Ox House Camel Door

My sneSpeech™ at Rajeka's Wedding

2011-06-21T03:55:00.007-04:00

This past weekend, my cousin (a Gujarati/Guju like me) married a Bangladeshi aka Bengali aka Bangu.

Stereotypically speaking, Bangus love poetry almost as much as they love fish. Gujus, on the other hand, love making money almost as much as they hate poetry.

During the reception, I decided to break these stereotypes by reciting my own poem:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
But you won’t get either,
Since you married a Guju.

Poppies are orange.
Hibiscus is gray.
If you buy another dog,
Raj will sell it on eBay.

Lilies come in all colors.
You deserve a dozen in blue.
But since this wedding cost so much,
You might get one or two.

Because some people like Krishna,
And some people like Allah.
But for us Gujaratis,
It’s the almighty dollar.

Raj, your new wife,
Should cook you whatever you wish.
But since she’s Bengali,
It will always be fish.

And picking a baby name,
Is such a tough thing to do.
But because of these Bangus,
You’ll have to pick two.

A nickname for family and friends,
Preferably something easy to say,
And a “good name” for the birth certificate,
That you’ll forget by the third day.

And start reading literature.
The Wall Street Journal don’t count.
And when you go to museums,
Just pay the full amount.

So meet each other halfway.
You’ll need each other to lean upon.
Raj, start collecting poetry.
Rebeka, subscribe to Groupon.

Empire State-Rise

2011-04-05T02:35:00.004-04:00

In Manhattan, there aren't too many places where you can watch the sunrise. The horizon is never visible.

But during the filming of this stop-motion, I was finally able to witness—for the first time—the Empire State Building light up.

I always assumed it was instantaneous. But the lights took over a minute to fully fire up. Almost as long as a sunrise. But unlike the sun, you never know what color the Empire State Building will be. In the opening seconds, the lights looked green, but eventually intensified to classic white.

Something every New Yorker should experience first hand: an Empire State-rise.

Why Hindus Like Being Hindus

2010-08-15T01:25:00.014-04:00

So what's up with Hinduism? It's weird. The gods look funny. The rituals are long and always seem to involve either burning something or pouring milk onto it.

The one-god thing that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have is easy to get your head around. But Hinduism has more gods than America has people (330 million seems to be the number that people agree on). All this is xenophobic fodder for douchebags like Joel Stein.

In a modern country that gives the world its lion's share of tech support and medical staff, why do so many people still cling to an outdated, fucked up religion?

It would be presumptuous of me to speak for all Hindus...so let me be presumptuous.

Most of the world was Hindu at one point.

India didn't come up with their gods. The Indo-Europeans did. Who are the Indo-Europeans? They are the parents of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, Vikings, and yes, Hindus. The Greeks eventually stopped worshipping Athena, but we didn't. We call her Saraswati. The Vikings stopped worshipping Thor, but we didn't. We call him Indra. The Romans stopped worshipping Neptune, but we didn't. We call him Varun.

You've seen The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien based that loosely on ancient Viking sagas. These Viking sagas are related to Hindu scriptures which we still read and which have their own version of orcs, elves, wizards and kings that return. So for us, LOTR isn't just entertainment, it's also Sunday school...though many of us get down religiously on Tuesday and/or Thursday.

Hinduism doesn't have a one-size-fits-all moral code.

With rugged individualism being all the rage among Tea Partyers, it's somewhat of a contradiction that they want to teach the Ten Commandments in school and bind everyone to them. Don't get me wrong; the TC is a good start for making a functioning society. We'd all do well to live by them.

However, the Fifth Commandment (Thou shalt not kill) makes a soldier's life difficult. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna explains that priests are not allowed to kill, but warriors are duty-bound to do so. Since I'm from a merchant class, I'm duty-bound to provide goods or services—in my case, architectural services. I'm also duty-bound to make money from these services. I can live with that.

Hindus aren't torn about idol worship.

The First Commandment is also confusing. It's the one about graven images. On the surface, it makes sense. There's one God. Worship Him, not pictures of Him. So far so good.

Jews and Muslims take this to mean not to make any images of God (or even humans), which is why their synagogues and mosques don't have sculptures or paintings. They have beautiful buildings, but they won't adorn them with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Christians are divided on idolatry. Some Christians (mostly Catholics) believe religious images are fine since they venerate God, not replace Him. But every few hundred years, others disagree with this notion of religious images or icons. When this happens, you get the extraordinarily douchy practice of iconoclasm, whereby paintings and sculptures are destroyed, often violently. The Byzantines did this to hundreds of their own churches under Emperor Leo III in the 8th century. Most recently, the Taliban did this to the large Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001, which they blew up.

Don't get me wrong. Hindus are as capable as any other group (religious or not) of extraordinary douchiness when they take their beliefs to ideological extremes. But Hinduism is always friendly to the arts. That's why it's not uncommon to see a picture of Jesus or a statue of Mary in a Hindu's house chilling with Krishna or Ganesh.

As a scientist at heart, I believe we are just overgrown monkeys (actually apes). Therefore, when it comes to contemplating really heady stuff like the underlying power that created and controls the universe, the monkey in me prefers to have illustrations.

Hindus aren't skittish about superstition.

Luck—whether good or bad— is supposed to come from God and not from objects. But tell that to an athlete who carries a lucky charm to a big game. And sailors have myriad rules about what can and can't come onboard (apparently bananas are out and black cats are in; go figure). According to the Bible, these beliefs are sinful. But for Hindus, objects do carry positive and negative energy.

Religion aside, any scientist will tell you that the placebo effect is a real thing, so if you think it'll bring good luck, it will. I'll side with the Hindus on this one.

As far as religions, it's as democratic as it gets.

When you go to a Hindu temple, you'll see people worshipping dozens of different ways: head down, head up, eyes open, eyes closed, standing up, sitting down, lying prone on the ground (yes, some people get down like that, literally). It's all good. That's because we don't have a central governing body of Hinduism. While Christians have formed dozens of religions based on nuanced interpretations of the same Book, Hindus don't even all agree on which gods to worship. But's that fine, and we're all OK with being collectively called Hindu. If you believe a man in an ashram is a walking saint, go ahead. If you don't, that's fine too. You won't get excommunicated.

Hindus aren't that different from westerners on the monotheism/polytheism thing.

Hindus do believe in a universal spirit which we refer to as Bhagwan or Brahman. Christians call this God. Muslims, Allah. Atheists call it physics.

But Hindus also believe in other entities that are more powerful than humans but less powerful than God. But so does any westerner that believes in ghosts or saints. I've gone to Catholic school long enough to know you're stirring up a hornet's nest when you compare Christian veneration of saints to Hindu worship of gods. But sending a prayer to a patron saint instead of directly to God is not that different from Hindus sending a prayer to, let's say Saraswati, instead of to Bhagwan directly. And technically, a child asking for something from St. Nicholas is a form of polytheism since this goes beyond veneration and is intended to produce concrete results.

So Hindus and western theists (and even atheists) ultimately agree there's one big thing that controls everything. Hindus and westerners, though, also tend to break the universe down into digestible chunks, each with its own protector or patron saint. As an architect I can get protection and inspiration from Saint Barbara (patron saint of architects and stonemasons) or from Vishwakarma (god of architecture).

And any time I, or any other surfer, say a prayer or mantra to the sea, instead of to an abstract entity which is often hard for me to contemplate when freezing in 45º water, I'd like to think I'm not performing a damnable offense, especially since all I'm really asking for is good waves.

And last but not least, it's freakin' fun.

Hindu weddings have more dancing and blinged out costumes than The Source Awards. And it lasts a week. Our weddings do also have their fair share of not-so-fun time. But during those mantra-filled hours (yes, hours) guests are free to walk around and do whatever. Our priests and yogis are very disciplined. The rest of us; not so much.

Beyond weddings, Hindu festivals are fun. Dancing with sticks, fireworks, pelting each other with color, cutting down kites with glass-impregnated kite string...all in the name of religion. And those are just four festivals, in a religion that has a festival every week.

Freedom of Religion for...Everyone?

