Stuff and Nonsense: Past Entries

Posted on 9/15/05: Report to an Academy

Fellow scientists, both gentlemen and ladies – for we are pleased to welcome more of the gentler sex to our annual meeting this year than ever before. And it’s about time, too, I might add. (Applause) As many of you know, my own life-partner Sylvia has chosen the other path, staying at home to raise our boys. But Syl and I know that’s not for everyone.

I thank you for the great honor you have shown me in selecting me as this year’s keynote speaker. It has been a fine year for meteorology. (Applause) Yes, it has been a fine year for meteorology, and we can safely say that the question is no longer when, but weather. (Laughter)

Today we sip the sweet wine of vindication. Our discipline stands on the verge of fulfilling its centuries-long quest to step out from behind the veils of superstition and into the spotlight of science. The world, it turns out, is not flat. Today only a small coterie of zealots still adheres to the blind belief in atmospheric planning. But when we hear laymen mouth phrases such as “acid rain” and “greenhouse effect,” we are reminded that the scientist must always remain vigilant in his – or her – efforts to enlighten a superstitious world. Over the past year, our academy has carried on this noble fight in so many different ways. Our puppet play, "Winky the Weatherman and the Invisible Hand," has now been performed in over three hundred elementary schools nationwide. Our other youth outreach programs continue their good work, too, sowing the seeds for a new generation of truth-seeking meteorologists. We must always remember that the children are our future. (Applause) I have three boys of my own, so this is something personally very important to me.

I would also like to recognize the fine work done by our colleagues in the television news field. (Extended applause) Their tireless efforts, assembled nightly in two-minute segments for the eleven o'clock report, are all too rarely acknowledged. Yet they do more each and every day to spread the good tidings of science among the lay community than do all the rest of us toiling away in our laboratory coats. Do I need to remind anyone here that only a few short years ago the average Joe Citizen still expected to receive a “forecast” in his nightly news? As of last month, nearly one fourth of all the television stations in the nation had dismantled their severe weather warning systems, and the number grows with every passing day. Good work, gentlemen!

Of course, the past year has not been without its setbacks. The East Coast media has grossly distorted the work of our colleagues at the University of Chicago as they join hands with liberalizing governments in South and Central America to spread the democratic ideals of free, untrammeled weather. Their heroic attempts to guarantee equal and unhindered climatic opportunities for all, rich or poor, have made them subject to the vilest slander from the lips of those still shrouded in the fog of ignorance. It is sometimes a painful business to deliver the verdict of science, but we must take heart that in the long run our efforts will lead humanity to the best of all possible weathers.

Another setback has landed us on the front pages in recent months and exposed us to great ridicule in the press. I am referring, of course, to the collapse of the Malaysian weather hedge collective organized by a number of our most prominent members, including Professors Tritkowsky and Kaplan. Our detractors – and they are numerous – seized upon this as if it signaled a repudiation of neo-meteorology, instead of the greatest possible proof of its validity.

When my eldest boy saw some of the biased reporting on television, he asked me about it. Those of you who have met Matthew know he’s a real firecracker. I told him, let’s look at the facts. And that is just what we all need to do. I don’t need to tell any of you that the seventy-three consecutive days of rain that pelted Kuala Lumpur were really a cleansing mechanism whose long-range effects will benefit all. In the end, even Dan Rather will come to appreciate the Malaysian mudslide of last September 8th. But the sunshine-loving media have, as usual, exaggerated the damage and focused entirely on the short-term harm that supposedly resulted from the suspension of public weather forecasting. Do we really need to see yet again the same old tired video of families whose unhygienic huts have been washed away? Why no coverage – the Fox News Network was a notable exception – of the boom in raingear sales? Or of the considerable fortunes being made by enterprising salvagers? And just once, I wish our critics would have the intellectual integrity to tell us where it is written that dry ground is somehow inherently preferable to supple and pliant mud. (Applause)

And so, my colleagues, even as we pause this evening to celebrate our collective achievement over the past year, I remind you that our job is far from finished. Every morning, when I see the shining faces of my boys – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – across from me at the breakfast table, I remind myself that we must not shirk the great tasks that remain before us. Even today, we find those who advocate the bankrupt fallacy of governmental weather bureaus. The seemingly noble idea of providing forecasts to all, lazy or industrious, deserving or undeserving, still sounds its siren call for those who would skirt the hard truths.

