there to be utilized.

Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are. You can repeat the word as often as you like; the sound won't give you a clue as to how the character is to be written. After you learn a few more characters and get hip to a few more phonetic components, you can do a bit better. ("Zǒng 总 is a phonetic component in some other character, right?...Song? Zeng? Oh yeah, cong 总 as in cōngmíng 聪明.") Of course, the phonetic aspect of some characters is more obvious than that of others, but many characters, including some of the most high-frequency ones, give no clue at all as to their pronunciation.

All of this is to say that Chinese is just not very phonetic when compared to English. (English, in turn, is less phonetic than a language like German or Spanish, but Chinese isn't even in the same ballpark.) It is not true, as some people outside the field tend to think, that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though a perfectly intelligent beginning student could go several months without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic the language is a very complex issue. Educated opinions range from 25% (Zhao Yuanren)7 to around 66% (DeFrancis),8 though the latter estimate assumes more knowledge of phonetic components than most learners are likely to have. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.

As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while I was in France. (Again I use French as my canonical example of an "easy" foreign language.) I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the radio. An ad comes on, and I hear the word "amortisseur" several times. "What's an amortisseur?" I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to make an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to leave the apartment. A few hours later I'm walking down the street, and I read, on a sign, the word "AMORTISSEUR" -- the word I heard earlier this morning. Beneath the word on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha! So "amortisseur" means "shock absorber". And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur". Before long I can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to seem less daunting.

When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.
I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.

What was going on here? Why was this "foreign" language so transparent? The reason was obvious: cognates -- those helpful words that are just English words with a little foreign make-up.9 I could read the article because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.

Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork ("diabetes" is just "diabetes" and "insulin" is "insulina", it turns out), you're saved. In China you'd be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.

Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing with the ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a stupid, time-consuming chore that slows the learning process down by a factor of ten as compared to other languages with a sensible alphabet or the equivalent. I'd say it took me a good year before I could reliably find in the dictionary any character I might encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally stumble onto a character that I simply can't find at all, even after ten minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky, Job-like, and consider going into telemarketing.

Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese dictionaries of various kinds on my desk, and they all have a specific and distinct use. There are dictionaries with simplified characters used on the mainland, dictionaries with the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries with both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization, dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more surrealistic romanization methods. There are dictionaries of classical Chinese particles, dictionaries of Beijing dialect, dictionaries of chéngyǔ (four-character idioms), dictionaries of xiēhòuyǔ (special allegorical two-part sayings), dictionaries of yànyǔ (proverbs), dictionaries of Chinese communist terms, dictionaries of Buddhist terms, reverse dictionaries... on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some elusive or problematic lexical item can leave one's desk "strewn with dictionaries as numerous as dead soldiers on a battlefield."10

For looking up unfamiliar characters there is another method called the four-corner system. This method is very fast -- rumored to be, in principle, about as fast as alphabetic look-up (though I haven't met anyone yet who can hit the winning number each time on the first try). Unfortunately, learning this method takes about as much time and practice as learning the Dewey decimal system. Plus you are then at the mercy of the few dictionaries that are arranged according to the numbering scheme of the four-corner system. Those who have mastered this system usually swear by it. The rest of us just swear.

Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:

FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE."
Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary look-up difficulties of a non-native speaker of English. The passage is pretty trivial for us to understand, but then we already know English. For them it would often be hard to tell where the word boundaries were supposed to be. So it is, too, with someone trying to learn Chinese.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure.

Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese paintings and character scrolls, and most people will assume anyone literate in Chinese can read it. It's truly embarrassing to be out at a Chinese restaurant, and someone asks you to translate some characters on a wall hanging.

"Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?" You look up and see that the characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible "grass-style" calligraphy to boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.

"Uh, I can make out one or two of the characters, but I couldn't tell you what it says," you stammer. "I think it's about a phoenix or something."

"Oh, I thought you knew Chinese," says your friend, returning to their menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese person would also just scratch their head and shrug; the face that is lost is yours.

Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."

In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets easier the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket.

7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.
Well, perhaps that's too harsh. But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings.11 And if you're serious about a career in Chinese, you'll have to grapple with at least four or five of them, not including the bopomofu phonetic symbols used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more romanization schemes out there somewhere, most of them mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored. There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.
Okay, that's very Anglo-centric, I know it. But I have to mention this problem because it's one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese, and it's one of the aspects of the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible that shùxué means "mathematics" while shūxuě means "blood transfusion", or that guòjiǎng means "you flatter me" while guǒjiàng means "fruit paste"?

By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it means that, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra, seemingly irrelevant aspect of the sound of a word that you must memorize along with the vowels and consonants. But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed -- when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say something like "Hey, that's my water glass you're drinking out of!", and you follow your intonational instincts -- that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for "my" -- you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.

Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available in non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.
Language and culture cannot be separated, of course, and one of the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our two cultures have been isolated for so long. The reason reading French sentences like "Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne," is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not just because of the deep Indo-European family resemblance, but also because the core concepts and cultural assumptions in such utterances stem from the same source. We share the same art history, the same music history, the same history history -- which means that in the head of a French person there is basically the same set of archetypes and the same cultural cast of characters that's in an American's head. We are as familiar with Rimbaud as they are with Rambo. In fact, compared to the difference between China and the U.S., American culture and and French culture seem about as different as Peter Pan and Skippy peanut butter.

Speaking with a Chinese person is usually a different matter. You just can't drop Dickens, Tarzan, Jack the Ripper, Goethe, or the Beatles into a conversation and always expect to be understood. I once had a Chinese friend who had read the first translations of Kafka into Chinese, yet didn't know who Santa Claus was. China has had extensive contact with the West in the last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge and ideas that is not shared by both cultures.

Similarly, how many Americans other than sinophiles have even a rough idea of the chronology of China's dynasties? Has the average history major here ever heard of Qin Shi Huangdi and his contribution to Chinese culture? How many American music majors have ever heard a note of Peking Opera, or would recognize a pipa if they tripped over one? How many otherwise literate Americans have heard of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, or even Mozi?

What this means is that when Americans and Chinese get together, there is often not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier as well. Of course, this is one of the reasons the study of Chinese is so interesting. It is also one of the reasons it is so damn hard.

Conclusion
I could go on and on, but I figure if the reader has bothered to read this far, I'm preaching to the converted, anyway. Those who have tackled other difficult languages have their own litany of horror stories, I'm sure. But I still feel reasonably confident in asserting that, for an average American, Chinese is significantly harder to learn than any of the other thirty or so major world languages that are usually studied formally at the university level (though Japanese in many ways comes close). Not too interesting for linguists, maybe, but something to consider if you've decided to better yourself by learning a foreign language, and you're thinking "Gee, Chinese looks kinda neat."

It's pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and multi-faceted as language-learning, but one simple metric is to simply estimate the time it takes to master the requisite language-learning skills. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.

How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

One could perhaps view learning languages as being similar to learning musical instruments. Despite the esoteric glories of the harmonica literature, it's probably safe to say that the piano is a lot harder and more time-consuming to learn. To extend the analogy, there is also the fact that we are all virtuosos on at least one "instrument" (namely, our native language), and learning instruments from the same family is easier than embarking on a completely different instrument. A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.

Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.

There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people manage learn their own language very well. Perhaps they are like the gradeschool kids that Baroque performance groups recruit to sing Bach cantatas. The story goes that someone in the audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs flawlessly singing Bach's uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks the choir director, "But how are they able to perform such difficult music?"

OK
In Steven Covey's book "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", he made an excellent case.What he said, in short, is that in a debate or negotiation or discussion, a person should first seek to understand, and second seek to be understood. He explained it in a lot more detail, but the basics were that everyone wants to be understood, and once a person feels understood, he/she is more willing to understand someone else.

Venus and Mars
My wife and I fight like alleycats about twice a year. We say all kinds of nasty crap, throw stuff around, threaten each other with all manner of nonsense, and generally let our yayas out all over the place. Then we separate for a couple of hours until one of us is big enough to come back around and apologize. The other one then apologizes too and usually a calm exchange ensues in which the issue is discussed calmly and rationally. This usually leads to a greater degree of emotional intimacy and the physical expression of same. It is all part of the relationship package and is actually kinda fun in a way. I think women just pick fights because somewhere in deep down inside they know it will lead to a release of tensions, laughter and such.


Nope
Nope. History is filled with bravery and self sacrafice. And everyday life is filled with compassion, tolerance and small acts of kindness. It just doesn't make the news. Bad things happen, but they run counter to human nature. People who consistently do evil things are unhappy to begin with and usually end up paranoid and alone. Human nature strives for happiness and happiness is found in rough and ready harmony with others. Most of the problems you see in the world are simply ignorance of that fact.

Take it Easy
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.

Chinese proverbs



Parent Hood
hatch- What will you say? What will you say when they ask why? Why this, and why that? Of course those aren't easy questions...The questions I'm more wondering about will come in time.

Why so many wars? Why is it so confusing? Why is the telephone off the hook for those who really need a ride? Why is it so unfair? Why is it that you either "drink bubbles or you die of thirst". It baffles me. We all bloody see it and noone wants it but yet, it gets worse daily... Is humanity a junkey? Hungry for illusions, for chocolate.

Your kids may not say those questions, but the questions will be asked IMO and experience. What will you say when they ask why?

bob - Scram kid you are starting to bug me?

hatch - That's what my dad used to say. Don't you love me now.

I'm serious. I know many guys and gals have little ones here and some coming soon too.

I have a buddy back home with two little ones now. Sounds crazy to me the guy was so unstable. I told him once: "I don't want kids because I can't control myself yet." He replied: If you wait to be ready, you'll wait for ever. You should see us sometimes, the whole family looks like a feak show."

bob – yeah well

hatch - So I take it that's what you'll say to your child bob? Hmmm...Will you be surprised if that 15 years old kid replies: "Then why did you and mom make me? I never asked for any of this!"

bob - Smart kids ask smart questions. Anyway I'd tell him that yes there are too many people in the world but since he is here already he might as well find some happiness in life without making too much of a pig of himself in the process. Heck I'd tell him that he might even be able to do some good if he is cheerful, creative, honest and humble enough. At fifteen a kid can start getting used to the idea that life can be difficult and their parents aren't perfect.

hatch - There are no bad questions coming out of a fifteen years old if he is asking about world problems. Only the questions that the less fortunate and not so smart kids will "not" ask. I wish all my teachers had known that...

bob - I don't know anything.

hatch - Hold your horses! My wife and I are thinking about having a kid dude and we both feel unsure about it. Those were some of the reasons "we" felt it would be a challenge to raise a child. Nowhere did I imply that this had anything to do with my childhood. Secondly it's not so damn cool if you get out of your luxurious life and take a look around. Besides, why do teenagers commit suicide? That won't be your child of course. Thirdly, you dismiss my intentions too quickly and so did Brian as I'm now posting this in the flounders. Fourthly, If what I write doesn't make sense to you, there are no need to suggest that I have issues. This one made sense to my wife and I. So I guess we have issues for thinking about adopting a troubled teenager. I can't talk about the struggles of being a teenager...Without your comments related to my childhood. Nevermind mentionning I want to adopt one don't you think?

bob - Try raising a puppy first.

a poem
I got style
I got wit
I got a nipple
on my tit.

Policy Statement
Inside evey person there exists a desire to develop his social, intellectual, artistic, practical and ethical potential. This desire may be subconscious. The purpose of all education is to help each person discover and develop his unique talents, and to help him understand the world in which he lives so that he can make healthy, informed decisions about how to live his life. Success in this will bring happiness. If you are passionate about learning English or if you think it may be one of your talents or if you think that English will help you to realize other dreams, then this is the class for you. Like anything worthwhile, improving your English will require a commitment of time and energy. In the context of this class laziness will be considered a lack of self respect and is therefore antithetical to the goals of our relationship


Dying
Another guy I know said that he was laying in bed one time after doing rather a lot of heroin and sudenly he felt his soul rising up out of his chest. That is what he said it felt like. Dying I mean. Anyway, as he lay there dying he got to thinking about the beach and stuff and how he didn't really want his wife to wake up next to his corpse so he started pulling back down on it (his soul) but it wasn't like such a big deal actually. Death felt OK, he just wanted to go to the beach the next day more than he wanted to go with this pulling that was going on in his chest, so he got into this casual sort of struggle with death and according to him the only “really” scary thing about it was that he didn't care that much which side won.

Roger Ebert's Second Favorite Movie
Gates of Heaven" is so rich and thought-provoking, it achieves so much while seeming to strain so little, that it stays in your mind for tantalizing days. It opens with a monologue by a kind-looking, somewhat heavyset paraplegic, with a slight lisp that makes him sound like a kid. His name is Floyd McClure. Ever since his pet dog was run over years ago by a Model A Ford, he has dreamed of establishing a pet cemetery. The movie develops and follows his dream, showing the forlorn, bare patch of land where he founded his cemetery at the intersection of two superhighways. Then, with cunning drama, it gradually reveals that the cemetery went bankrupt and the remains of 450 animals had to be dug up. Various people contribute to the story: One of McClure's investors, a partner, two of the women whose pets were buried in his cemetery, and an unforgettable old woman named Florence Rasmussen, who starts on the subject of pets, and switches, with considerable fire, to her no-account son. Then the action shifts north to the Napa Valley, where a go-getter named Cal Harberts has absorbed what remained of McClure's dream (and the 450 dead pets) into his own pet cemetery, the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park. It is here that the movie grows heartbreaking, painting a portrait of a lifestyle that looks chillingly forlorn, and of the people who live it with relentless faith in positive thinking.

Harberts, a patriarch, runs his pet cemetery with two sons, Phil and Dan. Phil, the older one, has returned home after a period spent selling insurance in Salt Lake City. He speaks of having been overworked. Morris lets the camera stay on Phil as he solemnly explains his motivational techniques, and his method of impressing a new client by filling his office with salesmanship trophies. He has read all of Clement Stone's books on "Positive Mental Attitude," and has a framed picture of Stone on his wall. Phil looks neat, presentable, capable. He talks reassuringly of his positive approach to things, "mentally wise." Then we meet the younger brother, Dan, who composes songs and plays them on his guitar. In the late afternoon, when no one is at the pet cemetery, he hooks up his 100-watt speakers and blasts his songs all over the valley. He has a wispy mustache and looks like a hippie. The family hierarchy is clear. Cal, in the words of Phil, is "El Presidento." Then Dan comes next, because he has worked at the cemetery longer. Phil, the golden boy, the positive thinker, is maintaining his P.M.A. in the face of having had to leave an insurance business in Salt Lake City to return home as third in command at a pet cemetery.

The cemetery itself is bleak and barren, its markers informing us, "God is love; dog is god backwards." An American flag flies over the little graves. Floyd McClure tells us at the beginning of the film that pets are put on Earth for two reasons: to love and to be loved. At the end of this mysterious and great movie, we observe the people who guard and maintain their graves, and who themselves seem unloved and very lonely. One of the last images is of old Cal, the patriarch, wheeling past on his forklift, a collie-sized coffin in it’s grasp.

Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.


Metaphysics
Fred - Well, when I ponder the infinite whether for time or space I tend to think of the mind bewildering qualities of the life that we lead and live and how the day to day lives that we have here are vastly unimportant. This could lead to cynicism and negativity and nihilism, but for me they lead to awe and amazement about the truly amazing gifts that I have been given for these fleeting moments that we call our lives. If anyone really thinks about these things I do not understand how so many can doubt the existence of God.

bob - The universe is infinitely complex. That's a fact that is impossible for any thinking person to avoid. But how does postulating some phantasmagorical creator make it any more comprehensible? Any more likely?

fred - It depends on your concept of the divine. If you cannot wrap your mind around the need for such a concept and insist that somehow God must be manlike, then you may be confused, others are less so. Suffer as you must.

bob - I don't insist that God must be anything Fred since the concept makes absolutely no sense to me. I know the universe exists. I know I exist. Heck, I'm even fairly certain that you exist. But God? What is that? A figment of man's imagination. One that has inspired the best and the worst in us, but a product of pure lunacy nonetheless.

Somebody wrote - I tend to agree. Humans are so egotistical that they cannot accept that there measely existence is going to be snuffed out.

So they invent a god, the afterlife.... heaven and hell... then come the Marvelous Muftis, Rabid Rabbi's, Predatory Priests, and Nuns who get none... all telling us how we should live our live according to their banal interpretations of some so called sacred scripts handed down to them by God, the Son of God, and Bezelbub.

bob - fred smith wrote: It depends on your concept of the divine. If you cannot wrap your mind around the need for such a concept and insist that somehow God must be manlike, then you may be confused, others are less so. Suffer as you must.


I am not sure what you meant by "need" here Fred. Do you mean the "logical" need for a being which created the universe, but whose existence but was not in itself created by any other thing? If that is what you meant, why can't it be that the universe itself is that thing?

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I suffer much LESS since giving up entirely on the concept of god. It always seemed vaguely nuts to me but when I even admitted to the possibility of God as some sort of all knowing being that sat in judgement of my thoughts and actions I tended to feel a bit paranoid. Paranoid and confrontational at the same time. Like the kid who challenges his parents just because it feels good.
These days, mostly as a result of reading about Buddhism, I feel that man is esssentially good and that living in accordance with that basic nature is what will make you happy. There is no heaven and no hell but the ones you create inside yourself with the way you think, talk and behave. You can achieve greater peace of mind by simply watching yourself very closely and asking yourself whether or not what you are thinking, saying or doing is likely to lead to long term happiness. It's pretty simple. Getting into the habit of cussing to yourself about every minor annoyance isn't likely to contribute to your long time happiness. Nor is creating bad feelings with the people in your life because you can't control your temper. Replacing your negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviours with positive ones however will contribute to your long term happiness. There is no need for a God in any of this, and I have never suffered less than since I adopted this basic attitude toward life. There may be an afterlife. There may not be. What I know for sure is that there is this life and it makes sense to enjoy it as much as I can by trying to build a web of affectionate, respectful, fun - heck maybe even a wee bit naughty - relationships around myself while I am here.

butcher boy wrote - bob wrote: These are all facts that I can observe. It would however require faith to believe that there is some God behind all of this. I don't see the point.
The point is that is is both impossible to prove God exists or that God does not exist. Therefor the claim either that God exists or that God does not exist must be based on an article of 'faith'.

