Down and Out Of Sài Gòn

Last Post

2009-11-02T16:28:00.004+07:00

This is the last post at this site - at least for the foreseeable future. I have decided to decamp from Blogger and set up my old domain. That place is also called Down and Out Of Sài Gòn, and comes with its own blog.

I doubt few people are reading this site after nearly a year of inactivity. But to those happy few who wish to read anything more by or about myself, please visit the new site. Cheers.

Reconciliation via bad arithmetic

2008-11-08T21:24:00.001+07:00

From 52 to 48 with Love is three or so pages that shows Democratic voters (the 52) patch up things with their Republican counterparts (the 48) by holding up pieces of paper. The idea is to let the Red Staters know that they're not going to be ignored or mocked in the future. Examples are "Let's vow to be gentler, kinder and more understanding together", "one nation indivisible US", "dear 48, I will listen to you", and (eeewww) "dear 48, you complete me."

The spirit is admirable, but why do the page owners have to fib? It's really 53 versus 46, when you round to the nearest number. Is the extra 2 there to make the Republicans feel good about themselves? If so, it's a futile gesture; this kind of white lie inspires contempt from the "spite" voters. And why is there no reconciliation shown for the other 1 - the Libertarians and Greens? They deserve it more.

My message to the 48 46? No hard feelings, but what the fuck were you thinking? That's about as much as they deserve.

Remember, remember, the 4th of November...

2008-11-04T20:06:00.001+07:00

Yes. Obama's going to win. Random guess: 350 electoral votes and 58 senators to the Democrats. Damn - I'm fascinated by the election - refreshing the browser every couple of minutes, and trying to chase down another link or two. Stop it. I tell myself. Most people are sleeping, and only two little hamlets in New Hampshire have got to vote . That's not literally true - there's been a lot of pre-poll and postal voting throughout the U.S. of A. But I still have to tell myself: stop chasing news that doesn't exist. Get some sleep. Hell, it's your wedding anniversary tomorrow - an early rise is in order. The results will be available soon enough.

So rather than procrastination and wasting time, I turn to writing to get my thoughts and emotions in order. What do my feelings tell me? Quiet relief - even contentment at the certainty of the outcome. No moments of ecstasy, no "Hallelujahs!" nor "Praise the Lord!", not even quiet weeping (common, I hear) at the sheer utter history inherent in the outcome. Perhaps a little wet-eyed when I heard that Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, had passed away on election eve. But that's just empathy; it would hurt, especially as she was as much surrogate mother as grandmother.

But at the end of the day, there have been other events in my life of greater priority and immediate import. My wife's surgery for endometriosis and other gynecological problems last Monday. (Successful, for now.) Australia's not-quite-a-perhaps-we-avoided-the-worst-of-a-full recession, at a time where I'm thinking "I should find a better job". My dissatisfaction with being a requirements analyst - a job work out what is required of software, when I feel could get paid more for writing the software itself. Finding that it's not so easy to get a programming job when you haven't done it for six years. Oh, fuck it - stop whinging - at least I have a job. I'm not in debt. I can even save a little. I can afford some magnanimity.

Good luck, Obama and good luck America. You're going to need every bit of it.

Welfare Bastardry

2008-08-26T20:45:00.000+07:00

Rudd defends 'hardline' benefits plan

Families face losing their welfare for three months if their children continually skip school, under legislation to be introduced to Federal Parliament this week.

Under the Federal Government's proposed scheme, regular school attendance will become a condition for receiving all welfare except the Family Tax Benefit.

If the legislation is passed a pilot scheme at eight schools will begin next year.

"Hardline?" I call it punitive. It won't prevent truancy in families who are rich enough not to need welfare - it's easier to skip school when both parents are at work. It won't help those unemployed who are dedicated to giving a better life for their kids. What it will do is penalise those families who are dysfunctional enough to be affected by the scheme. They may not be that many, but they exist. And if the parent(s) are that fucked up, then they probably don't get the crude cause and effect reasoning ("truancy implies no welfare") behind the plan. Given that, their kids probably need all the money they receive from the dole. Even if much of it is lost at the bottleshop or goes up mom and/or dad's arm, some of it may spill out into food and textbooks and uniforms. Cut off the cash, and you're going to have a lot more kids hungry in class. Unfortunately, empty stomachs are a poor way to motivate children to concentrate on their studies. From this, a small problem (truancy) is aggravated, as kids feel even worse at school. Their studies decline. They get picked on by richer kids for torn and worn uniforms (with mum and dad less able to afford to fix the things). Given the conditions, do you blame them for escaping school?

The only bright note in the plan is that it is a trial. Howard would haven't even bothered to experiment - he'd implement the scheme everywhere and le the chips fall where they may. But governments have a bad habit of ignoring bad experiences. I expect Rudd to pronounce it a success even if children are literally starving as a result.

Howard may be gone, but his authoritarian heavy-handedness lives on. Let Jarvis explain:

Thanks to Wombo for passing on the YouTube on this
Larvatus Prodeo thread.

2008-08-24T21:14:00.001+07:00

6 out of 204 ain't bad at all.

I'm bored.

2008-08-21T20:01:00.001+07:00

I'm the chairman of the bored.

Google Street View in Việt Nam?

2008-08-06T21:22:00.001+07:00

Perhaps that's a premature question to ask at this time. Only four countries have Google Street View now, with Australia possessing the best coverage of them all. (Even Canada misses out, and that's a surprise. Located next door to the U.S., it's generally the second stop for new ideas and tech coming from there.) I know Google Street View would be mostly popular in Việt Nam. My wife told her friends about it, and they want one too. Mostly popular. But I see a few issues in the way.

If Google Street View comes to South-East Asia, it's likely to hit Singapore first, because it is small and thus easily mappable - and also prosperous. Then bordering Malaysia, which is a little less prosperous but shares a border and English - then Thailand. All three of these countries have excellent coverages under Google Maps, with Thailand's being utterly superb - it displays place names in the original Thai with their transliteration underneath. Both are represented well in Map View and Satellite View - all countries are displayed in the latter, but it's the fortunate few that have city streets shown in the former.)

Alas, Google's coverage of Việt Nam is lousy. It's not that it limits itself to showing highways, and misses city streets - let along missing the common hẻm - the alleys in which most people live. I expect the granularity - the detail - to improve in time, and the company has to start somewhere. What gets my goat is that Google makes mistakes with the place names they've written. There's an attempt to get the tone markers right (to its credit), but either misses a few or gets the letters in the wrong order. For example, Biên Hoà (a satellite city of Sài Gòn) is rendered as "Bein Hoa". It's like they got their information from an old encyclopedia. I can complain to them (and I will), but I also take it as a sign of how important Google considers the country. Not very.

Having said this, do I need to mention the paranoia of the Vietnamese government - the one who would be certain to nix any deal? I doubt they'd like foreign companies taking detailed pictures of their roads - no matter how pure their intentions are. It's not just the military angle, although Street View allows ~~the United States~~ ~~China~~ foreign governments to case the place without even visiting. It's the vested interests of the local party hacks that are endangered. Imagine if Street View could show roads as they really were? Not a nice yellow line on the map, but potholes and rubble where streets should be? And that the same people who were in charge of maintenance are suspected of embezzling the budget blind? I know these people are quite vicious when their interests, livelihoods, or lives are threatened.

Street View won't stand a chance.

That Newfangled Google Street View

2008-08-05T20:38:00.000+07:00

Corner Barkly and Stuart Highways, Northern Territory

This is the new Google "Street View" as applied to Australia. One day of publicity gone, and already the variety of our pictures exceeds that of the United States. Over there, they've limited themselves to a paltry few cities, and even big ones like Washington, D.C. are excepted. I suppose security theatre is to blame.

Google Australia may have started with the cities, but they've gone one better with photographing all major highways - from the cities through the bush and into the centre of the outback. They may not have succeeded, but one can see the lines of blue stretching from sea to shining sea when zoomed out all the way.

Yes, I may have concerns with privacy and terrorism, but they can wait until tomorrow. For now - hats off.

Starbucked

2008-07-30T19:24:00.001+07:00

Announcement to Customers 29th July 2008

Starbucks has been a part of the Australian market since 2000. There are currently 84 Starbucks locations throughout the country, including Brisbane, Canberra, Gold Coast, Melbourne, South Australia, Sydney, and Tasmania. 23 stores will remain open in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and surrounding areas to serve customers in those communities. The list of stores that are scheduled for closure will appear on this site by 5pm July 31st after all affected stores partners (employees) have been personally notified.

Losing nearly three quarters of their stores isn't the worst of it. It sounds like Starbucks is abandoning whole cities. If the company has to flee the Gold Coast - one of Australia's most famous tourist destinations - they're in worse shape than I thought.

I've had my doubts about Starbucks succeeding in Australia. There were, and are too many alternatives - from the small cosy places and fancy cafés to existing chains like Coffee Club and Gloria Jeans. The coffee is better elsewhere, there's more room to sit (or cuddle or seduce), and meals are available as well. The competition also have better aesthetics, while Starbucks expect their customers to order their coffees like they order their Big Macs and their KFC. As for the produt: my first and last impression of their brew (sipped in 2001 in Salt Lake City) was that it was coffee-flavoured froth. I haven't tasted it since then.

It's the staff who get my sympathy. From The Age:

Several former Melbourne employees, mainly aged in their teens to early 20s, said after a meeting at Little Bourke Street's Mantra Hotel, that they were shocked by the sudden nature of the announcement.

One former employee of the Lygon Street store in Carlton said he was upset former employees had been given less than a week's notice despite Starbucks making the decision to close the store two weeks ago.

"All the stores were just cannibalising each other, all the bigger stores were just taking money from the smaller ones," Ilias, 22, said.

Perhaps I'm not reading the press release correctly. Let me put on my amateur MBA hat. The sensible thing now would be to reduce the number of stores - I know Starbucks is cash-strapped in the States, and they're cutting back there. But I would try to keep at least one restaurant in each of the CBDs, and spread the rest around. It seems a little extreme that they can't make a profit from one single franchise in Adelaide or Perth (both +1 million cities).

The sensible thing would be to spread themselves widely, concentrate on one or two stores in the city centres, and if possible spread (or re-spread) to the suburbs. Instead they've been engaging in Darwinian selection with their franchises - crowding hem together, and letting them fight each other. That seems to be the Starbucks business model - I've heard it happen in the States, and in the U.K. Alas, the result is not the survival of the fittest, but the malnourishment of the population. No wonder the company is failing, and leading to massive retrechments. The soon-to-be-unemployed have my sympathy, but the management can go Starbuck themselves.

Macro Madness - Copying without Formatting in Word

2008-07-23T17:26:00.001+07:00

Microsoft are an institution of this age. How could it survive otherwise with such buggy products? People use Office because most other people use Office, and it is harder to "collaborate" from some other suite of products. Office is not too large to fail - nothing is - but without some Bear Stearns loss of liquidity, it is not going to disappear overnight. Instead, there is the slow decline in market share to competitors such as Google and OpenOffice, and the loss of revenue to piracy. It can't come soon enough for me - as long as the upstarts have learnt from MS's mistakes.

The biggest problem of all is featuritis - packing new features into the product so that customers upgrade to new version. Because Microsoft did (and still does not, for all that I know) ask what the customers want, the customers get a lot of unwanted additions. Remember the dancing Paperclip? Of course you do. Then there's the automatic formatting, and the one hundred and one permutations of AutoCorrect.

Because of Microsoft's top-down approach to its base, they also miss the obvious. For example, paste without formatting. It's obvious - people want to cut some text from somewhere but without the formatting crud. The source may use bullets or numbers or odd fonts or different colours. The destination uses the standard Word styles. All the fancy styling is undesired. But by using the standard Paste function, that's what the destination gets.

Microsoft does let the customer do this, but they don't make it easy. Rather than provide a nice one-click menu item or a shortcut key, the user has to choose Edit → Paste Special from the menu, and then choose the "Unformatted Unicode Text" option. It's ok if you do it once or twice. Unfortunately, my job involves updating old software requirements documents, and that includes updating the content to a new style. Doing these actions 100+ times a day was becoming a strain.

So I wrote these macros, and then gave them shortcut keys for quicker use. (I chose Alt+U and Alt+C, but others can make their own.) Add them to your Normal.Dot or whereever else you want.

The PasteUnicode is the simplest - it just pastes without formatting. The CopyUnicode is a stranger beast. One of the snafus of Word is how it copies bullets and numbering - it "thinks" the user wants the number in the numbering or the bullet in the bulleting. When copying from sources, I found it was better to make the text "plain", copy, and then undo the operation. That's what the macro does. It's a kludge, and I'm not happy with it, but at least the macro alerts you if there are problems. Use with care - preferably when the source is read-only.

Sub PasteUnicode() ' ' PasteUnicode Macro ' Macro written 8/03/2008 by DaOOSG ' Free for distribution. Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdFormatPlainText) End Sub Sub CopyUnicode() ' ' CopyUnicode Macro ' Macro written 18/07/2008 by DaOOSG ' Free for distribution. Selection.Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("Normal") Selection.Copy If ActiveDocument.Undo = False Then MsgBox ("Undo was unsuccessful") End If End Sub

Any feedback is appreciated. Cheers.

I hate Yahoo! Chat

2008-07-22T15:42:00.001+07:00

I hate it. I despise it. I loathe it. To me, it is a pest. But it lets my wife keep in touch with friends and family in Việt Nam. She can type with them. She can even speak with them, and without paying Telstra or VNPT a single cent. So it stays on the family computer, as there's only the one. But I don't like it running when I use it. Most software runs in the background when minimized, and never disturbs the user except in emergencies. Yahoo! Chat is designed to distract and grab attention, even if the user has other ideas. I think it is not an accidental bug, but a deliberate feature - the same feature possessed by a lot of malware.

Last night illustrates my scorn. Yahoo! Chat was running, as my wife wanted to get a reference from one of her friends. She was speaking on the headset, so the keyboard was free for me to write. It was a nice moment of domestic bliss - husband and wife using the computer in tandem without getting in the way of each other. I'd made a few notes, but hadn't got to the point of turning them into sentences.

Then 5 of her friends tried to chat with her at once. I was in the middle of a word, and BLAM! there was Yahoo on top of my writing showing someone's message! I clicked minimise, returned to my application, got out two more characters and WHAM! another message from someone else! I tried to return to the same word (the fundamental unit of language - not the application), and before I had even typed out a character ZAAM! Yahoo was back again! Think of 5 ADHD-inflicted children crying for your attention. Letting users embed sound effects in messages makes things worse. One of them displayed this insistent woman whining "Alôôôôô". My train of concentration was derailed, and writer's block was in da house. I was angry.

The biggest problem with Yahoo! Chat is that it grabs the focus off other applications running on the same computer. As the article says:

In computing, the focus indicates the component of the graphical user interface which is currently selected to receive input.

Selected - one hopes - by the user. Not some rogue program. Which leads to a further issue - anger. I get really furious when Yahoo! steals the focus. The people trying to chat with my wife are interrupting what I am doing, even if they aren't aware of this. It makes me want to type "fuck off" back at them. I don't. It's rude, and they're the friends of my wife, and most are nice. They don't deserve to be abused by me, and my wife certainly doesn't need me using her nick to do so.

I have to live with the program - close it down when I can, and (if my wife needs it on), avoid work when it's open. Perhaps TweakUI can stop Yahoo! stealing focus. Perhaps not. And did I mention I hate Yahoo! Chat?

Clusterfuck Bollocks

2008-06-04T19:04:00.001+07:00

Don't get James Howard Kunstler talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories. He should stick to Peak Oil and financial meltdowns, where he can be amusingly snarky. And for god's sake, don't bring up Arabs: they seem to be his personal untermensch.

From a strategic point-of-view, 9/11 required a severe punitive response against the people responsible (casualties were higher than the attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941). That meant against an Arab people. Since the act was not perpetrated by any Arab nation per se, this left the US in a quandary. And of course, it begs the question: why was such a response even required?

Yes, and since Irish people are behind all the IRA bombings in the world, the appropriate response is to re-annex Ireland.

Jim: the problem is that what you are talking about isn't strategy at all - it's madness. Apocalypse Now 'Are my methods unsound?' - 'I don't see a method at all, sir' lunacy. It's also collective punishment, which is not ethical nor desirable or (in this case) that effective. "Severe punitive response against the people responsible" - I have no problem with that, if you actually choose the actual people responsible (like Osama bin Laden), rather than the people responsible (Arabs). And if you are going to blame a multi-million ethnic group for the work of a score or so of dead hijackers, you're a fucking loon.

Why can't more war commentators be like the War Nerd, who talks about war so jovially, yet makes so much sense? The opposite is the rule - polemicists who take themselves so seriously, and with little sense to show for it.

Make my funk the P.J. Funk? Don't wanna get that funked up

2008-04-23T21:07:00.000+07:00

Back from Tasmania, and what a pleasant holiday! Got a small bottle of The Lark, as promised to myself. Nice distillery too - a great place to look at Hobart harbor while kicking back, sipping drinks, and reading a Sharpe novel. Even if this item was on my mind.

You are looking at a SR506 - a six-string bass manufactured by Ibanez. Mine is the same model except that it's green, about 12 years older and missing a mid-range EQ. If I had a favorite possession, this would be it. Much missed, but not much played. I had to leave it at my folk's place while I lived in Việt Nam for four long years. I had plans to shipped over - I even put it in a packing crate - but it stayed put in my parents' garage. Maybe that's a good thing. God know what Vietnamese customs would have done to the thing if I'd shipped it. Break the pickups while searching for "contraband", perhaps.

Even when I returned to Australia, I left it be; I was too busy looking for work, and then I was too busy at work. But when that slacked off, I realized I wanted to play again. But the strings were old, and one of the heads was broken and welded to the strings, and so I arranged for it to be repaired before my holiday. I picked it up two days after returning from Tasmania. It cost a lot (3 figures, not 4), but it's cleaner, the rust is removed, the dust is gone, and I don't regret it one bit. I've been having too much fun practicing (which is what I need), and I'm working on expanding my repetroire. Ideas for now:

Every Breath You Take - Police standard. Rather that the "duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh" simplicity of the original, I attempt to play the Andy Summer's guitar riff on the bass one octave down. No, the song is not about love, despite what Puff Daddy and Faith Evans may think. It's really about paranoid obsession, and that's how I'm tackling it. Or do these stanzas sound that romantic to you?

Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I'll be watching you

Jerry was a Race Car Driver - I used to be a Primus fan, and even was inspired to buy the bass after discovering them in concert at "Alternative Nations", one of those rock festivals I used to attend. Drove my flatmates mad with my playing, as one reminded me when I visited her in Melbourne a fortnight ago. I'm not that obsessive now about the band, but I like the "tap-with-the-right-hand/pop-with-the-left-hand" technique of Jerry. [*]

I want to say something about P.J. O'Rourke's latest article: 24 Hours on the 'Big Stick'. Only heard about it because it was reprinted in The Australian. Good points - still an excellent writer on certain subjects, such as what happens on an aircraft carrier. Bad points - using this as a metaphor to tout the virtues of American-style "Conservatism", despite 8 years of Bush demonstrating that the ideology sucks dogs bollocks. He thinks John McCain would be a good president because he was an aircraft-carrier pilot. By the same criterion, Randall "Duke" Cunningham - legislator and confirmed "ace"- would be an even more stellar commander-in-chief. Perhaps he could run in 2016... after completing his 8-year sentence for tax evasion and fraud.

[* "Alternative Nations" was also the same concert where I saw women pelting Ice-T with water bottles. "KKK Bitch" was not appreciated.]

Escaping the Horse Race

2008-04-09T08:21:00.000+07:00

OK folks. I have been on the internet for two US election cycles, and have observed that during a Presidential election year, the political web becomes totally fucking unusable, as one gets sucked into a) a vast amount of pointless horse-race coverage and b) the horrific internecine fights of one's friends in vaguely left-wing politics in the US (this has been mainly over Ralph Nader last time round, but the Hillary/Barrack fight certainly appears to have the legs).

Daniel Davies - I bless the rains...

Lately though, I don’t hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called “rage fatigue.” Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it’s true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I’m no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing. Obama may yet be borne through the White House portico by a Democratic host of seraphim, but he cannot do much without the consent of a bought and paid for Congress. Only George Bush can do that, and we can only hope God broke the mold after he made George. And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the “American lifestyle,” is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely “the entertainment branch of industry.”

Joe Bageant - The Audacity of Depression

And now here's my chance to escape the horse race for a while. For what it's worth, I prefer Obama as the next president to Clinton or McCain. I don't care about his "Audacity of Hope"; I just think he's the only one with the potential to be a decent president. Clinton is too prone to being mis-advised, while McCain is too angry. Unless someone works out how to bring back FDR from the dead, Obama is the best option possible now.

I'm going to wean myself off American blogs for a bit. They're definitely more dramatic that Australian ones, but is that necessarily a good thing when American politics is so dramatic - that is, fucked up?

For now, I'm having a real holiday - not a period between jobs, or traveling from one country to another, but a chance to actually see new places - Tasmania in particular. There's a lot of hiking lined up for us, as the place is brimming with National Parks. And at the end of it all, I want to visit a little distillery in Hobart and bring back a bottle of one of these.

Nice country - shame about the processed food

2008-04-07T07:35:00.000+07:00

Sen. Barack Obama sampled $100 ham, but didn't chow down on a cheesesteak during a visit to the Italian Market yesterday. During a half-hour tour of the market, Obama sampled wares at Claudio Specialty Food and DiBruno Brothers - where he noshed on a Spanish ham that retails for $99.99 a pound.

Staff at DiBruno's told him the ham only recently became available because it was previously barred by the FDA. "All I know is it tastes good," Obama said. As good as whiz with onions?

In fact, neither Obama nor Sen. Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, has made the traditional stop at South Philly cheesesteak establishments Pat's or Geno's.

Obama - I'll try that cheesesteak next time

I like cheese - good mild cheese, such as Edam. Processed cheese is another thing entirely. I can't understand how a country like America, with so much good agricultural land, could be content with a product involving "regular cheese that has been reprocessed along with additional ingredients such as emulsifiers and stabilizing agents, such as xanthan gum or carrageenan. These products derive their tanginess and flavor from additional ingredients such as citric acid and flavoring compounds." Gag me without a spoon.

So why can't Michelle Malkin work this out for herself?

I’m flying out of Harrisburg, PA this morning, but I just had to pop in as a Philly-born girl to say my peace (sic) about Barack Obama dissing the cheesesteak.

Yes. Dissing the cheesesteak. Yo. What is he thinking?

"Yuck." If Barack Obama decided to choose "mozzarella, provolone, salami, and prosciutto" over this example of the Philly cheesesteak, then the man has taste.

I showed it to my wife. She grimaced.

"What's that?"

"It's cheese steak."

"It looks like số hai." (A literal translation of "Số hai" is "number two", and is our own family euphemism for "shit".) "That [pointing at the yellow] is people's số hai, and that [indicating the brown] is Timpani's số hai." (Timpani is our family dog - sadly missed - but adopted by our in-laws.) "Where do you get that?"

"America".

She shuddered. "If I go to America, I won't eat that!"

And neither would I.

Absolut Trolling

2008-04-05T18:02:00.002+07:00

Michelle Malkin has got herself into quite a frenzy over this ad. Let me quote the full title for her outrage: Absolut arrogance and the advertising agency behind the reconquista ad; Update: Absolut’s mealy-mouthed response. Fuck me - doesn't that really sound pompous?

It's not like the U.S. doesn't have real problems, with a 4000+ death toll in Iraq, a currency that's tanking, a economy based mostly around worthless mortgages, an overexploited working class, and a president who thinks torture is great (up to and including crushing child testicles, apparently). That doesn't bother Michelle Malkin and her wingnuteers one bit. It's mischievous advertising agencies in Mexico City that get them angry!

How do I explain this to an Aussie audience? Once upon a time, places like California and Texas were part of Mexico. In the 1800s, they taken over by the U.S., except for Texas which became independent and then was taken over by the U.S. Fast forward to 2008, where a a lot of Americans are frightened that Mexico will take it back. I have no idea why, but only if I assume reason, decency, half-decent education and a sense of proportion (qualities apparently absent from the readership of that blog).

Here's how I think. There are 30 odd million "Hispanics" in the U.S. (as their Census defines) - and that's not just people from Mexico but also from Cuba, Guatemala and even as far south as Tierra del Fuego. However, my impression is that they left their countries for a better life in America - not for expanding their own countries' borders. Escaping to the U.S. and bringing their own country with them seems quite the contradiction. I really doubt that Mexicans-Americans want to swap the corruption of the Republicans for the more extreme corruption of the PRI, or have the high inequality of the U.S.A. replaced by the higher inequality of Mexico. But the way things are going, it looks like six of one against a half dozen of the other.

I found the whole saga funny, in a sad way. The sadness is that the only other person around here who would have really "got it" would have been my dad, and he passed away a few months ago. Wetbackophobia isn't a common malady in Brisbane, and certainly not in West End where I live; people are pretty cool with the Latin Americans in the community. The only "Mexicans" folk know in this area are New South Welshpeople up for the State of Origin.

On Balloon Juice (where I discovered this story), a commentator by the name of "r€nato" suggested regarding the right-wingers:

I have an idea for an Absolut ad which would (hopefully) give ‘em all aneurysms: A Photoshopped pic of Bush languishing in a jail cell after his war crimes trial, with the tag line: “Absolut Justice”.

You mean, something like this?¹

Ask and ye shall receive. It's not quite what you're looking for, but it will do. I don't think it will bother the mouth breathers that much, because they can't imagine Bush and cronies in the dock at the Hague. They will say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

The person I feel sorry for is Jeffrey Moran, Ad Executive at Absolut. As unwilling contact man, he's been getting a few nasty grams from the trogyldytes. If he's been deleting them unread - good for him! But I wonder how else he'll deal with this. My guess is that he'd create another ad. Michelle, this drink is on me.