Above all, we must continue to root out the traces of that ultimate seduction, the ruinous dream of perfect weather. Ours may be a less glittering, a less romantic vision, but in the end it is the only realistic path for humanity. Only when we finally check the meddling bureaucrats and the well-intentioned but ultimately misguided efforts of the do-gooders, only when we finally unchain the mechanisms of weather and allow them to unfold in all their unpredictable beauty: only then will every child grow up free to experience wind, rain, thunder, snow, sleet, lightning, and sunshine – yes, sunshine too!

Meteorologists of the world, I salute you and I thank you. (Thunderous applause)

Posted on 7/24/05: The National Diet Library, Tokyo

The National Diet Library in Tokyo is one of the real joys of life here. It is also the bane of my existence. Unlike the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the Diet Library is open for public use, and as the copyright repository for Japan, it owns copies of almost everything published here. The Diet Library collects the sorts of publications that university libraries and other archives generally ignore, things like sports and entertainment magazines. The collection is absolutely indispensable for someone like me who is researching Japanese popular music—and yet it remains the library of last resort.

The library is easy enough to find. It’s right across the street from the Diet building in central Tokyo. The Diet building has to be one of two or three ugliest halls of parliament in the world. Imagine a typical state capitol building constructed out of white Legos that have been sitting in a musty basement too long and you’ll have a pretty accurate mental picture. Apparently, back when it was built in the prewar era, it was believed that curved lines promoted moral decay, and so the architects avoided them wherever possible.

The Diet Library buildings, on the other hand, are fairly comfortable and spacious examples of modernist architecture. There are two main buildings, one housing books, the other periodicals. They are air conditioned in summer, heated in winter, have plenty of benches and chairs to use, and are rarely very crowded. So why is this the library of last resort?

Let’s start with how you get through the front door. The first thing you do is place all of your belongings in a coin locker: you’re only permitted to carry in one clear plastic bag. Next, you have to fill out a form with your name, address, and age to get a temporary user’s card. As of this year, the process is completely automated: you stand at what looks like a voting both and punch the information into a machine, which issues the card. Through last year, you had to write this all down by hand. I had a grad student once who was offended by the request for information about her age, and so she left that section blank. When she brought her form up to the entrance, they told her she had to write down her age to be admitted. In an angry huff, she scribbled down “12” and handed the form back. Whereupon the guard informed her, ever so politely, that you have to be at least twenty to use the library.

Once you’ve cleared the front door, you now have to use their catalog and fill out request forms for the materials you want. This process too has been fully automated as of this year: you file your requests via the same computer that you use for looking up call numbers. This has sped up the process, and saved us foreigners from having to scrawl out our childish Japanese script on paper request forms. There is still, however, a limit to the number of items you can request and check out at any one time—a limit that fluctuates over the course of the day, depending on how far behind the library staff gets in processing orders.

Once you’ve filed your first requests, you sit and wait for your user number to flash up on a call board. It often takes twenty or thirty minutes. This is when the contents of your clear plastic bag come in handy: hopefully, you’ve remembered to bring a book or magazine to read. Once your number is called, you pick up the books or magazines and bring them downstairs to the photocopy center, where there is another form to be filled out to request photocopies. You turn in the forms and your books and then wait around again until your number flashes up on the board, meaning that your photocopies are ready: another twenty minutes or more. You pay for them (about 25 cents a page, depending on paper size), go back upstairs to return the books, and then you start over again.

On a typical day, I try to get to the library right when it opens at 9:30 a.m. I stay on until two or three in the afternoon, which allows me to get through the above cycle four or five times, checking out two or three items on each go-around. I typically leave with about forty pages of photocopies, a yield of roughly six or seven pages for every hour spent in the library. That, my friends, is why it is the library of last resort.

One of the interesting things about spending the day there is that you can spy on what the people around you are doing. You have plenty of dead time to fill, after all. A thirty-something man sitting at the table next to you is paging through a stack of shojo manga: comic books aimed at young girls. An older lady and a younger man (her son?) are paging through old city registrar maps of Tokyo, intently seeking information about something. A young attractive woman in classy professional attire is slowly paging her way through what look to be a stack of legal case histories.

