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The Comenian Islands

Living in a small European nation, there are often times when I feel that I’m missing out by not living in a larger European nation, one with more historical prominence and cultural relevance. For instance: I don’t even know how the Czech national anthem goes. It’s half-surprising there even is one anymore, after centuries of pummeling from foreign neighbors. Somehow, I don’t think I’d have this problem if I lived in France or Germany. And it would be nice if mentioning where you live brought to mind a deserving historical figure than Jaromir Jagr for the average listener. Even if it was one as belittling/reviled as Peppy Le Peu or Adolf Hitler– still, it would be an improvement.

But most of all, I feel I’m missing out by not living in country with a colonial legacy. Um, not that I’m into colonialism, per se– heck, it’s responsible for all sorts of bad things. But from a sheer present-day travel perspective, it would be fantastically entertaining if we could jump on a plane during these cold winter months and taking a lengthy flight to some distant Caribbean island with a poignant connection to the Czech lands. I imagine local guys wearing white sweaters and playing cricket while speaking in an island patois variant of Czech. Jerk goulash. A mysterious, enduring tradition of giving male children traditional Czech names like Jaroslav and Svatopluk.

In all likelihood, this island– if it existed– would be named after Charles IV, like everything in Czech. But let’s pretend that they throw us a curve ball this time and name it after the third-most historically noteworthy Czech, Jan Komensky. ‘The Comenian Islands’ have a nice ring. (Komensky fun facts: generally regarded as ‘the father of modern education’… was allegedly asked to become an early president of Harvard University… pops up in a Rembrandt painting… attempted to invent a language in which false statements are impossible).

My unreliable sources inform me that there actually a brief flickering moment where the possibility of the Comenian Islands could have become a reality: at some point in the 90s (sic?), Croatia owed Czech a ton of money, and the idea was briefly floated of the debt being paid off by Croatia handing over one of its innumerable islands. Unfortunately, they seemed to have come to their senses (or perhaps this never happened– I’ve been totally unable to confirm it). I think the group that gives up the island for cash always winds up regretting it down the road.

My favorite-ever parent-child relationship in the annals of colonialism is definitely Denmark and Greenland. Like a tiny parent walking down the street with its Augustus Gloop-sized offspring, there’s a delicious size juxtaposition at work here in this relationship. One salient fact that I think is often overlooked is the fact that Greenland and Denmark are actually similar in shape, despite the massive difference in scale (shown below with the Faroe islands, to complete the formidable ‘Danish Commonwealth’):

I would love it if the two were somehow exactly the same shape, in some sort of unparalleled geological and political coincidence.

Hello, Birdie pt. 2

This past weekend, we threw the kid in the back seat and drove to Berlin through some really bad weather. On the D8 highway that connects Czech Republic to Germany, there’s a big Mattoni sign that looms over the highway. I’ve always thought the sign is pretty cool looking, but I can only remember doing the drive in decent weather before. In the foreboding context of our Friday drive– low visibility, gathering clouds– I suddenly realized how much it looks like a giant prop from Schindler’s List or some other Nazi movie, ‘welcoming’ you to Germany:

In normal weather, the sign has much more of a ‘hello, birdie’ quality:

(Photo: Flickr user Bharfot).

Unfortunate communications misstep that could have been avoided if they’d provisionally changed the Mattoni mascot to an anteater or a caterpillar for the Czech market. But I suppose the brand dilution wouldn’t have been worth it.

The choice of title for this post is sort of an homage to my favorite-ever Roz Chast cartoon, which I’m desperately trying to find an image of online but without success. It appeared in a New Yorker issue rightaround when Prozac first hit the market, and the premise is basically: What if various historical figures had access to anti-depressants? There are four examples, and the last one shows a doped-up Edgar Allen Poe cheerfully looking over his shoulder and saying, ‘Hello, birdie!’ to the raven.