Suppose I told you there is an invisible dragon in my garage? You probably wouldn't believe me because the default assumption is that invisible dragons don’t exist. This assumption isn’t born out of faith. It’s merely an inductive inference we make based on experience. The same is true with the existence of gods.

butcher boy - I understand both the Easter Bunny and the Dragon examples but think that they represent something different. It is possible that we have merely invented the God figure for our own sanity and to explain certain things we can't understand, despite much thought and reflection. I'm not so sure the same can be said for the idea of the Easter Bunny or the invisible dragon. I am one of those 'not too sure variety' although at the moment I probably lean more towards a belief than a non-belief. Why? Well I like to believe that I really do choose to do my actions. I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that I am just a very complicated piece of machinery that seems to have free will, but in fact does not. Without free will I cannot see any value in morality since whether something is moral or not will really have no effect on what we do anyway. Perhaps this is just another side to the egotistical human that STV talks of above. Anyway after that bit of rambling, I'm thinking that only the existence of a God can allow me out of the trap of determinism, and as I don't really like being in that trap, then I am tending towards belief in God rather than belief in nothing. (I don't think the Easter Bunny or the invisibkle dragon help in this regard ).


More Metaphysics
Danimal -This assumption isn’t born out of faith. It’s merely an inductive inference we make based on experience. The same is true with the existence of gods.


I suspect that some who believe in God would claim that their belief was merely and inductive inference based on experience.


bob - butcher boy wrote: I probably lean more towards a belief than a non-belief. Why? Well I like to believe that I really do choose to do my actions. I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that I am just a very complicated piece of machinery that seems to have free will, but in fact does not. Without free will I cannot see any value in morality since whether something is moral or not will really have no effect on what we do anyway. Perhaps this is just another side to the egotistical human that STV talks of above. Anyway after that bit of rambling, I'm thinking that only the existence of a God can allow me out of the trap of determinism, and as I don't really like being in that trap, then I am tending towards belief in God rather than belief in nothing.


Why not accept free will and an ethical sense as apparent facts of life? Ones that you can use to create yourself. There are a lot of things we can't understand - the fact of existence for example - but that we accept as part of reality anyway. The god notion doesn't explain free will any better than it explains the existence of the universe.
butcher boy - bob wrote:
The god notion doesn't explain free will any better than it explains the existence of the universe.

It doesn't explain it but it allows the possibility which I think the 'Godless' option precludes.

jdsmith - I feel that free will is more a matter of understanding one's own actions and desires in relation to their known and unknown consequences than god's gift to mankind.

Chris - butcher boy wrote: It always amuses me when hardcore atheists say that belief in God is irrational. They never see that both sides are limited to faith rather than proof.

I don't believe in leprechauns. I can't prove they don't exist, though. Am I irrational? Is my position based in faith?

Is belief in leprechauns irrational?

Chris - fred smith wrote: If anyone really thinks about these things I do not understand how so many can doubt the existence of God.

Well, the total lack of evidence for the existence of God, and the sheer absurdity of the notion of God are both good reasons to doubt God's existence.

bob - butcher boy wrote: bob wrote: The god notion doesn't explain free will any better than it explains the existence of the universe.


It doesn't explain it but it allows the possibility which I think the 'Godless' option precludes.


Free will and an ethical sense are as real as anything else we experience. It is no more neccssary to assume a god behind them than there is to assume a god behind the universe. The godless option precludes nothing.

TomHill - bob wrote: Free will and an ethical sense are as real as anything else we experience. It is no more neccssary to assume a god behind them than there is to assume a god behind the universe. The godless option precludes nothing.


Yet it seems logical to you to assume there is no god behind them.

Anyone who says there is no god... prove it.

Prove what you say? I cant prove there is a god. I cant prove a damn thing. How can you prove a counter argument?

Somebody wrote - The mainstream belief in God is that he has always existed. Some ask "What was before God?"
The answer is "Nothing. God has always existed and nothing existed prior to him (it)." or contrary to mainstream belief; "Something did exist before God." If so what was/is it? and did anything exist before that? Both arguments seem highly illogical.

When did time begin? What was there before time? The logical answers are; "No time." and "Time" but both are illogical answers. Did time always exist? If so when? and what was before that? (please feel free to add other answers )

Is the universe endless? Apparently so, because the scientists believe it is expanding. If it is not endless, what is on the other side? If it is, how can it be expanding? If it is a series of wormholes, black holes and white holes, there must logically still be an edge of the universe? But what is on the other side? Totally illogical, yet the universe exists.

The Universe is estimated by scientists to be 10-15 million years old (a little older - or younger - than our galaxy ).
This would imply the universe had a beginning. What was here before the universe? Nothing? Did the universe appear nowhere and from nothing? Illogical? If there was something here, what was it? Where was it? and what was here before that? and before that? and before that? etc.? Logical?

I was taught in science class that energy can not be created or destroyed, only changed. Does that mean that energy has always existed? Where did it come from? It must have been here before the universe. But where is that? I was taught in the same science class that it is illogical to believe that God could always have existed. (Alright not in these explicit terms - but God doesn't exist = God could not have always existed. )

Is it logical to believe that energy could have always existed, but God could not?

It seems that it is highly illogical to believe in God. And it seems highly illogical not too.

TomHill wrote - bob wrote: Free will and an ethical sense are as real as anything else we experience. It is no more neccssary to assume a god behind them than there is to assume a god behind the universe. The godless option precludes nothing.


Yet it seems logical to you to assume there is no god behind them.

Anyone who says there is no god... prove it.

Prove what you say? I cant prove there is a god. I cant prove a damn thing. How can you prove a counter argument?


bob - You want me to prove the non existence of something that nobody has ever seen?

Danimal - butcher boy wrote: I understand both the Easter Bunny and the Dragon examples but think that they represent something different. It is possible that we have merely invented the God figure for our own sanity and to explain certain things we can't understand, despite much thought and reflection. I'm not so sure the same can be said for the idea of the Easter Bunny or the invisible dragon. I am one of those 'not too sure variety' although at the moment I probably lean more towards a belief than a non-belief. Why? Well I like to believe that I really do choose to do my actions. I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that I am just a very complicated piece of machinery that seems to have free will, but in fact does not. Without free will I cannot see any value in morality since whether something is moral or not will really have no effect on what we do anyway. Perhaps this is just another side to the egotistical human that STV talks of above. Anyway after that bit of rambling, I'm thinking that only the existence of a God can allow me out of the trap of determinism, and as I don't really like being in that trap, then I am tending towards belief in God rather than belief in nothing. (I don't think the Easter Bunny or the invisibkle dragon help in this regard )

They’re only different in terms of their emotional fulfillment. Otherwise, belief in God is not any more rational than belief in invisible dragons. When we talk about belief in God existing on the same footing as disbelief, it’s really irrelevant whether belief in God helps you cope. It might be more relevant in terms of its practical value, but it doesn't make it any more true.

By the way, you seem to be saying that rejecting the concept of god mandates acceptance of determinism. Why would you say that? Free will can exist without god.

smerf wrote - I don't know if God is dead, but God sure is old.

According to the US Geological Survey, a part of the US Department of the Interior, the Earth is around 4.54 billion years old; the Milky Way Galaxy is between 11-13 billion years old; and the Universe is between 10-15 billion years of age. Although, I don't see how the Universe could ever be 10 billion years old and the Milky Way 11 billion years old. Shouldn't the Universe come first? Scientists.

butcher boy - Danimal wrote: By the way, you seem to be saying that rejecting the concept of god mandates acceptance of determinism. Why would you say that?


Because I need to find a way to be able to break the law of cause and effect. I cannot see how you can have free will without this condition being met. If there is something else that can break into the chain of cause and effect that allows us real control then that would do just as well as 'God'. Thing is, I haven't been able to work out even a basic concept about how that might occur.

Yet More Metaphysics
(the part where it gets good)
bob - You are relying on a concept that has no basis in fact to explain a fact that you experience on a daily basis. Try this experiment. Pay very close attention to your own thoughts and the feelings that go with them and make a "rational decision" about whether or not you want to have the same sorts of thoughts and feelings in the future. When you realize that you are indulging in some self pity or are over critical perhaps "think" about how you could instead "choose" to focus on how lucky you are or on the positive qualities in the people around you. After a few months of this notice how your thoughts and emotions have changed for the better and then "decide" if you want to continue with this. You'll be believing in your own free will in no time.

butcher boy - bob wrote: You are relying on a concept that has no basis in fact to explain a fact that you experience on a daily basis.


free will is not a fact. That is just the problem. Given the law of cause and effect, it seems much more likely that free will is only an illusion.

Quote:
Try this experiment. Pay very close attention to your own thoughts and the feelings that go with them and make a "rational decision" about whether or not you want to have the same sorts of thoughts and feelings in the future. When you realize that you are indulging in some self pity or are over critical perhaps "think" about how you could instead "choose" to focus on how lucky you are or on the positive qualities in the people around you. After a few months of this notice how your thoughts and emotions have changed for the better and then "decide" if you want to continue with this. You'll be believing in your own free will in no time.


This is all very nice but even you have had to put specific words in quotation marks. Now why did you need to do that? I may well be believing in free will in no time (in fact I do believe in free will). That is not the issue though. The issue is is that belief well founded? Not that I can see. In fact to me it seems to be the ultimate act of faith as it goes against one of the most basic laws we know - cause and effect. So the problem remains.

bob - Let's take this position of yours to it's logical conclusion.

Some billions of years ago the universe big banged it's way into existence and at that point a cause effect chain of reactions was set off which essentially determined EVERYTHING that was to come after. Every last detail. Including, for example, the decision I just made.... hang on, to scratch my ass. And this feeling I have that I should perhaps try to be kinder to my wife is nothing more than an electro-chemical event. An electro-chemical event whose outcome was already decided some billions of years ago. And the music I happen to hear, the books I read, this conversation I am having with you now were also all predetermined way back when, as were the emotional reactions and insights that might come from those experiences. Similarly everything that you do, everything that you experience and learn from in subtle and complex ways was also predetermined from the start. Your conscious participation in these events has no effect. No need to consider the pros and cons of anything because it has already been determined what you will do.

Honestly, does the scenario that I am describing here resonante in any way with that deep part of yourself that knows it is alive? The part that FEELS things like love and that big burden of guilt. The part that feels responsible for it's actions? Maybe this sense of freedom we have is, like you say, just an illusion, but by god you have to admit it is a persistant illusion, and the facts of life sure come into focus fast when you accept the apparent reality of choice. Choice within a context of course. Choices within the parameters of what you consciously and unconsciously know now, but choice nevertheless. There are a lot mysteries. Existence is a mystery. The origins of life are a mystery. Life's consciousness of itself is a mystery. Free will and our ethical nature are mysteries. If you accept the idea of god, then there is another mystery. My question is does another mystery help to explain the mysteries that already confront us?

jdsmith - I said this earlier in this thread, but it seems I should say it again:

God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends ALL human categories of thought. joseph campbell.

You must at least think about this before you start discussing God's will and free will.

Faith is the supposedly intangible aspect of religion that many people get hung up on. But I feel, faith is intrinsic to us...we eat until we are full..yet as thinking beings, why don't we eat until all available food is gone? Physical limitations be damned. Why not eat every last berry, or every last fry? Because Faith allows us the belief that there wil be more fries in the future. I've seen a guy eat 60 hotdogs...far beyond normal physical limitations.

Why do we have faith? We are people mostly positive about their daily existence? How many people run screaming through the streets "I need to eat!"

God is something we cannot ever comprehend. And that's ok.We're smart enough to recognize out own insignificance as well as our own individual purpose. Does that mean god does not exist? No. Does that prove god's existence? No.

So what?

A great great part of literature, the religion of literature, is that the more one reads, the more one knows one doesn't know.

And again, that's ok.

Who's judging?

Peace.

bob - [quote="jdsmith"] God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends ALL human categories of thought. joseph campbell.

That sounds to me like another one of those supposedly brilliant lines conjured up by some supposedly brilliant person that when looked at a little less obsequiously seem rather less brilliant. To start with why would we need a metaphor for something that absolutely transcends human thought? It might just be my narcisism acting up here again but I thought we were doing a pretty good job of thinking about these things right here. And why specify human? Does he imagine monkeys do a more insightful job of pondering these questions?

jdsmith - No, he implies that as humans we ONLY can even consider these things. And if you dont know what a metaphor is, look it up. They are powerful entities.

And this may just be MY narcisim talking.

bob - jdsmith wrote: No, he implies that as humans we ONLY can even consider these things. And if you dont know what a metaphor is, look it up. They are powerful entities.

And this may just be MY narcisim talking.

bob - Powerful entities. Yeah the questionaire said something about that. I said that yes I believed I was a powerful entity but actually what I meant was that there were powerful entities living INSIDE me and that they only became manifest during certain phases of the moon. They didn't leave room for that on the questionaire though. Cheap bastards.

a rare genius
bob - You forgot the part about words not meaning anything, but rather people meaning things and words being the symbolic represntations they use to give expression to their thoughts or something. It's a subtle distinction I realize. In any event, over time connotations and denotations become associated with words and this gives rise to that fiction known as dictionaries, which, given the changable nature of words need to be updated regularly, daily as a matter of fact, but of course these revisions are not made public until the next edition is published. It's a hell of a job keeping up with what the heck we think people mean and feel by the words they use but some people seem to enjoy such efforts and should be congratualated on their optimistic perseverance in the face of such mind boggling complexity. Being in the state of becoming I think they call it.

Should you feel inclined to continue with the tutorial I'd suggest you try and keep up. Mine is a busy schedule and I'd hate to see you miss this opportunity to study with a rare genius.

Writing
Krashen - Writing can make you smarter. When we write something down on the page, we make a representation of our thoughts, of our "cognitive structures." Once on the page, the brain finds it irresistible to come up with a better version of our cognitive structures. Improving our cognitive structures is real learning (using "learning" in the general sense, not as contrasted with "acquisition"). Writing is not the only way of doing this, of course, but it is a very effective way..... meaning is not what you start out with in writing, but what you end up with. Boice noted that inspiration is the result of writing, not the cause. In addition, there is empirical evidence supporting this assertion, experiments showing that writing can aid in thinking and problem-solving (Krashen, 2003) as well as positive correlations between eminence and amount written among professional writers and thinkers.

The Natural Approach to Second Language Acquisition
II. THEORETICAL BASIS OF THE NATURAL APPROACH

II.1. Theory of Language

Krashen regards 'communication' as the main function of language. The focus is on teaching communicative abilities. The superiority of 'meaning' is emphasized. Krashen and Terrell believe that a language is essentially its lexicon. They stress the importance of vocabulary and view language as a vehicle for 'communicating meanings' and 'messages'. According to Krashen, 'acquisition' can take place only when people comprehend messages in the TL. Briefly, the view of language that the Natural Approach presents consists of 'lexical items', 'structures' and 'messages'. The lexicon for both perception and production is considered critical in the organization and interpretation of messages. In Krashen's view, acquisition is the natural assimilation of language rules by using language for communication. This means that linguistic competence is achieved via 'input' containing structures at the 'interlanguage + 1' level (i +1); that is, via 'comprehensible input'.

II.2. Theory of Language Learning

(1) The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis

Krashen, in his theory of second language acquisition (SLA)suggested that adults have two different ways of developing competence in second languages: Acquisition and learning. "There are two independent ways of developing ability in second languages. 'Acquisition' is a subconscious process identical in all important ways to the process children utilize in acquiring their first language, ... [and] 'learning' ..., [which is] a conscious process that results in 'knowing about' [the rules of] language" (Krashen 1985:1).

Krashen believes that the result of learning, learned competence (LC) functions as a monitor or editor. That is, while AC is responsible for our fluent production of sentences, LC makes correction on these sentences either before or after their production. This kind of conscious grammar correction, 'monitoring', occurs most typically in a grammar exam where the learner has enough time to focus on form and to make use of his conscious knowledge of grammar rules (LC) as an aid to 'acquired competence'. The way to develop learned competence is fairly easy: analyzing the grammar rules consciously and practising them through exercises. But what Acquisition / Learning Distinction Hypothesis predicts is that learning the grammar rules of a foreign/second language does not result in subconscious acquisition. In other words, what you consciously learn does not necessarily become subconsciously acquired through conscious practice, grammar exercises and the like. Krashen formulates this idea in his well-known statement that "learning does not became acquisition". It is at this point where Krashen receives major criticism.

(2) The Natural Order Hypothesis

According to the hypothesis, the acquisition of grammatical structures proceeds in a predicted progression. Certain grammatical structures or morphemes are acquired before others in first language acquisition and there is a similar natural order in SLA. The average order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes for English as an 'acquired' language is given below:

-Ing--------Aux---------Irregular------Regular Past
Plural----->Article---->Past---------->3rd Sing.
Copula--------------------------------Possessive

The implication of natural order is not that second or foreign language teaching materials should be arranged in accordance with this sequence but that acquisition is subconscious and free from conscious intervention (Ellidokuzoglu, 1992).

(3) The Input Hypothesis

This hypothesis relates to acquisition, not to learning. Krashen claims that people acquire language best by understanding input that is a little beyond their present level of competence. Consequently, Krashen believes that 'comprehensible input' (that is, i + 1) should be provided. The 'input' should be relevant and 'not grammatically sequenced'. The 'input' should also be in sufficient quantity as Richards pointed out:


".. child acquirers of a first language are provided with samples of 'caretaker' speech, rough - tuned to their present level of understanding, ..[and] adult acquirers of a second language [should be] provided with simple codes that facilitate second language comprehension."
(Richards, J. 1986:133)


(4) The Monitor Hypothesis

As is mentioned, adult second language learners have two means for internalizing the target language. The first is 'acquisition' which is a subconscious and intuitive process of constructing the system of a language. The second means is a conscious learning process in which learners attend to form, figure out rules and are generally aware of their own process. The 'monitor' is an aspect of this second process. It edits and make alterations or corrections as they are consciously perceived. Krashen believes that 'fluency' in second language performance is due to 'what we have acquired', not 'what we have learned': Adults should do as much acquiring as possible for the purpose of achieving communicative fluency. Therefore, the monitor should have only a minor role in the process of gaining communicative competence. Similarly, Krashen suggests three conditions for its use: (1) there must be enough time; (2) the focus must be on form and not on meaning; (3) the learner must know the rule.