2010-07-31T16:40:00.037-04:00

I'm always touched to receive an email from one of my friends looking out for my best interests as a New Yorker. Just today, one of them sent me this eye-opener:

This is in New York City on Madison Avenue, which is not in France or the Middle East or Yemen. Try to hold a similar Christian event in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or some other Muslim country and see what happens...

This is an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon in several locations throughout NYC where there are mosques with a large number of muslims that cannot fit into the mosque - They fill the surrounding streets, facing east for a couple of hours between about 2 & 4 p.m. - Besides this one at 42nd St & Madison Ave, there is another, even larger group, at 94th St & 3rd Ave, etc., etc. - Also, I presume, you are aware of the dispute over building another "high rise" Mosque a few blocks from "ground zero" - With regard to that one, the "Imam" refuses to disclose where the $110 million dollars to build it is coming from and there is a lawsuit filed to force disclosure of that information - Just some facts FYI - But then, you have your own troubles with the "immigration" problem and the new AZ law - November can't come soon enough [sic].

What's even more shocking than the above email's lax approach to punctuation is that these photos are real. New York City really does allow people to openly practice their religion without locking them up. Actually, these scenes only happen once a year during the Muslim Day Parade and not every Friday, but that's beside the point. The U.S. flag that the worshippers are displaying in the background is also to be ignored.

The point is that freedom of religion shouldn't be taken so literally. The Founding Fathers didn't intend for that freedom to be extended to terrorists, which everyone in these photos clearly are, as evidenced by their choice of headgear.

The email raised another valid point: Try to hold a similar Christian event in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or some other Muslim country and see what happens...

Well, actually, it appears that nothing happens. Perhaps one of my counterparts in the Middle East or India receives a missive from one of his friends saying, "try to hold a similar Islamic event in the United States and see what happens."

But thank you, friends of mine that visit New York City once or twice a year. Thank you for looking out for our safety. I know our city looks like hell to you, but we actually like having crazies from all over the world come here and be themselves. We like going to Indian restaurants and being the only ones who speak English as a first language. We like having an entire city-within-a-city where all the signs are written in Chinese. And yes, we like buying falafels straight from the terrorists.

So please, don't go starting any wars on our behalf. We're OK. And if we're wrong, they'll likely attack our skyscrapers and not your shopping malls, so it's a win-win as far as you're concerned.

The Moderate's Manifesto

2010-03-15T18:19:00.019-04:00

1. Bill O'Reilly is a douchebag. But that doesn't mean that Keith Olbermann isn't also an ass clown. Twenty-four hour cable news is, by definition, shitty. Just because FOX sucks the most, doesn't mean the others don't suck too. CNN being "the most trusted name in news" is as dubious a distinction as me being the coolest kid on the cross-country team.

2. I support gay marriage. But that doesn't mean I'm gonna take off work to wait in line at the Dolce & Gabbana sample sale with you. That's gay.

3. I want decent healthcare. Since I work 50–60 hours a week, it would be nifty to not have to take an entire day off work and get referred to three doctors every time I cough up blood. This doesn't make me Communist, especially since I'm already paying for your Medicare. Joseph McCarthy died in 1957. If you're fond of the way he talked, I can arrange a meeting.

4. Just because I think we should think twice about starting land wars in Asia doesn't mean I want to go thrift-store shopping and exchange vegan recipes with you in Williamsburg.

5. Unless it's really funny, I don't believe in stereotyping anyone...even rich white guys that lived two-and-a-half centuries ago. So please don't throw the Founding Fathers at me to win an argument as if they all shared your hive mentality. Jefferson and Adams didn't agree on anything. They're not about to put aside their differences to make sure I can't see a doctor. Feel free to teabag someone else.

6. Trains in America need to not suck. The locomotive was invented two hundred years ago. Yet a train to DC still takes longer and is more expensive than a flight to Europe. Technology isn't the problem. People trying to turn a profit from a fundamentally unprofitable industry are the problem. Save the free-market lecture, Monopoly Dude. I think competition is great, but the Swiss practically invented capitalism and they have a state-owned rail system (and a pretty bad-ass one at that). Why can't we? Bailed out corporations running on private train tracks don't count.

7. Just because I think kids should learn at least one foreign language (well enough to order a Big Mac in another country, at least ) doesn't mean I think America isn't freakin' awesome. So enough with the Mexi-fences, freedom fries, and douchy cheesesteak vendors (White House Subs is better anyway). Just because foreigners have a hard time with the language when they first get here, doesn't mean their kids won't be fluent. Immigrants assimilate because America rocks, and not because of your stupid lappel pin.

8. I am not a Mac. I am not a PC. Windows sucks, functionally and aesthetically. But, I've been to the Apple Store in the middle of a weekday...a societal freak show. Macs have sexy hardware and a great operating system...and nothing else. iPhoto sucks compared to Picasa. Mac Mail sucks compared to Gmail. Same goes for every other Mac app. Mac users pride themselves on a spirit of rebellion. How about rebelling against Steve Jobs, whose vendetta against Adobe Flash is gonna set online GUIs back a few years. Don't even get me started on the iPad.

Why Avatar Sucked

2010-01-22T00:44:00.018-05:00

After seeing it this weekend, I've been obsessing over Avatar all week. I have a lot of respect for the Golden Globes and Rotten Tomatoes, which awarded this film Best Picture and 82%, respectively. That's why I was shocked to discover for myself that the movie kind of sucked.

Any film that gets Best Picture has to be judged not only for its special effects, but also for its storytelling.

Since most people agree that Avatar had a weak plot , let's just briefly agree on 6 reasons why Avatar's storytelling was lame, and then move on:

1. It was just like every other recent Cameron movie, that is to say A) you know who the good guys are in the first ten minutes and B) the good guys win. One-sentence-too-late spoiler alert: the good guys win.

2. The characters had no depth, despite the 3D glasses.

3. Unpredictably predictable. Was there ever a single point in the film where you didn't know what was going to happen next? When they established that the big tree has the power to move a spirit from one body to another, was there ever a doubt that the same thing would happen to Jake? When they established that every few hundred years, a mega badass could tame those huge pterodactyl-looking things, was these ever a doubt that the same thing would happen to Jake?

4. Its message was about as subtle as a public service announcement. If you're going to give me an allegory about the evils of bulldozing the Amazon rain forest, do you really have to have a bulldozer-looking spaceship bulldozing a rain forest-looking planet? Even thirteen-year-olds are capable of handling a little more abstraction. And what kind of freakin' lame-ass name is "Unobtainium"? You might as well call it "Oilium" since we're throwing Mid-east oil into the allegorical fray.

5. The aliens were boring. When you make a race of space-natives, after you give them the bodies of Earth cats, do you really have to give them the hairdos and accents of African natives and the rituals of South American natives? We get it: they're natives. You didn't need to overlay the mannerisms from Earth natives to drive that point home. Even the Ewoks (which I still don't fully approve of) accomplished nativism with more originality.

6. We've seen this movie before. It was called The Last Samurai, I mean Pocahontas, I mean Fern Gully, I mean Dances with Wolves. The world needs a lot of things right now. Another movie about a white guy going native and out-nativing the natives isn't one of them.

I could belabor the [lack of] narrative artistry more, but let's just acknowledge that the story sucked, the way it was told sucked, and that James Cameron seriously needs to apologize to the other nominees for his Best Picture Golden Globe.

Now onto the special effects, which everyone is calling the best that ever was. While they were pretty, I have to say ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

1. The CG was pretty, but not realistic. Yes the scenes were beautiful and complex, but at the end of the day, you could tell they were done on a computer.

It is not difficult to tell that everything in this frame is computer graphics. Even the washed-out scenery looks fake. The result is an unfortunate video-game feel. Even though the film is based on one, I don't think that's the aesthetic Cameron was going for.

In this frame from The Third & The Seventh by Alex Roman, it's not as easy to tell what is physical model, what is computer model, and what is real. The lighting is convincing as hell. By the way, it's actually ALL computer model, even though it looks like a photograph. If an unemployed architect with no money could do that, why couldn't an overpaid director with $300M do that? (By the way, click on the link above to watch the rest of this short film. Completely worth it.)

