Monday, August 12, 2002

Sceptical voters may be allowed to vote for no one. Politics: The electoral commission has decided to consider letting voters put their X against "none of the above." [Guardian Unlimited] I already did that the last two presidential elections here in the States - I voted Nader in Massachusetts.
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Gah - so my boss won't fill out my employment verification form, 'cos it's got a field asking for 'Possibility of Future Employment' and he's afraid of putting anything there and then having it turn out wrong. Of course, no one has a better idea of my 'possiblity of future employment' here than, say, my boss, so I don't quite get it. All told, this is just way more complicated than it should be. On a bright note, the car is running fine.

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Just nabbed radiofreeblogistan.com and freeblogistan.com (blogistan.com, of course, was already taken) at my favorite domain-name registrar. [Radio Free Blogistan] Which reminds me - I did the same with dreamingofchina.com. Shortly, that'll be pointing to this blog...
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Is the US invasion of Iraq already underway?. According to DEBKAfile: "Tuesday August 6, at 0800 hours Middle East time, US and British air bombers went into action and destroyed the Iraqi air command and control center at al-Nukhaib in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia." If that was all, I wouldn't have given it a second glance, as stuff like that has been going on for a few years now. But the following is what caught my eye: "Turkey Seizes Critical Bamerni Airport in North Iraq - Hurriyet. Strategic Airfield Now Occupied by Turkish 5,000-Strong Force With US Special Forces Troops" [kuro5hin.org] WTF? Check this out at DEBKAfile. Assuming they're right, NATO forces basically control Northern Iraq - a.k.a. Kurdistan. And it makes sense that it would go down the way they describe - how would we buy off Turkey, keep them from freaking out at Kurdish independence movement consulting with Dick Cheney? Answer: we give them de facto control of the northern oil fields. Damn. That site does seem to be a right-wing Israeli site, so take it with a grain of salt...but it makes sense.

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Maybe the best thing about working from home is that it's the only time my upstairs, downstairs, next-door, and across-the-hall neighbors are all gone. Translation: it's the only time I can actually play music at a loud volume. And some albums I've got NEED to be loud, like the new Primal Scream, which I'm listening to right now. Makes me happy, new Primal Scream does. I need to call the mechanic about my car - I forget whether he said he'd call ME mid-day Monday, or I was supposed to call him. I need to get it back and get to work for at least some of the day...I need to get my employment verification form filled out and faxed to the rental office of that new apartment I'm (hopefully) moving to at the end of the month. Of course, the $700+ I'm spending getting my car fixed is going to suck. Ah well - at least I've got my health. No, seriously, I've got my health. And if I get the new apartment, I've got a health club on-site. Rowing machine, here I come! I want an upper body!

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your muppet of the day: The Female Koozbanian Creature I have vague memories of the sketch this Muppet comes from - the female and male Koozbanians charge into each other and explode. Afterwards, there's a number of small, baby Koozbanians where the two adults collided. This really disturbed me as a small child - not that I thought that was how babies happened, just because that was weird and kind of creepy. As before, this image is from http://www.kermitage.com.