(5) The Affective Filter Hypothesis

The learner's emotional state, according to Krashen, is just like an adjustable filter which freely passes or hinders input necessary to acquisition. In other words, input must be achieved in low-anxiety contexts since acquirers with a low affective filter receive more input and interact with confidence. The filter is 'affective' because there are some factors which regulate its strength. These factors are self-confidence, motivation and anxiety state.

application of natural approach
1. Application of the Five Hypotheses to Foreign/Second Language Classes

In this part, we will try to sift through the practical value of the approach for foreign or second language classes by taking its theoretical bases into consideration.

i. The Acquisition-Learning Distinction

The first and the most useful hypothesis, the acquisition-learning hypothesis tells us that we should balance class time between acquisition activities and learning exercises. It is important to realize that students or any human being cannot both learn and acquire at the same time because one can focus on only one thing at a time, either on form or on meaning. Therefore, there must be a separation between acquisition and learning activities in FL classes and the relative weight of acquisition classes should be over that of learning classes.

The NA instructor does not expect students at the end of a particular course to have acquired a 'specific grammar point'. Instead s/he does expect them to display their comprehension. It is necessary and inevitable, as has been mentioned earlier, to employ two separated classes: Input and grammar classes (i.e., acquisition and learning classes). In input classes, students are given as much comprehensible input as possible. In grammar classes, however, grammar rules are presented deductively or inductively depending on the age of the students (also on whether they are field-independent or field-dependent). The role of grammar classes is to produce 'optimal monitor users' and to aid comprehension indirectly. Therefore, the core of the NA is acquisition activities which have a purpose other than conscious grammar exercises such as audiolingual drills and cognitive learning exercises.

ii. The Monitor Hypothesis

What is implied by the Monitor Hypothesis for FL classes is, therefore, to achieve optimal monitors. Students may monitor during written tasks (e.g., homework assignments)and preplanned speech, or to some extent during speech. Learned knowledge enables students to read and listen more so they acquire more. Especially in early stages, grammar instruction speeds up acquisition. This is one of the reasons why adults are faster than children in terms of the rate of achievement. However, the NA teacher wishes his students to use the monitor where appropriate.

iii. The Input Hypothesis

As for the application of the Input Hypothesis, the instructor should provide input that is roughly-tuned. The teacher should always send meaningful messages and 'must' create opportunities for students to access i+1 structures to understand and express meaning. For instance, the teacher can lay more emphasis on listening and reading comprehension activities. Extensive reading is often preferred because of ample amount of input provided. Outside reading is also helpful (e.g., graded readers, magazines and the like).

iv. The Natural Order Hypothesis

The Natural Approach teacher should be tolerant against errors. He uses a semantic syllabus for acquisition activities and grammatical syllabus for grammar lessons (i.e., for learning sessions). As is known "the grammatical syllabus assumes that we know the correct natural order of presentation and acquisition, we don't: what we have is information about a few structures in a few languages." (Krashen, 1983: 72). Therefore, the teacher will not organize the acquisition activities of the class about grammatical syllabi and only 'meaning' errors are to be corrected in a positive manner.

v. The Affective Filter Hypothesis

The application of this hypothesis would be that acquisition should be achieved in a low-anxiety environment. The teacher creates a comfortable atmosphere in the classroom by lowering the affective filter. There is no demand for early production speech and no radical concern for correctness in early stages of acquisition. This, of course, reduces the anxiety of students considerably. Our pedagogical goal in an FL class should, then, not only include providing comprehensible input but also creating an atmosphere that fosters a low affective filter.

2. The Syllabus

The syllabus underlying the Natural Approach is topical and situational. It is a semantic, or notional syllabus, simply "a series of topics that students will find interesting and the teacher can discuss in a comprehensible way" (Krashen, 1985:55). The focus of each classroom activity is organized by topic, not grammatical structures. What is more interesting is that Krashen and Terrell have not specified or suggested the functions which are believed to derive naturally from the topics and situations. Therefore, basic communication goals (both written and oral) are achieved mainly through topics and situations; and each topic and situation includes various language functions that the students will acquire.

As discussed earlier, a grammatical syllabus may be used in learning classes where learners are given conscious knowledge about the target language. Needless to say, the relative weight of acquisition activities is to be over that of learning activities. Similarly, practice of specific grammatical structures is not focused on in the above mentioned semantic syllabus.

3. Learning/Teaching Activities

Learners remain silent during the first stage. This does not mean they are inactive. What they do in this stage is to understand the teacher talk that focuses on objects in the classroom or on the content of pictures. Students are only expected to respond to teacher commands without having to say anything. The purpose of the beginning stage is not to make students perfect but to help them proceed to the next stage.

When students feel ready to produce speech, the teacher asks questions and elicit one word answers. This is the second stage where the teacher asks yes/no questions, either- or questions, and wh-questions that require single word utterances. Students are not expected to use a word actively until they have heard it many times. Pictures, charts, advertisements are utilized to proceed to the third stage where acquisition activities are emphasized (e.g., group work and whole class discussion).

The NA instructor uses techniques that are borrowed from other methods and adapted to meet the requirements of the NA theory. Among these techniques are TPR activities of Asher, Direct Method activities in which gesture and context are used to elicit questions and answers, and group work activities that are often used in Communicative Language Teaching. But, what makes the NA different is that every specific technique has a theoretical rationale. That is, the Natural Approach theory is so strong that within its framework classroom activities can be accounted for. This feature of the NA makes it superior to other methods like Communicative Language Teaching which lacks a sound theory of language learning.

4. Teacher Roles

We may speak of three crucial roles for the NA teacher. Firstly, the teacher is the primary source of input that is understandable to the learner. It is the teacher that attempts to maintain a constant flow of comprehensible input. If s/he maintains students' attention on key lexical items or uses context to help them, the students will 'naturally' be successful. Secondly, the teacher creates a friendly classroom atmosphere where there is a low affective affective filter. Thirdly, the teacher chooses the most effective materials and employs a rich mix of classroom activities.

5. Learner Roles

The language acquirer is regarded as a processor of comprehensible input. S/he is challenged by input that is a little beyond her/his present level of competence. S/he is expected to be able to assign meaning to this input through dynamic use of context and extralinguistic information. Acquirers' roles, in fact, vary according to their stage of linguistic development. Some of their roles are to make their own decisions on when to speak, what to speak about, and what linguistic expressions to use while speaking.

6. CONCLUSION

We are on the eve of a new paradigm shift in foreign language teaching methodology. The Communicative Approach or 'PPP' is no longer a dogmatically accepted best method. Its impact is about to fade away. Methodologists are in search of a successor of the CA. The Natural Approach with its strong learning theory and easily applicable techniques is the strongest nominee for the most common method of the 21st century.

Using our reasoning faculty, we can speed up the process of reaching the conclusion that the NA or comprehension-based methods are more efficient than grammar-based ones. Otherwise, we have to follow the footsteps of old-fashioned ELT literature which is preconditioned against the NA. Such a literature will most probably seek the successor of the Communicative Approach among production-based methods. If we are to follow this literature, then we are to accept losing another decade before arriving at comprehension-based methods.


the natural approach - theory to practice
In this paper, we will try to explain how the Natural Approach (NA) has been applied at the prep class of Kuleli Military High School. To our knowledge, Kuleli is the first school in Turkiye applying this rather unpopular method. Since the method is not commonly known and sometimes misinterpreted, a brief theoretical introduction would be beneficial. We'd like to start with a curious analogy between swimming and language acquisition: we as human beings are probably the only creatures who are capable of drowning (!) This is not necessarily because of our heavy flesh: even elephants which are heavier than man simply lay their bodies freely in water and almost never experience drowning. It seems as if the more we flutter, the deeper we sink. It is as if man's conscious swimming attempt deprives him off the natural swimming or floating capacity.

Interestingly, new born babies, who are free from fluttering in water, make the best use of their natural swimming ability and do better than their elders. Another domain where infants outsmart us is language acquisition. While babies pick up their mother tongue with ease, most adults can not learn a new language without much trouble. Even with their advanced cognitive capacity and problem solving skills they simply fall behind children's ultimate level of success. Again it seems as if adults' conscious learning attempts deprive them off the natural language acquisition capacity.

Is it not true that while teaching swimming, the first step is to make learners realize their natural ability to float on the surface of the water? Similarly in NA the aim is to make students rediscover their innate capacity to acquire a language. In fact NA is not the only method which tries to tap this natural capacity. What makes NA different from others, however, is its theory of second language acquisition.

The learning theory underlying NA is called the Monitor Model. It was put forward by an American applied linguist at the University of Southern California. There are five basic hypotheses in the Monitor Model. The first and probably the most important one is the "acquisition-learning distinction hypothesis according to which L2 learners have two distinct ways to develop competence in a second language: learning and acquisition.

Learning is the process of dealing with grammar in conscious way. It is the common practise experienced in most foreign language classrooms even today. Students consciously examine the grammar structures and try to internalize them through extensive practice. In this
sense learning a language is similar to any other kind of subject matter or skill learning like learning math, learning how to type or drive. In all these, you first learn the rules consciously and try to make them automatic through extensive practice. The product of learning process is also a kind of conscious knowledge which Krashen calls learned competence (LC).

Acquisition, on the other hand, is a subconscious process. It is similar, if not identical, to the way we pick up our mother tongue. Unlike a learner, an acquirer cannot feel the processes, the changes happening in his brind (brain and/or mind). When he acquires a new rule, he does not know what has happened because acquisition takes place below his level of awareness. The product of acquisition, AC, is also subconscious. That is why native speakers of a language do not know that they use their L1 grammar knowledge while speaking. In fact, without grammar communication would be greatly damaged. The same is true for second language speakers. While speaking fluently in another language, we have to use our subconsciously provided knowledge.

The existence of conscious and subconscious knowledge in the minds of second language learners is accepted by almost everyone. What is controversial, however, is the claim that consciously learned rules cannot become subconsciously acquired through practice. This view belongs to Krashen and reflected in his oft-criticised claim that "learning does not become acquisition". According to Krashen, LC and AC represent two separate knowledge systems between which there is no seepage, no passage, no interface. This view is known as NON-INTERFACE (NIP) position.

The majority of teachers and methodologists on the other hand, believe that we first learn a grammar rule and through practice it becomes automatic thus subconsciously acquired. This second view, known as INTERFACE (IP)position, appeals to our intuitions whereas NIP is quite counter-intuitive.

In scientific philosophizing intuitions are of undeniable importance but as long as they are not contrary to research findings. And it is at his point that IP and empiric data are in conflict. Research has been telling us, at least for the last two decades, that the development of AC and LC are rather independent. It has been repeatedly found that second language "acquirers" pick up the grammar rules of their target language in an unchangeable natural order even when the teaching/learning order in class is different. (Bailey, et al., 1974; Dulay & Burt, 1974; Fabris, 1978; Christison, 1979) The natural order that researchers have found does not necessarily match our teaching order. Third person singular "s", for example, is an item that we teach at the very beginning of our teaching program but our students seem to resist using this simple rule. In grammar exams where they can use their LC there is no major problem but while speaking fluently they simply ignore it as if they did not know the rule.

This apparent gap between what students consciously know and what they can use during fluent speech has led many researchers to investigate whether the natural order of acquisition can be altered or, in other words, whether they can interfere the process of acquisition. In two separate experiments carried out in 1989, Pienemann and Ellis examined the acquisition three of German grammar rules in a classroom setting. They presented these rules in a reversed natural order. That is, if A is the first rule of German acquisition then they presented it last and emphasized it the least: similarly they taught the last acquired C rule the first and emphasized it the most. At the end of the teaching period they analyzed their students' free conversation and found that again the students follow the natural order, just like naturalistic acquirers.

A comparison of this sequence with that reported for naturalistic learners of German revealed no difference, despite the fact that the order in which the rules were introduced and the degree of emphasis given to rules in the instruction differed from the naturalistic order... The results of this study support the claim that the classroom and naturalistic L2 acquisition ... follow similar routes. (Ellis, 1989, p.305) formal learners develop their language stepwise despite the scheduling of the teaching [and], more importantly, in the same order as has been found for natural acquisition. (Pienemann, 1989, pp. 71-72).

These and many other similar research results confirm Krashen's NON-IP. If learning became acquisition then it would be possible to change the natural order. Since conscious learning and practice cannot change the order of acquisition, Krashen asserts that acquisition and learning are two distinct processes and that learning does not become acquisition. If we cannot acquire through learning then how does acquisition take place? Krashen's input hypothesis gives the answer. According to this hypothesis, we acquire any human language in an "amazingly simple way": by understanding messages. Not through grammar practice nor through speaking and writing practice but by way of getting comprehensible input.

A cornerstone of Krashen's theory is that human beings are equipped with a language-specific acquisition device (LAD), which is triggered by comprehensible input. When we understand a message, LAD automatically operates and picks up the new grammar in that input subconsciously. That is, while we are focusing consciously on the meaning of a message, a subconscious mechanism, LAD, focuses on the form or the grammar of the same message.

Provided that a message is understood, LAD can acquire the new grammar items in it in accordance with the natural order. How does this gradual, piecemeal acquisition take place then?. Let's suppose that a learner-acquirer is at the level of "X" in terms of his current competence in his second language. In order for him to move from x to x+1, that is, the next stage along the natural order, he is to get a message that includes those structures representing x+1 . One cannot acquire an x+2 rule unless he is at the level x+1 even when the message is understood. Technically speaking, one who is at the level of x is not psycholinguistically ready to acquire x+2 structures. That is why, understanding sentences with 3rd person singular "s" does not result in the acquisition of that specific rule.

A common misconception among foreign language teachers is that when students are not told the grammar rules directly, that is, when we make them discover the rules on their own in an inductive way, they will be able to acquire them. However, research has shown us that a structure cannot be acquired either through deduction or induction if the learner is not psycholinguistically ready, namely, if he is not at the relevant stage at the natural order. Both deduction and induction are types of learning, not of acquisition. Both require a conscious focus on grammar whereas acquisition necessitates a focus on meaning.

But isn't there any good of teaching grammar? If you ask this question to Krashen, he would probably say "little, if any". For him the only function of learned competence is to make corrections while speaking or writing. Krashen might be justified in his underestimation of grammar since his ideal NA teacher is that of a highly proficient (preferably native) one providing an input-rich environment for the students. But in a scarcity-of-input EFL environment, where neither the teacher nor the environment can provide sufficient amount of authentic input, grammar plays a far more important role. Alongside its correction role in production, LC helps you understand better. With the help of some conscious grammar knowledge, you can decode those texts that are not decodable only with AC. Especially in reading, the amount of books that you can process is doubled or trippled with the aid of some conscious grammar knowledge. The more you read, the faster you acquire. So grammar helps acquisition by bettering comprehension and by increasing the number of input avenues.

The aim of teaching grammar, however, is not to convert LC into AC but to enable the students to understand better and to get more input. Learning still does not become acquisition but it aids acquisition by easing the way for better comprehension.

The acceptance of the claim that learning does not become acquisition requires a tolerance for grammar mistakes. That is, an NA teacher must be patient when his students make very simple mistakes like the omission of third person singular "s". But if a teacher does not correct grammar mistake, won't it be hard to eradicate them later on? In other words "How is the problem of fossilization handled in NA?" Krashen would probably answer this question by saying that error correction does not necessarily lead to the correction of errors. Error correction might be a temporary solution. A long-term cure for fossilization is to provide comprehensible input. Provided that the students get ample amount of messages, grammar mistakes will be eradicated gradually.

The only type of mistake that needs to be corrected in NA is the one which hinders communication, the one which causes a meaning problem. That is, if the grammar mistake is so awful that the message is not understood then the teacher might ask the student to clarify his message or to restate his sentence.

Correcting form-based grammar mistakes is not only useless but also harmful. Especially at the beginning level, student production is full of mistakes. Dealing only with meaning errors is enough intervention. If a teacher corrects both meaning and form errors then students will feel offended and hesitate to speak in class. As a result, the classroom atmosphere will get tense.

The affective filter hypothesis in Krashen's SLA theory predicts that in such a negative atmosphere, acquisition process is greatly hampered. According to the theory, this filter gets strengthened when a learner has high anxiety, low motivation and low self-esteem. Incoming input cannot trigger LAD if the filter is strong. In short a teacher who is correcting form-based mistakes is not only wasting his time and effort but also doing disservice to his students.

more on the natural method
The most important implication of acquisition-learning distinction hypothesis is that form-focused and meaning-based activities should be separated. Therefore, we divided our English program into two unequal parts: input and grammar hours. 75 % of the program is formed by input hours and grammar is handled only in the remaining 25 %. A similar division was made in the test system. 80 % of a common test includes meaning based questions whereas grammar questions formed 20 %. Such a parallelism between what is done in class and what is tested in exams is necessary to avoid negative backwash. That is, if common tests were heavily grammar-oriented, then students would not pay enough attention to meaning-based activities in class.

What kinds of meaning based activities are there in input hours? The majority of input hours is filled with listening activities. Why listening? Because while listening students get input. Why not reading? Because reading can be done outside with ease but not listening. You can make thirty or so students listen to the same tape in class but outside the class you need thirty or so tapes to attain the same efficiency.

Therefore listening activities form the core of the whole English program throughout the year.

Reading, on the other hand, is done extensively outside the class. How about intensive reading? The reason why we prefer extensive reading is the ample amount of input you can get in this way. For instance suppose that intensive reading of a one-page difficult text takes an hour whereas you can read ten pages of simplified text within the same amount of time. One page on the one hand, ten pages on the other. From a cost-efficiency point of view, therefore, intensive reading is held at a minimum in class. Instead students are encouraged to read simplified novels and the number of books read by each student is over 60 (in March). This amounts to more than 3000 pages of written input.