2. Avatar missed its mark, stylistically. The thing that separates Avatar from Frank Miller movies (Sin City, 300) and Pixar movies (WALL-E, The Incredibles), is that Avatar wasn't trying to look like a cartoon.

In Sin City, the actors blend well with their animated surroundings because everything is given a deliberate comic-book feel.

The cartoony feel of this scene, however, was not intentional.

3. The CG was used in places where it wasn't needed. I understand the Na'vi have super-slim torsos that aren't possible to accomplish with make-up, but when we're zoomed into their faces, or they're wearing baggy clothing, couldn't they have used live actors then? How about when there are hundreds of Na'vi in the background? Couldn't we have used extras instead of video-game looking CG? I'm sure money wasn't the issue.

Without knowing anything about the making of Avatar, it's easy to see that the laboratory and scientist are real and the avatar is a computer model. The shadows on the avatar's shirt are somewhat more faded and less crisp than the scientist's. The differences are even more noticeable in the movie, where the avatar's motion makes it just awkward enough to destroy the illusion that he's in the same room as the scientist. A live actor with make up could have been used here for a more seamless effect.

For all its narrative shortcomings, Where the Wild Things Are looked way more realistic (and cooler) than Avatar. In this scene, Max and the Wild Thing blend seamlessly with each other because good old-fashioned Muppets were used. Computers were used sparingly in post-production.

Computer technology has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. I Am Legend promised to be an exciting movie during the first half, but then fell apart when they decided to make the mutants from computer graphics. If they had left them as actors with make-up like they did early in the movie when Will came across the hive, it would have been a pretty scary movie to rival 28 Days Later. However, like all movies that try to do too much with CG, it sucked.

We can look back at The Empire Strikes Back nearly thirty years later and still enjoy it. The same will not be true of Avatar. Suck it, James.

Explaining a Foreign Pun

2010-01-14T21:59:00.022-05:00

Nothing kills a joke faster (or slower) than a lengthy explanation. But when the joke is a simple play on words, in a foreign language, which uses a foreign script, which doesn't always display properly on computers, a lengthy explanation complete with rasterized text diagrams is what you get.

I recently posted this Bengali word on a friend's wall:

বাংলাদূশী

To protect her identity, we'll call her Chebeka Roudhury.

I assure you my post was cute and funny. If your computer displays Bengali script properly, and you read Bengali, have yourself a chuckle and then feel free to move along.

If your computer doesn't display Bengali (this means you Chebeka), what I wrote was this:

However, it occurred to me that while Chebeka speaks Bengali, she doesn't read it. Ironically, I don't understand or speak Bengali, but I did teach myself to write it, since it's the language of poets and the most beautiful script in India—but not the world; that's Javanese. Gujarati, on the other hand, is the language of peddlers and money lenders that couldn't be bothered with properly writing out Persian and Sanskrit in their scribbled ledgers. Don't get me wrong, I love being Gujarati, especially because our weddings, holidays, and food kick ass. However, our language, while charming, does not kick ass. A Gujarati like me would never admit that to a Bengali, but I have no problem sharing that with the three people that read this blog, or Chebeka, who stopped reading this post when she got to the word "rasterized", but I digress...

So, the above word was a play on this word:

Bengali, like all Indic scripts, is a syllabic alphabet, meaning each consonant has an inherent vowel sound (the "a" sound in "about"), but you can change that vowel by adding diacritical marks (which is a fancy word for "accents").

That's right. Bangladeshi. India's ichthyophilous neighbors. But by changing one little accent:

We get the following:

Which, when joined back together, gives us my original post:

Bangladouchy: adj. Of or relating to Bengal AND having an inclination toward annoying crowds; Suggested usage: While I love Chebeka to death, she does have a Bangladouchy tendency to drag me out of my chill ass neighborhood, only to gather everyone at an Uptown or West Side douchefest, but good times recommence when I throw a hissy fit and convince everyone to come back to the awesomeness of the East Village.

The Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

2009-11-11T23:25:00.015-05:00

If you're American, you'll know today as Veterans Day. You'll also notice it's one of those national holidays that doesn't conveniently fall on a Monday or Friday to make a three-day weekend. There's a reason for that.

Polish people celebrate today as well. Not as Veterans Day, but as their Independence Day. Latvians call today Lāčplēsis Day. The British, Canadians, Aussies, Barbadians, Bermudans, and South Africans call today Remembrance Day. The French, Belgians, and Kiwis call today Armistice Day. So did we, until 1954.

Other than Christmas, New Year's, and the Olympics, it's the only time Americans celebrate something that non-Americans do.

Germans don't celebrate today.

At 11am on this day in 1918, the Allies signed the Armistice with Germany. This ended World War One. Of course, they didn't call it World War One back then, since they had no reason to think it would have a sequel. They knew it as the Great War or—more poetically—as the War to End All Wars. That second name wasn't bullshit either. People really believed it. Anyone who lived through the horrors of trench warfare would have had a hard time believing that men would develop an appetite for total war again less than two decades later.

When it became clear to the boys in the trenches—and they were literally boys—that they weren't gaining territory or liberating villages, and that their trenches hadn't moved in years, even though millions had died in them, the only reason they could find for their wholesale deaths was that somehow their suffering would mean their children and grandchildren would never have to.

However, nothing brings out the fighting spirit in men more than a lengthy peace. The three decades of peace before World War One culminated with French and German schoolkids being taught to dream of the glorious day when they could bayonet another kid's guts out. In 1914, this is was standard curriculum. In 1918, not so much. By 1938, however, this was back on the school syllabus.

So where do we stand today? The Toms (Brokaw and Hanks) have chosen to ignore World War One's Lost Generation. Instead, they elevated the subsequent Greatest Generation to such cinematic heights that boys today are given an inferiority complex for not having invaded Normandy. One such boy compensated for this by invading two distant countries (vicariously through other much younger boys, of course). That was in response to an attack in which 3,000 Americans were killed. In the ensuing invasions, 250 times as many people have been killed, both among us and them. Victory is still elusive, as is the definition of them.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice was signed ending all wars. It was a gift given to us by 16 and a half million people who died so we wouldn't have to. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to get a refund.

New Rules for Raksha Bandhan

2009-08-04T23:39:00.010-04:00

For those unfamiliar with Raksha Bandhan, here's my explanation in less than twenty words: Sister ties thread on brother and feeds him a sweet. Brother promises to protect sister, then coughs up cash.

If you still feel in the dark, read more here: Raksha Bandhan

Every family celebrates Raksha Bandhan a little differently, but I think it's time to lay down some ground rules we can all agree on.

1. The stronger the knot, the higher the pay: I'm tired of rakris (rakhis, for you Hindi speakers), falling off after two days. This is supposed to be a symbol of the bond between brothers and sisters. So from now on, I'm going to pay 25¢ for each day last year's rakri stayed on. Ladies, if your knotsmanship is good enough to last the entire year, next year I will gladly pay you 25¢ times 365 days plus one dollar for good luck. That's a whopping $92.25. Shilpa, I'm sorry, but this year your rakri fell off after a week. I love you, but next year you won't get a penny more than $2.75.

2. All are welcome: Normally, I only get rakris from my sister, my fois (paternal aunts), and my female first cousins. But really any woman foolish enough to seek my protection is welcome to have it. The two most famous events in Raksha Bandhan history didn't even involve blood relatives. I'm speaking, first, about Draupadi tying part of her sari around Krishna's wrist to stop his bleeding.

The second event involved Rani Karnavati. When she was under attack, she sent a rakri to Mughal Emperor Humayun to ask for his help. He was so touched by this symbolic gesture of the brother-sister bond that he stopped what he was doing (fighting a war) to come to her rescue. Of course he came a bit too late, but it's the thought that counts.

My point though, is that if a Rajasthani queen can give a rakri to a foreign emperor, and the wife of five brothers can give a rakri to God, then Salma Hayek should be allowed to give one to me.

3. Choose your prasad wisely: Enough with the dry Indian sweets. This is a day for sisters to express their love for their brothers. I truly believe India has the best food in the world. I also believe they have the worst dessert. Ladies, pick up some pastry from a German or French bake shop, or at least something from the supermarket candy aisle. Shilpa, your rakri might have fallen off too soon, but you get extra credit for your choice of chocolate. Teenaben, your rakris always last the longest, but c'mon: Cocoa Puffs?!