Of course, this also means that the people around you get to sneak peeks at what you are up to. A few years ago, I was researching an article on the popular music duo, Chage & Aska. They were enormously popular around 1990, yet the only publications that covered them extensively were tabloid newspapers, especially those affiliated with the Fuji Sankei group, the parent company of C&A’s record label. Most newspapers at the Diet Library have been transferred to microfilm, and so I spent a few days there reading through microfilms of Fuji Sankei tabloids, looking for articles about C&A. I quickly realized that the entertainment news was always published in the same place each day—on the pages immediately following the pin-up picture section. So to save time, I would hit the fast forward button on the microfilm reader and let the pages fly past until I saw pictures of semi-naked women, at which point I would hit the stop button so that I could read the entertainment news on the next page. What do you suppose the people at the next carrel thought I was researching?

Posted on 5/21/05: Counting Sheepish Grins

Marvin had somehow become an old, old man, a crumbling heap of achy joints and sagging muscles. Through an icy window, he could see a bleak landscape outside, late afternoon sunlight fading away on a snowy cornfield. It seemed he still lived in Iowa. He was sitting on a couch in a room that seemed familiar, though Marvin could not place it. The upholstery fabric was an ugly print, a pattern made up of images of fabulous creatures: unicorns, kylins, dragons. Dog-eared magazines lay scattered across the coffee table: Jane’s Defense Weekly, Lingua Franca, Reader’s Digest, Coin World.

There was one other person in the room, a boy of around fourteen sitting by him on the sofa. Perhaps the boy was his grandson. Perhaps not—the boy had fiery red hair. No one in Marvin’s family had red hair. The boy sipped grape juice from a glass; it left a purple streak on his upper lip. Marvin chose to ignore this, for he had more important matters to discuss. He glanced around the room to make sure they were alone. The boy leaned in, eager to acquire one of those nuggets of hard truth that adults had kept from him all his life.

It was really not so many years ago—Marvin began speaking in what he recognized as his own voice, though it had weathered considerably. It was not so many years ago, he continued, but certainly before your time. And, my child, that is why it is so important that I tell you this, so that you will know and remember, even after I am gone. (The boy leaned forward slightly, then sat back again, as if uncertain about how best to hold his body during such a serious talk).

Marvin continued: the horrors began so innocently, with a simple philosophical dispute among mathematicians—in fact, with the revival of an ancient debate. Were numbers real and actually existent in the world, something already out there that human beings had merely stumbled across, like apples or figs? Or, were numbers a creative fiction that humans had invented on their own, like poetry or music? Were numbers a gift from nature, or a product of our own imagination and labor? Today numbers play such a small role in our lives, it is hard to imagine the terrible passions they could stir up on both sides. Within a few short years, the once flourishing discipline of mathematics ground to a halt, unable to move beyond violent bickering between the two groups of partisans. It became impossible even to edit new textbooks for schoolchildren.

It didn’t help that the country was going through economic hard timed then. To make matters worse, old dormant quarrels achieved new life by insinuating themselves onto this new dispute. In Belfast, the Catholics vowed the sanctity of numbers as God’s creation, while the Protestants insisted on the doctrine of free will and human creation. Yes—that is how things were at the beginning. It was only after the actual fighting broke out that the two groups switched sides, another lesson erased from your history books. Then in the Middle East, Holy War broke out between Muslim and Jew. Numbers were Arabic inventions, the Muslims vowed; no, they were G*d’s handiwork, the Jews countered. In India, Hindus and Muslims took up arms. In Canada, it was English speakers against Francophones. The terrible conflagration quickly swallowed up the entire world—brother fighting brother, son fighting father. So many lives wasted!

Now, I do not take sides in the conflict—that, my child, is the entire point of my talking to you about this. But it was clear from the start which side would win. The Discovery Alliance, with its firm belief in the reality of numbers, was able to pursue new and terrible weapons, untroubled by the kind of doubts that plagued the Invention League of Nations, which could never feel confident about the validity of its numerical calculations. And of course the Discovery Alliance nations enjoyed vastly superior natural resources and economic might. It was a mismatch from day one.

