Nothing But Words

I’ve already gone ahead and checked with Penn’s Japanese department. They don’t have a class in the summer, but they do have an introductory Japanese class I can take in the Fall. My goal is to not have to completely depend on Maria or pantomime for the entire time we’re living in Tokyo.

A while back Maria got me an instructional Japanese book, but until now I wasn’t motivated enough to dig into it. I skimmed through it last night, and learned that the Japanese never use more than one consonant in a row. And on my previous trips to Japan I learned that Japanese words always end in a vowel sound, with the exception of “N” (e.g. udon). The tricky thing with English words that have been assimilated into Japanese is figuring out what vowel the Japanese will stick at the end of them. The funniest one is “cheese,” which the Japanese say when having their picture taken, just like we do. But a silent vowel at the end isn’t good enough for them, so they say “cheese-u,” which means they often end up with a funny look on their face in pictures .

As you probably know, the Japanese can’t say “L”, so if you put that together with the above rules, when a Japanese person tries to say an English word like “drill,” it comes out at “diriro.” It also explains why, while living with my mother-in-law in California, every time she offered me a “salad” with dinner, I thought she was asking me if I wanted some “sourdough.”

But I’m sure the Japanese I encounter next year will have even more fun as they bear witness to me butchering their language.

Several months ago Maria applied for a research grant from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Specifically, she applied for the International Affairs Fellowship in Japan. CFR awards this fellowship to two people each year, and the competition is intense. I’ve been sworn to secrecy until now, as Maria wanted to get through the interview and find out whether she got it or not before letting me blab about it . The interview was a few weeks ago, and Maria felt that it went badly. I don’t pretend to understand the specifics of her research, but my impression is that she presented a high risk/high payoff proposal, and that the reaction was very cautious. But today she got the letter saying she was awarded a fellowship for 2007!

The fellowship entails living in Japan for about 5 months, so before Maria went for the interview I talked with my boss about the situation. She thought it was an exciting opportunity, and gave a preliminary OK to the idea of me working remotely from Japan for the duration of the fellowship. I’ve worked here long enough that I know my projects, co-workers, and clients well enough that I can continue to be productive even from the other side of the world. An upside to being a programmer is that as long as I have a decent PC, a fast internet connection, email, a telephone, and instant messaging, I don’t really need to be in the office.

So it looks like we’ll be living in Tokyo from January through May (and maybe June) of 2007! Maria’s fellowship will cover most of our living expenses, and they’ll help us find a place to live as well. Between now and January I’ll have to hunker down and try to at least master “taxicab Japanese” so I can get around on my own. We’ll bring the boys of course – we can enroll Kai in an international school, where he can speak English but still learn some Japanese. We’ll have to figure out some babysitting arrangements for Eidan, but I’m sure that’s a solvable problem (with the time difference between the US and Japan, I’ll probably take care of him for part of the day and do some of my work at night).

I can’t tell you how excited we are!

Here’s some information about the fellowship from the CFR site:

In 1997, the Council on Foreign Relations established the International Affairs Fellowship in Japan, sponsored by Hitachi, Ltd., to enable a number of outstanding young American leaders and thinkers to expand their intellectual and professional horizons through an extended period of research or related professional activity in Japan…

The goal of the Hitachi Fellowship is to strengthen the U.S.-Japan relationship by expanding American understanding of Japan and enhancing communication among Americans and Japanese on global problems. In this context, the program seeks to address the continuing imbalance in opportunities for Americans and Japanese to get to know each other’s societies and cultures. Tens of thousands of Japanese come to the United States each year to study and work, but only a small number of Americans study or work in Japan. Although this imbalance is difficult to redress on a quantitative basis, the Hitachi Fellowship program seeks to have a positive impact by giving Americans with great leadership capacity the opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of Japan and to develop close relationships with their Japanese counterparts…

The basic term of the fellowship is one year, with a minimum of three months to pursue a program of the fellows own design consisting of policy oriented research or related professional activity. To assure that the fellows spend their time in Japan fruitfully and come into contact with their professional peers, the Council assists Fellows in arranging affiliation with academic, governmental, or private sector institutions in Japan appropriate to their professional interests. Hitachi, Ltd. assists the fellows, as requested, in locating housing and getting settled in the Japanese environment. Fellowships cover living expenses in Japan plus international transportation, health and travel insurance, and necessary research expenses.