4. Guys, keep up your end of the deal: First, this means stop at a freakin' ATM the day of Raksha Bandhan. There's no excuse not to have cash in your pockets today. They do so much for us. The least you can do is send a few twenties back their way. And make sure you have plenty of good luck singles to go around.

Second, look out for your sisters, whether they are blood or not. The point to today is that sometimes a brother or friend can help in ways that a husband or boyfriend cannot. If they're having a tough time at home, be a shoulder to cry on. If they're having a tough time at work, visit their boss with a baseball bat.

How to Ride First Class on Greyhound

2009-06-27T01:34:00.017-04:00

Greyhound is the only form of transportation on the planet that makes coach air travel seem humane. But, if you can snag two seats all to yourself, you just got yourself a free upgrade. I take Greyhound's casino bus every weekend. I've gotten pretty good at this. Here's what I do.

1. Sit near the front. People are gamblers by nature, and not just on the casino bus. When they first walk on, they're looking for that two-seat paradise. They see my annoying face taking up half of that dream, and they assume there's got to be something better near the back. When they realize there isn't, they sit their ass down in back of the bus, instead of working their way back up to me. Incidentally, the farther you place yourself from that bathroom in the back, the better. That septic tank might not smell like anything now, but let it slosh around for a few hours.

2. Grab that aisle seat. Personally, I prefer the aisle. More leg room, since you can sprawl out into the walkway. Since I sit near the front, I don't have to deal with too many people walking to and from that glorious septic tank. But the real reason to grab the aisle seat is that people always choose the path of least resistance. When someone realizes that they're gonna have to deal with a neighbor for the next two and a half hours, they'd rather plop down in an empty aisle seat than drag their ass or genitals across my face en route to the window seat.

3. Play dead. People hate sitting next to corpses. If you can't pull off dead, at least play asleep. While people are generally unpleasant to strangers, they are inherently good and—more important—meek. They really don't want to wake you up to say, "Hey, I need to ruin your little two-seat fantasy here, but before I do that, I'm going to give you a faceful of crotch". I'll be honest though. It's hard to pretend to be asleep when you have people hovering over you discussing whether or not to ruin your trip. To help with this, I put on my headphones. If I can't hear them speaking, their conversations can't make me break my poker face.

4. Look scary. For me, this is easy. I'm naturally an ornery-looking dude. On top of that, I learned early in my MTA career that every train car and bus in New York has a crazy guy in it. Be that crazy guy. Years of honing that character now help me in my Greyhound life. For starters, I don't shave that day. Leave the good clothes in your luggage. Since I'm already pretending to be asleep, I up the ante by sleeping with my mouth open. I take it even further by actually leaning over and turning my face toward the empty seat. If you can drool on demand, even better. C'mon. Who wants to sit next to a drooling, homeless-looking, mouth-breather with questionable ideas about personal space?

5. Put your bag on your lap. If your Weekend at Bernie's impression isn't enough of a deterrent, maybe that 20-pound backpack is. That's just another obstacle for them to deal with. In my situation, it just adds to the whole Al-Qaeda vibe I send out. Would you want to sit next to someone who may or may not be strapped to something "interesting"?

6. Lean back. But not your own seat. I'm talking about the seat in front of your empty neighbor. Basically, you need to not only find two empty seats, but you need to find two empty seats behind an empty window seat. When you do, just recline the hell out of the first empty window seat. New Yorkers can tolerate a lot, but if the whole homeless jihadi thing doesn't faze them, the zero leg room will.

7. Get wet. Everything up to now has been Bush League. This is Friday night and Port Authority is coming apart at the seams with casino-goers just ready to pull you down off your first-class high horse. Now it's time to pull out the big guns: your water bottle. You know what you have to do. Do not hesitate. The next two and a half hours of your life depend on this. Just a little bit of water on the front corner of the empty seat is all it takes. Make that spot visible. If the upholstery still hides it, call their attention to it. "That seat's wet for some reason." Trust me. You will not be asked to elaborate. Just don't overdo it. Remember that you're going to take that seat over once we get moving.

8. Do not jump the gun. You've done it. The bus has started moving and that window seat is still open. So now what? You lie down and go to sleep the way God intended: horizontally. Wrong! Next thing you know, some dude rolls up, tells you to put your feet down, and then takes your aisle seat. That-just-happened. My advice to you is to just chill ten minutes or so before breaking your zombie impression. In the first ten minutes, people haven't quite settled into their seats and they'd just as likely grab your aisle seat as stay in their own, especially if their seat mate is particularly rotund and in the process of gorging himself on a pungent, laptop, fast food picnic. After ten minutes, inertia sets in, and people are more likely to tolerate their unfortunate seating arrangement than get their lazy ass up and do something about it.

You are now equipped with tools of unspeakable power. Go Greyhound!

Why Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay Suck Ass

2009-06-23T21:53:00.014-04:00

1. Pearl Harbor.

2. Shia pissed on Marlon Brando's grave by pretending to be him in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Something.

3. Armageddon.

4. In Surf's Up, Shia defiled two of my favorite things (surfing and penguins) with his...himness.

5. Transformers.

Items 1–4 are self-explanatory. They suck ass. If you disagree, you suck ass. Item 5, however, is a divisive topic that warrants discussion.

Transformers sucks. If you liked the cartoon, AND you liked the movie, you are heartless and you're selling out your own childhood. If you didn't like the cartoon, you don't matter.

While I feel I've made my point, I'm surprised by the number of movie aficionados out there who have otherwise good taste in films but feel, for some reason, that Transformers didn't make them want to stick a ball-point pen through their left temple.

So, why do I think Transformers sucked so bad?

I don't think it sucked. It DID suck. What follows is simply a statement of the facts that are:

1. Two hours too long. Michael Bay turned one of the coolest intergalactic wars of good versus evil into another teen movie. I gave Michael Bay 140 minutes of my life. He gave me 20 minutes of Autobots fighting Decepticons, and 120 minutes of Shia LaBoeuf trying to get with Megan Fox. If he was going for realism, Shia would have needed a lot more than 120 minutes.

2. Michael Bay turned Starscream into a little bitch. Starscream is the coolest robot-cum-fighter-jet ever to grace the small screen. He was subversive, always talking back, and always trying to overthrow Megatron. Now, it's freaking ridiculous that a children's cartoon has more nuance, character development, and political intrigue than a feature-length film. Let me remind you that this film is 140 minutes long! Not only does that put it in the ballpark of The Godfather (which decidedly did not lack depth or development), but it's also practically as long as half a season of the Transformers Animated Series when you factor in commercials. Michael Bay, you suck. Starscream was awesome, he was a badass, and you gave him two lines in the whole movie, neither of which was awesome or badass.

3. No Shockwave! Are you fucking kidding me?

4. Too much CG. Too much CG. Too much CG. At a distance, the Transformers seem OK. Some of the action scenes were pretty well done. Don't mistake that for "they were awesome" because NOTHING in Transformers even approaches any of the physical-model fight scenes in Empire or Jedi. Michael Bay, you had $151 million dollars to work with. I'm sure you could have bought some pretty badass physical models. Instead, you squandered it on hyper-cluttered CG robots that look good from a distance but are confusing as hell up close. I mean, really: fifty-faceted lips? I prefer Optimus' classic, two-faceted, immobile underbite from the cartoon.

5. Shia LaBeouf sucks. We've gone through this already.

Transformers II: The Suckfest Continues comes out tomorrow. I haven't heard anything about it. I also haven't heard anything about drinking drain cleaner with a straw. I'm going to go out on a limb and say "Thanks, but no thanks" to both.

You might be tempted to check it out. But let me remind you of two things:

1. Michael Bay is the same man that turned the bombing of Pearl Harbor into a three-hour music video with a cast so annoying that you found yourself secretly pulling for the Japanese.

2. Shia LaBeouf is this ass clown...

...who seriously tried to pull off being this guy...