[1] Acknowledgment goes to Billmon, who created the original picture. No URL for it, I'm afraid; he went off line at the end of 2006. God bless him wherever he is.

Observed on a letter signboard outside a church

2008-04-05T10:18:00.010+07:00

It took three seconds for this to sink in.

PRAYER

THE
ULTIMATE
WIRELESS
CUNT

Iraq: it's not the battles - it's the goals

2008-04-03T19:47:00.001+07:00

'Who Won Iraq's "Decisive" Battle?', asks Gary "War Nerd" Brecher, and answers:

What happened in Iraq this week was a beautiful lesson in the weird laws of guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately, it was the Americans who got schooled. Even now, people at my office are saying, “We won, right? Sadr told his men to give up, right?”

Wrong. Sadr won big. Iran won even bigger. Maliki, Petraeus and Cheney lost.

For people raised on stories of conventional war, where both sides fight all-out until one side loses and gives up, what happened in Iraq this past week makes no sense at all.

Read it all, as they say - it's one of his best. It's hard to say that the Iraqi Army won, with troops defecting or refusing to fight, and dragging the Americans (and the British I hear) as unwillingly props. And then four farcical days later, Sadr calls for a ceasefire, and looks gracious doing so. No doubt he's going to milk everything he can out of the incident election season this year.

Some people seem to be of the "Peace offers are for Losers" persuasion. If they think that way, fine. But do real losers get to keep their weapons? The Mahdi Army did. After all, it's not about the battles, it's the goals. One of Sadr's main ones is to get the Americans out of Iraq. The last few days have moved him a lot closer to grabbing power off Maliki. Once then, I have no idea. But I feel he'd rather order the Yanks out than shoot them out.

It's not that I trust the guy - I don't - I have little tolerance for fundamentalists. I would rather have me an Iraqi Olaf Palme or Nelson Mandela, but they don't exist. Given this, Sadr is probably what we're looking at Iraqi leader a couple of years down the track, and (woo-hoo!) sitting on a lot of untapped oil as well. We'll have to deal with the man. But at least he's no Saddam (I hope), more liberal than the ibn Saud family (not fucking hard), gets along with the Sunnis (unlike the other Shi'ite groups), and might even come out looking better than Bhutto. After all, he never capped his brother, did he?

Sunk Cost

2008-03-22T16:25:00.001+07:00

A workmate had been given a Palm Tungsten E2 care of some corporate give-away. As he didn't want it, he emailed everyone to sell it at a discount - $200 AUD or so. I was curious - I'd never owned a PDA before, and I wondered what the fuss was about - so I emailed it back. I had some vague idea that I could note down ideas for my moribund blog on the train or bus home. As I was the only one to express an interest in it, he popped around, dropped it off, and then went on holiday. I didn't pay, but I agreed to, and will - despite what I am about to write.

Let this be a lesson to me: impulsivity is a disorder - especially impulsive buying. I am not impressed with the Palm. It has Bluetooth, but I don't use Bluetooth. It has no phone capability as far as Australian networks are concerned. The sole game - Solitaire - isn't even as good at the Windows version; I can't take card off the destination pile. There's no way of teaching the machine to recognise my handwriting, so the Graffiti handwriting software is no good for me. There's a PVC cover for the screen, but it has the aroma of car seats in an open carpark during a tropical summer's midday; some of the additives are unhealthily volatile.

The thing that shits me is that it doesn't handle Unicode very well, and that's the real deal-breaker for me. Most OS do these days - Linux does, Windows does, and so MacOS does. It's a sign that the designers didn't think about their client base very well - many of whom are multilingual. It's not a matter of internationalising the thing so it can handle English or Russian or Vietnamese - its a matter of making the product being able to handle all three (and others) at the same time. To do it properly, you need Unicode; otherwise you're buggering around with incompatible character sets that break when you send a message to someone else.

Well, I've got the thing, I opened the box, I played around with it, and I have to pay. It would be churlish to return otherwise. The only bright thing is that I could use the machine to learn about embedded programming, but I don't think I'll use the machine for much else.

What I'm watching: Scotch Mist

2008-01-29T19:23:00.000+07:00

It's a little film of every song off Radiohead's In Rainbows. You can watch it too.

I don't generally call someone a "racist" on first encounter...

2008-01-23T19:37:00.000+07:00

But I'll make an exception to the author of Countenance Blog.

After all, this is someone who tagged 474 of his own posts Black Crime, yet forgot to provide "White Crime" as a category. Or even "Crime".

And anecdotes concerning (white) men who attack others with chainsaws? They get put in the plain ol' "Missouri" pile, buddy.

Benazir Bhutto (nee Corleone)

2007-12-29T14:38:00.001+07:00

I hoisted this from Dsquared's comments at Crooked Timber:

By the way, here’s the cut out and keep collection of Benazir Bhutto editorials and blog posts:

1. Bla bla bla martyr, bla bla loved country, tragedy, father, bla.
2. Bla bla corruption, bla bla western puppet, bla bla popular uprising bla.
3. Bla bla stability, bla bla “strongman”, bla bla Russia bla.
4. Bla bla democracy, Islam, woman, bla bla.

The amount of boilerplate know-nothing crap flying around on the radio yesterday was nothing short of embarrassing. People at think tanks really ought to learn how to say “no, I don’t really know enough to comment” when the opportunity to hear their own voice comes up.

Uncle Kvetch adds number 6:

Dsquared, we’ve got an addendum to your list over on this side of the pond:

6. Bla bla, country 90% of Americans couldn’t locate on a globe, bla bla, what does this mean for the Iowa caucuses bla?

Initially, there was no number 5. Fortunately, Vivian filled the gap with the always timely:

Not to mention: BLA!! BLAH!! Al Qaida! Blah!
bleh.

That's why I'm putting only two thoughts of my own on this event - any more, and I'm just wanking around. I'll leave thinking to those who know something, such as these articles linked from the same Crooked Timber thread.

Juan Cole tells us about the riots running in Pakistan sparked by her assassination.
Daughter of the West - Tariq Ali. That's a fair history of Ms. Bhutto, but it was written before her death. He doesn't accuse her of complicity in the death of her brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, outside his house in 1996. He just lays out the facts in damning detail.
That explains why the most angry piece of them all is provided by Mir's daughter (and her niece) Fatima Bhutto. It was also written before the shooting, so I'm not going to accuse her of speaking ill of the dead. The title is Aunt Benazir's False Promises:

And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father [Mir Murtaza Bhutto, brother of Benazir] was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.

My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority.

My first thought about this story: that's cold, and not in a "cool" hip-hop way. Colder than Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II.

My second thought - arising from the first - is that it looks like she was a really horrible woman. Corruption is one thing, but fraticide is really not on.

"Man Made Global Warming: 10 Questions" - My Answers (1 and 2)

2007-12-24T22:03:00.000+07:00

Here is the story. There's a certain Pat Sajak, who hosts Wheel of Fortune in the States. He posted a piece called Man-Made Global Warming: 10 Questions at Human Events.com - a site which bills itself as "Leading the Conservative Movement - Since 1944". This tells me that Mr. Sajak is a capital "C", boldfaced and italicised, Yankee Conservative. Generally, I don't read such sites. While I consider myself a small "c" conservative in some ways - stability, rule of law, small (but not too small) government, blah, blah, bloody blah, I generally find a lot of big "C" webpages unreadable, especially American ones.

Never the less, the questions Sajak pose (and there are a lot more than 10) are not bad ones. Some seem naive, and some (like question 2) are evidence of someone too lazy to use Google. That's all the better - they help clarify a person's thoughts. Now here's my question - did anyone try to answer them? Did they fuck.

That's what gets me. A few of the conservative sites are interpreting the questions as the knockout blows to the theory of Global Warming. Take this example from "Isn't it Rich":

You need to visit the above links to see the rest of his questions. They're good questions that demand answers. We can't afford to lay down our freedoms, pocketbooks, and American way of life as we know it to those who espouse dubious scientific data. The left is in desperation mode to impose international taxation to bolster the socialist agenda put forth by the United Nations. Be sure to read Sajak's piece. More and more people are stepping up to question the faith-based consensus of "man-caused global warming."

So he's not going to try to answer the questions. Instead, he's interpreting the existence of questions as evidence that global warming is wrong. That is... well, I'm trying to think of a word without "descend[ing] into virulent-calling", as decried by Mr. Sajak. And those who think Global Warming is real - where are their answers? Possibly they're missing in action, or on Christmas breaks with their families. Or they consider Mr. Sajak part of the Conservative "ghetto", and thus worth ignoring or dismissing.

Personally, I don't give a damn. I'm going to try to answer the questions, in this (and subsequent) posts. Since he asked so many questions with so many subquestions, I'm going to stick with 1 and 2 for now. I'll answer number 2 first, as the answer to number 1 follows from this. Here we go.

2. Just what is the average temperature of the earth?

That's easy. The average surface temperature - land and sea included - is 15 °C (or 59 °F in American).

At any one time there are temperature extremes all over the planet. How do we come up with an average, and how do those variations fit in with our desire to slow global warming?

An average is calculated the normal way - for any one day, add up the temperatures found from a sample of measurements taken from around globe. Then divide this figure by the number of measurements. It has to be a "good" sample - one doesn't take measurements just from the sea, from the land, or from just one country. Measurements can be taken from weather stations, but it's more common these days to use satellites.

Temperature extremes aren't really a problem. You just add them into the total, like everything else. So if one day, you have a temperature of −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F) (as happened at Vostok Base one night), add it in before dividing. At the other side of the spectrum, if you find a measurement of 57.7°C (135.9°F) (which happened in 1922 in Libya) add it in as well. Either way, you have an average temperature for a day. That's how I learnt to calculate averages in primary school.

Since we are interested in climate change, and not weather change, we should consider the average yearly temperature of the Earth, rather than the average daily temperature. We're interested in how the earth is getting warmer and warmer over years - not over the month of May (or November if you live in the southern hemisphere like I do). If you have your sample from the last paragraph, then it's easy to take the yearly average - add up all the daily average temperatures for the year, and divide by the number of days. That's 365, or 366 for leap years. Ergo, you have your average temperature for a given year for the Earth.

If you do this for each year that we are interested in (say the last 150 or so), we end up with a jagged graph, with time on the x scale, and temperature on the y. We see a pattern - a pattern of warming temperature from 1900 onwards, and especially from 1960. We can use a moving average to smooth it out, and see what the trend is, rather than fixate on short-term changes. After all, we want to see the forest - not the trees. For example, if some people conclude that global warming ended in 1998, then they look pretty silly. Yes, it was a pretty hot year, but it's ridiculous to say global warming is over because we've never got as hot as that again. A good graph to show is from the Climate Research Institute Information Sheet number 1, with the average temperatures as the bars, and the black line as the moving average.

The point of this is to show what's happening with the average temperature of the earth - it is slowly, but gradually getting warmer. Now I'll answer question 1.

1. What is the perfect temperature?

About the same as it is now - minus half or a whole degree Celsius to make levels close to pre-industrial temperatures. We've adapted to that, the agriculture we depend on has adapted to that, and the environment(s) we live in have adapted to it. To be exact, they've adapted to the local temperatures that (added up) give us the average temperature of question 2.

If we are to embark on a lifestyle-altering quest to lower the temperature (or at least minimize its rise), what is our goal?

I'm going to put quotes around "lifestyle-altering", as I'll address that in question 8. But if we have a goal, it would be to minimize the changes that happen to climate around the world, and live with the consequences with the minimum loss of life.

I don’t ask this flippantly. Can we demonstrate that one setting on the global thermostat is preferable over another?

Yes. If the average temperature of the Earth is 100 °C, then we're dead - that temperature is above the boiling point of water, and we would have no more seas. Even something lower like 37 °C would kill us - that's the average body temperature of humans. Since we wouldn't be able to cool ourselves by losing heat to the air, we'd die of heatstroke. And 0 °C would be unpleasant - almost everywhere would be frozen over. It is trivially easy to demonstrate some temperatures are preferable to others, and I'm not being flippant either.

If so, what is it, and how do we get there?

I've already answered it - about the same temperature or a little less. "How do we get there?" Easier said than done, but reducing carbon dioxide levels (or not letting them rise) is a good place to start. That's all we can do at the moment - that, and refrain from cutting down trees if we can help it. The problem with using the term "global thermostat" is that it gives the impression that changing the temperature is as easy as flicking a switch. It isn't. All that carbon dioxide has to go somewhere; some gets absorbed by the oceans, some gets absorbed by vegetation, but most stays in the air. There is no magic bullet to get rid of the stuff.

And, once there, how do we maintain it? Will we ever have to “heat things up” again if it drops below that point?

Trying to control the climate is like trying to fix a watch wearing welding gloves. At this rate, I doubt we need to worry about the next Ice Age. But if we do, we should consider the Precautionary Principle before trying anything:

The precautionary principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.

I like the principle - it's small "c" conservatism in action. Unfortunately, it's probably not an example of big "C" Conservatism, as what Pat Sajak practices. I'll explain why wI think that when I answer questions 3 and 4.

It's the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.

2007-11-25T19:51:00.001+07:00

Here's how things stand.

Rudd won the election. Woo. Yay.

Howard lost Bennelong. Double Woo.

Andrew Bartlett lost the Senate. Boo.

Johnson won in Ryan. Hiss.

Humphreys won in the ACT Senate. Ho-hum. That means that there's going to be Liberal-held Senate until sometime next year... in opposition to Labor.

All in all - 83 to 85 for Labor. A reasonable majority. I wanted more, but mum said I should be satisfied with what happened.

The sad thing is that dad wasn't around to see it. He died of melanoma nearly two months ago. He wanted Howard gone. He would have been happy. And I'm sad he wasn't there to see it. But he was able to tell me about peak oil well before most other people.

People are writing off the Liberals' chance of getting back in power. Two terms - possibly three or four, if they don't disintegrate first. I'm not so sanguine. Petrol production has peaked, which means less petrol for more consumers. This means higher petrol prices. Australia will be looking at $2/litre in a year - perhaps in six months. Rudd might have won the election, but I think his battles have just started. Signing Kyoto is the easiest part.

How to Deal With Unwanted Government Advertising

2007-09-30T14:22:00.000+07:00

So you get this in your mail...

I bet you a dollar that you're not happy. There could be several reasons why. Maybe you don't have kids. Maybe you think the mailout is a waste of your tax money. Maybe you view the whole affair as a pathetic attempt to save a government in terminal decline. Maybe you don't like censorship. Maybe you think it will slow down your browsing. Maybe you feel you've forgotten more about computers than Helen Coonan has ever learnt. Or maybe you're like me: all of the above. What to do?

Prepare to mail it back - that's what Australia Post is for! Don't just add "Return to Sender", as I did with the anti-drugs ad. Address it to the Office of Prime Minister. That's where the pamphlet originated, after all. So jot this down on the other side. (You may have to rip the plastic. That's ok.)

The Hon John Howard MP
Prime Minister
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600

Add a personal note. (Please, no abuse is necessary!)

Mail it back.

Done! And of course, this tactic will work with the next government that comes along.

Google Election 2007

2007-09-16T15:30:00.000+07:00

Looking swell, but what wrong with this picture?

Two posts ago, I had AEC Electoral Divisions in Google Earth - Part I. It linked six Google Earth Maps that showed the electoral divisions for all the territories and four of the six states. They weren't very flash - all they showed were the boundaries, plus a little bit of metadata. Still, I was a little proud. I had generated and tweaked them from the Australian Electoral Commission mapping data myself. It was my first post in six months. I even planned on a sequel - linking the equivalents for Victoria and NSW. To my dismay, I've been trumped by Google itself. Witness their Australian Federal Election 2007 site yourself, view their maps on your Browser, or even download it onto your Google Earth desktop.

My reactions were mixed when I learned about it on Friday - dismay and annoyance at my efforts superseded, yet admiration for their product, plus relief in that I didn't have to add the extra maps, yet a niggling feeling that I should provide them for completeness anyway. I haven't made up my mind, but I doubt there will be no AEC Google Earth Part II post from me.

I'll start with the strengths of Google's Federal Election maps, and there are many. Party allegiance is shown by colour coding; they're more colourful than my maps. In addition, users can learn seat information and candidate lists from clicking on the icons. Using the map above, what can a user learn?

The seat in yellow is Kennedy, held by independent Bob Katter with a margin of 18.8%. That's very safe. On the right in green is Dawson, held by National De-Anne Kelly with a margin of 10%. That's safe. In the middle in blue is Herbert, with Liberal Peter Lindsay holding it by 6.2%. That's safe-ish... well, not that safe, considering how hopeless the Liberals are doing at the moment. I actually had to drag to the left and right a little to extract most of this information, but still, the maps are wonderful.

Unfortunately, there are problems with precision. Google sometimes isn't that certain as to where electoral boundaries stop. Take a look at the map again. See the island in white? That's Palm Island, an Aboriginal reserve. According to the AEC, it's clearly part of Herbert. By its lack of colouring, Google evidently considers it terra nullius - no voters, and hence no electoral district covering it. And what an unhappy history that island has had - originally used as a penal reserve for indigenous Australians, high unemployment, low life expectancy, a recent death in custody and ensuing riots. Having the whole island disenfranchised by Google doesn't help either.

I put the omission down to cluelessness or laziness, rather than maelevolence or racism. They've done the same mistake with Rottnest island (which should be part of Fremantle). Still, this leads up to my next problem - where do I go to get these mistakes corrected? There are lots of links to YouTube blather, but I do not see any clear feedback form on Google's site. Perhaps they don't care. Perhaps they should. I think the only think I can do is contact them on their Google Blog email, and leave it from there.

UPDATE: I got this in comments:

Thanks for pointing this out. It's a technical issue with the minimum specified polygon size in the KML. We've fixed it for Palm Island and Rottnest (where I spend many Uni summer holidays) should be correctly shaded soon.

Rob
Google Australia

I checked it out today. They have fixed the colours for those islands, and some islets nearby too. Good work, Google.

Beattie's gone

2007-09-10T20:16:00.000+07:00

It was the 13th of June, 1998. It was the Medieval Faire in Musgrave Park, and the patrons were drunker than usual, and gloomier than the norm. But that was to be expected. There was a specter haunting the park: the specter of Pauline Hanson. It was also the day of the state election, and the polls were predicting a strong result for her new, virgin One Nation Party. Reports were coming in from the bush, - especially the festival goers who had travelled in from the country. They knew how popular she was. To be honest, I can't remember much of that festival apart from the wariness and the political conversations. And the beer. Lots of beer.

My real concern at the time was: what if One Nation held the balance of power? Or worse: joined in some sort of coalition government? To be honest, the real concern I remember having with them was that they would rollback the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Not that the Liberals and Nationals tried that under Borbidge, but One Nation sounded like the sort of dickheads that would wear their base, unreconstructed prejudices with pride.

It was the next few days that the results came in. Out of an assembly of 89: 43 an unholy melange of Liberals, Nationals, and One Nation Party personnel. 2 independents, with one - Liz Cunningham - a little bit too close to the Nationals for my taste. The other - Peter Wellington - a pretty decent man. And 44 Labor people lead by one Peter Beattie - then better known for backing the CJC and getting up Wayne Goss's nostrils. It was a hung parliament. Fortunately, Wellington gave the nod to Beattie, and he became premier.

And if Labor had got 43, or 42: what would have happened? I don't really know. Could there have been a coalition between the "Conservatives"? More to the point - would anyone Labor have done better that then greenhorn premier like Beattie? In 1998, I doubt it. Certainly not Wayne "Kill all the koalas" Goss, and not the seriously right wing "Old Guard" that Beattie battled in the eighties. I also remember respecting Beattie for sticking up for no preference deals with One Nation - but that ended up winning him five seats in the city from the Liberals. There were - and are - a lot of Liberal voters who despise what Pauline Hanson stood for.

Fortunately, that was the high-water mark for One Nation. As backbenchers, they bitched, and squabbled, and split into eleven little factions - one for each member of the party. By the time of the next election - 2001 - only four or five of them re-took their seats, and mostly as independents.

This Thursday, Peter Beattie will step down as Premier of Queensland. I'm a little sorry to see him go. It's not that I saw much of him; I spent almost half of his tenure overseas. But I'm glad he got the job in the first place, and I can name the reason why: Pig Iron Pauline. Thank you, Peter, for helping nip that nonsense in the bud.

Elsewhere: Mark Bahnish's take on what Beattie's departure means for the Federal Election. (Good for Rudd, it seems.)

AEC Electoral Divisions in Google Earth - part I

2007-09-07T21:00:00.000+07:00

The following links should be to Google Earth maps of Australian Electoral Divisions. Victoria and NSW are coming soon. For now, here's the rest.

But there's a catch. They're generated from official AEC GIS data. I can generate it, and I believe I share it as well, but one condition of using the GIS data is that I also have to pass along the following copyright notice. (XXXX stands for the relative state or territory - not the beer.)

This product (XXXX Electoral Divisions for Google Earth) incorporates data that is: © Commonwealth of Australia (Australian Electoral Commission) 2007
The Data (Commonwealth Electoral Boundaries (2007)) has been used in XXXX Electoral Divisions for Google Earth with the permission of the Australian Electoral Commission. The Australian Electoral Commission has not evaluated the Data as altered and incorporated within XXX Electoral Divisions for Google Earth, and therefore gives no warranty regarding its accuracy, completeness, currency or suitability for any particular purpose.
Limited End-user licence provided by the Australian Electoral Commission: You may use XXXX Electoral Divisions for Google Earth to load, display, print and reproduce views obtained from the Data, retaining this notice, for your personal use, or use within your organisation only.

I'll get around to the other states in the next few days. Have fun.

Police Brutality in Việt Nam

2007-03-12T21:16:00.000+07:00

Pity poor Lê Minh Thảo. He wasn't driving a motorcycle without his helmet. If he'd been doing it in the city, he'd be fine, probably. It's legal to do it there, if I think unwise. But it's against the law to ride one on the highways around Củ Chi. But that's not the reason you see him bloodstained and gashed and with part of his scalp torn away.

No, it was the three cops he met that did it for him. But not at first. No, they wanted a bribe. But this brave young man stood his ground. Yes, he was in the wrong, and he admitted it. Yes, he would pay. But what he'd like to do is get a ticket, and a receipt as you'd expect in most places. That is the law there, and has been for some years. That is his right. Pay later, not now, and at the local office during working hours. Not to these thieves with uniforms.

The cops didn't like that one bit, and argued, and harangued, but Thảo was not giving in. There was money in his pocket, but that wasn't going to Việt Nam's finest that were in front of him. He needed the cash. So he got annoyed, and left, and drove up 50 metres before the cops caught up with him. And then they beat it, as you see in the picture. They beat him on the head, and on the shoulder. And if a journalist hadn't been driving past with his camera, his story would be only one of many similar, anonymous, stories from that country - unknown to all apart from friends and family.

As I recall, It was far easier for foreigners like myself. I once got stopped by a group of officers near my last place in Sài Gòn, because one of my bike's headlights was not working. Now, what I'd been told in such situations is to speak no Vietnamese - none whatsoever. English only, and preferably as idiomatic and quickly as possible. The average officer there doesn't have that good a grasp on English, and it's best to confuse them until they wave you away.

But it wasn't my night. The police man stated "Passport, please?" in clear, unaccented English. I guessed I could abandon my plan of doing my best Spud impersonation from Trainspotting. So I handed it over. He walked away, showed it his superiors, and then asked "License, please?" I said I no license. "No license? Bike registration?" I admitted the bike belonged to my wife, and I didn't have the paper with me anyway. The man retreated into another huddle. And I was thinking: well, my wife is in hospital, I needed the bike to visit her, and although I hated paying bribes, there was one or two 100,000 đồng notes in my pocket...

And the policeman came back and waved me away. They had me bang to rights, and I was free to go. I couldn't believe it. Neither could my wife nor my father-in-law when I told them later. They found it the funniest thing in the world.

Now if I had been a local, the cops would have been on me like piranhas on a jaguar's corpse. With hands out, that is - not batons out, unless I made a lot of trouble. But me a foreigner - well, it's not so much that I have rights but that that country has certain obligations to other countries when their citizens are involved - especially rich ones like mine. Maybe it was too much administrative overhead that night. Or perhaps, I too could have asked for a receipt as well, which meant no cash for those ticketing me. Beat up a foreigner? Well, that could jeopardize Việt Nam's embryonic but hard-won reputation as a tourism destination, affecting its GDP growth of 8% per annum or something... God, I have no idea what the authorities are really thinking. But the authorities tend to take a softer-softer approach with the expats and the tourists that with its own citizenry.

If only Lê Minh Thảo had been born overseas, like I.

(His story and the picture are derived from: Bị đánh hay... tự té ngã?, courtesy of Tuổi Trẻ.)

Oscars Obliviousness

2007-02-26T17:38:00.000+07:00

Mad props to Martin Scorsese (although I reckon he should have won the award for Goodfellas), and a tip of the hat to Al Gore. But in general my attitude to the ceremony is studied indifference. No, no, no... I don't hold it in contempt; I don't consider the Oscars significant enough for that. Want to know the reasons for the lack of affect?

Forrest Gump. Six Oscars. In 1994. Beating out Pulp Fiction for Best Picture. A maudlin mess of fake nostalgia and wish-fulfillment, which may have been seen as "inspirational" at the time, but now comes across as a desperate sop to a certain generation. I first caught it in 2003 - nine years after the hype had died - and I was astounded how many Yank Baby Boomer shibboleths it tried to jam into the movie. Less than a decade on, and it had already dated badly. It might have been an experience, but it was no education.

After that, I couldn't see the awards as that important.

Listed and Ordered

2007-02-24T15:09:00.000+07:00

I succeeded in moving back to Australia, even though I am appalling at organization.

How did I do this? I made lots of lists. I wrote, and rewrote and rewrote again, and numbered and underlined and stroked out and rewrote again. I go to so much trouble, and so much unnecessary effort, because scheduling generally gives me a lot of anxiety, and listmaking helps me fight the ensuing depression. Rather than thinking about "What is to be done?", I think "What have I forgotten?" So I sat down and spent my time trying to work out exactly what I needed to do.