The final Discovery triumph may have been inevitable, but the victory took many years of gruesome fighting to achieve. Cities were laid waste. Awful weapons inflicted hitherto unknown forms of pain on human flesh. The surrender in Budapest of the last rump forces of the Invention League came as a relief to all who had lived through the war, whichever side they took. We all wanted peace, at any cost.

But what followed was perhaps worse. The Discovery Alliance, in its triumph, had lost all external targets for its boundless energy, and so inevitably its restless probing turned inward. Unscrupulous politicians began to raise doubts about the numbers 8 and 9. Certainly, they said, the other numbers, 0 through 7, were indisputably real and actually existing facts, but 8 and 9 were tainted by uncertainties and bore the stench of artificiality. After an official inquiry, it was decided that enough suspicions had been raised that it was safest simply to eliminate those two numbers from our system. We converted to base 8—of course, it was not called that, but instead “base 7 plus 1.” To you, born so long after the conflict, the very words 8 and 9 must have an archaic ring. Have you heard them spoken before? I thought not.

Of course, the bleeding could not stop there. It wasn’t long before doubts were raised about the authenticity of 6, and once it had been purged, 7’s position immediately became untenable. The greatest struggle of all arose over 0. Perhaps you remember it—you were in preschool at the time. The congressional hearings were broadcast live, and you used to complain when your favorite cartoons were preempted. You remember that, yes? In the end, after months of heated debate, the authenticity of 0 was denied. And so on, and so on, until today we possess only the numbers that you know: 1, 2 and 4. You remember how two years ago in school, on the first day of classes you were instructed by your teacher to blot out the number 3 wherever it appeared in your textbook? She told you it was a misprint, a typo—but she lied to you. It wasn’t her fault, of course.

Why am I telling you this? You are old enough to understand things now. More importantly, you are a special child. On the night you were born, I saw a dream. The dream has returned to me many times since. It is only a dream, hardly worth mentioning. And yet, there is something undeniably fascinating to it. Let me tell you. In my dream, there is a parallel universe where the people have discovered, or perhaps invented—again, I refuse to take sides in this debate—the number 0, which previously was unknown to them. In fact, it is not the same number 0 that we once possessed, but that is the closest expression we had in our universe for naming it. In our old system, before the war, we could have expressed their 0 more closely as 0.0000000314. But of course this number means nothing to you, a product of our postwar educational system, and even it fails to describe with any precision the parallel world’s new 0. But, oh, what a remarkable civilization they built with it! One of its unique features, as distinct from the 0 we once possessed, is the subtle inaccuracy it introduces into all calculations. The foods prepared using this new 0, for example, containing as they do faint traces of all potential ingredients, are just a little tastier than ours.

Remember what I have told you, my boy. Look at the fingers on your hands and remember: 10. Remember 3. Remember 8 and 9. Curl your fingers into a fist and remember 0—above all, remember 0! Even if the names of these numbers sound queer to you, remember!

Marvin studied the boy’s face. The boy looked bored, even disappointed—as though he wanted to say: I thought you were going to tell me something useful, old man. Marvin sighed. And then there was the sound of footsteps on the porch outside, and an angry pounding at the front door….

(The above is an excerpt from a novel that may or may not be in progress; in it, Marvin causes a great deal of trouble for everyone, including the author).

Posted 12/30/04: My Top Ten Favorite CDs of 2004

1). The Kinks, The Village Green Preservation Society Special Deluxe Edition. It’s probably not fair to put a re-issue at the top of my list, but this is no ordinary re-issue: a new, expanded 3-CD version of The Kinks' 1968 masterpiece, the album that failed to chart in either the U.S. or the U.K. when first released, but that now is almost universally acknowledged as the band's greatest work—despite the fact that it contains none of their hits (although you may have recently heard the song "Picture Book" used as the backing track for an HP commercial on tv). The core album, with its wistful lyrics and deceptively simple melodies, is simply gorgeous. You get it in both the stereo and mono versions on disks one and two, along with a handful of nice bonus tracks on each. There are significant differences between the two versions, but probably only hardcore fans (me, for example) need both. But disk three is a wonder, full of rare tracks, many of them previously available only on vinyl or bootlegs. Some of them, I've never even heard before. One of the greatest rocks bands of all time captured at their creative peak—and almost no one has ever heard the damn thing!