SoHo Versus Soho

2009-05-12T13:20:00.008-04:00

New York has SoHo (capital S, capital H). It's short for South of Houston. New Yorkers and Americans—yes, they are mutually exclusive—can argue till they're blue in the face about how to pronounce Houston (HOW-stin or HYOO-stin). The New Yorkers are right.

Houston Street (and Houston County, GA incidentally) is named for Georgian lawyer William Houstoun who pronounced his name HOW-stin. Don't ask why the second u got dropped. That's the type of stuff the English language does every now and then, which is why no one can read Chaucer anymore.

Houston, TX was named for Sam Houston, who pronounced his name HYOO-stin. If you want to say HYOO-stin Street, go back to Texas.

Soho in London, however, has nothing to do with Houstoun or Houston or whomever. It was originally a hunting ground. Soho was a popular hunting cry, kind of like tallyho. I don't know what either word means, but any sport where an entire armed cavalry battalion and their dogs are deployed to take down a fox is bound not to make too much sense.

Anyway, that's why SoHo in Manhattan is spelled with a capital H and Soho in London is not.

Oversight

2009-01-21T23:24:00.009-05:00

So when you want to make sure something goes according to plan, you oversee it. You provide oversight, as it were. That way you can look over what's going on.

But when something goes wrong, it was an oversight. You must have overlooked something.

I can see why English puts out some confusion.

Now, does that mean that English generates confusion, or that it extinguishes it?

A Cup of Java(nese)

2008-12-29T10:51:00.012-05:00

What you are looking at above is the awesomest alphabet ever. Technically it's an abugida, but I don't give a shit 'cause it's elegant as hell.

It's the Javanese alphabet, also called carakan. It's related to the slick-ass Brahmic writing systems of India, such as Devanagari, Gujarati, Tamil, etc.

Javanese is one of the many languages spoken in Indonesia. In pre-colonial days, if you wanted to write the Javanese language, you used carakan. They were perfect together, like me and Jenny, and peas and carrots.

But then the Dutch, in typical Euro-douche fashion, replaced carakan with Roman script. Roman script is barely suited for writing a fucked up West Germanic language like Dutch (what else would you call a language that sometimes has four consecutive Es as is zeeëend?). Imagine how useless Roman script is for writing a Polynesian language using Holland's bass-ackward spelling rules.

Then the Japanese liberated Indonesia from the Dutch, and by liberated I mean they brought three years of famine and forced labor. As an added fuck you, they also banned carakan during their occupation.

Today, it's only used for decoration. Not many Javanese people can read or write carakan. If you can, you're considered kind of a badass.

What makes this script particularly freakin' elegant is the fact that just saying the letters in order makes a poem:

Hana caraka
data sawala
padha jayanya
maga bathanga

A very rough translation of this is:

There were two warriors
Their strength was equal.
They had an argument.
Here are the bodies.

In other words, don't mess with Java.

Instant Wilderness

2008-11-11T20:44:00.020-05:00

Fins are freaking scary!

Every surfer will tell you those first few seconds before you identify whether it's a shark or dolphin feel like an eternity. Is it triangular or crescent-shaped? Is it moving up-and-down or side-to-side? If the fin disappears, your eyes are glued to the water's surface to see if it reappears, hoping to God it's one of those animals that need air to survive!

So there I am, alone in the line up. The water's gray and South Jersey murky. A storm just passed, but that creepy feeling hangs around. My high shark alert is making me line up wrong for the few waves that do make it through the wind chop.

Then I see the fin come at me from upcurrent. As always, everything else disappears, and I'm hyper-focused on that swatch of ocean where I last saw the fin. Then I see three more. Definitely a good sign (I think). Dolphins travel in schools, and sharks don't...right? When I finally see one of them drop down the face of a wave, I'm sure I'm in mammalian company.

But I still can't shake that sharky feeling. Those fins are still coming at me for a full mile up the coast, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Dolphin or not, these things outweigh me like three-to-one, each! Being caught in a dolphin migration while I'm the only shark bait in a wetsuit isn't a good feeling. My brain keeps replaying all that Discovery Channel footage of dolphins swimming at the surface being accompanied by large sharks a few yards below. Something makes me feel like the stand-in for the schools of tropical fish being corralled to their premature deaths.

If just one other person were nearby, this would be a really cool experience. I'm not sure why having someone within earshot makes you feel at ease, but it does. A couple of summers ago, an eight-foot shark crept into a crowded line-up. No one panicked. There was almost a party atmosphere, and people were ambivalent about whether to paddle in or not. Any of those people wouldn't have thought twice if they were alone.

I try to catch a wave in, but these fuckers keep dropping in on me. I swear they're worse than shoobies (South Jersey-ese for tourist). I wait a couple of minutes for these tourists to move along, but this caravan is miles deep. I'm still not entirely sure if I'm really scared there are sharks down below, or if I think these dolphins are going to use me as a beach ball the way they do with small sea mammals (again, thanks for the regrettable footage, Discovery Channel).

I catch a wave. If I gash one of these assholes with my fin, that's a fight I'll have to face when the time comes. (The prospect of fighting a 500-pound creature and thirty of his closest friends in their natural environment for which they've been engineered for millions of years isn't particularly appealing.) The wave is amazing, and thankfully fish- and mammal-free.

As I chill on the beach, watching the rest of the procession go by, I admit to being a little embarrassed for my momentary cetaceaphobia. I usually like seeing those sons of bitches in the water, but being close enough to hear them breathe all Vader-like through the tops of their heads did unsettle me. And I don't entirely buy their perma-smiles. There's evil lurking in those skulls, I know it.

But when you're on dry land, it's easy to shake that sharky feeling and laugh at it, the way you and others I've told laugh at me for being scared of Flipper.

As I regain my composure, I realize something: in the middle of crowded South Jersey, I have instant wilderness. I'm not saying that I'm an hour's drive from the great outdoors. I'm saying that one moment I could be buying a pepperoni bagel melt at Wawa (the kick-ass Delaware Valley convenience stores immortalized by Johnny Knoxville's tattoo), and a two-block walk and five-minute paddle later, I've suddenly dropped a few spots on the food chain. Even residents of Anchorage, Alaska who shoot wolves from helicopters can't say that (mainly because Wawas are a Mid-Atlantic thing).

So to all my friends from the "real America" that give me a hard time for being a city-slicker, I say the best way to commune with nature is to take up a sport where "being eaten" is one of the hazards.

I paddle back out, with my shark alert downgraded to kind-of-high.

How Come Everyone Doesn't Skate to Work?

2008-11-04T00:09:00.004-05:00

Recently, I forgot my skateboard in Jersey. For two weeks I had to get around like every other New Yorker, i.e. by walking forever to a subway station, waiting for said subway, and then walking forever from said subway station.

Now I get why New Yorkers are always late!

There's one project site I go to in Alphabet City, way east in Alphabet City. It's practically Brooklyn. I'm not sure if the locals there even know that New York has a subway system since there isn't a station for about a mile radius of this place.

Normally, I can get there in eight minutes on a skateboard. But having been clipped of my wings, my choices were wait for a bus that comes twice an hour and stops every block, or walk.

So I walk. Fucking twenty-two minutes...each way! That's an extra half-hour commuting time I'll never get back for each day I was board-free.

Now, occasionally, I have to travel places beyond reasonable skating range. So I take the subway. But New York isn't London or Paris. There isn't a station every thirty feet. Yes, by US standards, it's a robust network.

But come on, there are definite chinks in the armor: like all points east of Lex and west of Eighth. That's fifty percent of Manhattan.

And even for "short" trips between points within the subway zone, you still have a five- to ten-minute walk from the station at either end of your trip. That's twenty minutes of walking on top of the five-minute wait for the train and the ten-minute—if you're lucky—train ride itself. There's something wrong with having to give yourself forty minutes to travel from SoHo to the Upper West Side. With a skateboard, that commute gets shaved to sub-thirty.

I know a lot of people bike and rollerblade, but they're not as convenient as skateboards. For lunch, are you gonna cart the bike in and out of your building or spend a couple of minutes donning your blades to go to that really good sandwich place six blocks away? No, you're gonna do what most New Yorkers do: pack a crappy lunch or settle for what's on your block.