One trick I used was to make my list as I cleaned my house. When I found a four-year-old gym card (with exercises and reps and weights attached), I immediately jotted down "Gym" on my to-do list. I then augmented it with "Pay mobile phone bills" after finding the paperwork for an old Vodafone plan. By that, I mean paying the bills for my Australian mobile provider after two years out of the country. (Fortunately, I was careful enough to leave Australia with a slight credit on my account. I'd been burned before.)

This may give you a flavor of what I have been trying to achieve over the last several months:

Get a migrant visa for my wife to come to Australia and live. This was step 1. Having got it, she had six months to use it or lose it. Now the clock is ticking...
Buy two plane tickets, one way, from Sài Gòn to Brisbane.
Clean house.
Pack stuff for shipping. That's all of my CDs (bought in Australia; not pirated) and those of my wife (some copies, some originals) and DVDs ($1 specials or less). That also includes almost all of my books - 80 odd of them. Various thrillers were given to my brother-in-law - he likes his Robert Ludlum - and the remainder were donated to my fellow teachers at school.
Organize a shipping company to carry the stuff away to Brisbane. The one we chose promised that the stuff would be delivered to our door. That sounded easy.
Evacuate the house. All our furniture went to our in-laws, as did we for our last week in Việt Nam for a very long time.
Close all of my bank accounts.
Conclude any work one has with one's employer, and settle pay.

Everybody does these sort of thing. Now this is what I did extra.

Get my acoustic steel-string guitar restrung and had a pickup installed as well. [*]
Work and study towards passing Level 2 Vietnamese.
Organize a going-away party.
Get my degrees and certificates notarized by the consulate...
Which would enable my applications for a Graduate Diploma of Education at two universities.
I needed the notarized copies to get myself a "Blue Card"...

Remember that I haven't even left Việt Nam yet. Were there more things to do? Oh boy, yes there was.

[*] I had these things done at the same place as where I originally purchased the guitar: Duy Ngọc, an extremely competent luthier located at 31-35 Nguyễn Thiện Thuật, Hồ Chí Minh City. Good quality, cheap prices, and one of the things that I brought back to Australia.

Scary Stealing Socialist Swedish Santa

2006-12-23T18:50:00.000+07:00

I am talking about Karl-Bertil Jonsson's Christmas Eve, translated by Rixstep. It's a tale of a postal worker influenced (perhaps a little bit for his own good) by Robin Hood. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. And a merry XMAS to you likewise.

Dead Dolphins

2006-12-17T18:31:00.000+07:00

The rare baiji dolphin which lives exclusively in the Yangtze, China's longest river, is believed to have gone extinct because of pollution.

A group of Chinese and foreign conservationists said they did not spot a single animal after 26 days on the river.

The last verified sighting of the fresh water dolphin species was in 2004.

That makes me so depressed that I am on the verge of tears. All gone. All gone. Thanks to the (literally) bloody Greap Leap Forward, and the Three Gorges Damned.

(Photo and text courtesly of Al-Jazeera.)

America - Fuck, Yeah!

2006-11-10T21:07:00.000+07:00

The Democrats won. Good.

Царь-бомба

2006-10-31T22:30:00.000+07:00

Behold Tsar Bomba, which was detonated 45 years and one day before today. It was a completely gratuituous nuclear explosion that killed nobody as far as I know. At 50 megatons, it was the largest nuke ever. It could have been 100 megatons, but the engineers decided to turn it down to reduce the fallout.

Does anyone have any idea who the composer is for the film? I'm thinking Schostakovich, but I'm probably wrong.

A Very Thai Coup

2006-09-21T00:30:00.000+07:00

By now, you've probably heard about the overthrow of Thaksin Shinawatra. It caused some interest in the staffroom this morning. My fellow teachers were ambivalent about the coup itself, but were unanimous in wishing the back of that particular ex-P.M. On the other hand, the Vietnamese I spoke to about the episode thought the coup was a good thing - "The military getting rid of incompetent and corrupt politicians? What a good idea! It should happen..." Well, actually I don't feel like saying where they thought it should happen. Think laterally, folks.

A lot of governments are tut-tutting the affair, and calling for the quickest resumption of democracy, and issuing travel advisories like Wiemar banknotes. If I were in the same position I'd still issue the warnings (and strongly hint that democracy is a good thing), but I'd refrain from the tut-tutting. It has been that rare thing - a totally bloodless coup - but there's no 100% guarantee it will remain bloodless in the future. So I'd "reconsider your need to travel" to the country, to quote the similarly bloodless language of my DAFT.

Personally, I'd give it a 98% guarantee that Mr. Thaksin is not coming back, and there's not going to be any soldiers fighting for him either. It now appears that the king of Thailand blessed the whole episode. They take the monarchy seriously over there - far more than Australia has for at least a century. They still have lèse majesté on the books - up to 15 years for insulting their king. They really believe "the king can do no wrong" over there. The matter has been fucking resolved.

As for the mild signs of disapprovals coming from foreign ministries over the globe - well, is it going to do any good? Thailand is an unusual place. Apart from China and Japan, it's the only country in the region that wasn't colonized by the Europeans - and unlike China, it wasn't conquered by the Japanese either - and unlike the Japan, they weren't even conquered by the Americans. Are you sensing a pattern here? In short, this is a country that has never really needed to listen to bloody "farangs" except when they think it is in their best interest. (For example, when money is involved.) Plus the whole concept of "face", and the related idea of "saving it" is far more important that the west, or even in Việt Nam. Related to this is their ability to ignore unpleasant facts. (Sometimes, that's an ability I wish I had.) I'd gather that the military will politely but firmly ignore pontificating politicians and do what they want to do regardless. If you ignore them too much, they won't do what you want them to do.

Oh, and if you have 30 minutes to spare, read Toppling Thaksin, courtesy of The New Left Review. It's eerily prophetic, considering it was written about four months ago. But it's not prophecy that I'm interested it - the article may get both the date and the manner of Thaksin's passing wrong, but that's not so important. What the article does is eschews dry legal fictions and gets into the interlocking powerplays of various factions in Thailand over the last 40 odd years - leading to yesterday's coup. It's essential reading for anyone interested in the region or political junkies - or in my case, both.

Five Years

2006-09-11T23:39:00.000+07:00

Yes. I remember when I first heard about the disaster. I was holidaying in Cairns at the time. I woke up, and there were those pictures of the towers and the airplanes on the morning tellie. I remember being surprised. Impressed, really. Then I remembered that my godfather (as in the baptismal bath - not the movies) also lived in New York, and then I got really, really worried quickly. Since I didn't own a mobile at the time, I had to use those bloody blue Telstra phones in the backpacker lobby. I hated those phones - there was something wrong with the handset, and I never could hear the speaker clearly. I recall chucking lots of $1 and $2 coins down the crevice, trying to contact my parents across 1700km of Queensland. I got hold of my parents. No, my father hadn't heard anything either. He would keep trying to phone NY. I bought another edition of The Australian (one of their rare second daily editions) because of the pictures of the disaster. It's still in a box somewhere back in Brisbane.

After a few days, we heard that my godfather was safe. That was good, or so I learnt this after finishing my holiday. Yep, I had it anyway. Well, what else could I do - just get on with life. It was an utterly horrific event, but apart from the aforementioned "relative", it didn't affect me too much directly. (Directly - but I'll get back to that.) I'd sort of been through it before in the 1970s, when I was a mere infant. There were these two stopovers in Rome. Both were delayed - one so much that the airline decided to check us into the airport hotel for the night while they checked the plane for bombs. Yep, I might have been too young to know much about the Baader-Meinhof gang, or Carlos the Jackal (the real version, not the Ludlum spinoff), but I did know what a terrorist was.

Directly, no. But indirectly... yes, the world changed after 9/11 - for the worse. There were two other terrorist attacks that affected me more emotionally. First, there was the Bali Bombing, with its dead Indonesians and Australians. That was a little closer to home. And a year or two later, the train bombs in London, closer still - to where my sister lived. Yep, I was a little bit afraid... But she was unscathed as well. So I go back to real life. But it's not terrorist attacks that concern me. Not really.

It's Peak Oil. Which would have happened anyway, but actions taken after the disaster aggravating the process. Since that day, petrols has been going up and down and up and down and down and down and up and down but mostly up. That wasn't due directly to the bombing, but indirectly - when Bush decided to pin the blame (under dubious circumstances) on Saddam Hussein. Oh, and the WMDs as well. The WMDs that were never really found. This attempt to annex all the Iraqi reserves is now FUBARed as we speak, with Shi'ites killing Sunnis, and refineries burning, and no electricity for those hot, 42 Celsius Baghdad days, and U.S. reservists now on their third and fourth successive tour of duties. And there may be just as much petrol in the world now as then, but it is a lot more expensive now. And could become a lot more expensive still if Bush decided to attack Iran, which in turn decides to block the Straits of Hormuz. All this leads back - in one form or another - to 9/11.

Yes. Everything changed after that day.

As for the victims: Rest in Peace. And I will say no more for now.

The Undying yet Ironical Significance of Trần Hưng Đạo: A Summary

2006-07-21T11:50:00.000+07:00

This particular Vietnamese general was the only guy to kick the Mongol horde’s asses twice. That’s quite a feat. I can’t think of anyone else who pulled this off. Not the Russians, not the Chinese and not the Persians. The Japanese came closest, but it was a typhoon that did the Mongols the second time around.

I like to think of those campaigns as an early form of Fourth generation warfare. He was a smart guy. He let the bulk of the Mongol army die of "tropical diseases" (read: "malaria") first before tackling them.

The irony is that while this country is justifiably proud of this man, they still won’t show his face on the banknotes.

(This post was inspired by a particular Crooked Timber thread, which asks "what would be the most off-putting title in the world?")

The Interpreter or the Bodyguard

2006-07-12T12:27:00.000+07:00

Good grief. China sounds like a tough place to do business in. (And why don't we get more fun stories like this here?) ESWN has his observations on The Toughest Motherf*cking Interpreter in China:

"[T]wo foreigners and their overprotective Chinese interpreter ... fought off eight guys who apparently gawked at his clients too long ... The interpreter came to table of eight and asked them to apologize to the foreigners because the group had "stared at them too long." The request was refused. The Chinese interpreter relayed the refusal to the foreigners and then he came back to the table and attacked and stabbed three of them, and continued to chase the other five who were trying to escape, stabbing another four."

This is ESWN quoting The Shanghaiist. Then he adds a sentence of his own:

Whenever there is an event without definitive evidence, the Internet goes amok.

Please ponder the last sentence for a minute. The story sounds like an urban myth to me. What's more amazing is that of the seven people stabbed, none of them died. That is serious Ninja shit, and thus a little unbelievable. It's hard enough to pierce seven people in succession, but it's even harder to avoid nicking an artery while doing. Personally, if I had magical martial arts powers, I'd stick with the coshes and truncheons and other blunt instruments, and only if necessary. But since the story was picked up by "official" news sources such as The Shanghai Daily, then it might be true.

I guess that the serial stabber is not an interpreter, but a bodyguard - albeit with fair English skills. But was he an employee or just hired on a retainer? If the latter, then I reckon he's got some explaining to do at the agency he works at.

Breaking News!

2006-07-11T19:13:00.000+07:00

Italy wins the World Cup.

Better 40 hours late than never.

Misery

2006-07-09T11:52:00.000+07:00

And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

Hilaire Belloc - "Jim"

Those lines always go through my mind when I think of Việt Nam. As I've said before, it's a conservative country - conservative not by political orientation, but by temperament. Most people here are happy to have one day follow the other with little variation between. Change is only welcome if it is for the better, and sometimes not even then.

But when you're a writer:

Confronted with a nurse like this:

Then a little change in nurse
Is sometimes not always found averse?

Electronic dictionaries considered harmful

2006-07-07T14:05:00.000+07:00

My impression? From a professional teacher of English? "Teh sux."

Behold one of the toys of the Vietnamese nouveau riche - the bilingual electronic dictionary. They are popular in my English classes. They're slim enough to be held with one hand, and even come with a plastic case for extra durability. They translate from Vietnamese to other languages, and retranslate back as well. Several flavors are available for the consumer: Vietnamese-English, Vietnamese-French, and even Vietnamese-Chinese. Some models even offer voice, so you can hear the word spoken. They can be purchased for a price of just over two hundred American dollars!

At this point, you may be forgiven for thinking "How poor is the country again?" There are several ways of estimating poverty. You can rely on a glance around the street ("Fuckin' 'ell! They're poor!"). Or you can use hard econometric data calculated by the IMF. I prefer numbers to impressions, so I'll use the common measure of average GDP per capita. When you add up the value of all goods and services produced within this nation in a given year, and divide by the population, what does it come to? That gives you a nice, measurable figure, and as of 2005, it was $612 USD. (I'm not adjusting for PPP; no adjustment is necessary.) My point of this is that these devices should be pretty damned bloody good if they cost a third of Việt Nam's average yearly GDP. In Australia, a third of the average income could buy you a pretty decent second hand car.

Personally, and (more important) professionally, I think the students have been gypped. They have been ripped off. They have been taken for a ride. They have been rolled like a sex tourist looking for a "massage" in Phạm Ngũ Lão. They've been deluded by the presentation - a nice new-fangled (for this nation) electronic device, often packaged as "All-American" for greater envy from their peers. The problem is that the content is not up to spec, and that's what you buy a dictionary for, isn't it?

Well, if these machines aren't 99.98% accurate, and I'd expect no less, then they're not worth buying at all, and certainly not for these prices. As Woody Allen as said to Stanley Kubrick "You can't polish a turd", and these are $200 turds indeed. But as Mr. Kubrick riposted back, "You can if you freeze them". It seems that congealing these pieces of poo in metal and plastic is sufficient to sell them to the masses.

What are my problems with these infernal machines? The major reason - and sufficient for one teacher of my acquaintance to blackball them - is that there are no example sentences. When students look up the meaning of a word in one language, they will get the equivalent or equivalents in the opposite tongue. That is necessary for a dictionary but insufficient to stop translation problems.

Let me illustrate with a purely hypothetical example. One of my students wants to know what "xanh" means in English. He turns on the device, and types the word in. The machine returns the following English synonyms back: (1): "blue"; (2): "green". Unfortunately, examples are not provided like "The sky is blue" and "Plants are green". So the student makes sentences like "The sky is green" and "Plants are blue" instead. In practice, even the rawest neophyte generally grasps the distinction between "green" and "blue", but still - a good dictionary should be careful in distinguishing these words anyway on principle.

This brings us on the related problem of "usage". How do native English speakers actually use the language? You can make as many "rules" as you want (that's what Vietnamese grammarians like to do) but the natives will break them without really trying. Examples sentences will illustrate what to do... and more importantly, what not to do.

Let me give another example. This time, I'll use phrasal verbs. For those that don't know, phrasal verbs are basically "verb + preposition". They are common in English. You use them without thinking. Unfortunately, they are painful for learners. There are "rules" for using them, and there are "rules" for not using them, and these "rules" are arbitrary and inconsistent for outsiders. Take as an example: "get on". You get on a plane. You even get on a bus. But you never get on a car, unless you like to ride the roof. You get in a car.

A good dictionary would show examples of what to do and what not to do. A bad dictionary (and these electronic dictionaries are bad) would just provide a translation of the word - say "trèo lên" for "get on" or "đến" for "get in". So students continue to produce wrong English, such as "I get on my parent's car. I sit in the passenger's seat."

Let me bring up the matter of pronunciation keys - another area where these gadgets let learners down. Since the the relationship between English spelling and pronunciation is capricious and uncaring, you need pronunciation keys for English words so that you can "read off" the pronunciation. The industry standard for pronunciation keys in the ESL world is the IPA - the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is what I was taught in my CELTA, and it is what both the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries use. The problem is that while electronic dictionaries provide pronunciation keys for English words, these keys are often wrong. I don't even know what standard the makers are using, or even if the makers are even interested in standards at all. I suspect their primary motivation is in shifting units.

Let's take an example: how do you pronounce "grape"? A good dictionary would use IPA, and write /greIp/.[1] These electronic thingamabobs seem to alternate between writing /greip/ and /grep/. Both are wrong. The first (/greip/) fails to distinguish between "I" and "i", but these are separate, distinguishable vowels in English. (For example, there's bit /bIt/ versus beet /bi:t/.) Alas, distinguishing these vowels are one of the big problems for Vietnamese learners - these vowels should be shown differently. As for /grep/, that is even worse. The vowels in "Grape" are a diphthong - two different vowels run together. Good transcriptions should show this. Using /grep/ seems to mislead my learners into pronouncing grape as a single vowel... a little bit like "grêp". It's close, but it's not quite right.

Some models come with a voice button. You can hear the word "spoken". Unfortunately, the sound is often so distorted that this feature is worse than useless. Anyone remember the old arcade game Gauntlet? With the narrator saying lines such as "Wizard needs food badly"? Then you get an idea of what noises these machines produce.

My aversion to electronic dictionaries is shared by other teachers. There are those who will ban them in class outright. Others will warn the students of their dangers. And me? For advanced students, I recommend that they buy themselves a good, monolingual dictionary such as the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. It's big, it has accurate phonetic transcriptions, it comes with example sentences, and best of all - it's a lot cheaper. Even with a CD-ROM, it's only £19.85. If they can't afford to buy the book, learners can afford to access the website - they can do dictionary lookups online. (So can you; just use that link.) For less advanced learners, I have no problem with using the bilingual paper dictionaries available locally. They're not always accurate either, but they seem to be more accurate that the electronic dictionaries... and they're even less expensive. Pulp gives you extra advantages - you can scan down the page, and pick up related definitions with a flick of your eyeball. I think it's better that my lads and lasses pry open the pages of a book.

Better than using electronic dictionaries - those exorbitant, inaccurate, dangerous... toys.

[1] To be 100% accurate, there should be a minuscule capital "I" there, like "/greɪp/". But font support for IPA is pretty patchy on the Interweb, and IE users may see a meaningless box in its place. Hence the substitution. My apologies for any inaccuracies.

Unwarranted Generalizations about Việt Nam - One

2006-07-05T13:54:00.000+07:00

What are my thoughts on war writing? I generally like it, even when it concerns this country in the 1963-1975 period. But I also feel that the less metaphors a book uses, the better it is to read. That's probably why I like Chickenhawk a lot - it's excellently written, it's exciting, and the author, one Robert Mason, is clear on the point that much of the disorientating images and sounds he suffers is PTSD, plus a little bit of guilt. He doesn't mythologize these symptoms or this country; he just knows he is a little off in the head. It also appears that he genuinely likes the inhabitants he meets here - the ones that aren't shooting at him.

By contrast, the Vietnamese people are just used as a backdrop in Michael Herr's Dispatches. There's some nice descriptive writing there, but there's also too much of the "Việt Nam as metaphor for the sixties"... wordsmithing I find quite suspicious after living here. This metaphor may make sense for the author. Not for the locals: they just live here. But then Herr Herr never seemed too interested in the hearts and minds of the indigenous inhabitants. As he admits in the book, he flies out of the country in an opium haze, never to look back. A few pages later, set some years after 1975, he remarks on "a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting in the same spot on the Danang river where the press centre had been... He looked so unbelievably peaceful." Well, that could be inner peace... or it could be the poor soul saving his energy during famine conditions. And conservation is a must, if this soldier was probably about to be sent to fight the Khmer Rouge. The late seventies in this country were hard. But Herr decides not to dwell on these unpleasant facts. They would be complicating the "Việt Nam = '60s" metaphor, making it a little harder to sell to publishers. Or maybe I'm getting cynical about the author's motivations.

When I return Stateside - Queensland, to be exact - I wouldn't mind checking out The Things They Carried. It's another book about the American War, as the Vietnamese describe what everybody else thinks as the "War in Việt Nam". I haven't read it, so I can't say whether I'd like it or not. I feel I would. But I admit, I rolled my eyes at this snippet. Never mind that it is set in 196x rather than 200x, or quotes a minor character (someone's girlfriend who decides to come over here and then accompany her fella on Green Beret patrols). It grates.

Rat continues: Mark waits outside the Green Beret's camp. Rat cautions him against bothering the Green Berets. Then they hear Mary Anne singing in what sounds like a foreign language. Mark can't wait anymore. He runs into the tent, and then everything is silent. Rat and another soldier follow him in. The tent is full of candles and has a strange tribal quality. But the most powerful thing is the smell: a mixture of incense and death. The head of a leopard sits on a post in the corner. There are bones everywhere. Mary Anne appears. Her eyes are dull, and though she wears the shorts and sweater she arrived from America in, she also wears a necklace of human tongues. She tells Mark that he doesn't understand what Vietnam really is. She says, "When I'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark--I'm on fire almost--I'm burning away to nothing--but it doesn't matter because I know exactly where I am."

At this point... and that's me imagining myself as another minor character in the novel... I see myself shaking her. Well, I'd disarm her first, and then shake her, and say "You don't understand what Việt Nam is either, lady!" Then I'd probably handcuff her, and force her to accompany me (on a motorbike, naturally) to the nearest dingy Phở eatery, and point around and say, simply, "This is Việt Nam". Then I'd give her a bowl of soup. I'd probably unhandcuff one of her arms at this point - if she's so in tune with this land as she says, then she can consume the stuff with one set of chopsticks. Oh, and I'd better remove her necklace of human tongues before setting off. We don't want to frighten other customers. Then it's off to Tân Sơn Nhựt airport (which is what they called Tân Sơn Nhất back then), and get her on the first plane home. This country can take a lot of stress, but it could not and should not afford her terrible "understandings".

In related news, Charlie is not in the jungle, getting stronger. Charlie's staying up late at home to watch the Cup. Charlie's also engaging in mild absenteeism. Charlie had to sleep in late this morning after watching Germany get beaten to smithereens by Italy. The diving bastards.

Word of the ... whatever: ăn vạ

2006-07-04T01:00:00.000+07:00

ăn vạ (verb): to dive (football), to pretend to fall down to get a penalty. Example:

Cầu thủ đội Ý đã ăn vạ trong trận đá với Úc.

(The Italian team dived in the football match against Australia.)

No good language should be without a verb for "dive". Guess who I'm not supporting for the World Cup Final.

Meet the new bosses, almost the same as the old bosses

2006-07-01T16:52:00.000+07:00

The old guard go, and the new guard come. The Asian Times has the story: Vietnam's south takes leadership wheel. Read it all.

HO CHI MINH CITY - Conventional wisdom has long held that Vietnam's communist north may have won the war 30 years ago, but the capitalist-friendly south has won the peace. Recent changes in the makeup of the ruling Communist Party's leadership dramatically underscore that point.

The party reshuffle reflects the growing prominence of southerners in Vietnam's national politics. If all the new leadership is ratified, as expected, two of the three top leaders will be from the south, a departure from the past convention of having one person from each region - north, center and south - represented in the senior leadership.

This represents a significant change, indicating that commercially savvy southerners are now rising faster than northerners inside the party. The average age of the new Politburo is five years younger than the outgoing one, and seven of the 14 newly announced members are from the country's more entrepreneurial south.

I'm not sure I like this change. More commercially savvy government is good. But changing the "North, Center and South" troika is bad symbolism, even if only symbolism. The geography of Việt Nam does not encourages centralized government, unlike France, a Paris-centred place, or Indonesia (where the densely populated island of Java makes a natural core). You have a 2000 km long country, with two big cities at either end: Hà Nội and HCMC, respectfully. That gives the country two areas of natural development. The problem is that the geographical centre area is in danger of becoming the new periphery. That includes highland provinces like Kon Tum, and the impoverished location of the old DMZ, Quảng Trị. The centre can and should not be left behind. There are ways of providing development.

Unfortunately, moving a oil refinery away from the gas and oil rich areas around Vũng Tàu is not one of them.

There are still some indications that communist leaders in Hanoi have not completely gotten with the reform program. In January, Hanoi abruptly decreed that the minimum wage paid at foreign-owned factories would rise by 40%, a move designed to end mass strikes by garment workers in the south. Similar government interference has plagued the development of the country's first oil refinery, which has been snagged in red tape for about seven years.

Moreover, two major foreign investors have pulled out of the $1.5 billion project because government officials insist the refinery be located not in the south, near existing ports and oilfields, but in the center of the country, in the hope of aiding that region's development. And the specter of corruption, particularly in massive infrastructure projects, still casts a long shadow over the party after a scandal that saw the resignation and arrest of high-ranking Transport Ministry officials.

On the other hand, I do agree with the wage raise. No, foreign investors do not like wage raises, nor do certain investment consultants acting as journalists writing from their comfortable desks. The problem is that the existing wages were appalling. $40 a month, or 640,000 đồng a month, is subsidence level, even here. It is urban poverty. It will get you a boarding house, and a minimum of nutritious food, but you probably won't get to spend too much time with your family, because you'll probably be working weekends as well. The current wages aren't too good either: $55 if you are living in the big cities. The problem is that if you raise the wages, then investors turn off, which means you end up with less cash in the country. What to do... what to do... Well, killing corruption would be a good step forward, rather than the current S.O.P of just stinging it. That would give some more cash to redistribute to the deserving.

Returning to the Asian Times, one stanza stands out:

After the northern and southern parts of Vietnam were reunited after the war with the US ended 1975, communist authorities made it policy that the northern capital city Hanoi should develop faster and grow more prosperous than the southern Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

Yep. That's what I always suspected. But it didn't work too well, did it?

How not to get English spoken at School

2006-06-30T16:41:00.000+07:00

English schools want students to practice English at school. But how do you direct students to do this? At a bare minimum, it is the teacher's job to make the students speak English in the classroom. Better schools try to encourage students to speak English outside of the classroom - in the computer lab, in the corridors, and even in the lift. There are various mechanisms to do this. Management start with a policy ("get students to speak English") and implement it in certain ways. You can start simple if you like. Photocopy A4 paper stating "Please speak English at [Insert School Here]", and stick them around the place.