John Meat-John

• Sorry for the extended writing outages lately. On top of general busyness and assorted crapulence, I’m also trying to write a short article for Smashing Magazine these days, so my spare ions of free time and writing inclination have been mostly sucked up in that task. The article concerns typography and is the very epitome of font-nerdishness. I’ll let you know if and when it goes live.

One of the great campaigns of disinformation that I’ve ever personally mounted has been trying to convince friends that the society of typography is actually a seething cesspool of loose morals and sexual adventuring, a la the stereotypes about Renaissance fair enthusiasts. Back in 2003, when I went to a three day typography conference, I had fun lying and persuading people that every conference was a veritable orgy waiting to erupt.

Little could be farther from the truth. With the notable exception of Eric Gill (devout Catholic and brilliant artist who, to everyone’s shock, was discovered decades after his death to have had sexual relations with everyone in his family including the family dog), type designers seem like the restrained bunch that you would expect. The one binding trait between them seems to be a tendency to wear bowties:

• Lately, I’ve been watching Breaking Bad with my wife. A few nights ago, we were watching an episode from season one where the teenage Walter Jr. is briefly shown in the liquor store parking with friends trying to get strangers to buy booze for them. Suddenly, I realized that I needed to pause the video to explain to my wife what was going on here– being Czech, she had no context by which to understand the American teenage rite of passage that is standing around asking random people to buy liquor for you. I even wound up getting into the time in high school that my buddy and I asked two winos to do the deed for us and they tried to run off with the money but weren’t very fast (being beat-up old winos), which set up an awkward confrontation once we ran them down in about two seconds, especially when one of the guys complainingly revealed that he’d somehow peed his pants during the run down (again, surely owing to general unhealthiness, not out of any sense of fear of the two high school kids bearing down on him).

• By a great coincidence, two of the more strangely named friends I’ve ever had have both recently made belated entrances to the Facebook community. First, there’s my colleague Jan Fleischhans, which means – in a munge of German and Czech – ‘John Meat-John’. Then, there are the two Hamburger brothers, Joel and Manny. Joel once told me that there was even an Abraham Hamburger at some point in the family lineage. Two bad he lived before the era of trendy name-shortenings, or he could be, concisely, AbraHamburger.

Crimson Tide

Few topics can numb my buns like a discussion of how some social networking platform is or isn’t changing the cultural and/or political landscape around us. I can’t explain my disdain in rational terms– it’s more like there’s just this big, bored, empty thought bubble that appears over my head whenever the subject is raised. I guess this ennui is best expressed by an article in the Onion brilliantly titled, ‘New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It‘.

So, I was surprised to recently encounter two new pieces of commentary on this subject that actually engaged my interest and/or taught me something new. The first was Malcolm Gladwell’s denigrating comparison of the so-called Twitter Revolution to a real bona-fide revolution, the civil-rights movement (this I found mainly revelatory for its explanation of how heirarchically and militantly structured the civil rights organizers actually were). The second was ‘The Social Network’, which I got to see last weekend in a rare case of a U.S. movie being screened in Prague almost synchronously with its stateside release. (In this case, some weird film club got a hold of a copy with Czech titles and screened it as part of their tenth anniversary party. I didn’t understand all of the festive ramifications, but I was glad to get to see it…. plus, there were lots of whisky shots distributed during the film).

I hadn’t been terribly interested in seeing a highly-fictionalized account of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg until I read the David Denby’s review that comes as close as a Denby review possibly can to enthused RANTING and RAVING about a movie. And, indeed, it is as good as advertised– the pacing and writing are both excellent, such that I was totally riveted the entire time. Most impressively, its a rare example of a Hollywood movie that handles an overtly moral subject with sufficient complexity – no hamfisted good-versus-evil dramaturgy– without wussing out and denying it sufficient gravitas and force.