There are, of course, downsides to the skateboard. I don't get to see much of the city, except for the five feet of asphalt directly in front of me; those pebbles and potholes warrant one's undivided attention.

Every now and then, however, I do get distracted, which brings me to another downside: I officially no longer have any pants without holes in the knees. And I'm talking dress pants here. It's hard for me to get away with torn pin-striped slacks at client meetings. I also no longer have a future in the knee modeling industry.

It's also hard for me to pull off bringing the skateboard to client meetings. But after consistently running ten minutes late, I say "Do you want a presentable but late architect, or do you want a presentable and punctual architect, who happens to have checked a kid's toy at the door?" I usually go sans board for initial meetings and first impressions. Once I hit a certain comfort zone with the team, I then let them know they're dealing with Doogie Houser, RA.

Another downside is that I can't buy nice gloves, ever. It's one thing to tear a pair of jeans every couple of months. I can work with those and make them look a lot more expensive than the $30 I spent on them. But when my gloves double as wrist-guards, I pretty much look at them as disposable hand condoms.

But these are minor inconveniences in a culture that's growing mega-casual anyway. In fact, recently I went to Katie Ford's loft for a Christmas party. I decided to leave the board and skate shoes at home, only to find half the room wearing Chuck Taylors or—more likely—some overpriced derivative thereof. Their shoes didn't have ollie wear, so my torn-up shoes would have had street-cred in a part of society that romanticizes the poor.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that office workers in New York need to skateboard to work en masse. No Razors, no Blades, nor any other wheeled cutlery. Just plain old skateboards.

Hopefully, then, the maître d' at Gramercy Tavern will stop looking at me like I'm an asshole.

Ground Zero...And Then Some

2008-09-15T01:25:00.001-04:00

So as the years go by, I guess the 9/11 anniversary grabs people's attention less and less. The same is true for me. Apathy's a good sign of recovery.

Now when 9/11 comes, I find myself thinking more about failed foreign policy and how shitty it is that my brother's in Iraq...again. It's becoming harder to remember that the whole thing began with a very specific tragedy, and that our first reactions were good ones. That there was a time when you had to wait in line for hours to give blood. A time when firehouse sidewalks were littered with flowers and candles that never went out. That for a brief while red or blue didn't matter. Nor did black, white, or Hispanic for that matter (brown was still an issue, I'm not gonna lie).

But the battle lines formed again, and the relative political apathy of the '90s gave way to the polarization of the...'00s (did we ever agree on a word for this decade yet?).

However, every year, they put up those lights (The Tribute of Light), and we try to put aside our differences and remember the very tragedy itself, i.e. the loss of 3000 people, even if arguably it would appear the architectural loss is the one being commemorated.

In 2002, I wasn't impressed with the lights. Maybe because the air was clear and the beams of light themselves weren't too visible when I looked. Over the years, though, they've grown on me. And maybe air quality is decreasing thereby yielding much more reflective airborne particulates, but the beams really seem to glow these days.

This year, though, in conjunction with my recent return to running, I decide to commemorate 9/11 by jogging to the lights, roughly two miles each way from my apartment. As I'm still rebuilding my endurance, a four-mile run at fast pace seems like more than enough physical exertion.

I get tired even before I hit Canal Street.

The westward jog on Walker from Bowery to Church Street seems about twenty times longer than how it's drawn on my cognitive map.

But once I turn left on Church, it's a brisk straight-away to Ground Zero. Game on.

My sprinting power decreased over the years. Whether it's age or Doritos, I can't say. But once I hit the crowds of tourists, I get my second wind. Maybe it's that I think that running fast will somehow impress total strangers. The veracity of that is laughable in comparison to the practicality of even bothering to do so in a city where no one even knows their neighbors. But whatever: I know I'm not far from the finish.

So after an all-out sprint down the final stretch, I get to Ground Zero on a empty tank and the closest I've ever gotten to runner's high. When I regain my eyesight, I look up to take in the lights. I'd never seen them up close before, in all six years they've put them up.

And you know what? I'm not seeing them up close now either.

Why the f--k are these lights still really far downtown from me? In all the years I've caught glimpses of them in SoHo's narrow streets, I just assumed they were at Ground Zero? Why would anyone assume otherwise?

So you mean to tell me I still have to keep running? The word "f--k" comes to mind, in its full spectrum of definitions.

How much farther? One block? Wall Street? Don't tell me Battery Park?!

!!!

I somehow will my deflated corpse through the Financial District's intestinal mishmash of non-numbered streets. Gotta love those Dutch.

Normally empty at night, the Financial District is now littered with tourists who themselves can't make up their minds whether they should be walking towards the lights or towards where they know Ground Zero is. I don't know anymore what address I'm looking for, but I do know there'll be two big blue lights there.

Half a mile and many lefts and rights later, I eventually arrive at the base of the lights. Actually, I arrive about fifty feet below the base of the lights. Those damn things are unromantically perched atop a four-story parking garage. I'm too tired to voice the expletives in my head.

But I do concede they are pretty. What I thought were two giant spotlights, are actually many lights (a subsequent wiki-ing establishes the number to be 88). The drama of seeing them strike the high cloud cover from such a fore-shortened angle would be more intense if there were any blood left in my brain. Instead, I take in the sights and head home.

Of course, I pass by Ground Zero again, now running on fumes. I don't have the energy to formulate a eulogy in my head. The best I can pull off is a slight nod, imperceptable to the naked eye.

So anyway, even if you've seen the Tribute of Lights from afar, make the journey to see them up close. Definitely worth the journey, even if it's a mile longer round-trip than it should be.

Why Obama?

2008-08-28T22:49:00.000-04:00

Good question. The most obvious answer is that he's a good speaker. That's not a trivial thing. I've covered that in a former post, Less Action More Talk, so I won't belabor that point again here. I'll just recap that if a guy can speak, that guy can lead.

OK, so eloquence may, in fact, be important, but come on; we need more. An obnoxious neo-con mantra these days is: "What are Obama's accomplishments?"

I could argue these points in the affirmative. I could list Obama's accomplishments, but you can check them out here if you're interested. But honestly, it's a bulls--t question to begin with. Can anyone name Lincoln's accomplishments before he became president? How about Kennedy's? FDR's? Sure, you could look those up, but the fact is that presidents with lengthy pre-White House resumes often had lack-luster administrations, e.g. John Quincy Adams, Taft, Eisenhower, and Bush Senior, to name four.

On the other hand, Abe was pretty green when he won the Republican Party's nomination, which, incidentally, he only won because of a kick-ass speech he delivered in the bottom of the ninth. He also had no prior war experience but became one of the most skilled military tacticians to sit in the Oval Office. Had General McClellan listened to this self-taught civilian, the Civil War would have arguably ended a few years and a few hundred thousand deaths earlier.

But going back to the current candidates' accomplishments, how does McCain stack up against Obama? In the interest of full disclosure, I should let it be known that I wanted McCain to win in 2000 (so any supposition that I'm a bleeding-heart liberal is unfounded). But, of course, McCain got the Rove treatment, and a much inferior politician—and person—wound up getting the 2000 Republican nomination. And the Republican Party evolved from rugged individualism to radical Halliburtonism, and somewhere in the confusion, evolution got filed under Fiction and common sense got thrown in the dumpster.

In the meantime, McCain has been trying to get back into bed with the party that stabbed him in the back with a Bob Jones-shaped dagger. He went from a speak-softly-but-carry-a-big-stick progressive conservative to a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later cowboy that thinks Iran is in bed with Al-Qaeda (I guess he never heard about the whole Sunni-Shia thing; maybe they didn't cover that in his well-publicized trips to the Green Zone). Whether or not he really thinks Iraq borders Pakistan remains to be seen; at best it was a senior moment, at worst, that son of a bitch is gonna march this country right off a cliff!

Now of course, McCain has military experience. Not just experience, but under torture, McCain proved that he's a pretty loyal badass. But military experience does not make you qualified to set war policy. MacArthur was the most experienced soldier in the history of the US Army, and that f---er thought nuking China would have been a good idea. Given the choice between a dude that can kill you with his bare hands, and someone that can find Pakistan on a map, I'll let Bachelor Number One be on Bachelor Number Two's Secret Service detail.