Other schools go even further. They deter the practice of other languages, like Vietnamese. They want the whole institution to be an English-only zone. They tend to be places affiliated with English-language colleges and universities elsewhere - be it the US, Australia or Singapore. They expect the students to have a basic level of competence, and have the vocabulary to communicate. These places not only encourage English, they discourage - firmly if not always politely - anything else.

I have some sympathy with these measures. These institutions exist to give enough language to study in a foreign college or university. They are often, literally, the last stop before flying out to Melbourne, London or New York. The students are going to find it hard enough overseas. They'll be away from their family, their friends and their culture, but just as importantly... their language. They'll be taken out of their comfort zone where all the things they've taken for granted - bus timetables, supermarket labels, noticeboards, TV and radio - are in their own tongue. Overseas, these things will be transformed beyond recognition. If they're really unlucky, the only time they'll hear their own language is inside their own heads. Making these schools "English-only" should advance the students' abilities, but just as importantly, it will give some psychological preparation before they are thrown in the deep end.

Having some sympathy does not mean I like it. Such moves smell of authoritarianism, and treating your adult students as grown up children. (To be fair, my adult students often act like teenagers - nice teenagers, but with maturity levels far less than students of similar ages in Australia.) I'm also used to more "free speech" environments. At the Australian institution I attended, it did not matter if I spoke German, Zulu or otherwise - no penalty would have been implemented. You spoke English because you needed to, and not because of any rules or regulations from the University Senate. I even remember one campaign for the student union elections. One left-leaning candidate had the bright idea of writing her advertising in Chinese. That netted her an extra 100 votes, and won her the position of Overseas Student Rep. I recall that some of the right-leaning parties complained about this tactic. It didn't get them very far. The pamphlet was endorsed by the electoral office, with some legal advice and translation beforehand. So the next year, the right tried the same tactic and won. Hypocrites.

So when does an English-only policy go too far? I think one of the places I'm working now fits the bill. I think their policy is both restrictive and ineffective. I'm not going to name names, so the institution involved will be hereby referred to as The Institution. I quote from their "Instructor's Handbook", a document neither marked "private" nor "confidential". The policy statement is simple enough:

Policy Statement

Speaking Vietnamese is prohibited at The Institution and its branches with the exception of students’ parents and The Institution’s clients.

Why?

Reasons for Policy

A Target Language Community (TLC) is one where the inhabitants speak the language, which the student is learning; for students of English, an English-speaking country would be a TLC. The students would need to learn English to survive in the community. For this reason, The Institution finds it necessary to create a learning environment in which English is the only language used to instruct and communicate, and students’ nonstop improvement on English is a must...

So far, so good, but it's the penalties that infuriate me. Read below. "B", "C", "D", etc., represent the numerical codes for the courses. "F" is for non-ESL courses taught at the same institution.

Disciplines

Where an act of speaking Vietnamese is determined, the following penalties shall be imposed:

(1) Students

- Each time a student is caught in the act on the campus, 2% will be deducted from the total 100% of each ESL course taken by the student in the semester – e.g. Student A, who takes Reading B, Speaking C, Listening D, and Writing E, is caught once, so 2% will be deducted from the total 100% of Reading B, Speaking C, Listening D, and Writing E. That is to say, he/she has only 98% left in each course. If this student is caught again, another 2% will be deducted from 98% of each course, and so on.

- In the case that a student has successfully completed the ESL program and is taking F courses, the same penalties shall be imposed on F courses. That is to say, each time the student is caught in the act, 2% will be deducted from the total 100% of each F course taken by the student in the semester.

(2) Staff, English Instructors and IT Instructors

Each time they are caught in the act, a penalty of 5,000 VND will be imposed.

Note: - All the money will be collected in the Accounting Office for charity.

- Violation will also affect the violator’s future promotion at The Institution.

I'm not so bothered about penalties on the teachers, except that they are disproportionately light in comparison. 5000 đồng is a pennyweight slap on the wrist for the foreigners, and even for the locals, that's less than one third of their hourly wage. One less cup of coffee to buy - boo hoo! One less xe ôm ride home; well, I guess you have to walk. It's the penalties on the students that bother me.

First, these penalties affect all courses a student is studying, regardless of how well or poorly they do in them. The policy is inflexible. The teachers have no freedom to narrow the scope of them. Let's say that one recalcitrant student is yabbering on in my grammar class in Vietnamese. I'd like to penalize him 2% for that course, but only for that course (and in practice, after a warning or two). Unfortunately, the policies do not give me the lassitude to do this. I'd be blackmarking them with a Texta pen. So I'm less likely to use this measure.

Secondly, these penalties apply to all students - not just the advanced ones. I've been teaching at this institution for a few weeks. Many are weak. My classes, I judge, are at Beginner or pre-Intermediate level, the latter roughly at the level of my Vietnamese. It's still hard for me to express myself in that language 100% of the time; why would it be any different for them? It makes it harder for them to understand new concepts, because they lack the axillary language in English to put them together. A few times, I've done the quick-but-dirty tactic of pulling out my Vietnamese-English dictionary. I should not do that, but I should not need to do that either. I would have less problem with disciplining more advanced students. They have the fluency to think and speak in English 24/7, and even have new concepts explained to them in that tongue.

(Related to that - is there any check on whether the students actually understand this policy? Including the "2% on all course" bit? That would be a case where a Vietnamese translation would be useful.)

Thirdly, it's hard enough to get some of these students to speak at all, let alone English. They do not enjoy speaking. I can understand why. The textbooks are inappropriate. They were designed for multicultural ESL classes in the States - not monolingual students in Việt Nam. So they contain the language for such intriguing issues as "Insuring your Property", "Counseling" and "Divorce" - a hell of a way to interest 18 year old boys. So the kids find them boring, and bored students are less likely to speak, or even mutter. Plus the speed of the material does not encourage fluency. In my speaking classes, I am expected to cover 10 to 15 pages in two and an half hour classes. The norm in English teaching is about one or two pages per hour. I find it harder to warm up students to a topic. By the time they are interested - if they are interested - we have to switch to something else.

(At least teachers have the freedom to drop material. That's good, but if we are dropping three quarters of it, why were we given those books in the first place?)

I think it all comes down to the quality of the management. They're quick at rushing the rules out, but not so good at listening to staff, or working out whether the rules work in practice, or having the creativity to think up new approaches to the problem. More carrots through better material would be nice. So would less stick, or at least sticks of various shapes and size. Giving trainers the freedom to warn would be lovely. But that would tax the imagination of the crew running the joint. Judging by the emails I received, they seem to be paranoid about anyone speaking Vietnamese in the various schools and branches. The whole attitude is of distrust - distrust of the students to do the right thing.

In a way, it's a very Vietnamese place, where rulers make rules, and have others ignore them when convenient. The attitude of my fellow staff belie this - not so much cynical, but more conspiratorial and resigned. This outlook has aided me in building up a rapport with fellow staff members against an insular and isolated administration. It also helps with cementing a relationship with the students. I tell them about the email, warn them to "watch out", but show I don't take the whole policy that seriously. They seem to appreciate this. I will insist on English spoken in classroom, and they know they should do that, but I am not going to throw the book at them if the odd "Trời ơi!" slips out. But personally, I'd prefer to work somewhere else, and will do so after my contract expired.

Oh, Bugger.

2006-06-27T09:51:00.000+07:00

Italy 1 - Australia 0. Fucking 'ell. Australia, good on ya.

The Road to Surfdom sez:

…my completely subjective, non-expert opinion is that it was a dud call. Didn’t look like a foul to me. However, Italy really were the better team on the day. Our attacks on goal never looked particularly dangerous whereas theirs sure did, and their defence, especially after they went a man down, was extraordinary. They looked fitter and more skillful throughout. Still, we held them and as I say, that was no foul, and you never want to lose because of dodgy calls, whatever the cosmic balance may require. Argggh.

Still, there's 2010 to consider. It should be easier to enter the World Cup, now that Australia is part of the Asian Football Federation, rather than Oceania.

These Three Go

2006-06-26T13:09:00.000+07:00

I should mention the resignations of the following men:

Phan Văn Khải: Prime Minister of Việt Nam.
Trần Đức Lương: President of Việt Nam.
Nguyễn Văn An: Chairman of the National Assembly of Việt Nam.

They are, or were, all important men, but not to the same degree. The Presidency is mostly a "ceremonial" duty, and the National Assembly had a reputation as a "rubber stamp" sort of place - a reputation I think is a little out of date. Mr. Khải, by contrast, was head of government, head of cabinet, and had the powers to approve and remove ministers. Accordingly, most international attention has been paid to his departure. Let the Daily Terror tell the story:

Mr Khai, a Soviet-trained economist from southern Vietnam who grew up during the French and American wars, pushed forward doi moi (renewal) market reforms and last July became Vietnam's first post-war premier to visit Washington. His likely successor, long-time deputy Nguyen Tan Dung, will reap the benefits achieved on Mr Khai's watch when Vietnam, now Southeast Asia's fastest growing economy, likely joins the World Trade Organisation this year.

Mr Khai was the man in charge as the government came under increasing fire from a usually pliant press and national assembly in recent months for failing to tackle corruption and fix infrastructure and other pressing problems. Observers say, however, that Mr Khai will be best remembered for pushing economic reform, earning him praise from the foreign investment community but attacks from the party's ideological old guard. One of the driving forces behind key US trade deals reached in 2000 and earlier this year, Mr Khai visited the United States in July 2005, when he also met Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

"Khai put Vietnam back into the world in terms of the economy, and that's quite an achievement," said Jonathan Pincus, chief economist of the UN Development Programme in Vietnam. "I do sincerely believe that he wanted to go faster than he actually did but he had to really resolve the internal political resistance to reintegration with the world economy."

A party veteran, Mr Khai has played by the rules of a system that stresses political control over all aspects of society and tolerates little dissent, while portraying unity and avoiding personality politics. "He does these dry stand-up speeches when you see him on TV that are not terribly inspiring," said one Western observer. "But I think, one-on-one, he has a vision of where he wants the country to go."

"Not terribly inspiring" is an understatement. I have heard him speak. It was last year: April 30th, 2005, I believe. That date was the 30th anniversary of "liberation", and he was giving a televised speech with an English translator. As I remember, he was talking about the festivities that night - about the acts and songs before... and that there was going to be a "laser show" later that night. But I listened in vain for any words about "vision". What did that fateful day, 31 years (now) mean for Việt Nam? What did it signify? What sand goes through the hourglass of the days of our lives? Let's just say that he makes my PM quite the life of the party in comparison. Or as I remarked to a cousin-in-law that night: quan liêu (bureaucratic). He agreed with a smile.

On the other hand, I cannot think of a time where Việt Nam's economy has been healthier. Can you? Let's look at the facts: no war at the moment, 7% annual growth, a fairly stable đồng against the U.S. dollar these days (unlike the hyperinflatory 80s), poverty reduced dramatically, and no sign of a return to the imbecilic collectivization policies of the Lê Duẩn period. Or you can listen to long-term expats. One running thread in conversation is how Việt Nam" has changed in the last 10 years. A decade ago there were cyclos and bicycles, but now there are lots more motorbikes, and even a few private cars. My intuition is telling me that much of this change is due to Mr. Khải's "back room" efforts to free up the economy. Well, good on him, and I tip my hat to him.

It's not all wine and roses. Corruption is way up; I suspect that this is the main reason why Mr. Khải is stepping down. Fortunately, the powers-that-be are allowing journalists to do their jobs and report corruption scandals. (Check the link; it's not one article, but the results of searching for "corruption" at the Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Niên. There's more than 200 results coming back.) Industrial strikes are up, "over 90 percent of them caused by employers violating laws and fanned by the authorities’ poor management". Pollution is up, and traffic is revolting, if not down to Bangkok substandards. Yes, this place could be better. but in some ways, Việt Nam looks a lot better when compared to the other "Free Market Socialist Economy", China, up next door. Here, you don't have armies of thugs to evict villagers in land disputes, yet. You don't have thousands of students rioting and vandalizing over the status of their diploma, yet. Industrial strikes, yes - but mass riots, a lot less in this place. Growth here is indeed slower, but income inequality is still a lot less, and in metrics such as literacy and infant mortality, Việt Nam surpasses its northern neighbour. There may be less to blog about here, but it makes for a more peaceful stay.

It's not a complete political shakeup. That would have happened if Nông Đức Mạnh had resigned as well. He's the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Việt Nam. That's the same position once held by Lê Duẩn and Hồ Chí Minh himself. But since he was reappointed for a second 5 year term in 2006, I suppose he's staying for now.

And how will the 80 million people living here react to the departure of Misters Khải, Lương and An? Going by my wife, I'd say mass indifference.

Enter the final 16

2006-06-23T11:51:00.000+07:00

Australia - Croatia: 2 - 2. Both my wife and I stayed up for the game. The big questions on the lips of everybody who is interested:

In what circus did they recruit referee Graham Poll? Ok, some of the Croats were being assholes, and I even saw one of their players push the ref around. That's appalling. However, three yellow cards for the same player?
Why was Mark Schwarzer on the sidelines for the match? I'm trying to be fair to Željko Kalac, but fumbles with the most innocuous of balls did not make my wife nor I happy. We actually got nervous any time the Croatian strikers came near the Australian goal. "Oh, nooo. Oh, fuck. Oh, etc."
Australia, please set up the goals currectly before shooting. There were a lot of wasted shots. Crossing needs to be improved as well. The score could have been 3-2 or 4-2 in Australia's favour.

At the end of the day, we made it to the final 16. It would have been nice if we had entered with a win rather than a draw, but we're in. Now it's off to play against the Italians. Win or lose - I'm content.

For completeness, I should mention Australia's other match against Brazil on this blog. Yes, they beat us: 2 to 0.

But you probably know that already.

This is a test of Flock

2006-06-21T14:42:00.000+07:00

I decided to try a new way of blogging, so I downloaded Flock. It's a form of Firefox with extra features for blogging. The idea is that one can blog directly from the browser window. You set up the connection settings with your blog, which in practice is the user name and password. It brings up a dialog with two tabs. The "Editor" tab is the easy to use-bit which allows one to bold, italicise or do other things with your post. The "Source" tab is where you can see the corresponding HTML if you choose. I always choose.

My observations so far:

The blog post window wants to stay in front of other Flock windows, such as the main window, and the "Accounts and Services" dialog. This is distracting and irritating. It's bad user interface design. Change this feature immediately.
Can Flock handle Vietnamese, or for that matter, Unicode in general? "Thỉnh thoảng tôi muốn viết Tiếng Việt." It seems to be able to do this from the interface, but will it garble the text when sent to the Blogger website? The only way to find this out is try and see.
There is a lack of features. I sometimes like subscripts and superscripts, but they aren't provided. A "CODE" tag or similar is absolutely essential if you want your text to look monospaced, but it's not there.
You can add pictures by the old "CTRL-V" command; that seems to be an undocumented feature. That's how the screen shot above was shown. However, it garbles the resulting HTML, and writes a link to one's hard drive. This is another feature that needs to change immediately.
The spelling feature works, up to a point, but still flags words like "blog", "blogger" and "blogging" as spelling errors. It's biased towards U.S.-style English, and does not like the word "italicise". (Actually, that's a general criticism, and not limited to Flock; I'd like a spell check dictionary that finds both British and U.S. variants acceptable.)
It would be nice to have a "clean-up" option of unused HTML tags. At the end of this post is a lot of redundant tags like the following:

<p><br /> </p>

(And I tried to enter the "code" tag on the preceding HTML snippet, by editing it into the "Source" tag. Flock didn't like that. Flock closed the tag as <CODE /> before it. I dislike applications who think they know what the users wants, and gets it wrong.)
The final problem is that there is no way to upload previous posts, and edit them. Here's the scenario. You make a blog post. Someone makes an important contribution in the comments section. Being the nice person you are, you want to mention this contribution, so you alter your post accordingly. Nope, you can't do this, unlike stand-alone products like w.bloggar. That's a serious limitation.

My comments. I would give it 8 out of 10 for the casual user, who does not want to worry about HTML. It is easy to use, and pleasant to look at. On the other hand, I would reduce it down to 6 out of 10 for more HTML-savvy people like me. It's a toy. It's a nice, functional toy, but it does not give me the features of NVU. However, I should say that Flock is only at version 0.7, and not a full version. so more features may be added later.

There's one last test, which need to be undertaken. Will this post publish? Let's find out.

UPDATE: (5 minutes later): the screenshot came out shite. It was too big, and invaded the sidebar. Flock does allow you to add pictures to your Photobucket site. That's nice. However, it does not allow you to resize pictures. That's not nice.

And no, you can't update previous posts. What you can do is choose another post to overwrite. That's nice if you've got one or two posts. If you've got over 100, then it appears it will try to load all of them into a drop down menu. "It appears", I say. When I saw it was doing, I decided to cancel quick smart; there's a fair chance Windows would break. So I'm going to enter this post a second time, but this time by Blogger's normal web interface, and with a little extra editing in NVU, to add the "code" tag. In other words, I am not going to use Flock to add this post, because the interface does not allow me to edit old posts easily. As I judge this sort of missing functionality critical for a good blogging tool, I will change my ratings to 6 and 4 out of 10, respectively.

Gates gives it away

2006-06-18T14:49:00.000+07:00

Comment-is-Free blogger Jeff Jarvis notices that Bill Gates resigns from day-to-day involvement in Microsoft, and asks "What is his legacy?" The best answer is given by commeter "xyzzy":

Gates' victory was in convincing people that computers are unreliable, and therefore failure is something to be accepted. That's now knocked on into other consumer durables, and audio equipment that needs to be rebooted once in a while, or need firmware updates in order to fix crucial bugs, is now a commonplace. The idea that a computer should work, flawlessly, unless and until the hardware fails, at which point the machine gracefully degrades, has been replaced by a knife-edge in which the man in the street risks the obliteration of his wedding photographs at any moment without the voodoo incantations of the elect.
I recently spent an hour resurrecting the PC of a neighbour [NTLDR and NTDETECT had gone walkies, geek fans]. Without skilled intervention, he would have been reduced to reinstallation and the loss of a lot of work. Gates' legacy is the sense of helplessness that intelligent man felt. It's a legacy we could do without.

And it's assholes to the rest of us, now that the unreliability of the software is now being matched by the unreliability of the hardware. (More grinding noises, again, which is why the Dell is "resting" under my desk as we speak.)

On the topic, I really, really, really can wait until my machine gracefully degrades; I'm content with Windows XP service pack 2, if not perfectly happy. I really do not want to face the burden of buying a new operating system in 2007 or 2008. Windows Vista sounds like utter bloatware, and the Macs these days are so shoddily built that they are staining after three weeks. And they overheat as well. I might be forced to Linux, despite its lack of user-friendiness; at least it's cheaper.

Power Cuts

2006-06-16T10:27:00.000+07:00

.. are not unusual in this country, but power cuts during the 83rd minute of the England - Trinidad and Tobago match are unusually annoying. The game was starting to get interesting, with 1 goal already by the Poms. I have no information how many people were affected, but most would have been as pissed off as my wife. Afterwards, there was a two hour wait for the breeze to build up. No fans, you see. Cooling fans, I should say - not the ones who sing "Vindaloo." The air wasn't that humid, but it was very hot and still. I couldn't get to sleep for two hours.

Related link: Thanh Nien, Football fans promised, 'no power cuts!'. That promise was made only to Hà Nội (I think), and not to HCMC. On the other hand, the people in the provinces are really getting it hard, so I shouldn't complain so much.

Power supply will be prioritized for crowded cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City where total population is around ten million, he added.

That doesn't say much by itself, but if you connect the dots with Peak time power cuts to be scheduled in Vietnam, you're getting an idea of how much stress the World Cup is placing on Việt Nam's electricity grid.

In related news, Ha Manh Te, deputy director of the Electricity Plant 1 in charge of the northern area, said power consumption skyrocketed by 20 percent per day since early this month over last, reaching 42 million kWh. To cope with the situation, his plant would implement power cut schedules on a large-scale covering 15 Northern provinces and cities to ensure regional electricity, Te said. Under the scheme, the affected provinces and cities would face power cuts 21 times a week.
Vietnam’s electricity shortage could run into 180-200 million kW this year, propelled by the limited transmission capacity and insufficient fuel to run gas-operated power plants.

This is not the most developed country in the world, after all. I shouldn't bit too much. Still, I want to give a little bit advice for the local Electricity Board: if you need to shut down the generators and turbines for an England game, do it when Wayne Rooney isn't playing. Without him, the English were hopeless.

Comment Rage

2006-06-15T19:04:00.000+07:00

Chase Me Ladies, I'm in the Calvary says this about this, so I reply with this. Now I'm wondering if I went a little bit overboard in replying these few hours later. I'm still fine with the content, but it's the tone, man - the tone! I know those words will never be unwritten, and I feel kind of better about it.

As for the anecdote about the man with the Pith helmet - it's a true story. It happened some years at a place called Allez Vous in the backpacker ghetto of Phạm Ngũ Lão. Locals would know about it. To understand the venue, imagine a bar which handles lots of visitors, but in most cases just once or twice. It's not one of the numerous Vietnamese cafés and restaurants, nor was it one of the standard expat watering holes. It was designed for the backpacker crowd - who are willing to try anything once with attractive furnishings. That the service was not enough to encourage many repeat customers doesn't matter - they're probably going to take the next bus to Phnom Penh tomorrow, never to return. So the customer experience is likely to rise to a certain level, but not beyond that. There's frankly no incentive.

The staff were friendly enough, but weak. I don't mean physically weak; one of the bar-workers talked to me about his National Service, and other males probably had the same experience; they could have taken down a Western prat no problem. But without direction from management, they were unwilling to deal with the hassle of a foreigner draining his glass into a pool table pocket. I had to point it out to them at great length, and with some reluctance, they gently moved the man away from the table. In other places (including pool halls in this country), an asshole like that would have been immediately ejected from the bar with force inverse to the liability law strength for that place.

It was the same weakness that made me leave Allez Vous for good. The staff were nice, but one day someone hired their asshole cousin, who immediately appointed himself as the pool table master. Write your name on the chalkboard, and when you win, you play the winner of the last match. Since he was generally the winner, he generally played every game... until I beat him in pool one night.

He just lost it. He didn't hit me or anything, but his body language was definitely aggro. He wanted to challenge me to another game. I refused. I pointed out that there were other people waiting, and it was their turn. So I started setting up the table, but he was still asking me to play him, and he was loud about it - so much that the legitimate challenger (i.e., one with his name in chalk) just decided it was "not worth it". Understandably.

Still, I had been coming to Allez Vous for a couple of months. So I reminded the bar staff of that, and also asked them to do something about their errant workmate, or I was never coming back. They looked back with horror. Maybe with a little bit of fear. I was a little scared too. Fortunately, some acquaintances were visiting another bar somewhere, and I had been invited along, so just then I walked outside straight into the interior of their waiting taxi-cab. I wasn't coming back.

And three years on, I never came back to Allez Vous. Nor did I need to - there are far better places in this town for both Vietnamese, and expats alike. And oh god, it feels good to share the story.

On the Australia versus Japanese match

2006-06-12T18:24:00.001+07:00

That will be on at 8 p.m., my time. And there's no shortage of simulcasts to watch - including two in Vietnamese. There's VTV in Hà Nội Vietnamese, and HTV for my wife's preference of local, Sài Gòn-style Vietnamese. I haven't even mentioned English programming; one of the cable channels is "Sports 3" from South Africa, and does a very good job of telecasting the game. (Better than the ABC channel in the States, whose commentary, editing, and synching has generally been judged as shithouse.)

The Road to Surfdom has a nice roundup of Group F, the teams that Australia has to come second in to progress.

I think that it’s pretty obvious that Brazil will win Group F. Without meaning to disparage any of the other teams in the group, this is the second World Cup in a row that Brazil has been placed in a group that will all but assure them of qualifying for the next round. Last time it was Turkey, Costa Rica and China. This time it’s Australia, Croatia and Japan.
So, the real challenge here is finding out who is joining Brazil in this group into the next round. Japan has a pretty good midfield, but their attack doesn’t impress me and I don’t think their defenders match up well against the attackers from the other teams in Group F... So the choice is then narrowed down to Croatia or Australia (although with the number of players on Australia’s team of Croatian ancestry, it’s somewhat hard to tell who’s Croatian and who’s Australian)...

I should mention our quick visit to Mũi Né over the weekend. I got photos too. We caught the first few games, including the one that started it off: Costa Rice versus Germany. Good job, Costa Rica, for trying your best, and good job, Germany for not resting on your laurels. According to the taxi-driver back from the bus, the city turned into a ghost town when the games were on. Almost everyone went home (theirs or a friend) or hit the nearest cafe. The problem is that the motorbike hoons are using the absent street as an excuse to speed like Speed Racer himself. Last night, we encountered some utterly stupid driving during the Holland game.

Good luck, Australia.

UPDATE: Lots of "Oh shit oh shit oh shit" was coming from the mouth of yours truly after the 28th minute (when sloppy playing by Schwarzer let a goal in). That would be 58 minutes of "Oh shit oh shit oh shit", while I was praying and beseeching for at least an equalizer. This was delivered at minute 83, with another goal six minutes later, and then one more at the 92nd - one minute before closing time. Those were the first three goals for Australia in a World Cup final ever - all in the space of nine minutes. The first two were due to the efforts of Tim Cahill, and "Well done" I say to him.

Australia 3 - Japan 1. For a "blow-by-blow" account, check the recap from The Guardian, and do ignore the pathetic jokes about soap operas.

Congratulations, Australia.

Lousy lukewarm Liechtenstein linkup

2006-06-08T11:25:00.000+07:00

It took a nation of millions to hold them back. Australia 3; Liechtenstein 1. The "1" was an own goal. It's a disappointing score for the last of the "friendlies" before the World Cup. Australia: lift your game. Or Japan are really going to wipe you out next monday.

Fanatic forces fatuous football fatwa

2006-06-07T01:18:00.000+07:00

This is Muqtada Al-Sadr. Don't ask him about David Beckham.