2). Ozomatli, Street Signs . If there was any justice in this world, “Saturday Night” would have been one of the hits by which the summer of 2004 is remembered (in fact, it got significant airplay here in LA on the great Indie103.1 FM). Then again, who said there was justice in this world? Certainly not Ozomatli. Every time I listen to this, I have to fight down the urge to jump up and dance. Sometimes, I lose the fight. A delicious blend of Hip Hop, salsa, and punk/pop rock.

3). Brian Wilson, Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Brian finally finishes the thing, and it is very, very good. The new material seems to fit right in with the classic songs. One of the great bonuses here is to have the lyric insert, with Van Dyke Park’s great imagistic language. Just terrific.

4). The Ike Reilly Assassination, Sparkle in the Finish. The Ike Reilly Assassination is a great Midwestern bar band that is developing a legend for incredible live shows. I'm not certain this is quite as good as their debut CD, Salesmen & Racists, but it's close. Ike Reilly has a remarkable knack for constructing rock anthems, ala Bruce Springsteen or The Who—complex songs built around multiple changes linking together several distinct melodies in widely variant styles. The music is a blend of garage rock, punk, hiphop, and Americana. He's got the Charles Bukowski barfly poet line down pat, too. His best songs are built around unforgettable lines--e.g., "I believe you when you say/That I'll be judged on garbage day" ("Garbage Day"). I don't know that he will ever break out with a major hit; I think it's more likely he will remain a cult figure for the next couple of decades. Well, here's your chance to get in on almost the ground floor of the cult--and there's almost nothing more fun on earth than being a fan of a cult band. Ask any Kinks’ fan.....

5). Nellie McKay, Get Away From Me. Quirky pop that reminds me a bit of the early Roches albums: clever lyrics, unexpected detours in melody, female vocal harmonies, etc. I heard a few cuts off of Nellie McKay's debut CD on KCRW here in LA and found myself intrigued enough to buy the double CD. She reminds me a bit of the early Roches' albums: the same clever lyrics, quirky song structures, flash genre hopping, and strong female vocal harmonies. About half of the songs are terrific, and the rest are at least listenable--at her worst, she reminds one of a female Billy Joel. And she's not even twenty years old. It's hard to predict her future: she could burn out quickly (cf. Macy Gray), or blossom into another Björk. Whichever the case, I'll be watching and listening with interest.

6). Various artists, Mayor of the Sunset Strip Original Soundtrack. Soundtrack to the new documentary about Rodney Bingenheimer, the great LA deejay who has introduced several generations of Californians to what’s new in pop/punk/rock: it collects songs he has played over the past two decades. It also includes the paean Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys composed for Rodney’s show, which still airs every Sunday night at midnight here on KROQ.

7). Wilco, A Ghost is Born. More of the same from this group—which is a very good thing. A cleaner sound than on the last release, and they are learning how to integrate guitar noise into their songs—very appealing.

8). Björk, Medulla. Her experiment in using only (or almost only) the human voice. The idea is quite attractive, and there are a couple of wonderful quirky songs here that I find myself humming: “Pleasure is All Mine,” “Where is the Line” and “Who Is It.” The rest is uneven, but even the weakest tracks crackle with Björk’s characteristic intelligence and wit.

9). Prince, Musicology . The artist formerly known as….oh, never mind. Not as good as, for example, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, his release of several years back, which was uneven but still had a number of standout songs on it, but still funky. And am I the only one who hears Frank Zappa in the oddball fills and bridges that Prince uses in several of the songs here?

10). Tie: Here’s a bunch of new CDs that I listen to via Real Rhapsody but haven’t bought (at least not yet): Ray Charles, Genius Loves Company (a classy way to go out); Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand (the old New York punk band Television’s sound, but with Scottish accents); P.J. Harvey, Uh Huh Her (my first brush with this widely celebrated avatar of low-fi punk/blues); Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose (the queen in a wonderful, stripped-down comeback); Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Love Bad News (College radio lives!); Northern State, All City (white middle-class feminist rap—somehow, it works); Rilo Kiley, More Adventurous (fine update of the West Coast folk-rock sound); Scissor Sisters, Scissor Sisters (glam rock lives!); Utada, Exodus (Utada Hikaru, one of Japan’s best singer/songwriters tries with some success to break into the American dance music scene).