Of course, there's also the neo-con scare tactic that Democrats are bad for the economy because they raise taxes. Wrong! As you can see, both will lower taxes for most Americans. Obama, however, will significantly raise taxes for those in the +$603K bracket. If that's your reason for hating Obama, relax; your life is pretty f---ing good and you might have many, many things, but my sympathy won't be among them.

As far as the tired argument about trickle-down economics, go ahead and give a rich guy one thousand dollars; then tell me how much of that trickles down to his employees and how much of that trickles down to cigar shops and strip clubs.

But let's look at what I consider McCain's biggest accomplishment: campaign finance reform. That's really why I wanted him back in 2000: because I didn't like the idea of Exxon—and subsequently Halliburton—setting war policy for us. But Obama's online fund-raising reformed and democratized campaign finance far beyond the reach of McCain-Feingold. Now of course, Obama made the disappointing—and possibly tactically unnecessary—decision to go back on his word and forego public financing. On this, I'll say two things: A) the promise was made before the realization that a fully democratized campaign could be run without public financing, and B) you don't throw away a Rolls Royce just because it has a dent.

Eight years ago, McCain was a maverick all about change. Now, he's a well-trained show horse being handled by the same people that want to do to America what religious fundamentalists did to the Arab world. If you'll recall, when Europe had its Dark Ages, the Arab world was the technological, artistic, and literary center of the world. In fact, much of Greek philosophy lives on today because of the ancient Library of Baghdad, and not the Library of Alexandria, which the Romans sacked much earlier. But the Arabs—like us—headed down the path of political, scientific, and artistic paranoia and created a culture where intellectual thought gave way to religious superstition.

But our social retardation is theoretically reversible.

Hey Ram

2008-08-26T00:15:00.003-04:00

My family lost someone special earlier this summer: Jayanti Sukharamwala (pron. JANE-tee soo-KAH-rum-WAH-lah). For those of you who never met him, let me tell you a little about him. Despite a lifetime amassing accomplishments and friendships, I was disappointed when Googling his name yielded no results. Hopefully, with this post, it will yield at least one.

He was my mother's brother. In India, we call that relationship mama. Yes, my uncle is my mama. In a culture that has a specific name for each of your relatives (your mom's brother, your father's sister, your father's brother's wife, and so on) one is closer to their mama than most of the other two hundred people in one's extended family. For instance, at weddings, a bride is given away by their mama, not their papa—sorry, I couldn't resist. And we always remind ourselves of this relationship by affixing his title to his name. I called him Jayantimama.

But it wasn't his relationship to me that made him special. Anyone not born of his sisters could tell you that. In a culture that places high value on wealth, Jayantimama used to view the world in other terms. Jayantimama used to tell me there are two types of people. Some are like Ram. Some are like Krishna.

Ram, he explained, was a simple man. He was happy living an obedient life with few possessions and a wife he was extremely devoted to.

Krishna, on the other hand, was very sophisticated. He had expensive taste. He was skilled politically and knew how to manipulate the changing alliances around him. He knew how to charm the ladies—lots of ladies—and was definitely mischievous, perhaps making up for all the fun he missed out on in his previous life as Ram.

Jayantimama proudly proclaimed himself a Ram. It was obvious by the way he lived his life. He didn't aggressively pursue money. He counted his wealth by the number of friends he had. He was so happy with his life, running his store, that the only time he was unhappy was on Sundays, when the store was required by law to be closed.

In Jayantimama, I felt I found a kindred spirit. Someone who understood my own life choices. Even down to the way he designed the addition to his house, you could see the simplicity by which he lived his life. Devoid of decoration or ostentatious materials, he was proud of the clean lines, and the surprising coolness and quiet it provided on an otherwise hot, noisy street. With all of the architectural training I have, I doubt I would have designed it differently. In fact, I'm sure in his next life, he's already back as a young minimalist architect-to-be.

He also made fun of elaborate rituals. He used to joke about my aunt's morning puja, saying that God isn't foolish. He knows she uses yesterday's milk. He didn't wear his religion around his neck. He wore it in how he treated people.

Of all the people in our family, his is the life I strive for: a life where you've traveled enough that you no longer need to (or want to). A life where you love your boring, simple job so much that you're absolutely miserable on weekends. A life modest in possessions, but rich in friendships.

Though he came from a family of businessmen, he was more scientist than merchant. His inventions in diamond cutting earned him recognition as far away as China and Belgium. There were even cases of the occasional Belgian traveler making their way to his store and being surprised at how unglamorously he lived. The days I spent in his store talking about philosophy, talking about nothing in particular, not doing a damn thing taught me more about life than all the travels I've done elsewhere. It speaks to his character that most of his customers have been going there since before I was born.

Blood is thicker than water. But I learned from Jayantimama that friendship is most important of all. And in Jayantimama, I lost a friend.

Taj

2008-05-31T02:55:00.001-04:00

Yeah...it was alright. But the one in Atlantic City has better slots and an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Plumbing Should Have Lead

2008-05-25T12:22:00.000-04:00

That's right! Plumbing should have lead. There. I said it.

Now that I have your attention, don't call the New York Board of Architecture to get my licensed revoked.

The point I'm making is etymological. Plumbing comes from the Latin plumbum, which means lead. Pipes (water supply lines, to be precise) used to be made of lead in ancient India, China, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Therefore, plumbing implies a lead-based system.

Nowadays, water supply and waste systems (notice I didn't say plumbing) are made of copper, PVC, or steel. Given our propensity for naming everything after their Latin counterparts (blame that on the Normans and the Roman Catholic Church) you shouldn't call a plumber when you have a leaky faucet. You should call a cuprer, plastiker, or aciarer, respectively.

Why So Many Apostrophes?

2008-05-25T11:39:00.000-04:00

What's with all the apostrophe abuse out there? Perhaps some of you are even asking yourselves, "Shouldn't it be 'Why So Many Apostrophe's?'"

To which I might reply, "Oh, you like apostrophes do you. We'll wh'y th'e he'll do'nt w'e j'us't a'd'd ap'os'tro'ph'es whe're'e'v'e'r t'h'e f''k w'e w'an't!" I would then reach for my handgun.

Third grade grammar: Pluralize a word by adding an s. For example: language killer becomes language killers, not language killer's. So far so good?

Make a singular word possessive by adding an 's (pronounced "apostrophe es"). The language killer's destiny to destroy English through incompetence.

Of course, we may want to make plural words possessive, especially since there are more than one lanugage killer. We do this simply by adding an apostrophe to the s that's already there. The language killers' mission to send me to an early grave by turning the language of Shakespeare into a string of half-thoughts randomly dissected by periods, commas, and of course, those damn apostrophes!

Great, you're still with me.

So how come when a new word comes into the English language, the rules of pluralization change. Take compact discs, which of course have been around for over three decades, but we still grammatically treat them like they just landed from Mars. One CD. Two CDs. NOT two CD's!

The same goes for DVDs, mp3s, jpgs, PDFs, PDAs, STDs, etc. I just saw someone write a post about Mac's. Come on! That's not even an abbreviation! And they've been around since the '70s!

Notice how it's not '70's?

Neck of Fat

2008-05-12T22:30:00.000-04:00

Recently, I heard a CNN talking head saying that Obama delivered Hillary a coup de grâce.

I don't like that phrase. It's pompous. Why can't you say that he "put the nail in her coffin?" Sure, it's crass wording, but CNN certainly isn't above that. Unnecessarily using a French expression when the same sentiment exists in English is simply pretentious.

But what's even more annoying is that people pompous enough to say coup de grâce should at least be stuffy enough to know how to pronounce it.

The French don't always drop sounds off the ends of their words. In fact, they never do that to words that end in a silent -e. Coup de grâce is pronounced KOO DE GRAHSS (or KOODE GRAHSS, if you want to sound mad official... thanks for the tip, Kairos). It means "final blow."

But through overcompensation (or what linguists call hyperforeignism), people tend to drop the -s sound at the end: KOO DE GRAH.