Iraq sounds like it's going to be one of the nastiest messes in the 21st century... and we're only 6 years in. 3 or more factions from the Shi'ites, tens of guerilla groups from the Sunnis, and there's the everpresent threat of the Kurds seceding. Which would even make more of a mess of the country, as Turkey would now intervene to prevent an independent Kurdish state. I have no idea of the death toll: probably 100,000 dead by violence, plus another 100,000 or so deceased from preventable illnesses - preventable pre-2003 - due to the collapse of the health system. It's screwed.

So by now, I thought I'd be inured to shock. When I heard about Haditha, well... I think it's a bad thing, but I wasn't really surprised. Soldiers lose their heads in the field and start shooting at civilians; it's not like I haven't heard of that before. But that damned conflict still has the capacity to shock. Muqdada Al-Sadr - the man with the bad teeth above, and one of the big powers in Iraq - has decided to issue a fatwa - a religious proclamation - on football. He thinks it is blasphemous and his fatwa prohibits the game. Let River of Baghdad Burning tell the tale:

...It was up for nearly two whole days before the problems began. The first hint of a problem came through G.’s neighbor. He stopped by the shop and told G. that a black-turbaned young cleric had been walking past the shop window, when the flag attracted his attention. According to the neighbor Abu Rossul, the young cleric stopped, gazed at the flag, took note of the shops name and location and went on his way. G. shrugged it off with the words, “Well maybe he’s a fan of Brazil too…” Abu Rossul wasn’t so sure, “He looked more like the ‘Viva Sadr!’ type to me…”.

A day later, G. had a visit at noon. A young black-clad cleric walked into the shop, and had a brief look around. G. tried to interest him in some lovely headscarves and abbayas, but he was not to be deterred from his apparent mission. He claimed to be a ‘representative’ from the Sadr press bureau which was a few streets away and he had a message for G.: the people at the abovementioned bureau were not happy with G.’s display. Where was his sense of national pride? Where was his sense of religion? Instead of the face of a heathen player, there were pictures of the first Sadr, or better yet, Muqtada! Why did he have a foreign flag plastered obscenely on his display window? Should he feel the need for a flag, there was the Iraqi flag to put up. Should he feel the necessity for a green flag, like the one in the display, there was the green flag of “Al il Bayt”… Democracy, after all, is all about having options...

As it turns out, Muqtada [Al-Sadr] has a fatwa against football (soccer). I downloaded it and this is a translation of what he says when someone asks him for a fatwa on football and the World Cup:

“In reality, my father's position on this topic isn't deficient... Not only my father but Sharia also prohibits such activities which keep the followers too occupied for worshiping, keep people from remembering [to worship]. Habeebi, the West created things that keep us from completing ourselves (perfection). What did they make us do? Run after a ball, habeebi… What does that mean? A man, this large and this tall, Muslim- running after a ball? Habeebi, this ‘goal’ as it is called… if you want to run, run for a noble goal. Follow the noble goals which complete you and not the ones that demean you. Run after a goal, put it in your mind and everyone follows their own path to the goal to satisfy God. That is one thing. The second thing, which is more important, we find that the West and especially Israel, habeebi the Jews, did you see them playing soccer? Did you see them playing games like Arabs play? They let us keep busy with soccer and other things and they've left it. Have you heard that the Israeli team, curse them, got the World Cup? Or even America? Only other games... They've kept us occuppied with them- singing, and soccer, and smoking, stuff like that, satellites used for things which are blasphemous while they occuppy themselves with science etc. Why habeebi? Are they better than us- no we're better than them.”

Important note: Islamic Sharia does not prohibit soccer/football or sports- it’s only prohibited by the version of Sharia in Muqtada’s dark little head. I wonder what he thinks of tennis, swimming and yoga…

I listened to the fatwa, with him getting emotional about playing football, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Foreign occupation and being a part of a puppet government- those things are ok. Football, however, will be the end of civilization as we know it, according to Muqtada. It’s amusing- they look nothing alike- yet he reminds me so much of Bush. He can barely string two sentences together properly and yet, millions of people consider his word law. So when Bush raves about the new ‘fledgling Iraqi government’ ‘freely elected’ into power, you can take a look at Muqtada and see one of the fledglings. He is currently one of the most powerful men in the country for his followers...

... It’s darkly funny to see what we’ve turned into, and it is also anguishing. Muqtada Al-Sadr is a measure of how much we’ve regressed these last three years. Even during the Iran-Iraq war and the sanctions, people turned to sports to keep their mind off of day-to-day living. After the occupation, we won a football match against someone or another and we’d console ourselves with “Well we lose wars- but we win football!” From a country that once celebrated sports- football (soccer) especially- to a country that worries if the male football players are wearing long enough shorts or whether all sports fans will face eternal damnation… That’s what we’ve become.

Well, I may be a layman on Islam, but I know one thing: saying Sharia (or Islamic law) prohibits football is a heap of utter bollocks. If you don't believe me - look at the teams in the World Cup - both Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Shi'ite Iran are in the line up. I don't think Sadr will get many adherents from his fellow Shi'ites. I doubt Sadr even has the religious weight to issue fatwas, unlike (say) Ayatollah Al-Sistani - a man yet to release a fatwa on the subject. I wonder also what would happen if the Muqtadaists tried that shit with the SCIRI rank-and-file. There would be a lot of Iran fans in that mob, and I suspect they would have little patience with Sadr's "protective" antics.

Even the most restrictive powers know not to mess around with sport. If religion is the opium of the masses, then sport is the speed - a big buzz in the bloodstream that will distract you from your cares for a while. Take away the porn, take away the drugs, take away the nasty music... but don't you dare take away the footie. It's good, clean, fun that develops healthy cannon-fodder for the state, and it's a great way to get nationalistic fevour on the cheap. This fatwa by Sadr is as sure a sign as any that he has "lost it", and I think this will cost him in the long run.

Or in the short run if the U.S and Iran end up in another match for the Cup. It is an extreme long-shot, I know, but possible; it happened eight years ago. (It would probably also be the most politically charged sport meet-up since the USSR-Hungary water polo match at the 1956 Olympic Games, where I hear the water was thick with blood.) Guess who the Iraqis are going to going to barrack for? Your guess is as good as mine, but the point is that the Iraqis would want to barrack. Hopefully, a quiet counter-fatwa by Sistani (why has a lot more scriptural weight) would neutralize the threat of bloodshed. And Iraqi can move the tellie back into the living room, like real men everywhere. Better that than soccer balls containing IEDs. Even if they are kicked in Al-Sadr's direction.

(Picture taken from Komiteen for et Frit Irak - The Committee for a Free Iraq, Denmark.)

Go Australia!

2006-06-05T12:13:00.000+07:00

Of course I'm rooting for Australia in the World Cup. I'm not one of those fairweather fans who go for Brazil just because they're the strongest team. I know Australia is nowhere in the latter's league, but it makes no difference to me.

Let's be honest: it's not going to be easy for us. It's been estimated we have only a 30% chance of getting out of our group. Group F, that is. Apart from Brazil (yes, we're playing against them, and good luck to us) we have Japan and Croatia to contend with. I'd be utterly ecstatic if we beat Ronaldo and Ronaldinho and sundry in the field, but there's little chance of that happening. But beating one or both of the others - difficult but doable. That should be enough to get us into the second round.

At the moment, we're in the middle of the friendlies - the matches before the Matches. And things aren't looking too bad. We beat Greece eleven days ago. Now we just got a 1-1 draw against the Netherlands. The Dutch are good, so not losing is almost as good as winning. There's just one more match before the World Cup begins: against Liechtenstein. Let's hope Australia gives that tax-havening relic from the Holy Roman Empire a good walloping on Wednesday. It's probably wouldn't mean anything; little Liechtenstein is better known for skiing than football. It would be a nice morale booster anyway.

Go Australia.

They call it pollution... we call it LIFE!

2006-05-21T01:01:00.000+07:00

That's the punchline of two utterly fucking stupid ads from the bullshit-sounding "Competitive Enterprise Institute" designed for American TV. "It" here is Carbon Dioxide, or CO₂ for short. It's good for you because you breathe it out, but it's even better for trees! Ad #1 tries to argue that CO₂ gives us energy, because otherwise we'd all be living in poverty. Ad #2 tries to contrast Time Magazine (the glaciers are melting!) against some scientific articles (no, they're not!).

They're crap, and not just because they're trying to interest the uninterested in journalism versus peer review. Both ads are narrated at great, unenthusiastic length for a minute by the same woman, who probably would be using the same voice for life insurance, or possibly an personal accountant. If only they'd learnt from my personal benchmark in the field: the classic Toyota "Bugger" ad of Australia. Only one word in the dialogue, repeated a few times: "Bugger". Now that was effective advertising - it never got stale to watch. If only CEI had learnt from this, but I'm glad they didn't.

But are the ads effective? I doubt it. They're not going to convince anyone with firm conviction about "global warming" - for or against. As for the unaligned middle, I doubt the advertisement will stop them taking a quick pottie break when it's on the tellie. It's unclear what the ad is trying to sell except no change in purchasing behavior. (That's pretty unique, when you think about it.) People will continue to drive cars because they want to, until the price of petrol becomes $2 AUD a litre. Or $3. Or another category 5 hurricane from the Gulf of Mexico wreaks destruction on their suburb. And then they're fucked.

Nor are the ads bad enough to be satirised. Now if they had used that basso profundo voice they use for movie advertising for the voiceover (you know, the guy who reads lines like "In a world where darkness reigns..." while you are waiting for the main feature) then the ads would be worthy of parody. But they're not even that wretched.

The kicker is that the assumption of the first ad (pollution versus poverty) is negated by the experience of the "Third World". Here, pollution and poverty often go hand in hand, such as in this country. Vietnamese people aren't stupid. They know pollution is bad for you: foul smells, coughing lungs, dirty eyes, runny nose, and oily, acne-prone skin. Not only that, but they are quite aware of where these symptoms come from: factories and vehicles - both large sources of CO₂. It would have been instructive for the CEI to use a small sample of locals as a "test audience" for the ad. Very polite people, but they have a way of cutting through the bullshit. They would not have been impressed with the ads, not at all.

Link source found courtesy of Peak Energy.

Dystopian Review

2006-05-20T23:29:00.000+07:00

If you want an entirely conceivable picture of the US after an economic collapse, you don’t have to subscribe to anything as internally contradictory as Kunstler’s Long Emergency, just look at much of the Third World today. As anyone who’s spent any time there knows, for the most part it bears little resemblance to the hell of brutality and rat-eating barbarism that fires the middle class imagination with terror, it’s mostly a place of long lines, limited mobility, less physical comfort, hard work, and larger scale poverty. Unfortunately for Kunstler, it is not “intensely local” in the pure, bucolic, Jeffersonian way he imagines, as elites still manage to wreak local havoc through crony capitalism, and millions of people must shift about the globe continually in search of work. The idea that some of them might be white Americans in the future is the only new thing about the scenario.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It… A Review of Some Current Speculative Thinking on Collapse

We got cable

2006-05-14T13:02:00.000+07:00

...and with cable comes World Wrestling Entertainment. Think of it as soap opera designed for teenage boys.

My Little Post on Chalk

2006-04-17T00:19:00.000+07:00

I hate chalk. I am talking about blackboard chalk, that is, and the blackboards that go with them. The teachers I know who deal with it feel likewise.

I didn't mind so much when I first encountered it at the mere age of 5. These were the materials used in school after all. But neither did I miss them when institutions converted to whiteboards. For me, that happened in the late eighties and early nineties at both high school and University. Old buildings used blackboards, but newly constructed rooms almost invariably used whiteboards.

I had no real preference as a student, except that whiteboards appeared neater and more modern. Oh, and with the potential for more amusement. In high school, one of my student scrawled some on it as a joke before the teacher came in. Ha-ha. Then the teacher tried to rub it off. Ha-ha-double-plus: the boy had used permanent ink markers by mistake. What a learning curve it was for everyone, especially him. Guess who has to stay behind with the special solvents.

When I started teaching, whiteboards were used 100% of the time. Even the dodgier ones with the leaking air conditioning and the eccentric approach to maintenance had them. So it came as a surprise when I started teaching English at Vietnamese state schools: blackboards it was. My feeling at the time wasn't apprehension so much as puzzlement at how archaic it all seemed. It had been at least 11 years since I'd really had anything to do with them.

So what do I think of it? We hates them, we hates them. Blackboard chalk (which is really gypsum) is messier than whiteboard markers. It gets on your hands, and a little bit gets in your lungs, and if you aren't that careful, it will get on your face, and on your clothes. I'm never that careful. I'll scratch my chin, and the stuff will infest my pores. It's a great way to give yourself acne.

(I understand the reason blackboards have been chosen - they're an investment by the school, and they're a sunk cost, and they're cheaper. Tell me that the next time I cut a spot shaving.)

The only bright side about blackboards is that they'd become a helpful aid in class discipline. Do you know how unpleasant fingernails scraping on a blackboard sound? Well, my kids know now. I don't like doing it, but now I don't have to do it that much any more. Make vaguely talon like shapes with my fingers towards the slate, and they're quickly learning to shush each other up.

Price Gouging

2006-04-04T18:52:00.000+07:00

I'm in a dark mood at the moment. My wife has asked me to stay in the bedroom with the door shut. Someone is around to clean the drain on the balcony. There was a thunderstorm on Sunday - a very early one for April, and the outflow was blocked. Water flooded into the house. Fortunately, nothing was damaged, but that drain needs to be unblocked, and quickly, because more rain is going to fall. So someone's coming around with the mother of all pipe cleaners.

So why do I have to hide in my room? The workman isn't doing it for free. There's a price attached to the exercise. The problem is that if the man sees me - a white man - he's going to mark up the price big time, and my wife knows this. So I'm typing this instead in the darkness.

I like the country, but this is one of the things that can shit me about the place - when Vietnamese attempt to gouge the foreigners. What's worse, it's almost done unconsciously. It doesn't happen to me too often, but I've read the occasional "I'm never coming back to this place" post on Mekong ESL. Firstly, where does this attitude come from?

One main reason is that Việt Nam has a bargaining culture. You name a price, they name a counter-price, and with many a cry of "Mắc quá" (literally, "too expensive"), you agree on the value of the purchase. Now, I have no problem with that. It's part of the culture. Of course, tourists pay higher than the locals - they don't have the language, and sometimes tour guides advise them to pay in United States Dollars. (To which I say, assholes. You pay in đồng in this country, and you get better bargains for it. A mother of a friend of mine got extorted that way.) But a little bit of the local lingo goes a long way to cheapen things. Sometimes, it's even fun.

But there are other reasons. It's a legacy of the old two-price system that Việt Nam used to have. One price for locals, and one, far higher, price for foreigners:

The example was set by the highest government officials and quickly trickled down to the lowest street vendor selling baguettes or noodle soup. There is a two-tiered pricing system for nearly all admission tickets and restaurants will commonly have two menus: one in Vietnamese and one in English, but with very different prices. Old women selling pineapples on the street will refuse to sell one to you unless you pay at least double the local price, even if it means losing the sale.

Grumpy, isn't he? But understandably so. This sort of thing pisses off a lot of foreigners, especially if it is in your face. That went double for overseas Vietnamese (I gather); they knew they were being screwed over. Pissed-off customers don't come back. Moreover, they tell their friends. Paradoxical as it may seem, the country made more money after they rolled back the system in the early noughties. Tourists were happier, and reviews were better. Best of all, you started getting a lot of visitors and workers from poorer places, such as African countries. (You think the two-price system just affected rich Westerners, Koreans and Japanese? Think again. It applied as much to Chinese and Russians - people less able to afford these anti-subsidies.)

The two-price system is almost gone, although exceptions remain, such as the Củ Chi tunnels. Most people print one menu with both Vietnamese and English (and Korean, and Japanese...) on it; it's a lot, lot cheaper, and there's clearly one price for all. Supermarkets are the same - you see the little sticker, you read the little number, and you know what to pay - auslander or no. Roadside stalls are now generally pretty good when it comes to coffee and coke, and you can bargain them down.

As for restaurants: the last time I encountered the "two menu" dodge was about a year and a half ago in Nha Trang, when I was suspicious as to the absence of Vietnamese words. (The trick to get around it: ask for both menus, on the pretext of "practicing my Vietnamese". Compare and contrast. Then ask the waitresses why there's a difference. Be calm about it - it's not their fault, it's the (suspiciously unavailable) manager's. Having my wife present to translate helped a lot. We paid the cheaper price, and agreed never to visit there again. I should say that my wife hates the phenomenon of overcharging a lot more than I do.)

But then you get what happened last night. My wife and I were on the way home, and we decided to stop at a fruit shop. She'd bought there a bag of some fruit for 20,000 đ by her lonesome some days ago. Alas, I was present in person this time, so the price magically doubled to 40,000 đ. I glanced at the fruit seller. There was no spark in her eyes - nothing like the old "scheming bargainer" stereotype that you sometimes get on expat/tourist blogs. I'd describe it as a slightly sullen blankness. I don't think she thought too hard about the consequences - angering a former customer, or that there'd be no sale as a result there, or in the future. (There's a lot of fruit sellers in this town.) I don't think she thought at all. Foreigner - therefore price gouge. As automatic a reaction as Pavlov's dog. Fortunately, cases like this are the exception, but a very large one.

Please, please, please - all Vietnamese reading - finish the two price system for good. And soon... preferably in the next hour. Because the workman hasn't left yet, and I'm stuck in my bedroom, and my bladder is about to burst.

(Update: the workman was a pretty decent guy, and hard-working too. He cleaned out that pipe, and I was even allowed out to meet him before he left. No price increase happened, but due to his diligence, he was given a nice - and unrequested - tip. I have no problem paying above the standard price. However, I do have a problem with being expected to pay above the standard price, 100% of the time.)

I could have been a contender

2006-03-27T22:48:00.000+07:00

I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. Just a bum.

The hits were spiking, and this blog even had its first ever flame war. Nothing to do with this country - nothing about rude fruit words, or shithead school management, or anything even bloody relevant to this place.
No, it's fucking Travis Frey, that guy with the creepy management contract. Look at the comment section - it's my tiny piece of Jerry Springer in the tropics.

(Editorial note on the thread: I see nothing wrong with bisexuality. However, I do have a problem with those who compare it to the severity of Frey's actions. Memo to homophobes: fuck off.)

And I didn't even know it. I could have build leverage out of this. I really could have been a contender. But you know... I got distracted by issues. Such as work (real issues there), and marriage, and getting a new visa. So I lost interest in the blogging thing for a while. Just a brief while. But while any decent self-promoter would have built his slice of the rock out of the opportunity, I let it... slide. Like that penguin in Fight Club. It's gone now.

I'm not worried. Another issue will come, sparking even bigger interest than before, and I'll fail to capitalize on it again.

What I am. Just a bum.

Breakdancers coming to Sài Gòn; suitable charities wanted

2006-03-25T12:54:00.000+07:00

This came in my mail from Lenga Nguyen (aka Buddhist with an attitude):

I am leading a small group of Canadians who will be visiting Vietnam in August 2006. We plan to bring some school supplies for an organization called Blue Dragon Children's Foundation in Hanoi (http://www.bdcf.org/ and http://vietnamstreets.blogspot.com/) but because 2 members of our group are also professional breakdancers, we also thought of having these people teach breakdancing to the kids at Blue Dragon and/or take part in a breakdancing show or battle with some of the breakdancing crews in Hanoi as a fundraiser for the Foundation. We are trying to coordinate such an event with Hanoian crews like Big Toe and others.

And I got to think: why just do it in Hanoi? Our itinerary also includes Saigon and we could also volunteer to take part in a similar fundraising show for a charity organization in Saigon. The problem is: I don't know anybody in Saigon. I left Vietnam in 1965 and I don't have any family left in Saigon. I was wondering if you would be kind enough to help me get in touch with a charity you know and trust, as well as with breakdancing crews in Saigon. A simple list of names and email addresses is all I need.

Sorry for the imposition. Like I said, you're the only person I «know» in Saigon. Thank you very much in advance.

Lenga Nguyen aka Buddhist with an attitude

I'm thinking "What imposition"? I'm not sorry for her email. What I am sorry about is that I can't think of any local children's charities. I know they exist, and I'm even attended the odd fundraiser, but I can't remember their names.

Breakdancing crews would also be appreciated. As she said in a follow-up email:

Let the Saigonese breakdancing crews know that we are challenging them to a (friendly) battle/demonstration, all proceeds going to whichever charity is willing to organize the event. Or whatever. Our breakdancers would be just as happy to meet some Vietnamese colleague dancers or dance for homeless kids or something. We're desperate for attention ;-)

If anyone could help with mere information, please contact her on kwanyin47 at hotmail dot com. Or drop it in the comment box. It's for a good cause, you know.

Attribute your sources

2006-02-23T14:15:00.000+07:00

I would like to thank my father. He's the one who sent me the BBC URL Vietnam bans fruity website name. I built a blog post around it, but forgot to mention his role in things. That's not good.

Sorry, dad.

Second Hand Books

2006-02-23T00:05:00.000+07:00

NV Tours
179 Phạm Ngũ Lão,
Phạm Ngũ Lão Ward
District 1, Hồ Chí Minh City
Việt Nam

Sometimes, I just want to thank those organizations who have made my life here better, and NV Tours are one of them. Their main purpose is, as the title suggests, a tourist centre providing tours for visitors. How good are these services? I don't know. I've never used them.

I come for their second-hand book section. You can't miss it. The shelves start behind the main desk. Here are the detritus of (I guess) 10 years of novels either unwanted or forgotten by travellers. To be honest, there's a lot of crap there - you can see several shelves devoted alone to mass-market junk like Tom Clancy and John Grisham. (We can't forget Dan Brown either.) But the joy is finding the gold among the gravel. I've found a few Iain [M.] Banks novels, and the odd Elaine Peters. But you won't find much John Le Carre or Len Deighton - I've depleted them of their stock. There are several other authors I've discovered that I wouldn't mind looking up when I eventually return to Australia.

(I'd also like to say that NV Tours is about the only reason I come to Phạm Ngũ Lão these days - period. There are many reasons, but an important one is that I no longer work near it. There used to be only one restaurant that I frequented, and their food went downhill once they changed the management. Oh, and it's backpacker hell, with own scamming mafia attached.)

My appreciation is born out of scarcity - but is none the less genuine. There is still a lack of good English language bookstores in this town. Part of it is due to economics - you have to get the books assayed by the local censors, and I have no idea of what import tax needs to be paid. It's probably substantial. But clueless management has something to do with it. Fahasa (one of the big bookshops here) has lots of the Asterix comic books - in the original French. But did they ever realize that the English translations could be hot sellers as well? (And with better puns.)

They did open up a new shop in the last few months. It was in Saigon Tower, wasn't it? Or Saigon Square? Or possibly the Saigon Tax Centre? (Most of the shopping centres have interchangeable names, as you can see.) I did see lots of books on graphic design, which would make my wife happy. But much of the fiction on hand was those "Oxford Learners" series - literature simplified for the English learner. I have no wish to read them again, having experienced their "edition" of The Big Sleep. I prefer my prose uncut. For that reason, I return to NV Tours once a week to see what they offer.

(What is the price? The answer is "negotiable". Don't ask for prices in dollars - that's bloody stupid. Try in đồng, and try starting at 35,000 or 40,000 and work your way up. They may print a price, but they could lower it. And now is as good a time to practice your Vietnamese.)

UPDATE: Some readers may be confused by the last line: "And now is as good a time to practice your Vietnamese." I could have given the impression that it's a monolingual operation. NV Tours is run by Vietnamese, but it provides much of its services in English. It's what you'd expect from an operation on the backpacker strip). However, a lot of prices in the country are negotiable, and speaking Vietnamese may help you get a lower price for books. And the staff seem to like it that way.

L'Affaire Grapefruit: In Your Pants

2006-02-21T13:49:00.000+07:00

There's this thing we call "Language Interference" in the English Teaching biz. Person X is a native speaker of Language A, and is trying to acquire language B. Unfortunately, habits from Language A continue to interfere with the production of language B words. One common example is when people from Spanish or Italian backgrounds pronounce English with an odd staccato rhythm. That's because those languages are syllable-timed: every syllable is pronounced with the roughly the same length. English isn't like that at all. It is stress-timed: the time between stressed syllables is roughly the same, and unstressed syllables are shortened accordingly.

You can test this at home, folks. Try reading this out at home with every syllable the same. ("Try rea ding this out at home with e ver y syl la ble the same.") Now read it in your normal voice. Do you hear a difference?

Language interference happens when people learn other languages, especially tonal ones. English has its own intonation guidelines: raise the pitch at the end of yes/no questions, but drop the pitch at the end of statements. People are able to vary the pitch to express emotion or irony, but it won't change the meaning of the words. Now imagine a English speaker learning Vietnamese (or any other tonal language) - habits learnt in a lifetime now obscure what they are trying to say. Odd as it seems, that's why I found one of the hardest tones to handle was the "không dấu" tone - or no tone at all. My natural tendency was to dip it at the end, which wasn't correct; I had to train myself to keep my pitch completely flat.

What does that have to do with my earlier Grapefruit post? Enter "Buddhist with an attitude" who confesses "Sorry for the blog whoring but check out my blog on the same subject." So I added her to the blogroll.And I just have to quote the last two paragraphs. They're a cracker:

I'm posting this text from Reuters as a joke, but any Vietnamese reader would tell you that the situation is not that simple. «'Buoi' can mean either a grapefruit or slang for penis» says Reuters. Well, actually, no. 'Buoi' doesn't mean anything in Vietnamese. A grapefruit is «bưởi» and a penis is ... uh.. look, all you need to know is: it's not spelled «buoi». Same thing with pigs and vaginas: not only are the tones different, the spelling is completely different. The real problem is that the domain registration system is based on the Latin alphabet and therefore cannot accomodate languages like Vietnamese that use a modified romanized system of writing.