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I just noticed that I've already used 10% of my space on the server - what happens when I run out? Will I need to delete old entries? Not to sound ungrateful, but I'd hope I get more than 10 meg of space, since I'm paying for this and all. I really hate the idea of having to nuke old stuff...
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Ack - Mercedes Benz is actually using that Janis Joplin song in a commercial now. That's really, really wrong.
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A Lonely Battle in Mongolia to Save Buddhist Relics [New York Times: International News I've had an obsession with Mongolia for a while now...and yes, it was partially inspired by Richard Feynman's thing for Tannu Tuva. Before my junior year in high school, I was supposed to read up on Chinese history for a history class called 'The Rise Of Western Civilization' and then make a timeline of Chinese history. (on a side note, that class has since been axed. It bore little resemblence to its title and was in fact an excellent world history class with a focus on intellectual history. But it fell victim to the blandizing of high school academics in the days of standardized tests as holy writ. dammit.) So I wandered off to the town library and grabbed a few books. One of them happened to be Harold Lamb's March of the Barbarians. This was a classic 'old book' - yellowed and slightly stiff pages, a decaying plastic cover surrounding an ancient dusk jacket, giving off a strange musty smell. If I remember correctly, this specific edition was printed in the late '50s. Needless to say, I never got around to reading any of the other Chinese history books I got, nor did I ever do that timeline. Instead, I read March of the Barbarians about 5 or 6 times that summer. I absolutely loved that book. It was unlike anything I'd ever read - and I'd read a LOT of history for a 16 year old. Lamb wrote it as if it were a novel, milking what few written chronicles of the time that he could find for all they were worth. He relied heavily on the account of a priest sent to convert Ghengis Khan, and, in fact, spent a lot of the book trying to show how the Mongols were *just* about to convert to Christianity before (insert unfortunate event here) happened. There's nothing like a little bias in your history, I always say. So that started me reading on the Mongols. Early that fall, I stumbled across an old history textbook that I think was called Rise of the West. I can't remember for sure, though. I just remember it really elaborating on the importance that the nomadic steppe people of Central Asia played on the established civilizations on their fringes - China, India, Persia, and Eastern Europe most notably. Every couple generations, a new dominant force would rise up in the steppe homelands (what's now Mongolia) and the losing tribes would escape, generally to the west. These tribes would then push the previous residents out of their new territory, and so on, until the Huns are at the gates of Rome. Amazing stuff, really. Well, to me. This kept happening, from the Scythians, who managed to push down to the southeastern coast of China as well as the north shore of the Black sea around 1000 BC, to the Mongols in the 13th century AD. The difference with the Mongols is that no one pushed them out - they just expanded. While there were a few significant nomadic waves after the Mongols, such as Timurlane's rampage through Central Asia and the Middle East, and Babur's conquest of northern India, the traditional cycle no longer played a role in them. Finally, in the early 1700s, a Turko-Mongol tribe trying to avoid the Chinese ran into the Russian army. This turned out to be the first major battle between nomadic cavalry and firearm-bearing infantry. It also turned out to be the last - the nomads were decimated. Since then, Central Asia hasn't really mattered that much in world affairs. The Anglo-Russian 'Great Game' for control over Afghanistan had India as the prize, and many of the same thoughts were behind the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American support of resistance there. Mongolia proper is home to less than a million people, many of whom live life the same way they did a thousand years ago - though without the periodic internecine war. There's actually a great exhibit on modern Mongolia at the Smithsonian in DC until the end of September. If you're in the area, I reccomend checking it out.

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posted by josephtate August 11 12:40 PM | 31 comments. The Origin of the Hamburger (npr.org). A restaurant named Louis' Lunch lays claims to the original hamburger. Dick's Drive-In has some of the best hamburgers and fries in Seattle. At the Beacon Drive-In in Spartanburg, SC you can get your burger served "a-plenty," meaning hidden under a generous pile of onion rings and fries. What's your favorite burger? Or has the recent beef recall got you down? [MetaFilter] My ex was capable of making any topic of conversation turn out to be about how New Haven was cool. Seriously. She grew up there, with her parents teaching/doctoring at Yale Med. She'd go on about her high school was the oldest in the country (which it wasn't - Boston Latin is the oldest English speaking school in the country), and how there was a restaurant in New Haven that invented the hamburger. I still refuse to believe that she could actually be right.

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RIP: Alba, the Glowing Bunny. Is the world's most famous glowing bunny dead? And did it ever really glow at all? The scientist and artist who collaborated on the project aren't clear on the issue. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News] I'd forgotten about this - they made a rabbit glow with jellyfish bioluminesence. My first reaction was that I wanted that so I could read at night without needing a light on.

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