I’ve been an astronomy buff all my life, but I’ve never seen a total solar eclipse. There’s going to be a total solar eclipse in two days, but you need to be in Brazil, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, or the Middle East to see it. I came across this very cool map of where to see total eclipses between 2001-2025. The next one that will be visible in the US is in 2017, so mark your calendars .

This article explains what it’s like to witness a solar eclipse, and why they’re visible only within paths that are typically thousands of miles long but only about 100 miles wide:

Only during totality can one observe the pearly white solar corona, as well as the ruddy chromosphere, and prominences – sights that are normally hidden from our view by the brilliant light of the Sun. In addition, darkness similar to 20 or 30 minutes after sundown suddenly falls over the surrounding landscape, allowing the brighter stars and planets to appear while strange and exotic colors rim the horizon…The regions from where the spectacular sight of a totally eclipsed Sun can be seen, however, are strictly confined to a narrow track; the path that the dark central shadow of the Moon (called the “umbra”) traces out over the Earth’s surface. That track may run for thousands of miles, yet may average less than a hundred miles in width. So while the dark lunar shadow might sweep over the Earth twice over a span of just three years, for a specific geographical location, the odds of lying directly in the path of that shadow is very small.

My post yesterday generated a lot of comments at TPMCafe…on the Vietnam War. This sort of thing happens a lot in comment threads: someone will make a small, tangential remark, someone else will disagree with the small remark and write a long response, others will chime in, and before you know it, you’ve got an active discussion thread that has absolutely nothing to do with the original post. But last night someone did offer a criticism that was actually about my post. I thought I’d share it here, along with my response.

The thing the author of this article fails to grasp is that the “blogosphere” is NOT a grassroots medium. It’s constituency is by and large pretty much a narrow slice of life.

It excludes a huge percentage of the population, it’s not representative, and leaders interested in representing the common interests of the people aren’t going to get examples of the diverse voices and needs of the people by relying on blogs and ‘net forums…

Your point about the blogosphere representing a “narrow slice of life” is correct. I never stated otherwise in my post, so I’m not sure why you’re making this a point of criticism. But it’s not as narrow as you suggest, and it continues to grow rapidly. Blogs do exclude a huge percentage of the population, but – with barely half of Americans voting in the first place – so does our political system. Those who don’t vote aren’t lazy or happy with the status quo. They don’t vote because they feel that the political system does not speak to their interests and doesn’t care about them. The blogosphere contains citizens who are deeply concerned with various political issues and are willing to devote time and money to candidates and causes. By trying to ignore and even villify the blogosphere, the Democratic Party is risking the loss of a vibrant and active part of its coalition. It might even drive many of them into the already too large camp of non-voters who are ignored by, and disenchanted with, our political system. Rebuffing energized people who are your natural allies, simply because you can’t control them, is a great way to maintain institutional control of the Party, and it’s also a great way to ensure permanent status as a minority party.

Cross-posted to the TPMCafe “Democrats Table.”