But I've got to admit, learning to recognize and reproduce accurately the different tones is not an easy task for people used to non tonal languages. During the Vietnamese/American war in the 60s, the national TV station in Saigon used to broadcast a show hosted by American «advisers» who would laboriously read the daily news in Vietnamese. The show was very successful, if only for its comical value, because once in a while, the poor anchormen would use the wrong tones, with hilarious results, of the pigs = vaginas variety. I remember one of their most frequent mistakes was to pronounce «quân» neutral tone (troops, soldiers, etc.) as «quần» third tone (pants), so they would announce that the pants did this, the pants did that, we're expecting more pants next month, etc. And hilarity would ensue in Vietnamese households.

Degradation on the Installment Plan

2006-02-20T13:27:00.000+07:00

What is it about "Frey"s and The Smoking Gun? I'm not talking about James Frey, but someone worse: one Travis Frey, "a 33-year-old Iowa man who is facing charges that he tried to kidnap his own wife (not to mention a separate child pornography rap)." From The New York Daily News:

When Ruth Frey tied the knot with her husband, she told police she did not expect to be tied to a bed, sexually assaulted and asked to sign a sick contract that conferred weird sexual obligations on her.

Travis Frey, a 33-year-old Iowa father of two, has been charged with first-degree kidnapping and assaulting his wife three times after allegedly tying her to a bed with a rope. Ruth Frey told Council Bluffs police her husband was angry with her for taking their two daughters to church.

But the case turned even more bizarre when prosecutors produced a four-page "Contract of Wifely Expectations" they said Frey had wanted his spouse to sign. The document, a copy of which was obtained by TheSmokingGun.com, stipulated that Ruth Frey was to do "anything and everything" her husband wanted.

The Smoking Gun does indeed have a copy, and you can find it under Sicko "Marriage Contract" One For The Ages. The link is bandwidth-heavy, with each of the four pages including a scan of a separate sheet for the contract - which the wife never signed, in case you are wondering. There isn't much commentary from The Gun. "While we normally point out the highlights of most documents, there are so many in this demented, and very graphic, contract, we really can't do it justice. So set aside ten minutes--and prepare to be repulsed." You have been warned.

(Thankfully, it doesn't contain much in the way of naughty graphics. However, the document uses one font with Kama Sutra-esque figures in the capital letters. Evidently, Mr. Frey thought it was appropriate for section headings. But pretty much all obscenity here is textual.)

What do I think will happen to Mr. Frey? The New York Daily News continues: "In Iowa, kidnapping is a class A felony and carries a life sentence without the possibility of parole." My feeling is that Travis Frey is going to get himself a lifetime behind bars - preferably in solitary. I am no lawyer, but the "contract" sounds like it is admissible evidence to me, and the jury will definitely be dismayed by it. Lines like "On demand means what I say, when I say, where I say and how I say" makes Travis Frey out to be a sexual predator, and a domineering asshole indeed.

No "thank you", please. We're Vietnamese

2006-02-19T12:49:00.000+07:00

This was found via Virtual Doug: a post from Six Months in Hanoi with the title of Never The Twain. I quote:

No Thank You

The constant need to say thank you is deeply ingrained in the Western brain (maybe especially in Canadian ones). There are casual thank yous and then there are heartfelt ones. I completely understand how absurd the casual thank you can appear to the Vietnamese. When we are at a restaurant we say thank you when the waiter brings the bill. But why would we do this? This is all part of the waiter's expected role, not some kind of personal mitzvah. Besides, why would you thank someone for asking for money? Ditto with the kind but wimpy way Westerners tend to deal with hawkers pestering them on the street. I've heard tourists proudly use the literal Vietnamese translation of "No, thank you". Thanks for what? Seeing me as a source of income? There is no rational reason to thank people for merely fulfilling roles.

What are my thoughts on this?

The first is that I seriously doubt you are going to lose many friends if you say thank you too often in almost any culture, and that includes Vietnamese culture. I did hear this story from one acquaintance: one day, her maid said "You don't need to say thank you all the time!" That was after six months straight service, mind you. The only drawbacks I forsee are perceptions of weakness, insecurity or insincerity, but a lot of this would have to do with secondary behaviour. Do you sound sarcastic when you say "thank you"? Are you unable to take "No" for an answer? Do you apologize a lot for the smallest things? (The last is an old problem of mine.) Work on those problems first, I say.

The second thing is obvious, but it needs to be said. A lot of us say "thank you" because it was the way we were brought up. Otherwise, we'd get told off by our parents, or sent to our room, or had our tongues washed with soap (or lye) or something like that. It's not a "mitzvah" (?), it's a habit - and unlike smoking, not really one to lose.

Third thing third: Mark is absolutely correct in saying that the Vietnamese don't bother to say "thank you" as much as Westerners. That's the culture, and I'm fine with that. But they do say "thank you" when they sit in restaurants. They say "thank you" when the waiters bring the menu, and they also say "thank you" when they serve the food. However, the customer is not expected to say "thank you" when the bill is paid; that's what the waiter should say. But many waiters/bartenders/etc. do appreciate the customer thanking the server even if he is being paid at the same time.

Fourth: Mark thinks it's "kind but wimpy" to say "No, thank you" to hawkers and Xe Ôm drivers in Vietnamese. Me? I find it the best way to get them off my back. Just look at them in the face, and say the phrase. After three years here, it's almost automatic. Smile as well. Treat them like a human, not like a "role". Others things help, like the (Southern?) Vietnamese gesture for "No". (Both palms out and facing the listerner with all fingers extended, then rotate up and down.) Generally, the would-be-seller beams back and walks or drives on... all within seconds. It breaks you out of your assumed "role" as a "westerner", and thus automatic cash cow.

(Occasionally, you get the odd seller who persists. Do you think it's rude in Western culture? That's good, because my impression is that it is also perceived as rude in Vietnamese culture. In such cases, it is both justifiable and wise to ignore them. Learn to shut them out. You've tried your best.)

My final point, and it needs to be said: my observations are based on living in Sài Gòn. Mark's are based on living in Hà Nội. Both cities are Vietnamese, but the "cultures" are slightly different.

"Thank you" (Cảm ơn or Cám ơn) is a good phrase to learn, as is "No, thank you" (Không, cảm ơn or Không, cám ơn). If you can only learn a few Vietnamese words, learn those. They will not do much harm, and they will do you a world of good. They worked for me.

Bad Grapefruit (two more Vietnamese words, etc...)

2006-02-14T12:57:00.000+07:00

BBC:Vietnam bans fruity website name:

A website hoping to promote grapefruit in Vietnam has been banned from using the fruit's name because of official fears of a mix-up with a penis.

The Vietnamese for grapefruit, buoi, sounds different from a slang word for penis, but without special accents it looks the same. Vietnamese regulations say website names cannot include "sensitive" words.

The site, set up to market a grapefruit wholesaler in Ha Tinh province, was told to find another name. "We have to refuse the website name of www.buoi.com.vn because the word for grapefruit, buoi, without a proper tone marking can be misunderstood," Thai Huu Ly, of the Vietnam Internet Network Information Centre [VINIC], told the AFP agency.

But will it be misunderstood? Will your average Vietnamese think "www.buoi.com.vn" has something to do with the sex industry? Will they think the site is about selling citrus fruits? To find out, I wrote "www.buoi.com.vn" on a piece of paper, and showed it to a few Vietnamese men I work with. I didn't explain what the URL meant. (Hinting that it had something to do with "fruit" would have been a giveaway, and biased the results.) After a minute of puzzlement, they ALL opted for that non-scatological Vietnamese word for "grapefruit": bưởi.

The other word - the one that VINIC was worried about - is buồi, which is North Việt Nam slang for Cheney. Its usage in Sài Gòn appears to be negligible: my wife hadn't even heard of it. When I showed her the BBC page, she had absolutely no idea how one derived "penis" from unaccented, diacritic-lacking "buoi". She was scornful about how VINIC had even thought that. In the end, I had to find that word in my (very fallible) English-Vietnamese dictionaries and show her. It didn't twig her memory at all. She still had never heard of it, and remained unimpressed with VINIC's actions.

In the end, VINIC is a government organization. Perhaps most of its members saw "buoi" as nice, honest grapefruit... but then one saw the alternative interpretation, and it could have been embarrassing. So they put the kibosh on it. I think it's a shame. Those greengrocers in Hà Tĩnh (which is in the North) probably weren't thinking scatological thoughts; they just wanted to sell fruit. Perhaps they could rename their domain "www.nhieuquabuoi.com.vn" (from nhiều quả bưởi: lots of grapefruit). It would be better still if domain names were internationalized altogether (permitting the unambiguous "www.bưởi.com.vn"), but wide scale implementation appears years off.

On the other hand, obscenity is generally in the eye of the beholder. I feel that if you have to explain in great detail and with a lot of effort why "www.buoi.com.vn" is rude, then it's probably not that rude at all.

What a Dick

2006-02-13T22:22:00.000+07:00

Dick Cheney, that is (but I'm being redundant). According to AP, he went on a quail-hunting over the weekend, has a bird in his sights, turns around to track it, and sprays a companion (Harry Whittington) in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Not only that, but it happened in a game farm (link courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). The animals in question weren't wild quails. They were raised in pens (along with some mallard ducks), and then let out just before the hunters came.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.

"This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets."

What a fucking waste of God's green earth. Did they hunters eat all of the quails they executed? I doubt it somehow. 400 divided by 10 gives you a little more than 40 inedible lead-and-hamburger corpses each. Not only unsporting, but a little bit sociopathic. Would you like killing 40 birds in a row? I wouldn't. I'd rather do what my father does: watch them with binoculars.

(Links courtesy of Firedoglake and Steve Gilliard.)

Raindrops keep falling on our heads

2006-02-12T11:44:00.000+07:00

It's the third day it's happened this month. I'm about to leave a place to go somewhere, when I notice the metallic light of an imminet thunderstorm. There's a few drops on the ground, and a few cyclists have put on their raincoats, but the worst is yet to come. Five minutes later, the heavens will open and water comes crashing down in a torrent. The first time I avoided getting soaked (a quick stop at a local Internet cafe); the third the same (instanteneous change of plans - let's have a coffee). It's the second time where I wasn't so lucky. Pitter-patter at 60 seconds, pealing rain at 120, and parking at 180.

It's definitely been an odd February for Sài Gòn, and I'm not the only one who has remarked on it. The locals seems really put out about it. The collective memory of the locals is that the rain peters out around November, and doesn't really return until May. That's backed up by climate data (courtesy ClimateZone). Torrential rain past Tết is almost unheard-of.

La Niña is probably to blame for this, according to PhilStar.com:

"The bigger picture is this: There is a developing La Niña condition in the tropical Pacific," the Pagasa-DOST weather branch chief said. According to him, La Niña’s signature is a "cooler than normal sea surface temperature in the Eastern Pacific covering the coasts of Peru and warmer than normal SST over the Western Pacific including the Philippines.
"The persistent warmer than normal sea surface temperature around the Philippines may bring more rains in many parts of the country," he said, adding the brewing La Niña condition may last up to the end of the first quarter 2006 when the see surface temperature begins to normalize.
Amid the La Niña and the puzzling climate within the region — above normal rainfall condition in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam while China, Japan and Russia are experiencing colder than normal winter — what is important is for people to be ready and prepared for possible disastrous effects of these unpredictable weather patterns, Cruz said.

Disastrous, perhaps, but I can see advantages. If the rain keeps up past March (which would be really weird) then it may cool the headstroke months of April and May. Those months are truly evil - temperatures soaring past 35 degrees, and the odd 40-pluser among them. On the other hand, it's got to be hard on the local road maintenance crews. They find it difficult to repair things when they're flooded.

Helmets are good

2006-02-09T17:54:00.000+07:00

It needs to be emphasized: helmets should be essential when driving or riding a motorbike. Even here, where motorbikes are the main form of transportation. Or should I say especially here?

To be honest, I didn't wear them much until I bought my Protec™ models last November (one for me, and one for my wife). But now I'm a convert. Every time I go out I don that motherfucker straight onto my head.

I should have decided the purchase on straight road safety grounds. People here may be driving slower than in western countries; 20-30 km/h is the norm in the cities. But it's the fall that makes the difference. You're looking at at least a metre and half drop onto the bitumen. If you're moving quicker, then expect serious grazing at least - the roads are like sandpaper at those velocities. I shouldn't forget facial reconstruction. I've taught some students with broken noses. Alas, these are near best case scenarios. To quote the Asian Injury Prevention Foundation:

In Vietnam, nearly 40 people die each day in traffic accidents and twice that number suffer debilitating head injury. This is a result of rapid motorization and modernization, where people have the ability to trade bicycles for motorbikes, creating a highly mobile population. Unfortunately, preventative safety measures have not accompanied this increased motorization. Limited traffic safety education, lack of awareness about the effectiveness of helmet use, and inconsistent traffic legislation and enforcement have contributed to annual death tolls of over 12,000 people in Vietnam. In addition, approximately 30,000 more suffer from severe brain damage or head trauma sustained in traffic accidents.

That's a lot of Death and Brain Damage, and I'm undecided as to which is worse.

Alas, the Vietnamese are a conservative people, in its original sense of "conservative" - averse to change. They will not change their behaviour if they don't think it will be in their best interest. Vietnamese generally do not think helmets look good on them, and they think they're too hot to wear. Plus there's a cultural thing: not so much keeping up with the Joneses, but keeping steady with the Nguyễns. I was talking with my Vietnamese teacher about helmets, and why he doesn't wear them with his wife and daughter to support. Well, he only drives three kilometres to work. If he kept bringing his helmet to school, there's the problem that his fellow teachers would think him - "odd" - which is not what you want in Vietnamese society or in your career. At all. I don't face the stigma, because I'm a foreigner, and thus assumed eccentric unless otherwise proven.

A shame, it is. One of my neighbours got himself in an accident with extra head injuries. He's one of the lucky ones - he isn't brain damaged. But now he's up for 20 million đồng (about $1800 AUD). That's a lot of money in Việt Nam. I don't know how his family can pay up, especially when the father has abandoned his family to follow some mistress in the Delta.

One welcome change is that helmets are now mandatory on highways, and have been for the last year or so. If drivers don't have a helmet, they're likely to be pulled over by traffic police, who generally are extremely avaricious. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.

To repeat, I should have decided the purchase on straight road safety grounds. But I didn't. I bought it for the face shield attached. I do some teaching in schools on the periphery of Sài Gòn, where the roads are dirtier and more dusty, and the road budgets are lesser. The face shield may not ward me from the nitrogen, sulphur and carbon oxides in the air, but it does spare it from the airborne particulates floating there. Of which there is a lot, from carbon caused by dodgy two-stroke motors and diesel engines, to the dust from cracks in the road. Imagine what it does to your pores. Visualize what it does to your eyes. I wear glasses, which prevent the bulk of the pollution from hitting the corneas, but there's always side winds to blow it there. The result was a lot of runny liquid with black bits and white bits, and lots of Rohto eyedrops to clean it all out. Oh, the face shield has made a big difference to my life, such as a decline in acne.

Helmets won't save you every time. Nearly a year ago in Gia Ray, I just avoided observing a fatality by seconds. Some young man drove out in the highway without looking, did a sudden right turn, not realizing there was a minibus just behind him, and well... let's just say "watermelon" comes to mind, with polystyrene mixed in. He was wearing a helmet, but that wasn't going to do him any good under some vehicle's wheels. (This led to a roadside embalming a few hours later, but that's another story.) Helmets are all well and good, but they're secondary to another quality - observation. Alas, that's another thing in short supply here.

Two new words of the week...

2006-02-02T23:02:00.000+07:00

Since the last word of the week was dead on arrival, I better provide substitutes. They are:

Lồng Tiếng: (verb) to dub.
Phụ Đề: (noun) subtitle.

The latter word's become a pretty important word in my life. My wife and I got ourselves a DVD player, as well as the the address of a local DVD rental place (at 2000đ a pop). Being far away from backpackers and "The Ghetto", the place rents almost exclusively to Vietnamese speakers, and the DVD are altered accordingly. The big question is how the DVDs are altered. I want to hear English-language films in English. I do not want to hear them in Vietnamese. So every time I'm off to the video store, I look for those magic words "Phụ Đề" on the covers. If they're not there, the DVD is dubbed, and it's no use to me at all.

I've commented on the dub versus subtitle conundrum before, so I'll summarize: dubbing bad, subtitling good. Unless your your target audience is illiterate... but that's not really a valid assumption in Việt Nam with its 94% literacy rate, is it?

Well, I've been thinking a little bit more about it lately. One important issue is how one measures literacy. This is what the Việt Nam National Literacy Policy defines as being "literate":

A person who is literate has to achieve the literacy skills equivalent to grade 3 out of 5 grades of primary education and to be able to apply these skills in his/her day life.

That's a bare-bones flat-lined definition of literacy indeed. In case you are wondering, "grade 3" here is at the same age as in the West: about 7 to 9 years old. It's not a high measure at all. Nor does it say a good deal about the local "numeracy" rates either. Grade 3 was when I first encountered those exotic mathematical operations called "multiplication" and "division".

Now the question arises: could someone meeting (if not exceeding) the National Literacy Level handle subtitled movies? I doubt it. As evidence, let me bring up the third member of the household, "Mr. B"; he helps around the house in exchange for free food and board and a small income. He's a nice guy, and he's bright, but he never finished high school. He's a few grades above the literacy level of grade 3. Nevertheless, he finds subtitles too hard. Every uttered English sentence is represented by about 8 or 10 Vietnamese words on the screen. He has to read them all, and he has to read them fast. Because if he doesn't, then he'll miss the meaning a second later when they disappear; i.e., when another English statement is represented by another 8 or 10 Vietnamese words. Understandably, he prefers dubbing.

Now I have a lot of Vietnamese friends, workmates and acquaintances (plus one wife) whose literacy levels are far more literate than that. But remember, I work in a "white-collar" industry - to be exact, the teaching sector - and almost all of my workmates have some sort of tertiary degree. I also live in a very large city (Sài Gòn). But most people in this country do not live in cities, and very few people go to university: 5% of college-age people in 1995. My experience is atypical for someone living here, even if typical for an expat. Mr. B is far closer to the median than my pals. If he find subtitles too hard, then I reckon a lot of other Vietnamese do too. Accordingly, the state TV stations dub any foreign movie they show. They know their target audience.

Interestingly, it has been cable TV that has taken up the slack. They've been subtitle all the time since I watched it (2003 to 2004). The problem is that they service they provided here use to subtitle in Thai - great for the Thailand market, but no bloody use here. Fortunately, some cable executive realized that Việt Nam has a bigger population, if not as rich. Presto - subtitles in Vietnamese, sometime in the last year or so. Now the cable companies are milking it in. Cable is popular here - to be exact, among the well-off who can afford it. That also includes their offspring, some of who I happen to teach. The kids like Discovery Channel. They love the Cartoon Network. And for the love of god, they absolutely adore Smackdown. Due, in large part, to subtitles.

2006-01-30T19:45:00.000+07:00

I had a bit of time tonight, so I decided to go through and clean all the "dead" links. By "dead", I mean those that haven't been updated in a calendar year, or have lost all their content. To my surprise, only three needed to be culled. Gone, but not forgotten:

Asian Labour News: the content is gone, and the URL is being hawked to the highest bidder.
BrainySmurf: left with a single root directory to its name.
Living in China: got ourselves a 404, and won't be visiting any more.

Still, that's a mere 2% extinction rate, and all the local blogs seem to have survived quite nicely - some with new domains, but all just chugging along. Admittedly, Long Xuyen (after nearly a year of inactivity) escaped the chop by the barest margin, and I quote: "I am still alive. I am still alive." Phew. No autopsy needed, then.

What's better is all the new bloggy goodness I've added on. You can read Dennis the Peasant's long standing vendetta against Pajamas Media, or Driftglass's take on James Frey (blame it on the writers' groups, I think) or Peak Energy on Peak Oil. Or you can just read James Wolcott; that's its own reward. I've also added Global Voices, which gives you a nice little blog aggregate for this country. So feel free to check out my mighty blogroll, with real Senators and Princes included for free.

Word of the week: sỉn

2006-01-29T20:05:00.000+07:00

(Say) sỉn is an adjective or verb expessing being drunk, intoxicated, or just plain hammered. For example, "Tôi say sỉn" means "I am drunk". "Say sỉn" may be more formally correct, but Vietnamese often elide it down to "sỉn" in spoken speech. Thus, "Tôi sỉn" also means "I am drunk", and has the added advantage of being shorter. When you're pissed, terseness is indeed an advantage.

Today's the first day of Tết, and there's a lot of sỉnning going on right now.

UPDATE: After some discussion with my wife, I learnt that the word is not "sỉn", but "xỉn". (That is also what "Anonymous" claimed in the comments section). My apologies.

I didn't even know I was nominated for the Blog Awards

2006-01-28T18:37:00.000+07:00

To be specific, The 2006 Australian Blog Awards, as hosted by Collective Apathy. Seriously, I didn't have the foggiest idea at all until I checked the little Technorati link on the right a few minutes ago. I just learnt that I'd been nominated for "2006 Best Overseas Australian Blog". I learnt it from "Paul and Mel's UK", who had a little, light-hearted gripe about being left out of the whole affair.

Who was my nominator, you may wonder? If you check the nominations page, you find Barista (aka David Tiley) is the culprit. I want to express my appreciation of David, who has been a constant supporter of my site during those ADSL-less times last year when the blog went on hiatus.

Did I win? It would have been nice, but no. That award went to a far finer blog than mine: The Road to Surfdom. He types more, and he's been around for longer. And I'm glad that Barista scored the "Best Overall Australian Blog". His site deserves the award. You don't believe me? Click on the link above.

On the subject, I don't know if there's anything like a "Best Việt Nam Blog 2006 Award". There used to be one at SimonWorld, but the link is about 2 years old. If there is one, I wouldn't nominate myself - because it's not done, you know - and I think this blog isn't that great. But if there was an award, I'd nominate Diacritic in a second. I like his site, because his writing goes beyond the journalism banalities ("friendly people", "bad drivers") and oversimplified dichotomities ("market economy" versus "collective planning") that are often printed in the press. He has a long memory (longer than mine, when this country is concerned), and he's better at connecting the dots.

Merry Tết, everybody.

Hurray for Harry

2006-01-26T22:40:00.000+07:00

I have not yet heard from the repair shop for my Dell laptop. I'm not too worried. They've come through before, and I'm sure they'll come through again. They've done miraculous things with the machine - the machine that I took to Australia (and back) to fix - the machine that other, Australian, repairpeople told me to abandon. (For one simple reason: in the West, it is often a lot cheaper to buy a new computer than repair an old one. But it's not so true here, when hardware is expensive, but labour not so much.)

Unfortunately, it's a busy time at the repair shop. A lot of people are trying to get their machines fixed up, including a corporate client or two. Everyone wants their computers back before Tết (the Vietnamese New Year). Because during Tết, the shop with be closed, CLOSED, CLOSED, and the staff will be off to visit their relatives. If the customers don't get their laptops back now, they'll have to wait for a week until the shop opens again.

I reckon my machine is fairly low on the repairpeoples' list of priorities, and it looks like there will be a bit of a wait before I get it back. Damm... lots of free time made for blogging, but no hardware to do it with. Blast.

So, I'm using this site to give my hearty thanks to Harry - a great guy, but sadly now an ex-workmate. Harry (who is also in the business of English Teaching) has been working on and off in Việt Nam since the mid 90's. He's had enough of the country, and of the school I work for. He's off to Macao with his family. Since he's discovered the joys of Powerbooks, he wants to unload his computer. So I bought it off him, and for a very, very good price too, and just when I needed it most. Now I'm using it to type these very words. Thank you again, Harry - and best of luck in the future.

SITC management do a runner

2006-01-25T16:51:00.000+07:00

This is a big story. Cowboy schools come and go, but it is rare to see one this large rip off their customers, and then run away to Singapore. From VietnamNetBridge: Singapore-owned schools shut down:

VietNamNet – Schools operated by Singapore International Teaching Consultancy (SITC) in HCM City, Da Nang and Can Tho suddenly closed last week, leaving thousands of students and teachers in the dark about the cause.
Nguyen Ngoc Hong Chau said she and other students in HCM City were asked to leave on Friday afternoon because of a power cut. "But the school hasn't opened since then," she said.
Teacher Joseph Hermann said no one was at the school when he arrived on Monday to collect his salary...

Why is it a big story? Because this school has offices in six cities:

Besides its five schools in HCM City, SITC has branches in Hanoi, Hai Phong, Da Nang, Vung Tau and Can Tho.
About 13,500 students were enrolled in SITC schools in HCM City, reports Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.
Nguyen Thi Dung said she had paid US$175 for her daughter's year-long course at SITC's school on Suong Nguyet Anh Street. "She has studied only three months," she said.

And why did the management choose this time? I suspect the "work permit" thing had a bit to do with it. But it was also the time when their license was up for renewal:

"Can Tho's SITC began operation nearly two years ago with the approval of the Ministry of Planning and Investment," Tran Ngoc Sau, inspector of the city's Education and Training Department (ETP), said.
Can Tho's People's Committee on October 2005 asked SITC to apply for a license from the city's Education and Training Department.
"However, SITC did nothing while it continued to recruit students," Sau said.

People are angry about it - people like one of my in-law's neighbours, who shelled out $200 dollars for her son to learn at the school. $200 dollars is big money here. It wasn't just the students who lost out. The (mainly-foreign) teachers didn't get their salaries paid, and the same goes for the (mainly-local) staff. Hmmm... I wonder what Singapore has in the way of extradition treaties...

UPDATE: If you are puzzled by the last sentence above, I understand. I forgot to quote another line:

A member of SITC staff met with us on Monday but the top managers could not be contacted because they are in Singapore."

If life was an interactive fiction computer game

2006-01-22T11:49:00.000+07:00

... then it wouldn't be life. On the other hand, no-one would be killed either.

(On reflection, that sounds profound. Or pseudo-profound. Or something.)

Via Defective Yeti: lots of clicky goodness in Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure.