Aren't the students assigned any grammar outside the class? Yes, but not extensively. Grammar plays a minor role outside the class as it does inside. How is the grammar taught in class? Through deduction or even through grammar translation. Why are such old-fashioned techniques used? Because deduction is easier and faster than induction and it is no less effective (especially for adults). Some methodologists suggest that inductively discovered rules are retained better, but one should not forget that it takes quite a long time. What is more, there is no guarantee that the inductively learned rules become acquired as has been emphasized before. Both induction and deduction are instances of learning not of acquisition. If neither of them result in acquisition, then why should we spend so much time with indirect teaching of grammar? In our application, therefore we preferred direct, deductive teaching of grammar basically because it is the shortest way of teaching grammar allowing us to give more time to acquisition activities.

What is the relative weight of production-based activities as compared to comprehension-oriented ones? Aren't speaking and writing as important as listening and reading? Sure, they are. In fact one of the most important aims in NA is to develop students' communicative skills.

But the way to develop them is different from other communicative methods. The NA theory suggests that dwelling on receptive skills positively affects the productive ones as well. Therefore in NA speaking and writing activities occupy a small portion of class time.

Students are believed to develop all of the four skills provided that they are exposed to ample amount of input.

During the first semester, students are not forced to speak or write. This practice is in line with the concept of "Silent Period" mentioned in Krashen's theory. During this silent period students are not passive but actively processing the input and developing their acquired competence. Forcing students to produce before they have enough subconscious grammar knowledge (AC), enhances students' anxiety. Especially in Communicative Approach, the students are required to speak from the very beginning. In NA, however, this is avoided in order not to strengthen the affective filter. If the filter is strong, LAD cannot be triggered. Therefore the only thing that NA students have to do (especially during the first semester) is to display their comprehension one way or another. To achieve this, they can use single or double-word answers, non-verbal means, body language, or even mother tongue.

Answering T/F or wh-questions, drawing charts while listening are other means of displaying comprehension. If students spend most of their class-time by just listening, doesn't it mean that NA teachers are doing the speaking all the time? Isn't this too much burden on the shoulders of our teachers? In Krashenian NA, yes! Krashen's NA teachers has to speak a lot because he is a native (or at least native-like) speaker and he is the main source of input in class. But in our EFL setting, teachers are non- ative . Let alone the non-natives, it is even hard for the native teachers to be the only source of input in class. The solution that we have found to this problem is to use authentic listening texts in the form of audio or video cassettes from the ELT market in addition to the audio and video cassettes of our old coursebook.

If the main source of input is authentic material then what is the role of teacher? The basic duty of our teachers is to check students' comprehension? This is far easier than being the main source of input or being a communicative teacher.

Interestingly, however, this easy method of language teaching is not necessarily less effective than others. One can even suggest that it is one of the most effective methods. To test the efficacy of our application in Kuleli we gave a standard test (KET) comprising listening, reading, writing components plus a separate grammar test (in March). We also gave the same tests to the students in another military high school using the same textbook but with a grammar-oriented method. The test results indicated that Kuleli students are 25 % better off in reading, 40 % in listening. Their better performance might be considered as a natural, expected outcome of the heavy emphasis on receptive skills.

What is more interesting, however, are the writing and grammar results. Kuleli students performed 18 % better in grammar and 30 % in writing though these two language areas have not been emphasized in our program. Even if there were no differences in success between Kuleli and other school students, NA would be successful due to their superiority in overall-proficiency. In short, research results have confirmed the hypothesis that getting great quantities of input develops not only the receptive skills but also the productive ones plus grammar.

NA, in its somewhat modified version, seems to be an appropriate method applicable in an EFL setting like Turkiye. It is a reality that the number of native or true- bilingual teachers is low in our country. But even under such restricted conditions, the application of NA at Kuleli prep has shown that students attain high levels of proficiency when exposed to ample amount of input. To sum up, NA seems to be a method of fostering both productive and receptive skills plus grammar by just relying on input, a method of killing many birds with one stone.

Ethical Journalism
Every mainstream news organization has its own sets of ethics rules, but all of them agree broadly on what constitutes ethical journalism. Information should be verified before it is printed, and people who are involved in a story should be given a chance to air their viewpoints, especially if they are under attack. Reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, even significant appearances of conflicts, and disclose any significant ones. Often, a conflict means being disqualified to cover a story or a subject. When errors are discovered or pointed out by internal or external sources, they must be corrected. And there should be a clear wall between editorial content and advertising.

New York Times

Taiwan
Taiwan is like a poem that does not rhyme.
But just when you toss the book angrily into the corner,
You find yourself picking it up again,
And wonder why the story is so damned touching.

BobHonest


Motorcycle Diaries
sandman wrote (about che guevera)- A murdering bastard is a murdering bastard, no matter how much of a starry-eyed idealist he is.


bob - That may be true but there were and still are a lot of people around whose business enterprises and influence over government policies pretty much force millions of people even deeper into poverty. That's some of the worst violence you can do to a person. It should come as no suprise that the victims of such violence, and the people who sympathize with them, become capable of some violence of their own. Perhaps the real intention of this film is to remind us of these sad facts.


Psuedo Dilemma
Anyway this whole thread amounts to a hill of beans. TPY will do whatever she does for whatever reasons she does them and the rest of us will have grown a day older having participated vicariously in another person's pseudo dilemma. I dunno why but these internet soul of love sessions give me the creeps. Sorry.

Tell Me
“Tell me, and I will forget.

Show me, and I may remember.

Involve me, and I will understand.”

-Confucius

Good Money In That
Jefferson wrote - Returning home after a long journey abroad allowed for a fresh perspective on life in Taiwan and how I see it. The first couple of days back, I was mostly having a good time visting my old haunts, seeing old friends, etc. Not too much bugged me.

Of course, after getting back to the grind and the nitty gritty of daily life, the little frustrations started piling up, and I found myself getting annoyed at things like people crowding onto the bus, driving like lunatics, etc.

Instead of letting those (everpresent) problems get me down, I did a quick assessment of my situation and realized that Taiwan, well, was still Taiwan. Nothing had changed over the last week. It was my mental state which had changed, which had affected my attitude and outlook.

Now, granted that every place on this little globe has its own problems, the question is this: To what extent are the "problems" you encounter here products of your own state of mind? Or, to put it another way, to what extent is the focus of your complaining and irritation affected by your current living condition?

I realize those are extremely difficult questions to answer when you're "in the middle" of things here. BTW, I'm also interested in hearing from folks who've left and come back after a period of months (or years), and how that's affected your perception of life, Taiwan, the universe, and everything.

jefferson again wrote - I wonder what percentage of Taiwan Tantrums are reflections of a person's own wrecked state of mind. And to take that further, I wonder to what extent the people who see a lot of problems are in fact revealing a deep well of personal troubles. To extend that to a point that might be ludicrous, I wonder if cases of extreme ranting might be an indication of serious personal issues, which might be completely unrelated to the object of one's ranting.

Of course, this can never be cut and dry, since it's a complicated business. There are issues of culture-shock, adjusting to a new home, etc. But I think it is interesting to draw a connection between our changing perceptions of a place and our changing states of mind. Because then, once we realize that's what's happening (if in fact, that's what's happening), it can allow for a shift in perception, added stability, and a better sense of balance and well-being.

At least that's the theory.

bob - Taiwan can be irritating as hell of course. My personal beef is the traffic and the attendant air pollution. There are a number of wonderful things about the place though such as the sensitivity that you can expect from people who are actually your friends. Basically I think that the healthier you are psychologically the more you will find to appreciate about Taiwan and the less you will find to bitch about. That's probably what you should try to do if you want to become or remain psychologically healthy as well. Looking for the positive is a good general strategy wherever you are. Of course it is also healthy to try and shape your environment in positive ways as long as you don't become grandiose and over estimate your potential influence. I've seen a lot of Westerners in Taiwan who don't seem to understand any of these things. They bitch and complain and expect things to improve as if by magic all on account of their having identified a problem or a shortcoming. It really is an embarassing thing to behold and all the more so because I was once one of the worst offenders.

Wookie - Righght-on, Bob.
Wherever you go that's where you are. So you can either go somewhere else or adapt to your locality.

Back home: The boss screwed me, the driver cut me off, this person is an A**hole, I didn't get enough respect from so and so, This person is a shithead and is holding me back, the govt. sucks, "The Man" is pulling the strings and little people can't get ahead, "The System" is designed for those who are within, the world is f**ed up and I can't make a difference, so why try...

Here: Ditto

It is easy to externalize our problems. Not so easy to look for the source--usually inside ourselves.......Peace!

bob - Thanks Wookie. You know something else I've realized lately is that the grandiose, narcissistic, hypercritical, depressive, paranoid mess I was when I arrived here five years ago was to quite an extent pretty much an unavoidable consequence of coming from a grandiose, narcissistic, hypercritical, depressive, paranoid, shame based mess of a society. I have no idea really what the society is about here, but thanks very much to a book entitled "The Art of Happiness" I have chosen to look for whatever positive I could find in whomever I have had contact with here and that has made all the difference; which, in a round about way, brings us back to Jefferson's original question: Is it Taiwan (or wherever you came from for that matter) or is it you? And that my dear readers is a hell of a question since it is bloody near impossible to extricate a "you" from the mass of influences that created you. It is possible though to yank yourself up out of that cause effect dynamic and chart a more deliberate, controlled course for yourself but that requires a good bit of soul searching.....

Jefferson - Sounds like a good attitude, Bob. It may well be that Taiwan is allowing you (along with many of us) to undertake a personal reinvention. Being in a place where our previous habits, reactions, and assumptions are decontextualized allows the slate to be recast. Or, at the very least, it allows for a new slate to be created, especially when speaking Chinese or Taiwanese, as many of the cultural and behavioral artifacts of one's native language are dropped.

But again, it's not all that rosy or cut and dry, which is a reason we need to do things like engage in regular introspection, read books to help us sort things out, and start threads like this to share experiences.

bob - People who have a chance to step out of their birth culture as adults for extended periods of time are some of the luckiest people alive. Especially people like us coming from the west at this point in history, which it seems has been characterized by abuse of both the most blatant and the most subtle kinds for decades. Most of the smart people I know in Canada are recovering from it in one way or another. The dumb ones don't even realize what they did or what happened to them.

Which of course isn't to say that there isn't a lot of negativity here. It's just that I am not part of that dynamic, since most of my interaction with people is in the role of teacher, and in that role I usually seem able to maintain mutually respectful relationships. That would probably not be possible were I to find myself employed less professionally here. Were I to return to Canada you could be well assured that I would quickly find myself employed less professionally. I doubt that it would suit me much. Anyway both the Chinese and Western Zodiacs say I would make a good assassin. I wonder if there would be good money in that....

Siesta Time
Somebody wrote - A beautiful fishing boat was docked in a tiny coastal village south of the border. An American tourist complimented the local fisherman on the quality of his fish and the beauty of his boat and asked how long it took him to catch them.

"Not very long," answered the fisherman.

"But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American.

The man explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family. The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

"I sleep late, play with my children, catch a few fish, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar and sing a few songs. I have a full life..."

photoThe American interrupted, "Hey, I have a MBA and I can help you. You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge enterprise."

"How long would that take?" asked the fisherman. "Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American.

"And after that?" asked the fisherman.

"Afterwards? That's when it gets really interesting," answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!"

"Millions? Really? And after that?" asked the fisherman.

"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny coastal village, sleep late, play with your grandchildren, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and playing the guitar with your friends!"

Johnny Revolta
bob - Hollywood producers get funding for a film on the condition that there are certain number of fights, a certain number of flatulance jokes and/or on the condition that John Travolta or Brad Pit gets a certain amount of screen time. They don't care if the thing makes sense or deals with an aspect of real human experience because they know that if the sound bite is "cool" and they have a big name star people will pay to see it. Hollywood films are as bad as they are because they're produced by business people and not by artists, and because there literally hundreds of millions of people in the world who "just want to be entertained" and bring almost no intelligent critical judgement to their movie viewing choices. As long as we keep paying to see stupid movies they will keep making them. It's show business. Show "business." With no "business" there's no "show." That would perhaps be preferable.

Who Knows?
Mr. Sai lost his horse and when his neighbours commiserate with him he says "maybe bad maybe good, who knows?"

Then the horse comes back, leading another wild horse. His neighbours rejoice for him saying how lucky he now has two horses. He replies again "maybe good maybe bad, who knows?"

His son breaks his leg, and again the same gets played out, "maybe bad maybe good, who knows?"

Then the army comes to town, but the son cannot be pressed into service because of his leg.

Maybe bad, maybe good. Who knows?


Elegant Nonsense
Elegant nonsense
By Victor Davis Hanson
July 16, 2005


Nearly 24 centuries ago, Plato warned not to confuse innate artistic skill with either education or intelligence. The philosopher worried the emotional bond we can forge with good actors might also allow these manipulative mimics too much influence in matters on which they are often ignorant.
So he would cringe that the high-school graduate Sean Penn is now capitalizing on his worldly fame from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" to pose as an informed commentator on the Iranian elections.
Then there's Robert Redford, who once played Bob Woodward in "All the President's Men" and apparently still believes that role made him an experienced muckraker a la The Washington Post in the Watergate era. Now Mr. Redford lectures reporters to go after George W. Bush, undeterred that the real journalist Dan Rather ended his career by such an obsessed effort.
Mr. Redford and Mr. Penn, of course, aren't the only entertainers as would-be wise men and moralists who lecture us on the evils of the Bush administration.
The United States took out the Taliban in seven weeks, Saddam in three. Despite a difficult insurrection, there is a democratic government in Iraq. Yet action-hero George Clooney pontificated, "We can't beat anyone anymore."
Osama bin Laden declared open season on Americans during Bill Clinton's administration, well before the September 11, 2001, attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq. But Sheryl Crow announced, "The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies," as if her musical genius translates into expertise on radical Islam.
Richard Gere of "The Jackal" fame elaborated: "If you can see [the terrorists] as a relative who's dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is love and compassion. There's nothing better."
Cher often sings of losers and so drew on her artistic insight to share a complex portrait of the president: "I don't like Bush. I don't trust him. I don't like his record. He's stupid. He's lazy."
What's so disturbing about our leftist celebrities lecturing us on what has gone wrong after September 11? Nothing, as long as we realize why they do it.
Entertainers wrongly assume their fame, money and influence arise from broad knowledge rather than natural talent, looks or mastery of a narrow skill.
In fact, what do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is "stupid," but she -- not he -- didn't finish high school.
If these apparent autodidacts are without degrees, aren't they at least well informed? Not always. Right before the Iraqi war, Barbra Streisand issued an angry statement assuring us Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iran.
Second, liberal guilt over their royal status explains why leftist entertainers drown out the handful of conservative celebrities. Sanctimonious public lectures provide a cheap way of reconciling rare privilege with professed egalitarianism.
British rockers draft legions of lawyers to evade taxes, yet they parade around at hyped concerts to shame governments into sending billions of taxpayers' money "to end poverty" in Africa.
Such public expressions of caring provide some cover for being long-haired capitalists -- or, in the case of an impoverished Africa, not worrying how in the messy world one really deals with Zimbabwe's kleptocrat Robert Mugabe, who just bulldozed the homes of 1.5 million of his own people.
Third, celebrities have lost touch with the tragic world outside Malibu and Beverly Hills that cannot so easily be manipulated to follow a script or have a happy ending. Thus an exasperated Danny Glover, Martin Sheen and others recently ran an ad in the trade magazine Variety lamenting that Hollywood's illegal alien nannies couldn't obtain driver's licenses to drive to their estates. How dare the voters of California not grant licenses to those who broke the law to nobly serve the exalted?
Fourth, Hollywood's megaphones don't have a very good track record of political persuasion. While Josef Stalin and later Mao Tse-tung slaughtered millions, many actors still preached that communism offered a socialist utopia. Jane Fonda went to enemy Hanoi to offer marquee appeal to the communist Vietnamese but was ignorant of their documented record of murder and autocracy.
If retired actors and entertainers wish to become politicians -- an old tradition, from the Empress Theodora to Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- let them run for office and endure a campaign and sustained cross-examination from voters. Otherwise their celebrity is used only as a gimmick to give credence to silly rants that if voiced by anyone else would never reach the light of day.
In this regard, we could learn again from the Greeks. They thought the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides were brilliant but not the mere mimics who performed their plays.

Elegant nonsense
By Victor Davis Hanson
July 16, 2005

The Life Aquatic
...with steve zissou. for those of you who ever wanted to join the crew of Jaques Cousteau, shoot a movie, reconnect with a long lost son, embark upon one last adventure, or sing a song with david bowie

Dependant Origination and the Nature of Evil
bob - In the Dalai Lama's "Ethics For the New Millenium" (his second best book IMHO) there is a chapter entitled "Dependant Origination and the Nature of Reality" in which he explains that nothing exists independantly of other things, and so the only thing that exists, in fact, is a complex web of relationships. The "self" that we tend to be so proud of, as if it was something we created "ourselves" for example turns out to be the product of a vast array of influences: genetic, societal, historical, chemical.... The harder we look the more difficult it becomes to find any independant "self" at all. To some extent it is simply illogical to hate an individual when that individual is in fact only a product. Words like evil lose much of their meaning because what most of us mean by that word has something or other to do with free will, and while free will is something we experience, it is not something that stands up very well to scrutiny. So far so good. Lets call it a draw. A paradox.