As political blogs have become more influential over the past few years, hostility between several of the most popular left-leaning blogs and the Democratic Party has grown. This is more than the usual tendency of the left to fracture. What we’re seeing with the rise of blogs is a competing power center, and rather than embrace this new source of power and energy, the Democratic Party has been doing its best to run away from it. Glenn Greenwald explains the situation well:

With very few exceptions, national Democrats in Washington see the blogosphere as composed of uninformed, ranting, dirty masses who need to be kept as far away as possible. While they are willing to take your money, many of the Beltway Democrats see the vibrant activism in the blogosphere as some sort of an embarrassment, while others see it as a threat to their feifdoms. As The Times’ review of Crashing the Gate makes clear, national Democrats — although they don’t seem to know it yet — don’t really have the option anymore of ignoring the blogosphere. Its power is growing inexorably and is going to influence the country’s political debates one way or the other…

[Glenn explained to a Senate staffer] …that there is a bursting and eager energy among the literally millions of people who write and read blogs to take meaningful action against the Bush Administration. The people in the blogosphere are highly motivated, informed, and politically engaged. Activating that energy and having national Democrats work cooperatively with the blogosphere (rather than ignore it or scorn it) could make an enormous difference… It is monumentally dumb not to embrace the one mechanism which has the ability to unleash genuinely impassioned, mass citizen action.

[Glenn was rebuffed by the Senator's office]…This response is not uncommon. Many – if not most – national Democrats really are afraid of working with actual citizens, and are particularly afraid of having any involvement at all with the blogosphere. It’s as though they think they need to remain above and separated from the poorly behaved, embarrassing masses. They actually have been scared away from working with the very people who they are supposedly representing and who are on their side.

Bush followers, along with their media allies, recognize the lurking power of the anti-Bush component of the blogosphere and — for that very reason — have been expending considerable efforts recently to demonize it as nothing but fringe, extremist lunatics who are political poison. Rather than combat that demonization, national Democrats — as usual — have meekly acquiesced to it — even internalized it — and are now intimidated to go anywhere near one of the very few vibrant, living and breathing instruments of political activism available to them.

There’s more to this than the Democrats just being intimidated however. What’s happening now between the Democrats and the blogosphere is just the latest example of a pattern in US political party dynamics that goes back at least 100 years. I sent Glenn an email recommending he take a look at the book “Why Americans Don’t Vote” (there’s an updated edition titled “Why Americans Still Don’t Vote“) by political scientists Piven & Cloward. They persuasively argue that both parties have consistently preferred stable and reliable constituencies, even if it meant remaining in minority status, to the risks of bringing new, unpredictable voters into the fold. The parties are even more resistant to the idea of working with new centers of political power – like the blogosphere – which they cannot control.

There’s an interview with Piven that provides a parallel example – Democratic officeholders’ lack of genuine enthusiasm for making voter registration easier:

It’s a long-standing pattern in American electoral politics that the parties compete as much by trying to keep people from the polls as by trying to bring them to the polls. That proposition flies in the face of a kind of truism that’s taught in political science classes that competitive parties try to enlarge turnout. This was a proposition advanced by a very eminent and brilliant political scientist named E.E. Schattschneider. He thinks that it was party competition that led to enlarging the electorate in American political history. That was true for a little while early in the 19th century. But by the end of the 19th century, the parties had discovered another way of competing, by disenfranchising groups that wouldn’t vote for them, by keeping them away from the polls, by making it harder for them to vote. We know it’s true in the South, where blacks and poor whites were kept from the polls, but it was true in the North as well.

We can still see this in electoral politics. In our book we tell the story of our efforts to win agency-based registration to make it possible for people to register to vote when they used other government services. That reform was eventually embodied in federal law in the National Voter Registration Act, known as motor voter. We worked at that reform for 15 years. At the beginning, we thought that liberal Democrats would be our allies because, after all, if we made it easier for poor people and working people and blacks and Hispanics to vote, they would vote for Democrats, so why shouldn’t Mario Cuomo or David Dinkins be on our side? They have the authority to order voter registration in state or city agencies. But they weren’t on our side. They mouthed our principles. They said they were on our side. They slapped us on the back and issued orders, but they didn’t see to it that those orders were implemented. We think it’s because of the destabilizing impact that a large influx of poor and minority voters would have not only on the chances of Mario Cuomo, but on the entire Democratic establishment in New York State, and ditto for David Dinkins and the entire Democratic establishment in New York City.