Dell Laptop

2006-01-21T17:58:00.000+07:00

When the chip fan is making grinding noises, it's time to take it in for servicing.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm typing this from work.

Work Permits and Sex Offenders

2006-01-16T02:18:00.000+07:00

... However to muddy the waters still further, today I've just learned that VATC has had, and I quote: "2 teachers arrested and 20 deported" for not having a work permit that is extremely difficult to obtain in so short a time. This information is unconfirmed but has been given to me in good faith. The thought of being detained (and ultimately fined) in a country like Vietnam is, how shall I say, unappealing.

There is a hanging pall of uncertainty and fear in Saigon at the moment. I don't want to be around to be detained, questioned and fined, then told to leave, never to return. Next week is the last I shall teach in Vietnam, barring some significant sea-change in the way Vietnam views it's foreign resources...

Proffeshnial Teachman - "How can Vietnam pay ESL teachers so much?" - ESL Cafe - Fri Jan 13, 2006 5:38 pm

At 16:30 on January 3rd, Peter Mueller was escorted by Vietnamese police to HCM City’s Tan Son Nhat Airport and transferred to Austrian authorities who will take him home. All of Mueller’s possessions were also transferred to Austrian authorities. Peter Mueller of Bradford, 69, was arrested in HCM City under a wanted notice from Interpol for child sex abuse.

During his time in Vietnam, Mueller appeared to carry-on a normal life. He participated in social activities, and he taught English at the Vietnam-America Training School. However, he also allegedly engaged in unlawful acts with minors and reportedly enticed several disadvantaged children to live with him.

According to police, Mueller molested at least five Vietnamese boys while in Vietnam. When he was arrested on December 26, he was found living with a 14-year-old boy in a hired room in HCM City’s District 1.

In early 2003, Mueller was prosecuted by Austrian police for "child abuse". In October 2005, Interpol issued a special wanted notice for Mueller for child sex abuse.

VietNamNet Bridge - "Sex offender extradited to Austria" 11:17' 04/01/2006 (GMT+7)

[Mueller] worked at VATC. A friend of mine worked there with him at one time and says he;s a horrible person. I was interested in the quality of his English as a non-native, to be teaching (also as a measure of a school!) and friend said 'not good enouogh to be teaching'.

I think these articles are a good thing, as there are a lot of these animals around (really, a lot) and it appears for years the people of Vietnam have, in general, been completely naiive to it. Obviously with so much poverty here, a lot of people are grateful for money however they can get it, and this scum abuses this desperation.

These two have been addressed because a) Glitter was hounded from his house by British paparazzi; and b) Interpol told VN authorities to look out for Mueller.

I can think of at least 3 or 4 people who I know have abused minors in Vietnam. One of them I challenged in a cafe, as I had been involved with one of the victims, in a counselling role. I later found out from a friend who knew someone in the relevant consulate that this character had a history of drug and alcohol related violence. At that time he was teaching in a school much more reputable than VATC, let me say.

These scum should be named and shamed and the word out around the planet not to come here for nonsense like that.

Beer_Monster - "A teacher following the Glitter trail" - Mekong ESL - Sun Jan 01, 2006 12:06 am

...Here's exactly what's needed for work permits: completed work permit application; completed cirriculum vitae; completed local police record application and a completed Certification of Temporary Residence form (this involves the local police in whatever district you live in HCMC, not where you live overseas); three passport size color photos (without wearing glasses or a hat); medical exam certificate; copies of your degree and/or teaching certificate; properly authenticated criminal background check (I'll go into more detail about this below)...

Ryno - "Here's what you need to bring to work in VN" - ESL Cafe - Mon Oct 24, 2005 2:42 am

I'm 100% certain that Peter Mueller - known English teacher and child molestor - never had a work permit. A criminal background check would reveal his checkered past. His English appears to be mediocre, which would bar him from obtaining a decent teaching certificate like a CELTA. (I've done one. You have to be a very good English speaker to even enter the course.) That he was teaching English at all is a disgrace - but VATC - like many other schools - were pretty lax with this particular paperwork.

So I'm not surprised that they got the first crack of the government crackdown. Having a known paedophile working with you can damn you by association. But then, he's not the only sex offender here teaching ESL. (I've even heard rumours that Gary Glitter was teaching English in Vũng Tàu before his bust.) I doubt not that there's going to be more busts after this.

UPDATE: After posting this (and a good nice's sleep afterwards), I fear I might have given the implication that the English teaching industry is swarming with pervs. That's not true at all. Most English teachers are fine, fine people. I work with them. I've worked with them. I am one.

But this government does not know that. The government has not borrowed a textbook, attended a seminar, or gone out for drinks afterwards - the sort of things that help you assay someone's character. All it can do is opt for background checks. Sadly, this will make a lot of teachers leave - but then again, there's a high turnover anyway. However, it will also make a lot of paedophile masquerading as teachers leave. That's a good thing. If the Vietnamese want to kick that sort of individual out of the country - who could blame them?

The James Frey Experience

2006-01-12T03:22:00.000+07:00

There's a little literary scandal building around James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard. In case you don't know, story one is this trustafarian author's "tale" (and the scare quotes are there for a reason) of crime, drugs, and kicking off same by going into rehab. Story two is the sequel. People die and the author cries a lot about them in the novels, and then goes on Oprah in real life. That's what I've heard. No, I haven't read them: there's a lack of English-language bookshops here. The books don't sound like me at all. But literary fraud has always fascinated me, and the author sound like a major league (as in 20,000 leagues under the sea) prick. Cardinal, read the charges.

The first is of plagiarism. John Dolan (the review for the eXile) alleges that quite a bit of AMLP is stolen from Eddie Little's Another Day in Paradise. Not everything. Just the drug anecdotes. He changed a lot of other things, such as adding "redemptive" endings where there was no redemption before.

The second allegation? Fraud. The Smoking Gun did a lot of investigating of such things as: "Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel" and so on. Basically, they state that James Frey made shit up about "his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states.'" This Bad Boy ain't so Bad after all, unless you count conning the self-help market.

I don't mind buying a book from an author who admits to warping the truth. Hunter S. Thompson may have had a weird time in Las Vegas with Oscar Zeta Acosta, but it wasn't as weird as what happened in Fear and Loathing. William S. Burroughs could have based Naked Lunch on the most depraved existence imaginable in Tangiers, but I'm still pretty sure Mugwumps don't exist. It's no problem for me. Writers can bend reality like a Moebius strip as long as they're up-front about it somewhere along the line.

Now, that James Frey character - the way I heard about him talk about himself, he's harder than the Kray brothers, yet with a sensitive side TOO. He ain't faking it either: AMLP is 100% the real story of accept-no-substitutes Mr. Frey.

Until it isn't.

And then his mystique breaks into a million little pieces. Well, at least the title is true.

(Link back to Steve Gilliard. Again.)

Looking for more reasons not to fight Iran?

2006-01-09T01:53:00.000+07:00

Not convinced that attacking the country is a bad, bad, bad idea? Here's two more reasons, courtesy of The Guardian article: Did the CIA give Iran the bomb? Extracts from New York Times reporter James Risen's new book. The book is called "State of War", but I haven't read it yet. Let me summarize the article.

Reason 1: the CIA did indeed leak the plans for a bomb to the Iranian government. The idea was to introduce a few flaws in the plan for the time "when [Iran's] scientists tried to explode their new bomb. Instead of a mushroom cloud, the Iranian scientists would witness a disappointing fizzle. The Iranian nuclear programme would suffer a humiliating setback, and Tehran's goal of becoming a nuclear power would have been delayed by several years." Do I need to explain why the plan wouldn't have worked? That the Iranians have some very smart cookies on their nuclear program? That they would have sussed out the errors and corrected the blueprints? Or possibly, improved them?

The CIA then decided to make it extra difficult for themselves. They hired a Russian nuclear engineer (a defector to the U.S.) to courier the plans to the Iranians in Vienna, but without telling him about the flaws. Their problem is that the defector found the faults himself (within minutes, it should be noted), realized the deep shit he was in, and decided to play both ends against the middle. He appended a little letter to the plans - something like "Guys. Boris here. I've been asked to give this to you. Just watch out for parts A, B and C. Let's just say they're - ahem - a little buggy? Nothing personal. Inshallah, all."

(If Bill Clinton really did approve the plan, as the article alleges, then I would say that this is the most imbecilic thing he's ever done. We're talking about 100 kiloLewinskys on the fuckup scare.)

Reason 2: the CIA wouldn't be able to find any secret nuclear sites the Persians may have up their sleeves - not any more. They ended up leaking all their spies to Tehran. How did they do that? By email. You see, one of their agents had incriminating information on their network in the country - all in a single file. She ended up attaching it to a message to the wrong "asset": one of her employees who happened to be a double-agent working for the Iranian security forces. It took Kim Philby years to do what she achieved in a single keystroke. Okay, it wasn't that easy; she probably had to drag her mouse a few times, and select from a dialog. I don't want to exaggerate here.

I like computers, but I have to say the whole affair makes one nostalgic for "old-skool" filing - when confidential documents were actually made out of paper and cardboard and kept in combination safes.

I do not like the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapons program. I do not really have any idea how to stop it. A couple of weeks ago, I would have thought a "Good Cops - Bad Cops" strategy would be the way to go, with the EU being the nice guys, and the US shouting and banging the walls in the interrogation room. Unfortunately, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - Iranian President - seems as mad as a cut snake.

But we can at least start by excluding strategies that will not work. One of those is to bomb Iran. Even if the USAF can find all the sites (see reason 2), the Iranians have got some nasty surface-to-air-missles. But there's a moral aspect as well. If they've got nukes, who's fucking fault is that? People notice this sort of hypocrisy these days.

Mỹ Lai massacre hero dies at 62

2006-01-07T23:10:00.000+07:00

From the BBC:

Hugh Thompson Jnr, a former US military helicopter pilot who helped stop one of the most infamous massacres of the Vietnam War has died, aged 62.
Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968.
He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians.

"There was no way I could turn my back on them," he later said of the victims.

Mr Thompson, a warrant officer at the time, called in support from other US helicopters, and together they airlifted at least nine Vietnamese civilians - including a wounded boy - to safety.

He returned to headquarters, angrily telling his commanders what he had seen. They ordered soldiers in the area to stop shooting.

But Mr Thompson was shunned for years by fellow soldiers, received death threats, and was once told by a congressman that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai.

He was brave man both physically and morally. Physically? Well, it goes without saying: he was a helicopter pilot in Việt Nam. According to Wikipedia, his job was "to fly over Vietnamese forests and try to draw enemy fire, to pinpoint the location of troops.".

Physical courage is common in armies. But moral courage always seems to be rarer - at least in the U.S. Army circa 1970. As it says, Thompson was treated like shit by his peers. Was it because he blew the whistle on the affair? Was it because it was bad for your career? Did certain higher-ups not even see dead "gooks" as something to get worked about? Or was it just too embarrassing? (Colin Powell tried to whitewash the affair, if you didn't know already). The Wikipedia article continues:

Kept in the dangerous OH-23 Raven Helicopter missions, which some considered punishment for his intervention and the subsequent media coverage, Thompson was shot down a total of five times, breaking his backbone on the last attack. He suffered psychological scars from his service in Vietnam through out the rest of his life.

I don't like to eulogize people; that's not my style. But this man was a true hero. Rest in peace.

Link found courtesy of Steve Gilliard.

WMF Hotfix Update

2006-01-04T11:28:00.000+07:00

In the last post, I mentioned an "unofficial" WMF Hotfix and a WMF vulnerability detector. They've been popular. Too popular:

Due to incredibly high load, the page has been reduced to the bare minimum.
Thanks for understanding.
Safe computing!
Ilfak Guilfanov

Fortunately, other sites have decided to host the applications. You could try Castle Cops or Sunbelt Blog. They are on the side of the Angels, so don't worry about bad stuff sneaking in the payload.

For those suspicious of electronic vigilantes, you could wait until Redmond gets its act together: January, the tenth, according to Email Battles.

Whatever happens, please be safe.

Viruses, Việt Nam, and WMF

2006-01-03T15:44:00.000+07:00

From Thanh Nien Daily: Survey finds computer virus explosion in Vietnam:

Vietnam’s leading cyber security center said Wednesday 232 computer viruses, adware, and spyware were spotted this year, up from 84 last year. A survey of 2,000 users by the Hanoi University of Technology’s Bach Khoa Inter-network Security Center (BKIS) showed 94 percent of computers to be infected with viruses, and 87 percent with spyware and adware.

Spyware is a software that covertly gathers user information through the user's Internet connection, usually for advertising purposes. Adware is a form of spyware that collects information about the user to display advertisements in the web browser based on the information it collects from the user's browsing patterns.

Forty-four percent of the surveyed users said their companies or organizations had to stop working for at least one day due to virus infections. Viruses hit 96 percent of computers of people working in the field of commerce, 95 percent in education, and 94 percent in services.

... By late last month, Vietnam had 9.9 million Internet users, or over 11.9 percent of the total population, compared with 6 million and 7.3 percent a year earlier. Nearly 2.7 million were Internet subscribers, many of whom used broadband, the Vietnam Internet Network Information Center told Xinhua, noting the country's total international bandwidth stood at 3,505 Mbps. Vietnam linked up with the global computer network in December 1997.

Here's the situation as I see it. This country got a fairly large population of users. They're growing rapidly too: the figures above equate to 65% growth per annum. Most use the Internet in Internet Cafes or at work, some use them over a phone modem, and very few use broadband connections like ADSL. Accordingly, technological literacy is low, but growing - albeit slowly. Two years ago, many Internet Cafes didn't have anti-virus software; even the administrators didn't know any better. Installation is now the norm. However, I'm not sure how many people suss out that you're supposed to keep your anti-virus files up to date as well. Installation isn't enough; you've got to download the latest patches to fight the newest viruses. Antiviral software are essential for Windows machines in this day in age. But they have to be used properly, and not just as a totem to ward off evil. For these reasons, I'm dismayed (but not too shocked) at the 9X% incidence of infection.

I wouldn't blame the users too much, however. First, Vietnamese people speak Vietnamese... but computer security material is generally written in English. This discriminates aagainst the computer professionals - but it really causes problems for the amateurs, the computer hobbyists and so forth in this country. Unless someone translates for them, they'll be kept in the dark like everyone else. The second problem is that most users don't use their own machine. It's owned by someone else, whether it is their employer or the local cafe. If the machine crashes, it's not their problem, but that of the people who are meant to maintain the machines. (Do not pass Go; go straight to coffee break.) In short, they've got less incentive to learn. One final factor: this is a place where hardware is expensive, but software is pirated and cheap. If the machine is well and truly cocked up, you save as much as you can and reinstall. Never mind that you've lost about 20 new security patches as well.

Then, there are incidents when the lack of local knowledge interferes with my machine, and I get really pissed off. A year ago, when my wife had her own graphic design business, some one decided to install PurityScan (please don't click) on some of the computers, including my laptop. The woman thought it was some sort of anti-viral software. Alas, it's not; it's spyware, as I tried to explain to her afterwards... but I got the feeling she wasn't grokking what "spyware" was.

And there was that time, a month ago, when I got reconnected to ADSL, and someone decided to turn the firewall off. Imbecility.

Now, we have a new virus on the scene: the Windows Metafile Vulnerability. It's a nasty one, too. From Wikipedia:

The Windows Metafile vulnerability is a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows which was first disclosed on Bugtraq on 27 December 2005 [1], and subsequently used in a variety of exploits. The vulnerability, located in gdi32.dll, arises from the way in which Windows operating systems handle Windows Metafile (WMF) vector images, and permits arbitrary code to be executed on affected computers without the permission of their users. Windows versions from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003 R2 are known to be vulnerable to the exploit, while versions as old as Windows 3.0 are probably also vulnerable. Exploits of this vulnerability are thus among the very few examples of genuine drive-by download.

So we've got a 15 year old bug that's now become a problem. Given what I know about Microsoft quality assurance, I'm not too surprised. However, this is the sort of bug where you could infect yourself instantaneously by viewing the wrong page. Especially with that abomination called Internet Explorer, which still seems to be the norm here. But other browsers aren't safe either. The flaw is in the operating system, and how it display the file.

Don't trust your anti-virus software either. We learn from the Internet Storm Centre how the malicious WMF files could be tweaked in almost infinitely random permutations - making it harder to detect by antiviral software. This quotes an email by "white hackers" Metasploit, who are trying to show how the WMF vulnerability could be exploited:

We released a new version of the metasploit framework module for the WMF flaw, this one uses some header padding tricks and gzip encoding to bypass all known IDS signatures. Consider this "irresponsible" if you like, but it clearly demonstrates that a run-of-the-mill signature-based IDS (or A/V) is not going to work for this flaw. If anyone has any questions about why we are releasing these types of modules so early after the disclosure, feel free to drop me an email.

-HD

So what can you do, dear reader? Fortunately, there are several things you can do.

First: check if you are vulnerable. From IDA Pro, you can download a program from that address, and run it. It will not infect your machine; it will only test it, and state whether you are vulnerable or not. I have run this program.
Secondly, if you are unprotected, install the patch on your computer. It's not by Microsoft, I'm afraid; they seem to be on an extended New Years Break. But there's a temporary hotfix also by IDA Pro. What it does is disable the dodgy command in gdi32.dll. I've installed it. It works fine. Microsoft will probably get around to releasing an "official" patch in a fortnight or so. But that may be a little long to wait.
Thirdly, Sunbelt Blog recommends that you unregister "shimgvw.dll":

As CERT says, “Remapping handling of Windows Metafiles to open a program other than the default Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (SHIMGVW.DLL) may prevent exploitation via some current attack vectors. However, this may still allow the underlying vulnerability to be exploited via other known attack vectors.” ... At any rate, here’s how you do it. From the command prompt, type REGSVR32 /U SHIMGVW.DLL. A reboot is recommended. (It works post reboot as well. It is a permanent workaround). You can also do this by going to Start, Run and then pasting in the above command. This effectively disables your ability to view images using the Windows picture and fax viewer via IE. However, it is not the most elegant fix. You’re probably going to have all kinds of problems viewing images. But, no biggie: Once the exploit is patched, you can simply type “REGSVR32 SHIMGVW.DLL” to bring back the functionality.

Finally, it won't do you any harm (and it will do you a lot of good) if you stop using Internet Explorer. Perhaps you could change to another browser like Firefox, which both my wife and I use happily. This may be hard at work if clueless system administrators insist you use IE. But you have no excuse at home.

How will this affect the Vietnamese computing community? There is some awareness, at least: Nhân Dân has an article on it, and so does VCDOnline. But it looks like there's going to be a lot of infected machines. It will take time for information to percolate down to the users. More people will use the Internet, ignorant of viruses and adware and spyware. Most people already on line won't change their habits; they'll continue to use IE, and forget to update their anti-virus patches, and their machines will end up trashed. Then they'll reinstall and start again. Just like anywhere else, really.

Oh, and I'd best say Happy New Year. We'll need it.

Abseiling in Flanders Field

2005-12-30T15:42:00.000+07:00

Wonderful. A VietNamNetBridge article about translation errors contains some fairly creative "translations" inside. Some make sense:

Many foreign books have been translated into Vietnamese in the past 15 years and many of them contained major errors in translation. Are translators assassinating foreign authors’ works?

Others do not:

For many years, Russian poetry was considered the epitome of literature in Vietnam. Now, one must wonder if the translations were good in the first place. According to many experts, Vietnamese translators have been assassinating Russian poets for quite some time.

This comes to us via the fine, fine Diacritic blog of R. Streitmatter-Trần, who has his own observations:

Several translated books that have been released in Vietnam have been recalled. Most recently the best-selling The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. It was discovered that the translation errors were so gross that the publisher was forced to recall the books.

This may be a natural growing pain. Given that until recently Vietnamese have not had access to contemporary foreign literature, the language is often is often outdated. Bookstores are often stocked with heavily abridged translated classics (similar to Cliff Notes). In the excerpt below, the key phrase is "international literature of any consequence." Although the wildly popular Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter might not fit this criterium, translations of Pulitzer Prize-winning works such as Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee can be found. But often such recognized literature is social or political commentary. The art is the writing. What happens then, particularly in states where material is frequently censored, when the writing itself is controversial? Does the translator take the liberty to rewrite the work? Do translators simply opt for translation of less critical or important works?

It probably is a natural growing pain. But I suspect there's two other reasons that the Vietnamese version of the Da Vinci Code was - ahem - "assassinated". The first one is that the book contains a lot of stuff about Freemasonic Sex Magick - stuff that I suspect wouldn't go down too well with the Ministry of Culture. Unfortunately, it's so integrated into the storyline that removing this material would leave an empty husk behind.

The other reason? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Dan Brown is an awful writer. He's awful with plot, he's awful with characterization, but most of all, he is awful with style. For example, he mixes metaphors with abandon, such as "learning the ropes in the trenches, and many other errors and accidents. (Thanks, LanguageLog, for your love-hate relationship with those novels.) What is the poor translator supposed to do when confronted with such abominations? Try a word-for-word translation, which is sure to make no sense? ("Học những dây thừng ở những chiến hào"?) Let's just say that I pity the fools who try to translate Dan Brown into Vietnamese for a living. May they turn their work towards more worthy contemporary authors such as Iain [M.] Banks or Susanna Clarke.

The Magic Hat of Inevitability

2005-12-30T12:37:00.000+07:00

I never thought game shows were good for you.

Game shows don't interest me. They haven't done so since puberty, when Sale of the Century occupied the next timeslot after Dr. Who. I'd be quite happy to be on them, especially Who Would Like to be a Millionaire? It's not the same thing as watching them, but then I don't enjoy watching TV much these days. My wife does enjoy game shows, though.

To set the scene: the box was on on Boxing Day, and Mrs. Down and Out had tuned it to Chiếc Nón Kỳ Diệu. It's a Vietnamese version of Wheel of Fortune, where contestants spin a big wheel. If if stops at the right spot, the player must guess a letter from a secret phrase. You could describe it as a combination of roulette and hangman. Chiếc Nón Kỳ Diệu provides a few additional letters over the "canonical" U.S. version as choices: "Ă", "Â", "Đ", "Ê", "Ô", "Ơ", and "Ư". Tones aren't part of game play, although they are present in the final phrase. Otherwise, the show is almost a straight copy of Wheel of Fortune. The name, however is new: it translates as "Magic Hat". People think the roulette wheel looks like the traditional conical Vietnamese hat.

So, we have a Vietnamese show, where the host and audience and contestants speak Vietnamese, and the secret phrase is Vietnamese. That would make the contestants Vietnamese, right? Not this Boxing Day, where there were not just one, or two, but three foreigners on the show. One was from Canada, the second came from Australia, and the third hailed from Iraq. All three spoke understandable Vietnamese, and were competent enough in the language to play it. At one point, the Iraqi even sung a song in it, thus endearing himself to the audience. My wife loved that episode, and I even came out and watched it for all of five minutes. Regrettably few foreigners learn the language, so getting your proficiency up to playing a game show - that's almost unheard of here.

Now imagine a thought bubble, like you have in comics, coming from my head, and from the head of my wife (and later, when he heard about it, from the head of my Vietnamese teacher). The bubble contains the following sentence:

If they could do it, why can't you?

So the episode has inspired a big sea change in the Down and Out household. My wife stills wants to improve her English, but now she's speaking to me mostly in Vietnamese. What's more, she'll be throwing lots of new words into the conversation. The consensus is that I have a lot of problems with vocabulary, so her doing this will improve my language. Even if it is occasionally disorienting, I'm glad she is doing it; it's what I need.

I'll continue to refrain from the game shows, however. If you've got a neat moral lesson from five minutes watching, why continue further?

Holocaust Denial and Iran

2005-12-29T23:45:00.000+07:00

In the last month, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, has said a lot of nasty things about Israel. For example, he thought it was a good idea to wipe the country off the map. Since sentiments like these have been around since the wars of 1948, so it's not too much of a shock to me. But then he took the unusual tactic of Holocaust denialism. You expect it from the losers in Stormfront, but it is depressing to get it from a government leader. The comments made it easier to label him an Islamofascist (he's Islamic! He's a Fascist! Ergo, he's a Islamofascist!), but I always thought that label a bit wanky.

It's an open question as to whether Ahmadinejad believes his statements. It takes some intelligence and some cunning to lead a country, so I presume he doesn't. But a better question is to ask why he said those bad, bad things. Fortunately, Jeremy Bray of Catallaxy has made a post entitled Iran, Israel and Middle-Eastern Diplomacy, which delves into the possible reasons for these outbursts. I could say it's a fine debut at Catallaxy, but it's actually his second post there. It's also a good antidote to all the hysterical huffin'-and-puffin' about invadin' by Atlas Shrugs (as I posted about two days ago.) I heartily recommend Bray's post, even if I don't quite agree with the implied conclusion: Iran risks losing its reactors to an Israeli bombing run:

The thing is: what does he do next? The Israelis are now sharpening their bayonets, the Americans are miffed that he’s come in and knocked over their dominoes, and the rest of the world is wondering if letting Iran have enriched uranium is such a good idea. Think quickly, Mahmoud – Israel’s Air Marshals have drawn a big red circle around March 2006!

Why do I disagree? Firstly, Iran knows damn well when Israel tried pre-emptive bombing before: the June 7th, 1981 strike on the Iraqi reactor of Osiraq. The Iranian military know about this; they even tried to destroy that reactor themselves in 1980. They don't want it happening to them. I would be very surprised if they haven't thought long and hard about countermeasures, such as dispersing the facilities. According to Wikipedia, Iran has about 15 or so "nuclear"-related places spread around the country. (Yes, I know Wikiknowledge can sometimes be dubious, but each site has a cite.) Secrecy is another countermeasure (but one that annoys people): three of them are "suspected, but not confirmed". Then Iran has a few topological advantages over Iraq: it's got a lot of mountainous terrain, and it's three times as large in area. Israel could try to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. I doubt we'll be getting Osiraq Part II.