I think it was in the Art of Happiness that he talks at some length about the human tendancy to view any given phenomenon in terms of it's effect on us personally. The tit on the motorcycle for example becomes just that, some tit on a motorcycle, when his exhaust fills my lungs and his riding style jepordizes my safety. I forget that TOM (tit on motorcycle) is also a human being like myself who has needs and desires, who was born of a woman, will someday die and who is perhaps very much afraid of that. He probably possess many admirable qualities. Perhaps he takes good care of his family for example or is a trustworthy friend to somebody. Given my extremely narrow perspective however it isn't likely that I will approach TOM, should that ever become necessary, with much of the respect, good humor or compassion that he very likely deserves. This is a mistake on my part. It is always wiser to take the larger perspective, except I would argue with people like Hitler, Stalin or Sadam Husein despite whatever charm, asthetic sense or love of Mommy they might have possessed. At some point the damage you cause cancels out the positives. At this point that the world is justified in labeling you "evil" and owes you no compassion beyond a painless death.

Plato
Plato's theory of justice amounts to "each receiving from the community, all of the support, training and resources necessary to fulfill their particular potential, minus what the community requires in return in order to see others fulfill their particular potential."

Dying poorly
Tears save sick China mother from cremation alive

A Chinese peasant woman who suffered a brain hemorrhage was left at the undertakers alive for cremation because her family could no longer afford hospital treatment, state media said on Friday.

She was only saved by the tears in her eyes.

The case is the latest in a series of tragedies illustrating China's stretched health care system and the inability of rural workers to meet spiraling medical costs.

You Guoying, a 47-year-old migrant worker from southwestern Sichuan province, was taken for cremation by her husband and children in Taizhou, eastern Zhejiang province, where she worked, the China Youth Daily said.

Fortunately for You, the undertaker realized she was still alive when he saw her move and tears in her eyes, the newspaper said.

"This is not only a tragedy for the family, but also for society," it quoted Xu Yinghe, a Taizhou official, as saying.

"The fundamental reason is the absence of a social welfare system."

You was taken back to hospital for further treatment with money donated by sympathetic citizens of prosperous Zhejiang, the newspaper said.

"Three days of treatment cost us more than 10,000 yuan," it quoted her daughter as saying, adding that was the sum of the family's life savings.

"If there had been another option, who would have the heart to send a member of their own family for cremation while there was still a hope of survival?"

The newspaper did not say if the family would face charges.

Vice Health Minister Zhu Qingsheng said last December that about half of all farmers could not afford medical treatment when sick.

A 42-year-old farmer too poor to afford treatment for lung cancer set off a home-made bomb aboard a bus in Fuzhou, capital of the southeastern province of Fujian, in August, killing himself and another passenger and wounding 30.

Also in August, a security guard hailed a hero for fighting off a purse snatcher jumped to his death from a hospital window in south Guangxi province because he couldn't afford the bills.

In the late 1970s, 94 percent of China's villagers were covered by cooperative medical schemes. But the collectives were disbanded during market reforms of the 1980s which ended cradle-to-grave welfare for the masses.

What Do You Think About Thinking About Thinking?
bob - I seem to be doing a lot of it (thinking about thinking) these days and am not really sure that it is entirely productive. Anyway, what do you think, about thinking about thinking I mean, like, or whatever...

Jaboney - I think it's like a dog chasing it's own tail.
Only it's not really it's tail, but the shadow of it's tail.
Consciousness lies. It's too slow to catch what's going on and too proud to admit it.
At least, that's about what I think about thinking about thought.

bob - .... the cure I sought. Brilliant. Thank you.

In The Beginning
In the begining there was nothing! Then god said "Let there be light!" . Then there was still nothing....but you could see it better.

I don't know anything
bob - Do you?

Tigerman - I'm with you, bob.

jdsmith - The more I read the less I know.

I read a lot.

sandman - bob wrote:
Do you?

Quit putting me on the spot like that! How am I supposed to know?

TC - I thought I did.

Then I moved here and got married.

Now I'm stupid in a language I don't understand and married to boot.

Oh well...life goes on.

Durins Bane - (bubble, bubble) Like, whatever, man (bubble, bubble)

SuchAFob - I don't understand a goddamned thing. Completely lost. Right there with you. Nothing. At all. About anything.

cfimages - My name's George Bush.


bob - I don't understand the difference between autism and happiness half the time, but at least I understand that I don't understand that and that in itself represents something of a breakthrough (in either the field of autism or the field of happiness, depending of course on your theoretical orientation to the issue).

bob - I don't understand how language works. How do words "mean" anything? What does "mean" mean?

Notsu - I believe you haven't met many autistic people, cause autistic people are generally unhappy - they don't fit in our world and most of them live in fear and confusion day by day.

Language is a system of symbols. Words don't mean anything but refer to certain things and the connection between the word and the thing it refers to is typically arbitrary ... and I find it difficult to explain it in English..

Whatever.. It's funny you chose these two questions to ask me, cause I've studied linguistics as well as worked with autistic kids.

bob - OK so words don't "mean" anything, people "mean" things and use words to refer to those things. The word "cup" refers to a drinking utensil but doesn't "mean" drinking utensil unless someone happens to use the word in that sense. Of course, they could just as likely use the word as a verb as in "Cup my balls baby" but that would be obscene and somehow inappropriate to a discussion of linguistic subtlties. And one might be left wondering whether it is perhaps possible to organize words according to the dictates of logic and grammar but still not "mean" a goddamn thing. I dunno, like, I just dunno, you know?

guangtou - I think I understand tinea. Got that under wraps. It comes and goes on my feet with my level of depression (lowers my resistance), and how often I use the skanky showers at the NTU gym. I use this blue cream that my local pharmacist gave me for a couple of days, and soon enough, it's gone. PM me for ANY question related to Hong Kong foot, crutch rot or ringworm (which is actually a form of tinea fungus). Apart from that, I haven't got a clue about anything. I'm an idiot.

Discombobulation in Hangzhou
bob - guangtou wrote: Apart from that, I haven't got a clue about anything. I'm an idiot.

Somehow I seriously doubt that. For example I bet you know something about Hangzhou China and Huang Shan. I only ask because I am going there with my wife and co-workers on thier company vacation. As the token white boy I imagine I'll be required to sing Karokee and perhaps perform a strip tease but that's seems like a small price to pay for a week of travel with first class accomodation....

guangtou - Yep, know something about Hangzhou and Huangshan, but not as much as I know about tinea. And that's the problem with knowing a lot about one specialized topic - everything else pales in comparision.

For example: if you have Hong Kong foot, and then you get rid of it, and THEN you wear the same shoes you wore before you got rid of it, it'll come back again really fast. You have to disinfect the shoes AS WELL AS treat your feet, otherwise you'll go on reinfecting yourself forever. It's a vicious circle (and probalby a PhD).

Hangzhou? It's in China right?

bob - Last I checked. On the map it appears equa-distant between Nanjing and a great big pain in the ass as for some milenia now it has been inspiring poets and philosphers with it's somehow uniquely Chinese grandiloquence which, for the unitiated, translates to a cable car to the top.

bob - Sorry I thought you were talking about Huang Shan. I don't know why though since you quite clearly stated Hang Zhou, a fact that can be confirmed with a quick puruse through the previous posts. In any case such is the case in this case and what with one thing and another each coming into play and becoming factors worthy of consideration each in their own right it isn't long before one feels overwhelmed again.

bob - Apologies for this thread and whatever discombobulation it may have caused so far. The doctor has switched my anit-depressant and so far the effects, while certainly colorful and energizing, have not been entirely integrative. Adjustments will be made and we hope to have things back to normal shortly. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Richardm - I used to think I could understand anything. (Sometimes I still do.)

Huang Guang Chen - I lived in Hangzhou and should have climbed Huangshen with a bunch of class mates, but that was 14 years ago. I suspect that despite the odds, you are in for a a seriously good time. Oh yeah, and outside of HK feet, Guangtou knows fuck all.

And while I'm here, let me just say what a treat it is to have Richardm's presence. Long may you tap, old horse.

bob - Staying at that hotel right on top of Huang Shan we are too. Despite the tone of my earlier posts regarding the issue you can believe I feel pretty durn excited about that. In fact, given a choice of ALL the worlds hotels, I would probably chose that one (provided of course that the weather co-operates). It certainly has to be one of the world's most extraordinary locations.

Namahottie - I don't understand bob and why bob talks about Jesus.

JOHN MOSS - dear bob,

what is it that you are trying to understand?? don't try to understand everything, because a lot of stuff really makes no sense. the world has become a complicated place. I find it's best to look deeper, and by that I mean get to the basics, look past all the material crap we have acquired.

humans are all the same, yet we are all different, that's the beauty of life. we all wake up in the morning and take a poop. we all eat food, we all drink water, we all laugh, we all cry. we all came in to the world butt-naked. we all will die someday. we have to enjoy each day while it is here.

find something that makes you feel wonder each day. it could be looking deeper at something you always took for granted before. for example, have you ever looked at a dragonfly's eye up close? I mean really close, like with a botanists hand-lens if you have one, or a magnifying glass. or a leaf. stuff is cool if you examine it in new ways. take a hike. listen to silence. listen to good music.

don't go trying to find enlightenment on the surface. I think it's deeper.

just remember to keep it simple and keep it real.

nobody knows everything; besides, nobody likes a "know it all".

take care,

pg 4 and still don't undertand a damn thing
bob - OK like for example how is it that I have come to look a lot like Socrates. And I don't understand how people make movies. How do they know what to take a picture of first, and how do all those people work together without murdering each other. And what about all the cities each with millions of miles probably of wires and pipes running everywhere. Stuff like that drives me crazy.

X3M - I see your question, but what is your problem?

JOHN MOSS - dear bob,

well, time happens. look at boy dylan. once he was young and cute, but now he looks like vincent price. that's ok, he is still one of the best songwriters our time will ever know.

as far as the movie makers. they too are artists. you never know what's going on with them deep down. they work from within. something just strikes them as the right thing to do to express themselves.

the people working on the movies though, not murdering each other, they probably just don't want to go to prison. or maybe it's the common goal to get through this thing so they can hopefully make some money and therefore buy things.

all those pipes and wires. well, I don't know what to say about that. sometimes I think about all the miles of roads we have in America. and not even just paved roads, but all the miles of forest service roads that criss cross our "wild lands". they are just there from years of people putting them there. all those wires and pipes make it so you can light up your home, and flush your toilet. don't worry, they are your friends.

something else I think about along those lines is all the food that is grown in this world. i look at the produce section in the grocery store and think about this is just one grocery store. there are many other grocery stores in this town, and many more towns with many more grocery stores and markets and all are stocked with the same multitude of food. where does it all come from? and how can they keep growing it all the time so that when i come back in a couple weeks, theres all new produce that wasn't there before. before it was perhaps still growing, or being picked, or being loaded, or being shipped or being unloaded. it's mind boggling. how does the soil sustain this I wonder.

anyway, keep pondering, it keeps your mind active.

john

bob - But I'm not one of the best songwriters our time will ever know. I am not anything. I don't even own a boat. What kind of man doesn't own a boat? And what about all those girls. Do they look like Vincent Price now too? Or did they get become drug addicts and die, dirty and alone, in some back alley? Or did they have children and do the children wonder where all the fruit and vegetables come from, or do they just eat them and then have a poop later while playing video games on their cell phones?

Richardm - I don't think anybody knows what Socrates looked like.

bob - I do. I have seen photographs.

Vindication
bob - I was waiting for a bus one cold day last week and since I had a nasty bloody cold too I didn't feel like walking around looking for a garbage can and threw my empty zun cu nai cha container in some guys scooter basket. Some frustrated, 40ish, office worker type saw me and told me it wasn't a garbage can. Feeling really quite embarrassed I mumbled an apology of sorts and took the garbage out. That wasn't enough for miss fancy pants though so she continued to yak (in English) at me about what a terrible thing littering is blah blah blah yak yak yak until finally I said "Look lady, I took the garbage back, what do want me to do now, climb up on a cross?" That didn't gel in her pin brain either so I said "Listen, either stop talking to me or I'm going to put the garbage back." That didn't work either and she got started on the yaking again so I put the garbage back in the scooter basket and said "There, you happy?" She said she was tired of foriegners coming here and disrespecting her country so I said I didn't disrespect Taiwan I was just tired and quite ill and getting tired of her bitching already. Then I put my thumb over my left nostril and blew a big gob of snot out of the other. Unfortunately a thick green glob of said snot gob landed on her shoe. It sat glistening there like a tiny phosphorescent oyster for a bit and then the bus came and luckily for me did one of those flick of the back door rolling stops so I jumped on thinking that at long last I could be rid of miss hormone disorder. She had other plans though and tried to jump on the bus behind me so I gave her a sort of back kick to the top of her head. She stumbled backwards and was run over by a cavalcade of motor scooters each with basket fulls of garabage left by inconsiderate foriegners and I felt vindicated.

dunno anything (page five)
jdgvflervl wrote - Quit looking for attention. Undertsand

bob - Are you trying to antagonize me?

bob - Corn holio?

chodofu wrote - JOHN MOSS wrote: dear bob,

.... we all came in to the world butt-naked. we all will die someday. ...

john


Isn't it funny how we come into the world butt naked, but leave it in our best suit.

JOHN MOSS - oh bob,

you say you are not anybody??

you are bob

you are good enough, you are smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.

X3M wrote - I see your question, but what is your problem?


bob - In a word, infinity.

Richardm - There is an infinite number of integers, that is whole numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on.
There is an infinite number of real numbers, that is whole numbers plus everything in between.
But there are more real numbers than there are integers. No matter how you try to match them up, there will allways be real numbers left over.
How can one infinity be more than another? I'm not sure there is anyone who understands that.

dunno pg. six
Richardm - How can one infinity be more than another? I'm not sure there is anyone who understands that.


bob - See. I told you guys, everything is too weird. Think about water. Or music. Or music underwater. What about that?

guangtou - If you are on a train travelling at the speed of light, and the speed of light is as fast as anything can go (according to relativity theory), and you walk from the back of the train to the front, doesn't that mean you're travelling faster than the speed of light?

Something tells me RichardM knows the answer to this one, and bob, who wants to know the answer, will loose sleep over it. As for me, I'm an idiot and don't really understand the question. Even though it's my question. Really confusing all this...

bob - Yes, but not by very much. Say, for example that you were on a really long train like the one that goes from Taipei to Gaoxiung, and when you started out in Taipei you were at the back of the train but walked towards the front on route. I imagine you would only save about five minutes on the trip actually (assuming of course you didn't stop in at Tainan and give TC a hard time - in which case the whole deal would be thrown all out of whack so lets just forget that idea) and since all the doors on the train open at the same time on arrival you'd just have to sit an wait anyway. It would probably be better to just sit a relax the whole trip.

About the music and water thing, I'm wondering if it would be possible to teach fish to dance and if so what steps would you start out with. Richard?

Richardm - Start with a watlz. Fish hate tapping. And then they are at a total loss with what to do with the banana.

Big Fluffy Matthew - guangtou wrote: If you are on a train travelling at the speed of light, and the speed of light is as fast as anything can go (according to relativity theory), and you walk from the back of the train to the front, doesn't that mean you're travelling faster than the speed of light?

No. When you measure your speed, what is it in relation to ? (That's why it's the theory of relativity)You are at walking speed in relation to the the train. When the train is going that fast, time slows down, and you're going faster, so it slows down even more. And speed=distance/time, so your speed is still less than the speed of light.
And don't forget that as your speed aproaches c, your mass approaches infinity, so it takes an infinite about of energy to go faster, which is why you can't go faster.

Richardm - I knew that.

guangtou - Thanks for that BFM. There's one more thing I know now that I didn't before. And so does bob. And this makes the whole thread kind of superfluous, 'cause now he knows something.

That's assuming of course, that BFM isn't lying. Then we'd be back where we started (i.e. with bob not knowing anything).

RichardM knew about the light speed thing without even being told about it. It's just great knowing he knows, you know?

bob - Big Fluffy Matthew wrote: ....as your speed aproaches c, your mass approaches infinity, so it takes an infinite about of energy to go faster, which is why you can't go faster.

bob - I guess that's why light particles are so tiny huh?

dunno pg. 7

bob wrote: I guess that's why light particles are so tiny huh?

BFM - They're teeny, they have no mass and no charge, but you can't measure the size because of Heisenberg's uncertainly principle.

bob - Sneaky little buggers. I bet there is a lot of them too.



Shari Law
Muslim theology divides the world into two categories: Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb (House of Islam and the House of War). Don't let anyone tell you that Islam means "peace" in the typical English sense of the term. It really means "submission", or "the peace brought about by submission to God". Muslims consider themselves to be living subserviently under God's Law. Either a region of the world is under submission to God, or it isn't and therefore must be subjugated to God's Law by any means necessary. Either through open warfare, voluntary conversion, or a gradual takeover by a growing Muslim population. As long as the end result is total submission of the world to God's Law, otherwise known as the Sharia. Various passages of the Koran support this (8:39, 9:29-30, 8:12-17), and dozens of hadiths recount Muhammad's battles to spread Islam. I read through a UK forum when the poll came out revealing that 40% of British Muslims want to live under total Sharia. The Brits posting on the forum were shocked that 2 in 5 British Muslims want to live under 7th century conditions...I'm shocked the number wasn't much higher. But either way, it puts that "Tiny Minority of Extremists" mantra to rest. To those of you convinced Islam is a peaceful, beautiful religion, better go and read up on dhimmis and see if you'd like to live as on under Sharia rule. Never heard of dhimmis or dhimmitude? Better go and Google it so you can see what kind of life you'll be living if the Muslims do win.

Let Us Review

bob – Let us review...

A few thousand years ago people didn't know a heck of a lot about science so they invented this god thing to explain stuff. The god idea caught on and then a few schizophrenics came forward claiming that this phantasmagorical god thing had spoken to them. They wrote down or preached about what god had said to them, or what they thought god had said to them, or what they thought people would want God to say if, in fact, you could ever get a word out of the old bugger. One guy even went so far as to say that he actually was god, or the son of god, or one corner of a triangle. Does that make any sense to you? Look, its complicated....