As Denby notes, the movie also does a great job illustrating the pressuring and potentially-alienating atmosphere of Harvard University. Now, as the only one out of the three people who write for this blog who didn’t attend Harvard, maybe I’m the wrong person to comment on this. But, the film is set in the exact same years when friends of mine were there and I was occasionally loitering around on campus hanging out with them. Mainly, the malice and pent-up rage evident in some of characters in “The Social Network” reminded me… not of people I personally met, thank god… but of a string of scandalous and disturbingly violent incidents that unfolded during those years.

Principally, there was the case of Sinedu Tadesse, an Ethopian biology student who became increasingly unhinged and in 1995 murdered her roommate and hanged herself in the dorm room they shared in Dunster House– the same house that most of my friends there inhabited. At the time, I remember that part of the lore around this was the fact that the culprit was so socially alienated that she gave herself ‘assignments’ in how to socialize and graded herself accordingly– a strange and tragic attempt to impose an academic structure on mastering human relationships. Articles written on the case at the time (principally, a New Yorker article by a woman who went on to write a full length book on the subject) confirm this to be the case, and also paint the sad episode of Tadesse sending a strange beseeching letter to individuals that she picked out of the phone book in search of friendship. At the time, I also remember thinking that perhaps the muder of her roommate was inspired by a competitive desire not to let the roommate benefit from a semester of automatic straight A’s that you’re always rumored to receive if your roommate commits suicide. (Has anyone ever confirmed this, by the way, or is it just an academic urban myth?). But, it turns out that her roommate was the last person to serve as a friend to the culprit, and when she eventually announced her desire to live with some other girls, that served as the final social betrayal that pushed Tadesse over the edge.

Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder, the aforementioned book by Melanie Thernstrom, generated mixed reviews to put it kindly (apparently, she gets carried away in a kind of blunt good-versus-evil moralizing that her reviewers object to, which I guess brings this blog post around full circle somewhat)… but one thing that every reviewer seems to find illuminating is the emphasis placed on Harvard’s apathy and insensitivity to the whole matter, particularly to the increasingly evident signs of instability in the culprit in particular and its lack of psychiatric support for students as a whole.

Incredibly, this jarring murder/suicide transpired in the same year that Harvard accepted a young woman named Gina Grant and then generated enormous negative publicity by rescinding the acceptance after it came to light that Grant had apparently murdered her mother several years earlier.

Macalester College– the humdrum, plain-Jane school I attended– was completely lacking in this kind of drama. In fact, the school had singularly failed to do anything noteworthy at all until it recently made its way into Jonathan Franzen’s newest novel Freedom as the alma matter of the fictitious main characters. I suppose I should have taken this relative lack of sociopathology as a positive indicator at the time, but I think I wanted to be part of some more unhinged and psychotic atmosphere back then, and the morbid news streaming out my friends’ college only succeeded in arousing my envy.

Making Ends Meet

Just read a good article in the October 4th edition of the New Yorker about John Cage. There’s a brief discussion of a period of great austerity– he rented a small cottage for years and lived barely above the poverty line– which the composer finally emerges from not thanks to music but rather because he had become one of the world’s foremost experts on… mushrooms, of all things. There was even a series of appearances on an Italian TV quiz show that culminated in Cage listing sixty-four specific types of mushrooms in precise alphabetical order to win prize money that allowed him to buy a van. (For a glimpse of Cage’s TV persona, see this clip of him on the American show I’ve Got A Secret. No mushrooms, but interesting banter and a great performance of Water Walk).

Cage’s mycology doubtlessly belongs in the shortlist of great unlikely jobs taken on by creative geniuses in order to make ends meet. My favorite such example is David Lynch: approaching 30 years of age and struggling to finish Eraserhead, the director supports himself and his family by working a paper route at nights. The example that’s always made me feel the worst is Nick Drake‘s sad notion towards the end of his life that he’s going to study computer programming. The idea of someone with Drake’s clueless sensitivity developing such a misguided idea about how to make his way always strikes me as an example of how cruel the world can be. I think I’d hire one of the Amish to program mainframe computers in 1972 before I would hire Drake, if forced to choose.