(Personally, I prefer an unsuccessful bombing run to an unsuccessful U.S.-led invasion, but would rather have neither.)

There's one other thing I want to mention. There is an alleged religious fatwa forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. It's coming from none other than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of Iran. "Alleged", I said. According to a later release by the Federation of American Scientists, "there does there does not seem to be any published text of such a fatwa, leaving its political significance and even its precise meaning in doubt". Damn. That's the sort of fatwa we could live with.

Do you want to be in my Untergang?

2005-12-28T14:04:00.000+07:00

Another paedophile has been arrested in Việt Nam:

Hanoi - A 68-year-old Austrian has been arrested in Vietnam on child-sex abuse allegations, police said on Tuesday after acting on an international arrest warrant. The man, Peter Mueller, was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City on Monday, and would face extradition to Austria, said a spokesperson for the investigative police department.

Mueller fled to Vietnam in July 2003 after allegations of child abuse against him in Austria, said Vietnamese state media.

He went to Ho Chi Minh City as a social worker, sometimes teaching English at a foreign-language centre, said Vietnam News Agency.

Mueller also faced criminal investigation in connection with allegations of sexually abusing children during his stay in Vietnam, said the spokesperson. On Monday, he was allegedly found living with a 14-year-old Vietnamese boy in a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, said the spokesperson.

"Mueller admitted that he had had sexual relations with the boy for two years and he also had close relations with many other boys in Vietnam," the spokesman said.

The action comes weeks after the arrest of former British glam rocker Gary Glitter, who stands accused of "obscene acts with children" in southern Vietnam's Vung Tau city.

There are some points that I'd like to make.

Firstly, everyone in Việt Nam - Vietnamese, foreigners, everyone - must notify the police whom you are living with. If you are living in a hotel, you leave your passport or National ID card at the front desk, and the staff will take it to the nearest station. If you live in a house or flat, you have to fill in a little registration booklet showing everyone who lives in the house. There are several other rules that should be observed. For example, Vietnamese aren't allowed to stay the night, or even share the premises, unless you are married to them. That's the law.

In practice, the system is falling apart. It's a clear and present opportunity for police corruption. Rules can be enforced or not, in offer for cash. If someone is doing anything suspicious such as living with unrelated children, the bribe may be higher. Even if you aren't breaking the law, you may be hassled for money anyway. Do you want your registration book witnessed by the police? It's a very useful document. Cough up or else.

Or there's the story told to me by a teacher acquaintance, who's also married to a Vietnamese woman. Every couple of weeks, the cops would come knocking at the door, looking for money. My acquaintance reckoned it happened every time a new guy joined the local force. It happened so frequently that this teacher made multiple photocopies of his married certificate, so as to throw to Sài Gòn's Finest.

The other thing is that the guy was teaching English! I've got so many questions. What school? Did he teach children? (God, I hope not.) Did he have a teaching certificate, like a CELTA? I doubt it. Too many of the local "foreign language centres" are looking for warm bodies - preferably Caucasian - to fill their teaching quota, and it sounds like Mueller scuttled over here as quickly as possible once the Austrian Government was on his ass. In theory, you're supposed to have a work permit to work over here. For teachers, you need to show various documentation to obtain it, such as the possession of a teaching certificate, and a clean, "no-record" criminal certificate from back home. In practice, it has been put on abeyance; it's harder for Americans to jump through the hoops than any other nationality. This is partly due to the incompetence of the local U.S. consulate, I suspect, rather than any long-standing grudge. My point is that if the work permit system was working, it would cull a lot of rock spiders masquerading as teachers from these shores.

And what's happening with The Shitter nowadays? The last I heard he was looking at the death penalty for raping children. But not anymore. He paid the families off:

Hanoi (dpa) - Disgraced former glam rock king Gary Glitter has paid $2,000 (about 82,000 baht) each to the families of two Vietnamese girls, ages 11 and 12, who had accused him of coercing them into sex, police and his lawyer said today. The lawyer said authorities will not charge Glitter with rape, meaning he will not face the death penalty.

The families have since written to police asking for a reduced sentence for Glitter on current charges of "lewd acts with a minor," not the child rape charge, according to lawyer Le Thanh Kinh.

Police and prosecutors said this week they had finished their investigations and would not file child rape charges, though Glitter still will be prosecuted for the lesser lewd acts charge.

As a result, the 61-year-old former singer, who was convicted of child pornography in his native Britain, would likely get as little as six months in prison instead of the death penalty he might have faced on child rape charges, the lawyer said.

"Gary Glitter told me to do anything to reduce the sentence and said he will pay money to do that," Kinh told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa by telephone Tuesday. "Two weeks ago, I gave the families of the two girls 2,000 dollars each."...

Glitter's lawyer said he raised the issue of compensation with the families shortly after his client was charged last month and that they first asked for between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars.

So what began as an extortion bid turned into weregild. Sorry if I sound cynical, but it has too much stench of the old tycoon-paying-off-woman-molested-by-rich-spoiled-pervert-son story. I don't like it at home, and I don't like it here. Nor do I trust the families involved either. Yep, $2000 is a lot of money. It's a shame that they care more about that than their daughters. But Glitter is probably going to end up in jail - from 6 months to 3 years. Hopefully afterwards, he'll be escorted on a British Airways flight back home, and never leave again. But that isn't a happy ending at all.

How to destroy a superpower in one easy step

2005-12-27T16:12:00.000+07:00

Invade Iran. It's that easy. If you want to turn your country from #1 to #111, try putting your troops in Persia.

Unfortunately (for America, that is), that's what being advocated on the American-based website Atlas Shrugs 2000. The post in question is called Nuclear Iran: the case for war. A fair summary of the argument by author "Pamela" is here:

Iran must be disarmed.

I would not dispose cavalierly of precious life. But the essential question is- is it appropriate for a country to defend itself? Yes. Iran, along with China, and North Korea are monstrous aggressors, whose first victims are against their own people. But if those very same people by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness couldn't overthrow their leaders, their oppressors, they must pay the price of the sins of their government. When should we attack them? At the first sign of aggresion by them, in other words NOW. We should fight them with every means we have. We must remove the comforting blinders of complicity and appeasement and recognize that Iran attacks by proxy (IE Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, tricky business). The fact is the Iranian regime has declared war on the West.

She's mad, you know. Quite mad. The whole article has so many "features" (as Microsoft uses to describe unwanted and buggy additions to its products). Read if you dare. But I want to comment on just two.

The most interesting part of the article is her presupposition is that the USA is up for the job. To me, it's an odd thing: thinking your country is omnipotent. I wouldn't say that it's a American characteristic in general. Most Americans I've met do not think their homeland is all powerful. Nor do they wish their country to act as if they were - quite the opposite. But this belief of "all-leistungsfähige" is a quality found almost uniquely among Americans. I can't think of any of the 190-odd nations that believes in their ability of "go anywhere, invade anywhere, take anywhere". Even the Soviets were more cautious than that, as were the Brits in their prime.

If we're going to listen to armchair pundits on the subject, why not take another American - Gary "War Nerd" Brecher - instead? His Super War Preview may be nearly a year old, but it is definitely less obsolete than day-old "Nuclear Iran":

In my "Quagmire Bowl" article I said the Iraq war probably wouldn't be fatal. It's definitely hurt us, but it won't mean the downfall of America. Well, if we invade Iran, that bet is off. All bets are off. People don't realize how fast a Superpower can fall. It only takes one invasion too many. Napoleon was unstoppable before he invaded Russia. So was Hitler. Now France and Germany are "Old Europe." Invading the wrong country can age you faster than driving a Long Beach bus on the night shift. Invading Iran helped end the win-streak of the best, biggest Empire of all, the Romans...

Then the War Nerd gives fact after fact after fact why any invasion of Iran would be a bad idea for the invader. For example, he mentions that there's 18 million men of military age in that country. I consider that an important fact by itself. I could quote line after line; paragraph after paragraph, but why should I? You know where the link is, and this time, I recommend you click it. In my opinion, Gary Brecher gives enough evidence to damn any further Axis-Of-Evil adventures in Teheran's direction.

But even if the facts don't interest you (and they don't seem to interest Pamela, our Ayn Rand-wannabe), there's another reason to IED her argument. This time, it's a moral one. I'll repeat my quote:

But if those very same people by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness couldn't overthrow their leaders, their oppressors, they must pay the price of the sins of their government.

In other words, she advocates collective punishment, which is against the Fourth Geneva Convention (Part III, Article 33.). It's a war crime. It also shows she's an asshole, and an ignorant one at that. Has she ever lived under what she considers an "oppressive" government? I doubt it. Let's put it this way: as a thought experiment, you are given two choices in life. Choice A: make no trouble, work at your job, and feed your family. Likelihood of success: 99%. Choice B: move to overthrow your government. (Here, we're talking about armed insurrection, and not just a letter to the editor in your local newspaper.) Likelihood of success: less than 1%; thus the likelihood of messy, bloody, disgraceful failure, with blowback affecting your loved ones: more than 99%. Most governments - democratic or not - like to skew the odds heavily in favor of A, and many are successful at this. This is why very, very few people go for the armed insurrection route. It ain't worth it.

The choices are generally not that stark in real life, so there's many other options available. Such as C: leave said oppressive government. These choices can be subdivided further. Do you take C1 (board a plane illegally) or C2 (apply to study abroad, in the hope that you'll score a permanent visa there?) And so on.

I think Pamela is pretending - if not to the public, then to herself, that if she were under the yoke of a country like Iran, she would be part of the "Fight the Power" brigade B. To that, I call bullshit. I think she's a not so bright, superficial woman who would lack the moral strength for such an occasion. Her strength lie elsewhere, such as munging for cameras. But I could be wrong. If she feels so strongly about overthrowing Iran, then she can do the one concrete thing about it she can - enlist.

Vietnamese Word of the Week: Bán Độ

2005-12-22T17:31:00.000+07:00

Bán Độ: to fix a match:

After five days of repeated denial and intense interrogation by police officers, Van Quyen, 20, admitted to collaborating with a local gambling ring for US$80,000. The gang is allegedly masterminded by former national player Nguyen Phi Hung.

The story came to light after several players of Vietnam's U23 team revealed they were lured by Van Quyen to rig the 23rd Southeast Asian (SEA) Games match between Vietnam and Myanmar on Nov. 24.

Forward Quoc Vuong was also arrested for being involved in the case. Other players also face questioning.

That wasn't the only time a game was fixed:

In the semifinal game with Malaysia Dec. 2, Van Truong lost control of the ball 18 times in the first half. He and his ‘teammate’ Bat Hieu coordinated to cough up the ball allowing Azlan Ismail in the 33rd minute to open the score.
The behind-the-scenes betting gang wanted a draw during the official 90 minutes of the game to be able to collect on all of the bets made with them.
Cong Vinh, playing honestly, broke through the rival defensive and took his side to a 2-1 lead, causing the four suspected players to make more mistakes, but other honest team members played cautious and covered them.

It wasn't just the players. The coaches were in on the action:

At least one member of the Vietnamese football team’s coaching board was informed of the plot two and a half hours before the match against Malaysia, confirmed a source close to Thanh Nien.

The source said a footballer on the team heard of the news and immediately reported it to his assistant coach, who never notified coach [Alfred] Riedl.

The Vietnamese people I know are really pissed off about it. They take football seriously. So am I, for several reasons. There's my wife, Vietnamese that she is. I also happen to live here, which color my sympathies somewhat. But it's not just that.

There was a little bit of football-related homework I gave a fortnight ago to some children (ages 10-11) in a local school. It contained such questions such as "Who is your favorite football player?" And I remember the name "Van Quyen" (or I should say, "Văn Quyến") coming up in answers a few times. The kiddies want to believe in their national team, and who could have blamed them?

I don't wonder at all how they feel now.

I'm back.

2005-12-05T11:46:00.000+07:00

I got ADSL. And married. But not in that order.

Hiatus

2005-08-01T15:51:00.000+07:00

We're moving house today. I like the curent place - wide, airy rooms, fans, modern bathrooms, and a roof that you can soak up cool air after a hard day at work. The problem is the flatmates. (There's a story in there, but now is not the time to tell it.)

So we're off. We now inhabit a new unit about a km to the north west, and pretty close to the airport it is. The problem is that we leave behind the ADSL connection as well. It will be a couple of weeks before we get a connection up again. That makes blogging harder. For the time being, this blog is on ice. Service will resume shortly.

Cassettes in English classrooms - why I dislike them

2005-07-22T13:51:00.000+07:00

Fellow Blog Readers: what medium do you like to use to listen to music? Cassettes or CDs? If you don't spend a lot of time driving in your car, you probably answered "CDs". (Unless you are one of those who answered "Records". Or you could be one of those MP3 listening folk. Good for you! But this post is about teaching. Few schools use iPods, and even fewer expect you to mix up the decks. Tapes and CDs are the basic options here, as they can be played on cheap, portable stereos.)

So how do these media feature in English teaching? 95% of the time, schools choose a textbook for a class. It is extremely unusual to do without a textbook: they provide a framework for the class, and provide lots of activities to test speaking, reading and so on. Schools also choose the accompanying class CD or cassette, which is sold under the same brand name. Why? These media are used for listening activities, because listening is a core skill for language acquisition. From time to time, the students will be asked to answer a few questions from their New Buzzword textbooks which involve a corresponding tapescript from the New Buzzword class cassette. For example, the students are asked to listen to Jack and Jill as they walk up the hill. What do they want to get? (A pail of water.) Do they get it? (No.) Do they walk down? (No, they tumble down.)

Last year, I taught at one school which used CDs exclusively, and I was content. CDs are light, and they can generally (but not always) be cued to the right spot in seconds. Before class, you fast forward to desired track number x by pressing the fast-forward button x times. The LCD screen tells you where you are. Sorted. Later one, you may need to rewind - since students always need to hear the track again. So one just presses the rewind button once.

I guess I was naïve. Working at that school, I got the impression that CDs were the norm - not the exception - as far as teaching English is concerned. But I learned I was wrong when I started doing part-time work at other schools. In Việt Nam, tapes are the norm. That's a shame, as I think CDs are far superior for teaching.

To start with, they are a purely sequential medium. One has to cue the tape to the right spot before the lesson, adding unwanted preparation time. Sometimes, that involves a few minutes of forwarding and rewinding while attempting to find the end of some infinitesimally small section. When it comes to listen to the track again, there's another round of rewinding. Like before, time is wasted while trying to find the exact place to start. My problem with this is not that it is embarrassing; rather, it breaks the flow of the exercise. Step 1: Rewind. Step 2: Play. If not at the right spot, repeat step 1. If I've gone too far, go to step 3: fast-forward. Then do step 2 again. It helps immensely if there is a counter on the machine, but few do.

Another problem with tapes is when I have to skip over sections of the textbook I dislike. I don't dislike them because they are uncool or boring, but that they are useless. Some examples:

Listen and check your answers. This perversion is common in American Headway - the McDonalds of the English textbook world. The students have to answer some questions. Afterwards, the listen to a tapescript to see if they're right. I never do this. Never. You don't know if they're wrong, because the students don't say anything. But worse, the students often don't know if they're wrong either. (After all, their listening skills may not be up to scratch.) I prefer to get the answers from the students themselves. This approach provides more error-checking and more speaking.
Grammar focus. The idea (from New Interchange, another textbook I've come to dislike) is that the tape explains grammar to you. Fuck that, and fuck that for a sick joke. The students don't get any interaction out of it. I prefer to elicit a whole vocabulary table from the students: "I am, you are, he/she/it is..." Occasionally, write a few mistakes on the board, and act dumb, such as "I have like him". Is this right? (No!) It's more fun, and the activity centres around the students.
Drilling vocabulary. This is another dumb idea from New Interchange. I might play the tape once, but once is enough. Sometimes, I eschew the tapescript altogether, and teach it my own way. Tapes don't give any concept check, such as (say) the difference between a suburb and the countryside.

Another disadvantage of tapes is when it is time to copy the medium. It is cheaper to buy one tape or CD and copy it than purchase 100 tapes or CDs - and most (but not all) schools here are untroubled by intellectual property infringement. Alas, tapes are harder and slower to copy. Double cassette players copy, but then you have to wait for tape 1 to play while tape 2 records. There's also the possibility of distortion from repeated recordings. By contrast, a CD burner may take time to set up, but does its job, and is available on many PCs.

Not that CDs don't have their problems. The tracks have to be organized just right. It is no use if you have one track per-page, but then have 3 listening actives on it. In this case, the utility of the CD descends to that of a tape, because you are back to fast-forwarding and rewinding at random. But that's the worst case scenario. In general, CDs dump onto tapes.

General William C. Westmoreland (1914 - 2005)

2005-07-20T13:17:00.000+07:00

I heard the news today (Oh boy!) from fellow blogateers Driftglass and Billmon, an article from The Guardian, and finally a nice little obituary from the Times Online. Death appears to be due to "natural causes", polite longhand for "old age". The Times article starts:

Vietnam commander whose big battalions failed to overwhelm the communist enemy

ALTHOUGH he had been retired from the US Army for three years by the time Saigon finally fell to Vietnamese Communist forces in 1975, it was William Westmoreland who oversaw the build-up of forces and shaped the tactics that characterised the battles America fought against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong between 1964 and 1968. Taking over what was known as Military Assistance Command in Vietnam in June 1964, he aimed to fight large-scale set-piece battles against the communists, based largely on his experiences as an infantry commander in the Second World War.

Later his optimistic reports of the way the fighting was going were regarded as having contributed to the public’s deep disillusionment, when it became clear that massive American firepower and air mobility were having little effect on the enemy’s morale or capacity to continue fighting. The famous Tet offensive of January 1968, though it was in fact a military defeat for the North Vietnamese, came as a shock to the American public and did much to alter perception of the war at home.

In retirement from the Army after 1972, Westmoreland roamed the country restlessly, making speeches defending the American role in Vietnam and seeking to vindicate his own as a commander in the field. This effort culminated in his famous and costly libel action against the CBS network, which had criticised his tactics. This Westmoreland saw as a battle for his, and the Army’s, honour.

The last paragraph explains why I won't be shedding any tears for the bastard. Imagine you are an incompetent general in charge of a counter-insurgency war which kills or mutilates about a million people, and displaces a few million more. You survive until it is time to leave your job. Do you:

Retreat into obscurity, with the option of a little reflection and soul searching on the side?
Use your fame or notoriety to help the folks you hurt? (There are several possibilities here. Do you form your own charity, or jump on the board of another one? Do you specialize in areas such as land-mine clearing, or do you generalize by providing aid to the Vietnamese people as a whole? The permutations are endless.)
Spend the next 30 years trying to repair your image?

Westmoreland chose option 3, the most tawdry of the three. (To compare, Nixon - a President during the conflict - wisely opted for option 1 for the most part, and Robert S. McNamara - a Secretary of State - went for a variation of option 2 - presidency of the World Bank) For example, in 1985, he served up the following horseshit:

The silver-haired, jut-jawed officer, who rose through the ranks quickly during World War II and later became superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., contended the United States did not lose the conflict in Southeast Asia.

``We held the line. We stopped the falling of the dominoes,'' he said in 1985 at the 20th anniversary of the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade's assignment to Vietnam. ``It's not that we lost the war militarily. The fact is, we as a nation did not make good our commitment to the South Vietnamese.''

This was spoken at a time when there was no more South Việt Nam, a Communist Laos, and Vietnamese troops were also in Cambodia, trying to destroy the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. Of course America lost. Would a victorious power need to evacuate its embassies in a hurry? Such as those in Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn? (The answer is "no", for those who are still finding it hard to answer this question.)

He didn't stop the falling of the dominoes either. The people who did were people like Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore, and Bhumibol Adulyadej, King Rama IX of Thailand. Honourable mention goes to the British who did what Westmoreland could not - win a successful counterinsurgency war in Malaysia. Dishonorable mention goes to General Suharto of Indonesia, who stabilized that domino all right - at the cost of about a million dead.

Well, it is too late for Westmoreland to realize it. I doubt he would have understood if he lived on to the next ice age. A lot of people ossify in their thinking as they get older, and this general never seemed to be that open to fresh ideas in the first place. Leaving this aside, there are also psychological defense reactions at work. Imagine you start questioning - really questioning - what bad things you've done. There's the danger of waking up one night with the realization you've got the blood of millions on your hands. Most people couldn't take this, and Westmoreland - who saw himself and his army as honourable - would be even more aghast at the cognitive dissonance involved.

It looks like there's not going to be any more Self-Deception Whistlestop Tours for this old general. He's dead.

A Lot Like Nostalgia

2005-07-14T12:07:00.000+07:00

Nostalgia is getting worse, judging by the movie A Lot like Love. When I was a child it took about 20 years to elapse from spacetime point A to B, where B involves getting all misty eyed and weepy for ever-sundered A. I'm just old enough to remember the 70s movie Grease - a paean to the fictitious hot-rod culture of the 50s. About a decade later, it was the era of the 60s flashbacks, with programs like The Wonder Years, and lots of Việt Nam-era war movies. In the times since, I've noticed the nostalgia cycle getting shorter and shorter. Going by A Lot like Love, we now are down to 5 years. Five fucking years for nostalgia to kick in. That's seriously sick.

It makes me wonder as to the possibility - say, by 2012 - these cycles are going to shorter and shorter until we all hit some sort of nostalgia singularity. Some one-hit wonder hits his or her personal apogee in a week and then crashes. A week later, the magazines print the inevitable "Where are they now?" obits for the poor ex-celebrity. On the other hand, Peak Oil will probably interrupt this process. In the future, the only nostalgia people will have is for enough petrol to drive down to the shops. Oh, and having enough to eat. But I think I'm getting sidetracked here...

You can observe a lot of nostalgia in this flick. At the start, we meet the main characters seven years ago, when they are decked in full grunge/Reality Bites/op-shop mode. A few years later, we move to the start of the 90's dot-com craze, where our hero is trying to get venture capital for his on-line diaper dispenser company. Then comes the dot-com collapse. A few years after that, the inevitable happy ending. The whole film is a rambling story about two people who fall in love (as you know they would) after lots of accidental meetings and departures over a seven year span, with lots of cultural references mixed in. You notice those references more when they go over the heads of the Vietnamese audience I saw it with. To give an example, you had the hero's shady manager's Toyota Hilux repossessed after the company went belly up. (From their perspective, the dot com collapse could be seen as a good thing. It's one reason why there's a lot of outsourcing in this part of the world.)

The "tell-a-story-over-lots-of-year-in-a-few-hours-of-screen-time" works if you are dealing with characters and situations of grave importance. Martin Scorsese is a past master of this, and he did it with mob flicks like Casino and Goodfellas. The same can be observed in other crime flicks like Scarface and The Godfather II. You see your antiheroes and anti heroines rise, hit his peak, and then fall, in epic progression. But it's hard to pull it off when you are dealing with vapid slackers.

How vapid are the characters in A Lot Like Love? After a three year absence, our lovers meet each other in Los Angeles. They hit it off, have a few ups and downs at a New Years Eve party, and crash at the hero's place. But the great tragedy here is that he has to go to San Francisco the next day to start at the aforementioned dot com company. The heroine wakes up the next morning to see the hero already gone, and nary a forwarding letter. He has to go, you understand. Love will tear them apart, again. Or work. Or maybe it's the distance. Never mind that the two cities are just 800 km apart, which can be covered in a day on California's great Interstate network. Or that phone calls are cheap, and reliable mail in available. In their world, these are insurmountable obstacles to a long-distance relationship. Can you see why I found the characters so uncompelling, and their banter about "first strikes" so contrived?

At a mere 107 minutes, it seemed like it was too long. For a supposed romantic comedy, I noticed how little the audience was laughing. 3/10.

London Burning

2005-07-07T17:31:00.000+07:00

Multiple blasts paralyse London

Firefighters aid an injured passenger at Aldgate station Several people have been injured after explosions on the Underground network and a double-decker bus in London. A police spokesman said there were "quite a large number of casualties" at Aldgate Tube Station.

The map at the bottom shows where the explosions occured. It makes me anxious, to be honest. One of the explosions happened at Edgeware Road station. My sister lives at nearby Notting Hill. And since the bangs happened around communing time, I'm a little bit scared for her. I've sent off one email, but I've recieved no reply.

How quickly people find things out - even in this part of the world. One teacher got a phone call from an acquaintance watching CNN. People overheard, and asked questions. Others hit Google News. Distressing pictures were shown. (For example, this picture of a bandaged woman was on the front page of the BBC when I was viewing it.) All of this in under an hour. Another hour later, I hear there are two confirmed fatalities, with more to come.

Many of my teachers are from the U.K., if not from London itself. More than half have visited that city. Some had lived there. Many have relatives in that city. In this school, the London explosions are a big story.

My prayers go out to all involved in the blast. Especially my sister. May she be safe.

UPDATE: My sister emailed me (and family and friends) to say she is safe. She even apologized for her "blanket email". No apology necessary: I'm glad to know she is alive.

Meanwhile, Darp also posted on the subject with the exact same title. Don Arthur of Catallaxy analyses the parallels with Madrid.

Driftglass on Rumsfeld

2005-07-04T22:25:00.000+07:00

Here's his take on the man.

Rummy always struck me as one of the "Quint-from-Jaws" guys of this Administration.

Deranged shark-hunter who’s working out God-knows-what personal demons by taking a boat that’s way too fucking small deep into lethal waters, and once the peril of following his lunatic plan becomes clear, he decides the best course of action would be to smash the radio.

You can just imagines him pumped up on testosterone until it’s squirting out his tear ducts, bragging to Bush, “I'll catch these terrorists for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish. Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. …

And most especially, “I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no mates, there's too many captains on this island. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.”

Difference being that Big Don hasn’t ever actually been on a boat, or hunted Great Whites, or floated in the water and watched friends die. He’s nothing but a swagger-and-thesaurus manure dispenser with bulletproof job security because the one guy who can fire him is also the one guy who is actually stupid enough to keep take big bites out of Rummy’s guano-burgers and ask for seconds.

Read it all. It's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.