We also tried to get interest groups like the unions or the social service agencies to work on this, but with very desultory responses. They were willing to support us in principle, but they were not willing to use any organizational capital to see to it that voter registration was offered to people who used the services in social agencies or in the agencies where unions were strong. In both of those instances, organizational maintenance concerns were preeminent. They didn’t want any of the backlash they might experience if they were to make it easy for poor and minority people to vote.

This analysis can be extended to the blogosphere. Not only are blogs energizing new voters, they are raising money and independently promoting their own agendas, and the Democratic Party has no control over them. On the one hand, the blogosphere can bring in voters and money, but on the other, it has the potential to upset the power structure of the Party, which means the current leadership could lose its control of the party organization if it embraced the blogosphere. The Party leadership would prefer to maintain that control, even if it means being relegated to long-term status as the minority party, rather than run the risk of losing control for the sake of winning and becoming the majority party.

I spent most of last week concentrating on breathing. Just a few days after getting over the flu, I got my first (and hopefully last!) sinus infection, which kept me away from just about everything – including blogging – for a while. Now I’m feeling good again, and I’m having a new-found appreciation for my health!

One of the problems with getting older is that I’m starved for new music. In college I was surrounded by people listening to all kinds of cool stuff, so I was hearing new music all the time. I also don’t go to shows anymore, partly because I have kids now, and partly because most of the bands I liked 10 years ago aren’t around anymore. Yesterday I came across two sites that already have me listening to some great music I’ve never heard before, and might even get me out of the house. One is Pandora – tell it a song or band you like and it’ll construct a playlist of similar music, and stream it to your computer. As you listen you can tell it whether you like the songs, and it will continuously refine the playlist based on your feedback. And it’s free – since it streams the songs, you can’t download them (not without some hacking anyway). I imagine they make their money on referral payments from the iTunes links they provide for each song. The other site is Podbop – tell it your city and it’ll tell you what bands will be playing there, and it gives you some sample mp3s of their music. Both sites are simple ideas, but as far as I know, no one’s done these things before, and most good ideas are simple ones.

We took these about a month ago, before Eidan turned into a meatball.

Maria, Kai, and I had the flu this past week. Kai didn’t have it too badly, but I was flat on my back for three days before I started feeling better, and it was the same with Maria. Except she started a week earlier, got better, then relapsed…and then relapsed again. As a special bonus the last time around, she got these weird welts on her face, arms, legs, and throat. Maria thought they made her look like Ferdinand Marcos. Her doctor didn’t have any idea what was causing them, but put her on antiobiotics anyway. They seem to be working – the welts are shrinking and her skin is peeling, as if she had a sunburn. Freaky. Welcome to the wonderful world of 21st century viruses and infections.

Fortunately my mother-in-law is here, so she did her best to take care of everyone. Luckily she and Eidan didn’t get sick. She has taken it upon herself to fatten up Eidan as much as possible. She has an array of bottles and baby food laid out in front of her on the table at all times, angling for every opportunity to get as much food in him as he’ll tolerate. In the two weeks or so she’s been here, she’s transformed him into a big, rolly-poly meatball. He’s also taken to roaring. He likes it when you roar back, and then it becomes a game where you try to out-roar each other. This kid is all boy: in addition to roaring, he loves to play rough. The more you jostle him and wrestle with him, the more he smiles and laughs. And I do mean wrestle: he’ll grab at you and push you as best as a tiny person can. He’s not crawling yet, but he’s on the verge. He gets on his hands and knees and wiggles his butt while moving his arms – soon he’ll get all the different motions going in coordination, and he’ll be on his way. We’ve been warning Kai about this development: I’m certain that once Eidan can move on his own, he’ll want to follow Kai everywhere, and get into all Kai’s stuff.

I still have to finish posting the pictures I promised last week – look for them here soon!