Mistake, or Blunder?

As Krafty intimated in his Attacking and Defending post, he and I have nerding out and playing a lot of chess online in recent months. I’ve also been playing against his father, who employs a two-pronged approach of (1) being very good and (2) taking FOREVER between moves, such that its very hard to feel that you’re ever making any progress against him. Some easier pickins finally came along in the person of my friend Ryan, who mentioned having played against various math experts (or something like this), but turned out to be not very good and relatively easy to subdue.

Any you finish a match on chess.com, a button appears that invites you to click it to receive ‘Computer analysis’… but every time I’ve done this, I’ve simply gotten a message asking me to wait a very long time, after which nothing happens. For whatever reason, when Ryan clicked the after our match, he actually got a report that included the following taxonomically-curious information:

Inaccuracies: 6 = 31.6% of moves
Mistakes: 3 = 15.8% of moves
Blunders: 4 = 21.1% of moves

Now, inaccuracies I suppose just refers to any move you make that’s different (and, therefore, less accurate) than the one the computer would have made. Maybe. But I’m dying to know the difference between mistakes and blunders. Does the percentage of blunders include the number of mistakes, or are they counted separately? (If separately, that would mean that the computer is essentially telling Ryan that a full two-thirds of his moves were bad). Is there a level worse than blunders? Oafish calamities?

The whole thing reminds me of the mysterious classifications that used to lurk at the bottom of the IQ scale (before they cleaned up the terminology to use less pejorative terms):

50-69: Moron
20-49: Imbecile
below 20: Idiot

This is weird, I think, because most people would probably think of these terms as synonyms, not as a hierarchy of mental capability.

In any case, I think the chess analyses would be much better if assigned some final judgement like this at the end.

Tajikistan Calling…

Today’s add-your-own-caption contest comes from far-flung Tajikistan:

My friend recently ventured there with this girlfriend (who is studying Central Asian languages) and snapped these photos for me from a book he found somewhere along the way. It’s impossible to imagine what’s supposed to be happening here, but as you look through more of the images, a vague plot-line begins to emerge that combines elements of Columbo, National Geographic, Iron Chef and a James Bond movie:

But then — as if just to throw you off the scent — there are also generic shots of harmless frolicking locals:

Hmmm.

Hey, remember Barf laundry detergent? My friend also brought me back a sample box of this. The packaging is most excellent, as it depicts a model family smiling up in appreciative wonderment at the technicolor Barf masthead:

So many boxes of this stuff must be carried off to the West as souvenirs that they could include some little caption on the side, like ‘My friend went to Tajikistan and all I got was this vomitous packaging concept.’

See also: previous add-your own caption contests, San Francisco and Berlin versions

The Jimi Hendrix Facsimile

My friend Mike returned from vacation in Corfu last week to a spate of bad news:

A lawsuit involving his dog knocking over an elderly lady in park had somehow gotten revived long after he had deemed it over and done with. Over the years, the plaintiff’s allegations have gotten trumped up and dramatized to the point that they now include Mike standing over the victim and laughing evilly while she writhes around in pain. So, needless to say, it’s shaping up as quite a courtroom drama.
The same dog– now years older and much calmer since the park incident described above– nevertheless terrorized his dog sitter while Mike was in Corfu such that the sitter no longer has any interest in looking after the dog.
Most hurtful of all, Mike returned to find that he had been ousted from his role as Mitch Mitchell in the Jimi Hendrix tribute band he plays in and replaced by… a chick!

Now, performing in a tribute band is such a farcical and inauthentic experience to begin with that it would be easy to poke fun at someone’s feelings of betrayal at being kicked out of a fake Hendrix band to which they felt a sense of ‘belonging’. But, note a few disturbing facets of this: first, the fact that the band has removed a mild-mannered, male, native English-speaking drummer from the Mitchell role in favor of a Czech woman clearly indicates that it is taking its one big craven shot at ‘the big time’ and has abandoned any sense of fidelity that it once had to emulating the real Hendrix Experience. Unless you’re going to replace every member of the group with a woman, this expedient mixing-and-matching of personnel clearly violates the unspoken ethical/aesthetic code of the tribute band.