Anyway, at the time there was no TV, and writing was more of a chore so people tended to take more notice of such things and in fact whole civilizations, justice systems, architectural styles etc. grew up around the god idea. It inspired some of the most beautiful art the world has ever seen. There was a wonderful book written about all of this too with great stories about virgin births and women talking to snakes and some of it is even more or less verifiable and intended to be interpreted literally. There is a lot of stuff in the book that people have trouble interpreting cause it seems so dream like or like a fairy tale or something. Some of it though is definitely supposed to be interpreted literally, like for instance the part where the triangle guy in a fit of grandiose shame takes it upon himself to die for all of our sins. There was even a movie made about this part. You should see it. They break the triangle guys back and peel off his skin with whips and pull his arms out of his sockets and drive nails through his hands and this teaches us about the magnitude of triangle guy's sacrifice even though most of it isn't true probably.

Such is the power of the human imagination.

Not many people (with a few notable exceptions) today however claim to have had conversations with god and were they to really push the issue they would probably end up under psychiatric supervision. Unless those people happened to be very well connected politically of course. In fact these days we have Iranian politicians claiming to have a God given right to nuclear technology that will allow them to build a nuclear bomb, and a group called "The Taliban" seeking to bring human affairs under the will of God and a little monkey named Bush elected on the God idea and on his conversations with the God idea. Of course all these people are deluded and grandiose enough to believe that they are acting on God's will and in the process they threaten the security of the entire planet, but apparently in private conversations with god this is all part of the big plan or something. It's all covered in the last chapter of the book.

Such also is the power of the human imagination.

The problem with the god idea essentially of course is that it too often allows people who are so wrong to feel so right. There is nothing more dangerous than that, but the triangle guy isn't around anymore and the people who claim to speak for god are all in psychiatric hospitals, or in politics, or employed by oil companies or by weapons manufacturers so we wee people are pretty much left to figure these things out for ourselves. It is quite a strain generally and with time it becomes more and more difficult to always look on the bright side of life.

Yvons Deschamps
We don't talk anymore. 53 years married is a long time. Although it almost ended, I fought with the wife. She wanted to leave. I said: Are you crazy, we've been together 53 years, you're 76 I'm 79, we ain't splittin like that. She says: but we always fight like kids! "It's your fault" I replied, "you annoy me".
She falls on my nerves. It's always the same with her. At night we watch TV and she falls asleep during the movie. The next day lunch time, she argues with me about the ending. On top of that she says I was the one sleeping. I also sometimes fall asleep watching TV but at least I remember. I told her, I said: You're losing it? She was so angry she said: I'll go back with my mother. I said: Not only you're losing it but you're also losing memory."It's been three years your mom lives with us." "Besides, you're way too dependant to go anywhere." No, it's true, she's in a wheel chair. She can't even roll it herself, I have to push her. I'll never push her to go though.

So we don't talk anymore. We scream. It's normal we're both deaf. It's hard to fight when we're old. I mean it's not hard to fight but it's hard to make up. When you're young it's not the same. I mean even if you fight real bad, you know that at one point you'll make up and it will be fun...I remember when we were younger, we fought so hard once that we made up everynight for like three weeks. We named the first one Pacific.
When you're old it's scary. So we don't talk anymore.

I was thinking we've been together 53 years and we fought on average once a month. That's about 640 fights. Could she not have thought of leaving before.

Oh no wait, I must be losing it myself. She alsmost left many times. She always stayed. Me too I almost left many times. I always stayed. It's funny when I think back because it was never because of love that we stayed. We always had good reasons. The first time her mom convinced her it wasn't right and so she stayed. I almost left once too, I made it to the porch. You see her dad was dying so I thought losing two was too much. I stayed. Once she had her jacket on and she was just about out the door but I had a bad cold and a light fever so she couldn't. She stayed. It's never love that made us stay but when we almost left it's like something happened. Two-three weeks later it's like you love each other more. That's when it gets confusing. Because then you're not sure if you stayed because you love each other more than you thought or you think you love each other more because you stayed. The only thing you're sure about is that if you stay you have to make compromises. So after 50 years, I can't see leaving because you fought so many times and made so many compromises that you're nothing anymore by yourself. It takes two to make one. No, it's so true in fact that it is why often when one goes, the other one follows shortly after. That's why I told the wife"don't go." Well actually...trying to make her understand...At our age we don't have much time left to live. Each on our side it would seem like forever. Besides, leaving is dying a little and at our age that's a big chance to take. So we don't talk anymore. We don't even move anymore. We've become too frail.

Celebrate
Now is a rushing river. There are those who would
hug the shore, but there is no shore. Push off into
the stream. Hold your head above the frey. See who else
is in the midst of things, and celebrate.

-Native American saying

Two Hops and a Scotch
bob - Actually tash I was just lookinq for a way to use the term "bobologue" which Imaniou so graciously shared with me the other night at Carnegies and that led somehow to "the regina bobologues" (probably by means of the brain's tendency to store verbal information in rhythym files) and then since just that night there happened to be some rather good dialogue about just this very topic (how weird Canadians are) it was of course little but two hops and a scotch past two billion or so redundant synapses to the regina/weird Canadian connection. It is a convoluted and random approach to the art of internet posting that, like all paths with heart, leads, precisely nowhere.

Face
"Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.” - George Orwell.

Orwell says that if there are some things we are not supposed to think or say, it will in general hamper our overall ability to think creatively. Face often makes it harder to discuss some things publicly, so it may be avoiding embarrassment hampers free thought.

Ask a SE Asian to tell you a fictional story - to on the spot invent a tale. All that I have asked can not. Ok, maybe that skill is too complicated. Ask one to narrate any interesting instance of their life. Most not only will not, they CAN not. There are simply too many mental blocks - there is too much dangerous territory - will they reveal something about themselves? Must they take some sort of stand, betray an opinion? They will panic at the thought of free flowing yet structured thought, freeze, and claim that they "have no stories to tell". A Thai has no story - no history - no personal identity that can be shared. Because of the blocks to thinking imposed by face.

Sometimes someone is capable of narrating some personal events, but I've never heard a story told that included commentary. It will be a strict chronological telling of events that happened. Nothing will be mentioned of the meanings of events, their import to the person, their feelings about them, how they were affected or changed by them, how they see the world now because of the events. Strict narrative with no editorial. Meaningless, or at least, the meanings in the story must remain unconscious and unspoken, like meanings in a passing dream. Vaguely felt but not fully known, ephemeral, and relating to no real thing. The Thai remains semi-conscious, not articulating his history to himself, not making mental maps of meaning, not gathering and garnering potions of wisdom from his events. He just wades from moment to moment, semi literate, semi conscious. May pen rai. "You think too much", he will say, when you catch him in inconsistencies. He prefers his mental blocks and illogical catch22 paradoxes and blind spots to too much thinking or other painful clarities.

The catchphrase used in SE Asia "up 2 u".
“I don't trust you because you lie.”, I say. "Up 2 u.!" she retorts. ““No, not up to me. I don't move your lips. If you lie, up to you. If you lie, then I don't trust you.”

“I'm tired of your games and manipulation.”, I comment. "Up 2 u!" God gracious, what an insane cultural trait this avoidance of all personal responsibility for ones own actions! Up 2 you, up 2 you.

It seems they refuse to exist. All motivations and responsibilities are exterior. “Up to you.” “I can't because my brother won't let me.” “My father wants me to marry.” “Yes, I agree with you. And yes, I agree with you, with the opposite opinion.” Agree without taking a real stand, agree without being consistent, so no problem. No self, no problem. With that sense of no responsibility for anything said, and no importance attached to a personal stance, lies are flippant and expected. Truth is not hard, just not useful. No one has cultured a taste of it. It is irrelevant. There is no self who maintains opinions and hold responsibilities anyway, so no use to cultivate any allegiance to a silly abstraction like truth. It wouldn't make one a better person to be an honest person who can take an informed and thoughtful and moral stand on an issue that she believes, irrespective of what others believe. A person is bettered by being pragmatic about circumstances, doing whatever is convenient. Deep thought about deeper meanings about what is happiness need never impinge upon blissful ignorance. Mai pen rai remains the best and most insightful mantra. The nihilism in that protects all from embarrassment Don't think too much. Don't think at all, and if it causes pain, forget it.

No wonder a lot of us drink a lot when in Thailand – it is impossible to communicate verbally with much depth to those who derail the conversation whenever it gets a bit sticky or tricky, so we have to find our entertainments in other ways. Sex and alcohol seems to work.

Asians are not straightforward. Everything seems to be some sort of negotiation, and everyone is expected to not disclose their hand. The other morning my cell phone was off because of a dead battery, and there was a power outage until late afternoon. My playmate freaked, assuming I was fucking. There became no way to be straightforward – everything I said was interpreted as some sort of strategic lie. And then everything she said was a strategic lie. She starts saying how she hates me and will never see me again, when the day before it was that she loves me and wants my baby. So I tell her that I am a western guy, and that I am straightforward, and that I don’t' bullshit around - I aim exactly at what I want mean and I say it with words that mean exactly what I mean. If she wants me to love her, then say yes and I will, if not say no and I'll find someone who wants my love. That shook her up enough to start to change the subject, but I swear she was really getting off on the drama of the whole thing, and didn't seem to care one way or the other if I was telling the truth or if she was telling the truth. Truth totally left the picture. Reality had nothing to do with anything. She just wanted to show me how much jealousy she was capable of, and to show me that she was prepared to freak if I did anything that made her jealous. It's tiring. That constant mis-trust and emotional manipulation never once happened to me in the west. If I said something, it was either believed, or if the person thought I had such a character that I was lying, then there wasn't really much more to talk about – no need to continue the relationship. What is the point of talking if it is a lie?

Asians use language fundamentally differently - this has been noted in business manuals. At the negotiating table, Asians spiral around and about, as if getting to the point would cause everyone physical pain and reveal embarrassing genital flaws and long unspoken family shames. They often will purposefully obfuscate, puffing clouds of words at your direct questions, diverting question from hitting answer. Compound that onto feminine guile onto pre-rational unempathetic selfishly motivated confused and mixed desires, and what you've got is slush over ice on an ice floe on water. No traction, and even if you get anywhere, you aren't going anywhere. "How does that make you feel?" can not be translated into any Asian language. It would be heard as "What would you like to present as your face regarding this difficult and awkward issue, or would you prefer to remain silent or change the subject just now?" In Asia you aren't expected to look like a stupid ass if you giggle or twitter or otherwise completely avoid an unstoppably direct question as if it were not a twenty thousand pound elephant thwapping its trunk onto your forehead. Other people would be expected to show deference to you by not noticing elephants.

" Even if the love is real, the words you hear are somewhat less than genuine, because they’re said for effect rather than a natural outpouring of emotion. " - Lookpapa

Yes, language is used fundamentally differently here in SE Asia. Instead of to convey what actually is, as if there is a real external world worth talking about and real inner worlds worth disclosing, it is mostly used to emotionally manipulate and to create advantage. People say either what they think you want to hear, or deliberately try to throw you off balance to gain an emotional advantage over you, or invent some lie, to see how you will react, in order to try to find out your "real" motives. Thais don't and can't understand this: that westerners do not lie. The can not grasp the abstract concept of "truth". It is totally without meaning to them. They do not and will never trust you.

Every word is always said for effect.

How boring is that?

Fuck you Buck
So anyway what with all the shit that was going on it wasn't long before we were back into it again and what a sad fucking mess that was all melodramatic and hysterical as usual so I says to Buck "Fuck you Buck" and you know how bUCK is he don't take no shit off nobody and just then the windows blew open and all the guts fell out all over the floor so he couldn't square off proper and slipping around in the blood like that just pissed him off worse cock fucker he was goddamit.

How China Was
If you’ve been following the misadventures of little b bob you’ll perhaps be wondering how China was. If you haven’t been following I suppose I have to explain that the purpose of the trip was to make a video that the owner and managers of a cable manufacturing company could use to learn the English they needed to introduce their factory to foreign guests. My task was to play the part of “visiting big shot purchasing agent” and do the factory tour, get the full red carpet hotel treatment etc and teach whatever English might be related to those endeavors. The filming was to be conducted in whatever manner I felt productive. Life is surprising sometimes.

Anyway. We flew into Hong Kong and then drove into an industrial area just over the border with China, checked into a five star hotel, ate, and proceeded to drink ourselves faceless. Apparently that is how one prepares, in China, for a film shoot in a monstourously hot, enormous factory. I don’t think it is optional. One drinks with the guys, on the first occasion at least, or one is not, well, one of the guys basically, and I would guess, out.

The next day my assistant and I start the tour and the filming simultaneously. Easy right? The first stop was the secretary pool or whatever you call that place they keep all the secretaries and it was explained to me that it is company policy to only employ the most beautiful women in the secretary pool (or whatever you call that place). This portion of the film wanders somewhat as I forgot essentially that I was filming anything. What the factory owners got was a shot of a wall and a little bit of a garbage can with me gerbling away in the background in a language related perhaps to English. Or Chinese. It is difficult to say.

Things improved a bit after that as we moved through the engineering, testing, shipping departments etc and it wasn’t long before we were to eat again. Me and some of the guys had become pretty good buddies over the rice wine and all that the night before so the meal was a fairly loud, jocular affair as, in general, Chinese people tend to be fairly loud and jocular, only in Chinese so it is more difficult to keep up.

I was then left more or less to myself in a hot stuffy little office to try and figure out what in heck we were doing and what we should do next.

After that, of course, there was another dinner and more drinking and schmoozing around the VIP club and what with all the entertainment, karaoke and such, it wasn’t long before another lovely evening had past and it was time to sleep. In the morning the lights weren’t functioning in the restaurant bathroom so one of the attendants suggested that he assist me in my confabulations with a lighter. I thought that sounded like a rather peculiar proposal so said “Wo yao dabien. Ni yao bangzhu wo ma” which translates basically to “I want big shit. You want help me?” which apparently is about as funny in Chinese as it is in English so we both had a good laugh over that and I went back to my room and sorted things out there.

With all of that settled it was back to the factory where the filming had moved more towards the manufacturing end of things and I was to witness a series of processes so laborious, so mind numbingly repetitious that one would perhaps rather not think too much about where ones manufactured goods come from. There was not a lot of chit chat with this segment of the labor pool but I did discover that twelve hours a day six days a week of such employment nets about 175 dollars a month and a dormitory to sleep in.

The hotel was somehow less enjoyable that night but with a bit of effort I did manage to appreciate the absolutely immense infinity pool and warm tropical night breezes.


Wrapped the shoot up the next day and decided together with the owner and managers that what we had basically was a basis for a script that we could use next time we did the whole thing again, only properly. The plan is to do precisely that sometime in the next few months.

And there you have it. How China was. I really liked it actually. Such warm, simple, friendly people your heart would melt.

Canada Goosed
bob - Canada geese are on the endangered species list but it always seemed to us there was a lot around and damned arrogant too so we'd pop their heads off with a seven iron and then boil them in the steam vents that ran off the laundramats in China town. Not bad eating, a bit gamey and the bleach didn't do much for the flavor either, but heck, the price was right....

Old Gobbo - MMMmmmmmm Steam-bleached Canada Goose...ARRGGGGLLLL

Using an old needle as a meat thermometer, small B bob looking around at his dinner guests, raised a lysol sandwich and thusly spake, "Boys, our goose is near cooked!"

bob - And just then we noticed Fred was looking a little purple so Ned gave him a boot, and, with a giant fart, Fred fell flat on his face. Nobody said much or responded at all really till Ted spoke thusly "I think Fred's dead Ned. Freds dead" and with that each floated off to his own hell on clouds that were shrinking fast.

passion of the christ
satelite TV - I just saw this movie this evening on the MM2 Movie channel...

A great Mel Gibson film and definitely not one for young kids....

If you haven't seen it see if you can get it. English subtitles a must though.

Cyberguerrilla - Yeah, Christians certainly like their violence. Instead of focusing on Christ's message of LOVE and NON-Violence Gibson insisted on making a movie with enough blood to fill a swimming pool and a not so subtle anti-semetic message.

"The basic message of Christianity -- love your brother -- is obscured under torrents of blood to the point of benumbing the audience."
-- Bill Muller, ARIZONA REPUBLIC

"Whereas the words say love, love, love, the sounds and images say hate, hate, hate."
-- Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"So obsessively and so graphically bloody-minded that it comes perilously close to the pornography of violence."
-- Rick Groen, GLOBE AND MAIL

"While it fails to shed significant new light on its subject, Gibson's film and the all-Jesus-all-the-time attention from the media it's attracted do tell us something somewhat disconcerting about the state of American culture: That the way to make a religion based on love and forgiveness relevant today is to turn it into violent entertainment."
-- FILM THREAT


Number of minutes Jesus was beaten: 45
Number of times Jesus was whipped: 115
Number of nails pounded into Jesus: 4


Dr_Zoidberg - The key word here is passion. The Passion of The Christ. If you didn't want to see such brutality you should have paid closer attention to the title. The title often gives away what the movie is about. If you're not Christian, nor a native English speaker, use a dictionary to gain some insight into what you are planning on viewing.

Also, it's not that Christians enjoy violence; Christ's suffering is an integral part of our religion, it's not just about love, love, love.


Cyberguerrilla - Doctor, I DO understand the word Passion and it's implications in the movie. My complaint is that the "brutality" doesn't develop the characters in the movie. It's brutality for brutality's sake. Does it say anywhere in the Bible that when Jesus was nailed to the cross that it fell down and his face was SMASHED into the ground?

bob - "Passion of the Christ" sold more tickets on it's promise to feed people's sadistic fantasies than anything else.

Dr_Zoidberg - ..... what did you think crucifixion was? It does, however, say that Christ was scourged. Scourged, not slapped on the wrist with a wet noodle.

Had Mel Gibson presented us with a sanitized version in which not a drop of blood was to be seen and all was sparkling clean and new, you would no doubt be complaining that it wasn't realistic.

Bob - Jesus took enough of a beating in that movie to kill a person ten times over. We got the idea. He was tortured and yet forgave. They could have done a little less beating and used the time saved to explore other themes. Brutality for brutality sake and sold as something "religious". Hard to get much lower than that. bob - Jesus took enough of a beating in that movie to kill a person ten times over. We got the idea. He was tortured and yet forgave. They could have done a little less beating and used the time saved to explore other themes. Brutality for brutality sake and sold as something "religious". Hard to get much lower than that.