Next, in the long tradition of Rock Bands Not Handling Things Professionally, no one actually directly informed Mike of the palace coup. Instead, he found out from the band’s facebook page, where its Iago-like manager had posted a concert notice inviting followers to ‘guess who our new drummer will be!’ (A strange and unanswerable question to pose, by the way… what should one guess, Kofi Annan?)

When Mike told me about all this, I was reassured by the fact that he had already assembled a bunch of half-baked ideas for how to wreak revenge on his former band, as this — i.e., obscure vengeance plots– seems like the normal and healthy response of a bruised creative ego. One idea was to make a somewhat condescending documentary about a tribute band who arrives in the Czech Republic from the US and whose personal identities become totally eclipsed by their assumed Hendrix Experience identities. I endorsed this and vigorously recommended the Chuck Klosterman essay where he follows the Guns ‘n’ Roses tribute band around as background reading. My only other suggestion was that he form a rival Hendrix band that specifically emulates Jimi’s Band of Gypsies phase, and thereby re-ignites the whole debate about whether he was better when he was playing with British white guys or American black guys.

For old times’ sake, here’s a clip of the The Jimi Hendrix Facsimile from the Trutnov Music Fest back when Mike was still manning the drums:

See also: The Seven Types of Stories, in which I go to see the Stone Free Experience play, but wind up writing mainly about the Led Zep cover band that follows them.

This Week In Sports

1) I can never pass up a good defenestration story: it seems that an NFL player was hanging out with his girlfriend, a 19-year old cheerleader for his team, when things went somewhat awry. Given that she was only 19, it’s not all that surprising that the two of them were in the TV room of her parents’ house — but what is surprising is that one of her jilted admirers broke into the house with a plastic bag over his head and started chasing them around the room and pistol-whipping them, yelling things like, “I can’t believe you’re with that guy” and even some witty action-movie repartee. The NFL player escaped out the second-story window, suffering minor bruises, while the girl ran downstairs, got a gun, and exchanged fire with the intruder! Fortunately, neither of them had very good aim.

Here’s a link to the full story, with some other details such as that the intruder also took a few swipes at the family dog, and that the team in question — the Jacksonville Jaguars — refuses to admit or deny whether the girl is actually their cheerleader (although she plainly is, or at least was). As always, you can count on Florida to provide the weirdest stories.

2) For those who don’t know him already, Chad Ochocinco is a very talented NFL wide receiver. He is also extremely outspoken, may have a personality disorder, and is famous for getting fined for his over-the-top celebrations after scoring a touchdown. His name used to be Chad Johnson, but he went by the name “Ochocinco” because his jersey number is 85 (I know, I know, that’s not even how you say 85 in Spanish), and when the NFL wouldn’t let him put “Ochocinco” on his jersey , he legally changed his last name to Ochocinco! That is dedication.

Anyhow, Chad appears in this edition of “This Week in Sports” because of an unfortunate mishap with a new line of cereal he is promoting for charity called, natch, “Ochocincos.” Take it away, espn.com:

“Charity-minded callers are getting intercepted by a sex phone line because of a misprint on Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco‘s namesake cereal boxes. The phone number is supposed to connect callers to Feed the Children, which benefits from sales of ‘Ochocinco’s.’ But because the box has the wrong toll-free prefix, they get a seductive-sounding woman who makes risque suggestions and then asks for a credit card number.”

The lucky sleaze merchant whose earnings just went up ten-fold had better make a big donation to Feed the Children.

3) Finally — yet another Tour De France winner tests positive for a banned substance, leading to the inevitable question, “What is the point of a sporting event if the winner cheats every single year?” This year’s cheater gets style points for his creative explanation: the “false” positive was due to some contaminated meat that he ate.