Satellite TV wrote - I'm sure that 2000 years ago public crucifictions were probably pretty brutal.


bob - Indeed but they would not have that brutal because, like mentioned earlier, there was enough flogging to kill a person ten times over. The film was unrealistic on that score. And after you have admitted that you have to then ask what purpose all that extra violence served. A lot of people believe that it served to cater to people's violent fantasies and in a film about Jesus that is awfully goddamed hypocritical.

Dr_Zoidberg - bob wrote:

... there was enough flogging to kill a person ten times over. The film was unrealistic on that score you have to admit.


I couldn't say if it was or not, I have never witnessed a flogging. Or, in this case, a scourging.

bob wrote:

A lot of people believe that it served to cater to people's violent fantasies and in a film about Jesus that is awfully goddamed hypocritical.

Indeed, they may be right; but that was not the intent of the producers. Neither are they responsible for what fantasies people conjur in their own minds.

Again, it goes back to the fact that if we didn't want to see someone being put to death in that fashion (and we all knew what the movie was about before we saw it) we should have stayed away. Complaints about Roman scourging and crucifixion being too violent is like going to a porno theatre and complaining there was too much sex.


bob - The film was not shot in real time and yet covered the last day of Jesus life. It is left up to us to imagine how the other hours were spent on the basis of what information the film provided. The film gave us no reason to imagine anything but more of the same scourging in those intervening hours. Jesus would have bled to death.

Neither of us knows with any certainty what the intent of the producers was but we can guess that part of it's motivation was to make money selling violent images. That seems a fair conclusion based on what they presented to the world.

By the way I don't believe that it is simply a case of "if you don't want to see it don't watch it". I am interested in film. I see it as something that simultaneously reflects and creates the global community in which I live. It is my right, perhaps even my reponsibility, to see and criticize a film like this regardless of whether or not I want to be exposed to those sorts of images.


Cybergeurilla -

- The film portrays Jewish authorities and the Jewish "mob" as forcing the decision to torture and execute Jesus, thus assuming responsibility for the crucifixion.

- The film relies on sinister medieval stereotypes, portraying Jews as blood-thirsty, sadistic and money-hungry enemies of God who lack compassion and humanity.

- The film relies on historical errors, chief among them its depiction of the Jewish high priest controlling Pontius Pilate.

- The film uses an anti-Jewish account of a 19th century mystical anti-Semitic nun, distorts New Testament interpretation by selectively citing passages to weave a narrative that oversimplifies history, and is hostile to Jews and Judaism.

- The film portrays Jews who adhere to their Jewish faith as enemies of God and the locus of evil.


And if you believe that Gibson's intentions were pure and true:

Quote:
Gibson is a passionate member of the Catholic Traditionalist movement, a minority (but growing) Catholic sect that rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1964-65 - in particular the abolition of the Latin Mass. The Passion is nothing short of a party political broadcast for this movement, if only in the crude way Gibson's earlier Braveheart was propaganda for the SNP.

How influential is this Traditionalist movement, and what might it do with a multi-million-dollar war chest from Gibson? The publicity surrounding The Passion has fed all sorts rumours - particularly of an anti-semitic nature. Much of this has been provoked by the increasingly bizarre public comments of Gibson's 85-year-old father, Hutton. Gibson senior is a self-confessed anti-semite and Holocaust denier. In one recent radio interview, he claimed there were no Nazi extermination camps: "They [the Jews] simply got up and left! They were all over the Bronx and Brooklyn and Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles."
"They're after one world religion and one world government. That's why they've attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine."

Gibson senior belongs to the extreme fringe of the Catholic Traditionalist movement which has gone so far as claiming that the Church in Rome has been taken over by a weird coalition of Jews and Freemasons acting for Satan.

Dragonbones - ... but who wants to watch an orgy of violence and suffering?

bob - People who are into that kind of thing. S&M I think they call it. It's a big thing in shame based societies

redandy - Well, I think if you watch the Passion and only watch the violence that was done to Jesus, then you've missed the point. The Gospel story is not about how terrible the Jewish leaders and the Romans were, it's about how Jesus reacted to them.

As for whether it's justified to show it in film, consider 1) The story is extremely violent in itself -- there may be some question about whether every specific event happened exactly as the Bible and other sources indicate, as some have noted, but the movie follows the story pretty closely for the most part. 2) In the Bible the extreme violence is integral in highlighting the depth of Jesus's forgiveness ("forgive them, for they know not what they do").

As for accusations of stirring up violent anti-semitism, well, any Christian who interprets the story as a promotion of violence betrays their own beliefs. Someone willing to do that isn't really a Christian, they're just a bigot and they'd find some way to fuel that with or without this movie.

bob - I think most of us got that point. But as has been stated in this thread umpteen million times already, we could have gotten it with about a third the violence. More of the film could have been devoted to other aspects of the story. Given the sadomasochists a little less to jerk off over and a little more to think about like. Whatever. I give up.

redandy - Does that mean I win?

Just kidding Bob. But still, are people still more likely to be influenced by Passion than all the other violence out there that's actually on movies where the time period is today and the place is LA or NY?

redandy - I've been thinking back to when I saw the movie (shortly after it came out at an theatre in the States). The reaction I saw wasn't that of an audience enjoying the "orgy" of violence. It was a very sober reaction -- some crying, others thinking intently, a few discussions -- definitely nobody laughing it up about how cool it was to see someone get beat like that. Granted, there's different interpretations in different places, but a U.S. theatre with lots of Christians was probably pretty close to the target audience that were by and large seeing the movie.

bob - What was all that extra blood and torture for? There is no satisfactory answers to that questions and that is why the film, despite its tremendous production values, is essentially a muddle headed mess, or worse, an exercise in hypocrisy.

redandy - Are you an expert in how much it takes to kill someone? I mean really, can you tell me whether a beating would kill someone on the spot, or just get close enough that they wouldn't last much longer? We know he was severely beaten, spat on, etc. As Jesus was not a Roman citizen he probably recieved more than 39 lashes with the whip, and as somewhat of a revolutionary may have gotten a particularly harsh beating, the skin would have literally been nearly completely ripped off his back. He was incapable of carrying the cross up the hill, and the soldiers were surprised at how quickly he died once on the cross. So I'd say beaten to very near death is a fairly accurate portrayal -- if they overshot, it wasn't by a whole lot.

2) I bring up the audience because you offer the idea that somewhere perverts are getting off on violence, but you don't really give anything to support that, so the only retort I can give is that I didn't see it when I went and saw it. As for preaching to the choir, yes that's exactly the case, it was no secret that Christians and those interested in Christianity would be the primary market, since people tend to go see movies about topics they are interested in.

Ultimately, yes it was an extremely violent movie, yes it was somewhat disturbing - as it was meant to be. However, it was given an R rating, and was billed as being extremely violent - so the audiences had fair warning. Frankly, I don't see how the risk that a few perverts somewhere, somehow may get off on the violence outweighs the benefit of having a considerably accurate portrayal of a story that is so important to so many people.

Satellite TV - bob wrote: Given the sadomasochists a little less to jerk off over and a little more to think about like. Whatever. I give up.

You give up too easily Bob. We appreciate you thoughts on the film.

redandy wrote:
1) Are you an expert in how much it takes to kill someone?


No but out of appreciation for this...

Satelite TV wrote
Quote:
You give up too easily Bob. We appreciate you thoughts on the film.


I'll watch it agin and describe what I see. Perhaps together we can decide whether the violence he endured was enough to kill a person 3, 4, 10 times over.

(Times are aproximate.)

13 minutes in: Struck in the back of the head with a heavy chain.

15 minutes in: Struck in the back of the head two more times. Repeatedly kicked and struck by a gang of soldiers.

16 mins in: Dropped some twenty feet or so off a bridge. His fall is "broken" by a chain wrapped around his waist. Probably enough force there to break his back I'd say but then again, like you say, I'm no expert.

25 mins in: Punched in the head. Hard

53 mins in. The serious beating starts as two large men take turns striking him on his bare back with sticks designed for that purpose. They hit him as hard as they can thirty times.

58 mins in: Jesus refuses to stay down so these same large, angry men go to work on him with what appear to me to be combination of whips and large meat tenderizing instruments. Much of the skin on Jesus back is peeled off.

61 mins in: The same process is repeated on his chest.

Somewhere in there they also rip much of the flesh off his legs.

64 mins in: He is dragged away leaving several pints of blood behind.

65 mins in: A crown of thorns is thrust onto his head. The thorns pierce his flesh. Hit on the head with a stick.

68 mins in: Punched in the head by a soldier.

Jesus is left to sit and bleed for what appears to be at least an hour.

70 mins in: A heavy cross is placed on his back and he is forced to carry it a long distance. He is whipped.

76 mins in: He is pushed to the ground and whipped. And whipped. More carrying, more falling, more whipping.

81 mins in: Still carrying. Still getting whipped. "Finally" Jesus can no longer go on and a peasant is enlisted to help carry the cross. More whipping.

82 mins in: Jesus falls down a set of stairs and is left to bleed in the dirt for a bit. He is kicked repeatedly.

86 mins in: The cross is placed on his back again and he is forced to carry it while enduring still more whipping.

90 mins in: Still carrying the cross but up a hill now. More whipping of course. Jesus falls on his face.

97 mins in: His left hand is nailed to the cross.

98 mins in: His right arm is pulled from its socket.

99 mins in: His right arm is nailed to the cross.

100 minutes in: His feet are nailed to the cross.

101 mins in: The cross is turned over and Jesus is allowed to bleed suspended upside down for a bit while they work on fastening him properly to the cross.

102: Cross turned over again and Jesus is allowed to fall hard on his back.

104: Finally the cross is errected.

108: He hangs there as day passes into night. Still not dead. Still conscious. Still talking.

112: Jesus dies.

According to scripture Jesus supposedly suffered and died as a human being. In this movie however he dies more in the fashion of Rambo. What was the point of that? Any rational, thinking person would have seen that his head would have been caved in and his back broken in the first 25 minutes and yet they had him enduring whippings and carrying a heavy cross god knows how many kilometers. His arm is torn from its socket and his hands and feet nailed down and "still" he is talking! Come on.

TainanCowboy - This thread has quickly become very insulting to those who have a personal belief in Jesus Christ and the Christian faith.
If you don't understand what was so very graphically depicted in the movie, realise that it is your lack of understanding which is troubling you and not what you are seeing on a movie screen. The suffering portrayed was the destiny of Jesus. He went to it knowing that thru this he would bear the burden of manking, so that through their faith and belief in Him and His Heavenly Father mankind could find forgiveness for their sins and life after their death.
Its is an act of personal faith. A personal choice to accept this. Maybe its not for everyone to accept this but the offer is available for all who chose to.
If you don't believe it - thats your choice. But please, knock off the thinly veiled insults and condescending cracks about those who do make this choice.

Religious intolerance takes many forms.

bob - Nonsense. It is this film that is an insult to people of faith and it is you whose understanding is limited.

"An archeological perspective on the Passion of the Christ" turned up this...

Quote:
Flogging and beating are attested in ancient sources, however, there are neither descriptions, pictorial representations, nor physical evidence for the brutal treatment that is used at length to such horrifying effect in The Passion's scourging scences.

The scriptures are quite terse in their rendition "...after having Jesus scouraged he [Pilate] delivered Him over to be crucified" Mathew 27:26. Had Jesus been tortured in an exceptional manner, this would presumably have been mentioned in the Gospels.


Film making is all about making choices and in every case Mel Gibson chose violence. About the arrest scence for example the Evangelical Church of America says this...

Quote:
The film contains numerous scenes that are not found in the New Testament. According to all four Gospels, after Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, he is taken by the (Jewish) guards to the High Priest. In the movie, the guards escorting Jesus brutally beat him, and, at one point, throw him over a bridge. The only reason he does not crash into the earth below is that his chains excruciatingly wrench him to a halt inches from the ground.

This episode appears nowhere in the New Testament. It is drawn from the visions of a 19th century mystic nun. None of the Gospels provides any information about what, if anything, occurs on the way from Gethsemane to the High Priest. It is conceivable that those who arrested Jesus might have abused him, but it is not the only option. It is equally plausible that the guards were sympathetic, even reluctant, to carry out their duty, and escorted Jesus to the High Priest gently and with dignity.
The point is that the Gospels do not report this one way or the other. It has been added by the filmmaker. While it certainly heightens the suffering of Jesus, which likely is why Gibson added it, it is, at the same time, an unnecessary embellishment and exaggeration of Jewish mistreatment of Jesus.


And according to the archeologists I mentioned before...

Quote:
The armed Jewish guards shown accompanying the high priests, who arrest and abuse Jesus, are pure fantasy. The Romans would never have allowed the Jews to have their own guards.


Why then does Gibson make these choices? Why does he, in fact, lie?

The archeologists went on to say...

Quote:
Because the gospel authors were writing for an audience who did not live at the time or in the place of the events they were narrating, they worked to put the events of Jesus trial and death within the larger historical context of his life and mission. In his own narrative choices, however, Mel Gibson has chosen to ignore what the gospel has chosen to supply..... Gibson has ripped this event from it's historical context and rendered it unintelligible, with no apparent reason for the crucifixion of Jesus aside from blaming evil Jews and Romans.


From Wikipedia..

Quote:
Pontius Pilate is portrayed as a thoughtful, temperate man who ultimately agrees to crucify Jesus because he does not want to risk a Jewish rebellion on the one hand, and a Christian rebellion on the other. However, historians hold that Pilate was known for his rough treatment of Jews in general, and was responsible for crucifying hundreds of Jews during his reign.


Quote:
The High Priest is shown as if he a were a member in good-standing of the Jewish community; historians note that the High Priest at the time was in the service of the Roman government, having been appointed by the Roman-client King Herod.


And from the Bible:

Quote:
A great multitude of the people (Lk. 23:27) and all the multitudes (Lk. 23:48) of Jews are sorrowful about Jesus' crucifixion.

Jesus' execution was done in haste (Mk.15:25; Jn 19:31).


Again, Gibson chooses to lie. For what? To illustrate the enormity of Jesus sacrifice? To show his love of Jesus? Or to indulge his anti-semitism and love of bloody torture scenes. You be the judge.

bob - From the American Jewish Commitee

Quote:
There is no one story of Jesus' crucifiction and resurection. The four gospels are not in agreement on many details of the events leading to the crucifixion nor do they concur on the role jews played.... To present this story in a way that presents jews in a most derogatory light is a choice, not a fact and not the truth . We do clearly know that the Romans ruled the land of Israel, that they alone were responsible for the life and death of its inhabitants, that Jesus was a Jew whose preaching fit naturally into the variety of Jewish life, and that his disciples initially found a home preaching in synagogues....... the main story line puts the primary responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jewish cabal led by Caiaphas (the Jewish high priest). This is contrary to the recent Catholic documents and modern biblical scholarship.

Namahottie - I know that i am to abide by the rules of F.com and call out the posts not the poster, but Bob I really feel as though you are crossing the line a bit to often. And without responsiblity.

One thing that I've come to dislike the most about discussions on these boards,especially in the IP forum, is that if one presents a strong arguement, they don't back it up with their own deductions of the situation but rather with other published views. I don't give a rat's ass of some else's view when you are arguing your point. I care about your convictions.

bob - My point is that the movie is a lying sack of shit and should be regarded as such. Hitler loved passion plays dontcha know?

namahottie - I know that I am to abide by the rules of F.com and call out the posts not the poster, but Bob I really feel as though you are crossing the line a bit to often. And without responsiblity.


bob - I think I am one of the most thoughtful, responsible people on this site and I am sure that I have been so far in this thread.

namahottie - One thing that I've come to dislike the most about discussions on these boards,especially in the IP forum, is that if one presents a strong arguement, they don't back it up with their own deductions of the situation but rather with other published views. I don't give a rat's ass of some else's view when you are arguing your point. I care about your convictions.


bob - Deductions - Inferring of particular instances from a general law or principle. Oxford.

OK hows about this for a deduction. Passion plays have been used for centuries to inflame passions for what was very likely just one brilliant, historically very well placed schizophrenic's suicide. In the process of doing this they (the passion plays) have characterized the Jewish people unfairly and inflamed hatred against them, something Jesus would never have condoned. The Passion of the Christ is yet one more example of the general rule that, in the west, Jewish people are scapegoated.

You asked about my convictions. Well one of my convictions is that muddleheaded movie stars such as Mel Gibson should not be able to exert a cultural influence dispropotionate to their wisdom or inteligence. Many churches attended this movie as a congregation and according to most reports were much impressed by the film. If even one of those knuckleheads finds this site and sees the light I will consider that a minor victory.

Satellite TV - nammahottie wrote: but I choose to focus on Christ's work. Which is to love no matter what. I care about your convictions.


So you love with Bob and forgive him for any offense you think he caused you Bob's convictions on this film are pretty clear is you ask me.

All this over a simple film and how we all differently interpret the film. I didn't see it as an attack on Judaism or Jews. But then again I'm not Jewish so perhaps I don't understand what their agenda is.


bob - I didn't say that you and nammahottie were having a bitch fest. She said that you and I were having a bitch fest. Anyway...

I am not your detractor I am a person who happens to believe that film in general and movies in particular are the most influential art form that has ever existed. They reach more people than any other art form and they do so with tremendous impact. If you agree with that then perhaps you will agree that some of them need to be examined very closely for the sort of reality they convey. The Birth of the Christ is definitely one of those movies.

Satellite TV - Bob said: I didn't say that you and nammahottie were having a bitch fest. She said that you and I were having a bitch fest. Anyway...

My apologies Bob I was trying to Quote Namahottie....

quote="bob"]Satellite TV wrote:
The Birth of the Christ is definitely one of those movies.
Never seen that movie.

However I have seen Monty Python's the Life of Brian where the birth of Christ is portrayed

bob - That's OK. I hear old Mel is working on a very realistic remake anyway. Everybody is the wrong colour and they speak the wrong language, but there is lots of writhing around in agony (unlike Jesus, Mary is quite the screamer) and blood everywhere. Mel Gibson is a true auteur.

too
everything is true
this is true
that is true
the thing over there,
it's true too

China – Take Two
So anyway I am in the business class departute lounge at the Hong Kong airport today and really hoping that nobody notices that I don't really belong there when I spot a white guy reading "A Billion Customers - The China Boom" or something to that effect and I imagine that he likely thinks he knows something and wants to bore me with it, so I sit over by the fat lesbians but they just kind of glare at me so I'm thinking “Geeze this reassimilation thing isn't going so smoothly actually” but what with the fillet and the red wine and, of course, cognac, it wasn't long before sentimental, profound sentiments began to emerge with regard to all manner of things but especially the trials and tribulations of the first time factory video film maker in Mainland China, and hence was begun the document you see before you now…

China – Take Two
(As a sort of extended amble to the preceeding preamble it might be reasonable and correct to admit straight off that while your author has indeed been employed on a seriously part time basis as a factory video film maker he does not in fact know a thing about it, success with “Father and Son Reunion”, “Two Minutes a Day” and the upcoming “Penghu, The Video” not withstanding of course, since the abstract and nonchalant style of those films translates poorly to the factory video genre, as one might well expect.

An effort was made nevertheless to write a script and rehearse the lines etc. and it so in fact we arrive at…)

Day One
The usual, fly into Hong Kong, catch the transit coach into mainland China, eat too much, drink too much, feel bored, irritable and exhausted from trying to speak Chinese half the time and teach English the other.

Day Two
Discover that my star hasn’t memorized his lines or remember a thing about appearing natural and energetic for the camera. We give up early and I am sent off to assemble a “silent version” of the entire production line which we will overdub later with a description of the various processes involved. Am invited to my assistant, a young lady named Kuki, who turns out to be not Kooky in the least but an English major and fit as a fiddle to boot, which is helpful since otherwise we’d be required to do our own running around after things.

Kuki and I realize that certain portions of our script are not in the least amenable to the overdub concept and so set about filming a rough version of the whole concept just to see if it holds together at all upon viewing. Don’t know that it did but we certainly produced, just for practice like, what has to be the cutest series of factory video scenes in existence.

Day Three
I forget what happened on day three.

Day Four
My star, the owner of the factory, decides that this, our last day, is the day that he will finally devote “a couple of hours” to the production of our video. Scene one is in the main office where he introduces himself and the purpose of the video etc. As per the script he is interrupted by Kuki the office girl who approaches with a new order for a USB cable. Kuki has only been aware that she is to take a part in this drama for about two hours and yet does a suprisingly convincing job of delivering an order to her boss. My student is a little less convincing job and is apparently suffering tremendously from the dreaded “boy it feels stupid to act in front of a camera” syndrome suddenly. Anyway that eventually gets ironed out and we proceed to follow the order as it goes through the process of being approved by the engineering department, sent to the sample and testing rooms and on to the production department where I discover that the factory is no longer engaged only in cable assembly (putting the plug on the end) but in manufacturing the cable itself. This, of course, turns out to be an enormously elaborate process that nobody can explain so we decide to forget all that.
Next stop is the shipping department where the owner explains all about how the products are shipped to Hong Kong and sorted into various containers depending upon where they are being sent yadda yadda, and as he is finishing up his speech an employee is to roll by on a fork lift announcing that the shipment is ready and my boss tells him he can load it on the truck thereby bringing our little film to a logical conclusion even if we do have to go back and figure out how to overdub the cable manufacturing section. It isn’t as easy as you might imagine to sychronize somebodies speech coinciding with an employees driving past on a a fork lift but we had good fun trying and as the hour and a half alloted to film making dragged on to more like ten or eleven hours and even all the real factory workers had called it a day we even started to feel like a real film crew, Kuki, Kevin the boss and I, and luckily for us we were too tired even to be angry when it was discovered that while we indeed did a good job on that last shot the disc was full and we missed it. This of course necessitates going back and doing it again sometime in the next six months or so. We may even have figured out by then how to describe the production of cable so that, naturally, would be a bonus.



A Good Day for Monkies
better for them than for me of course cuz they could climb a little higher in the trees, up into the wind and the sunshine where the choice fruit grows, but still, not a bad day for monkies, not bad at all, must have been a hundred of us up there...


Borat
There was some discussion about the "Borat" guy and his big new movie.
This might change some opinions of this guy.
Having read this along, with a few other stories coming out about him, I don't think he'll be getting any $$'s from me.
Not that he'll miss them.
When Sacha Baron Cohen wanted a village to represent the impoverished Kazakh home of his character Borat, he found the perfect place in Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running water and where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land.

But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.

They claim film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the project, which they believed would be a documentary about their hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty and isolation. (more at link)

bob - Wow. And here I was plugging this thing all over the place based on the reviews it has gotten...

I'm a little skeptical though whether the villagers were quite as naive as is being suggested now.

Either way I don't suppose it made a lot of sense to insult a people that way.... Unless they are Americans of course. Americans are like Canadians, only further south and resiliant as hell to that kind of mockery.

Buttercup - From the least credible source ON THE PLANET!

"But feelings in Glod are running so high that The Mail on Sunday saw angry villagers brandishing farm implements chase out a local TV crew"

They're taking the piss. Really.

Big Fluffy Matthew - I saw that bit on a trailer, I thought it was filmed in Wales.

cfmidges - Interesting.

I remember he was accused of being anti-semitic a few years ago. Which is kind of odd as he's Jewish.

Tyc00n - So its ok when Ali G or Borat tricks ordinary Americans / Brits / whoever, but if its poor villagers its not ok?

bob - Precisely. "If" that story is accurate the guy is a major asshole.

buttercup - Looks like a plant by SBC's people to me... The Daily Mail? FFS...

I may be wrong, though.

When poor simple peasant folk from Romania are paid to do a job of work and then later realise their incredibly rich employers were exploiting them and laughing at them, then that's definitely grounds for legal action, isn't it?

Huang Guang Chen - That's quite an emmotive little piece, eh what?

"Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running wate."

"where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land."

"to scrape together whatever modest sums they can muster"

"Cambridge-educated Baron Cohen"

But fuck them, it was funny. In any case it was never supposed to be about them, rather Borat's mystical Kazakhstan. As it turns out, they've won a little time in the limelight and pocketed a bit of loot. They are making much bigger fools of themselves by being a party to this obvious stitch up, or is it really just a money grab?

Pathetic.

HG

bob - There actually "are" really poor people in the world you know. If Ali G took advantage of that poverty, and if, in the process, decieved them about what they were involved with and characterized them as sexually depraved then he is an asswipe, that's all.

buttercup - That's all. Lining up to take your cut is also not classy.

Have you seen the first four minutes on youtube? It has women pulling carts, children with guns. You can't 'deceive' someone into thinking that's going to be anything positive.

bob - You can decieve anybody into thinking anything.

Dragonbones - joesax wrote: I've always thought that Borat would have been just as funny, but much less offensive, if he had been from a fictional country; another "...stan", instead of Kazakhstan.

That was one of my first thoughts when I heard he used a real country name. He could have been just as funny, without offending quite so much.

joesax - That was one of my first thoughts when I heard he used a real country name. He could have been just as funny, without offending quite so much.

buttercup - 'Ridicule is nothing to be scared of'

And should receive EU subsidies in some cases.

joesax - Well, the thing is, he's not actually ridiculing or satirising Kazakhstan. But quite a few people might think that he is. And that's not so great in my opinion.

Buttercup - He's openly ridiculing Americans. Are they fair game because they're not poor?

Huang Guang Chen - I think the Borat vehicle is a great medium to ridicule many facets of the west, which is Cohen's obvious aim, particularly his heavy emphasis on anti-Semitism. However, at the same time, the reason Borat is funny is because there are grounds to "believe" the character. That's not Cohen's fault. Satire tends to bite.

Anyway, Cohen couldn't have scripted it better. Recently the Kazakh government spent considerably on ads in the NY Times and so on to promote their country and overturn the slight they felt Cohen had dealt them. And then recently it turns out they are running out new bank notes with a spelling mistake on the word bank.

Quote:
Kazakh central bank misspells ‘bank’ on money
ALMATY, Kazakhstan - The Kazakhstan central bank has misspelled the word “bank” on its new notes, officials said Wednesday.

The bank plans to put the misprinted notes — worth 2,000 tenge ($15) and 5,000-tenge — into circulation in November and then gradually withdraw them to correct the spelling.

The move has drawn the ire of the Central Asian state’s politicians who urged the bank to abandon the notes altogether.


As for his references to prostitutes, well guess what, Almaty is apparently a thriving haven for prostitution and a leading source of women trafficked for that very purpose. Oh, but it's not just women . . .

Quote:
Kazakhstan - Incidence and Nature of Child Labor
Recent statistics on working children under the age of 15 in Kazakhstan are unavailable.[2220] Most working children are involved in agriculture in rural areas during harvest time.[2221] In urban areas, the country’s increasingly formalized labor market has led to a decrease in many forms of child labor. However, children continue to be found begging, loading freight, delivering goods in markets, washing cars, and working at gas stations.[2222] Reports also indicate a rise in the number of children engaged in commercial sexual exploitation, pornography and drug trafficking in urban areas. Children working as domestic servants are often invisible and, for this reason, also vulnerable to exploitation.[2223] Kazakhstan is a source, transit, and destination country for trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labor. Girls in their teens are one of the primary targets for trafficking from Kazakhstan to other countries. Internal trafficking from rural to urban areas also occurs. [2224]


Kazakhstan is benefiting from high energy prices, which has increased domestic demand for prostitution. Maybe they should try and clean up their act.

Tyc00n - bob wrote: Tyc00n wrote:
So its ok when Ali G or Borat tricks ordinary Americans / Brits / whoever, but if its poor villagers its not ok?


Precisely. "If" that story is accurate the guy is a major asshole.


Tyc00n - See I don't see hows its worse for poor villagers to be ridiculed but it is ok for high level politicians to get duped? Where is that logic? In both instances the people in question were exploited for the humour of all.

Lets re-cap...

A wealthy, well educated comedian travels to an impoverished area of the world and engages the local population in the production of a film that ridicules the poor. He doesn't communicate to them the nature of the film he is producing, makes them appear ridiculous and pays them shit. Those same people, realizing how they have been offended, make an official complaint and two weeks later self satisfied wankers the world over are debating via the internet whether or not they have a legitimate grievance. Islam is right. The west is degenerate.

Huang Guan Chen -
Erh, do you have even a vaugue idea about what you are talking about?

HG

Buttercup - bob wrote:
Lets re-cap...

A wealthy, well educated comedian travels to an impoverished area of the world and engages the local population in the production of a film that ridicules the poor. He doesn't communicate to them the nature of the film he is producing, makes them appear ridiculous and pays them shit. Those same people, realizing how they have been offended, make an official complaint and two weeks later self satisfied wankers the world over are debating via the internet whether or not they have a legitimate grievance. Islam is right. The west is degenerate.


buttercup - 'Self satisfied wankers'- a tautology, surely.

Yes, I always thought the Islamic world had really got their shit together. Maybe concerned parents in the UK (my fatherland) could send their kids off for military training in Pakistan or Afghanistan? bring back National Service! That'll sort out the young toads!

bob - Buttercup wrote: tautology

Tautology? What's that, the study of tight ones? Where do I sign up?

buttercup - There were a few threads on this film before. No-one read them until the title '...tricks poor village actors'. That's quite interesting.

Truant - I just watched the trailer (thanks again TC) and it's 98% taking the piss out of the US/Western culture.

One quote is a lady saying "Yeah I don't think it will take too long to get this guy Americanized". I guess that is one way to 'save' the poor villagers. She was being serious, Borat was joking. Think about that.

plasmatron - oh the poor down trodden villagers, when will it all end?... the fact is, when a film crew rolled into town and offered them cash for being in a movie, they all jumped at the chance... regardless of the language barrier, it is pretty obvious that Cohen et al were taking the piss, "I though they were just making a regular documentary with a 12" dildo..." just doesn't cut much mustard IMO... Nobody forced anyone to do anything against their will and they were paid a rate they accepted, and that was the end of it... suddenly once word got to them that the film was a success they decide they should have asked for a bigger slice of the pie, suddenly they're quaint innocent villagers who knew no better and were duped by the nasty rich comedian… cue storm in a teacup... The villagers certainly can't be too up in arms about embarrassing Kazakhstan considering they're not Kazakhs, they're Romanians and sure, they didn't exactly get paid Hollywood rates for their willing participation, but almost nobody gets all bent out of shape and sanctimonious about how much the kids who sewed their Nikes together or assembled their alarm clock got paid and whether or not they are being exploited… but "Kazakh villagers", oooh, well that's different...

Those villagers remind me of the old story of the "million dollar whore", but in reverse...
"Now be honest, Would you have sex with me for a million dollars" asks the man.
So the woman says "To be perfectly honest, for a million dollars I would, yes."
He says "Want to have sex with me for $20?"
She says "What do you think I am, some kind of whore?"
He says "We've already established that. Now we are just haggling over price."


Big Fluffy Matthew - This isn't the first time Borat has filmed a piece "back home". Why didn't anyone sue him the last time ? Where were the complaints then ?

Buttercup - Not much money in it 'til he hooked up with Fox, I suppose...

Huang Guang Chen - From that first article:

Quote:
The "moviefilm" by Sacha Baron Cohen, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," is playing well in American theaters. One can only applaud the humorist's talent, but the movie is entertaining only because the world is so unfamiliar with reality.

Perhaps that will change. The movie has already created unprecedented interest in Kazakhstan. Not only has Borat promoted our name and flag, he has also indirectly fueled a great wave of patriotism among my fellow citizens.

Please take an opportunity to visit us one day and hear our real language, not Borat's:

"Kazakhstanga kosh keliniz!" - "Welcome to Kazakhstan!"


And from that Sun piece posted earlier:

Quote:
A FOREIGN exchange firm is thanking Borat for sparking a surge in travel to Kazakhstan. Travelex has ordered £500,000 worth of its Tenge currency to cope with the boom and a spokesman said: “It’s down to Borat.”


Now if Kazakhstan could use this international focus to sort out its child prostitution issue, well it would all be good, right?

HG

bob - plasmatron wrote:
...... but almost nobody gets all bent out of shape and sanctimonious about how much the kids who sewed their Nikes together or assembled their alarm clock got paid and whether or not they are being exploited… but "Kazakh villagers", oooh, well that's different... [/url]


Where does this kind of cynicism come from? You know that there are child labourers working at slave wages around the world, and you know that because concerned individuals made sure that you knew it.

The Kazakh Villager skit that Cohen did added insult to the injury of being exploited financially by also involving the villagers in a production that made them appear ridiculous. If they knew they were being made to appear ridiculous but accpted the money anyway that is just an indication of how desperate they were for money. If they didn't realize fully how ridiculous they would be made to appear, and there is a good chance that they didn't, then they were tricked. In either case, or if the reality of it is some combination of the two scenarios, Cohen still comes off as a complete sleazeball bastard. You have to wonder too about the wisdom of making a film that insults a largely Muslim nation in the current climate of increasing hostilities. ooooh, but all that's OK I suppose because the self satisfied wankers in the West got a good laugh, right? The West "is" degenerate. What else would you call a people with no understanding whatsoever of a country but an urge to ridicule it irregardless.

Quote:
"Now be honest, Would you have sex with me for a million dollars" asks the man.
So the woman says "To be perfectly honest, for a million dollars I would, yes."
He says "Want to have sex with me for $20?"
She says "What do you think I am, some kind of whore?"
He says "We've already established that. Now we are just haggling over price."


OK, so practically everybody in the world is a whore because they would engage in a natural if, perhaps in this case repugnant act, for an opportunity to get an education, give their kids an education, take care of his parents in their old age, start a business, own a home.... Did you care at all to elaborate at all on that profound insight?

Huang Guang Chen - Have you seen the skit, bob?

Here are those poor souls being ruthlessly exploited and humiliated. Watch it, but only if you have the stomach for such obscene abuse, of course.

Fox - Hilarious.

bob - Buttercup wrote:
There were a few threads on this film before. No-one read them until the title '...tricks poor village actors'. That's quite interesting.


It is but I think perhaps not for the reason you think.

I love Ali G, have his DVD as a matter of fact. I saw the Borat clip and thought it was hilarious indeed, even went around recommending the movie. Fox can attest to this. There was something niggling away at me even then though and it was the title of this thread that brought it out. Watch the clip again, but this time instead of focusing on the charm and comedic talents of Cohen take a look at the faces of the people from Romania. Then come back and tell me those people had a clue what they were involved in. Betcha can't.

Now it turns out that not only did he ridicule an unsuspecting people but he paid them shit for the priveledge of being ridiculed. Major miscalculation on Cohens part and he looks like a right prick for it.

Buttercup - But he's been doing this sketch for years and years. The lawsuit comes out now there is a big American production company to sue.

bob - He hasn't actually been involving impoverished people in the production of a movie scheduled for world wide release though has he? If he got sued for the profits to the film we'd be square I figure.

Huang Guang Chen - Well I'm sure those poor exploited untermensch will not get a bean next time, as Cohen, sincerely hoping not to offend, which is his trademark, of course, instead turns to a group of western extras to mimic the strange and varied customs of Romanian peasants. Hooray! The world is a better place. We can all move on now.

bob - Do Romanians usually have two wives, two mistresses, a girlfriend, and a regular prostitute? Do they behave in a lascivious way toward their sisters, eat raw meat, go for a hole cleaning and head relief at the local massage parlour? Do people in Kazakhstan usually do that? Just curious.

The only "characterization" in this film is the Borat character. The Romanian people involved were paid to participate in this characterization and in the process even their homes were mocked. At the end of the clip Borat invites people to come and stay there with the joke being of course that nobody would want to. The British and Americans who particpated were not involved in a characterization because they were just being themselves in relation to the uncouth, foul mouthed, ill mannered character. Is it really so difficult to see who was really insulted? Or does the desire for a quick laugh at the expense of impoverished people make that difficult?

bob - All this drama gave me a migraine so I went to see the doctor. Still have the headache but am at least happily disassociated from it. Bob spelled backwards spells god. I stand in awe at myself.