To a French speaker, that sounds like coup de gras, or cou de gras. So, apparently this week, Obama gave Hillary a "neck of fat."

Dude Scared of Blood Gives Blood

2008-03-29T11:13:00.001-04:00

I don't know why I give blood. I can't stand the sight of it. I can tolerate seeing a fair amount of gore in the movies, e.g. disembowelment, amputation, decapitation, and all that other good stuff that's more palatable to us Americans than sex.

But the sight of seeing someone onscreen slit their wrists or someone else's throat puts me out of commission for about ten minutes. Something about vast quantities of blood coming from an imperceivable cut makes me lightheaded, seriously. Even thinking about it now is slowing down my words per minute.

When I was twelve, a diabetic friend of mine showed me how he monitors his blood sugar. When he proceeded to monitor mine, the sight of a pea-sized drop of blood magically emerging from an invisible pin prick suddenly put the whole world on mute. The only sensation I had was that of my own heartbeat doubling and my temperature tripling. Maybe standing up quickly to get a glass of water wasn't the smartest thing. Chugging that glass was even dumber. Next thing I know, my head's on the bath mat, and his family haven't let me live it down since.

Anyway, you get the point: I'm a wuss around blood. Putting a bag of blood in front of me is akin to giving Superman a kryptonite necklace, for any super villains out there that see me as a potential obstacle to world domination.

So when I gave blood in January, I guess it shouldn't have come as a surprise that having skipped breakfast made the ten-minute blood siphoning a bit too much for me to handle. I accidentally caught sight of the translucent tube draining my right arm (I NEVER look at that shit) and I spent the next five minutes getting back into my "happy place." The nurse, seeing that I was—let's say "fading"—tried chit chatting me back to reality. I'm sure that's written in a nurse's manual somewhere, but breaking my meditation didn't work this time. She decided that I'd had enough. She cut me off at half a pint. The worst part is that I would have to wait three months to redeem myself. That's the required wait for donating whole blood again.

About a month later, I'd heard that you can donate platelets every three days. Not wanting to ride out the remaining two months before regaining my manhood, I signed myself up. I probably should have done a little more research though.

You see, giving whole blood takes about ten minutes. That's how long it takes to safely suck out a pint of your yucky red juice. And that's also about how long I can block out the outside world until they patch me back up before stuffing me with juice and donuts and sending me on my way.

Giving platelets, though, is a 90-minute ordeal. They take out several gallons of that vile, gross-out fluid, while intermittently pumping it back into you minus the platelets. So it's not a straightforward siphoning. This involves input and output. And yes, you can feel the blood moving back and forth in your veins.

I did know, however, that you could bring your laptop since you're plugged in for so long, literally. When the nurse starts prepping my left arm, I naively ask him if we could do this on my right arm, me being a South paw. In the past, this involved rolling the machine to the other side of my clinical Lazy Boy. Here, since a platelet machine is apparently a pretty complicated piece of hardware, the preferred solution is to run the tube across my lap to my right arm. Yes, I will spend the next one and a half hours like a dolphin caught in a tangled net of laptop power cables, earphone cables—I was planning to Rosetta Stone Hindi the whole time—and an added tube pumping my own corpuscular sludge back and forth across my crotch like some audio/video cable from hell.

But fuck it, I'm here to redeem myself. I might as well swim with the big fish.

So the machine that saps you of your life force comes with a nifty LCD screen (I hate the term "LCD display" since the D already means "display"). This screen has a progress bar counting down the minutes until your fluids are rightly yours again. If any of you have been on a really long fight where they display a map with a little airplane icon showing you how far you haven't gone, this is like that but with nausea and lightheadedness thrown in.

They also give you a padded handle to squeeze during the "draw cycle," which is a bullshit fancy way of saying "suck-the-life-out-of-you cycle." In retrospect, they may have given me a dildo to squeeze. I wouldn't know because I spend most of my time contemplating how not to pass out. There's also a "return cycle" where they pump your sanguine salsa back into your veins but without the platelets. Something about this reminds me about the scenes in movies where they take your wallet, kick you out of a moving van, but throw bus fare at your feet.

Anyway, you're apparently supposed to NOT go off to your happy place, but rather watch the LCD tell you which cycle you're on. As I said, you're supposed to squeeze the dildo during "draw," but in reality, I was too busy being on a mountaintop in Tibet to pay attention to when I should be squeezing and when I shouldn't be. My mistake: I find out squeezing increases blood flow to your arm. Without the added blood flow, negative pressure builds up in the tube, which feels...weird, to say the least. So here I am, dildo in hand, my fingernails carving crescents into my palms, and the reality that my grasp is directly pumping my blood into that clumsy, godless extension of my circulatory system does not go unnoticed. For someone overcoming their hemophobia by confronting it, this is like an insectophobe French-kissing a cockroach.

The "return cycles" are no better. You can actually feel the blood flowing back into your arm, as if the mechanical parasite decides its eyes are bigger than its stomach and so begins vomiting the excess back into your bloodstream. With the exception of the handful of kegstands I've done in my day (last year) I've never had so much fluid pumped into me. If I'm going to voluntarily induce lightheadness and nausea, I'd prefer for it to be while suspended upside-down over fifteen-and-a-half gallons of beer.

So that's when I realize that Rosetta Stone isn't going to happen today. You see, relaxed thinking activities aren't going to keep my mind off of my disgusting blood dance with this steel vampire.

Q: How do you say "dog" in Hindi?
A: My own blood is streaming across my lap.

Q: How do you say "cat" in Hindi?
A: What part of "My own blood is streaming across my lap" did you not fucking understand.

No, today is going to be about playing fast-paced video games to keep me distracted. Unfortunately, I have none on my laptop.

OK, so today is going to be about just manning up, which is why I came in the first place. Today is going to be about doing some old-fashioned mind over matter that would make Yoda say "Holy shit!"

I look at the progress bar. Eighty-five minutes to go. Those better be some good fucking donuts.

WW2BALA (Part 6): Site Design

2008-02-06T22:45:00.000-05:00

OK, I've been slacking. What do you expect? I waited nearly a decade to get licensed. The only reason I brought myself to write this next post is because there's nothing on TV.

So, where were we? If I'm not mistaken, I'm one post shy of finishing Site Planning. In retrospect, I spent less time studying for this section than I did writing about it.

Make sure you read Who Wants to Be a Licensed Architect Parts 1-5 before continuing. The rest of you, let's jump into fast-paced world of Site Design.

The rules are easy. The forum has tons of good posts regarding this vignette. I won't waste your time with a lot of prosaic repetition. I will posit the following tips:

1. Get your big rocks in first. For this vignette, that means place the big items first. First the office tower, then the restaurant (yes, the plaza and parking lots are bigger, but their shapes are flexible so they function more like the water in the jar-of-rocks metaphor).

2. Learn how to draft objects diagonally. Yes, your site plan will look pretty if everything is placed orthogonally to the compass points, but the grading algorithm doesn't care. Just get your big objects in place without killing trees, even if that means rotating them some arbitrary angle (within programmatic constraints, of course). Actually, on game day, I broke my own rule and tried to draw everything orthogonally. But then I realized I couldn't fit some of the program without just rotating the hell out of everything. Fortunately, I was already comfortable drafting diagonally on this clumsy software.

3. Make your parking lot ugly. I, personally, drop parking spaces wherever I can fit them without killing too many trees: six spaces here, five spaces there, HC spaces somewhere close to the building. Connect them all later with a road. This is much faster than laying out a huge Walmart-esque rectangular lot. The computer doesn't care how pretty your lot is.

4. Make a piazza, not a plaza. In Italy, the negative space between three or four buildings that don't quite fit together is called a "piazza." I think "piazza" is Italian for "a place where the road gets a little wider so you can kind of park your car or play soccer without causing a major traffic jam, most of the time." My point is, let the plaza fill in the negative space left behind by your rapidly strewn master plan. That means: no rectangles. We're going for square footage, not regularity.

Here's a sample. Yes, it's ugly. That's the point (click to enlarge).

Here's an example more in keeping with the orthogonal standard evangelized on the forum. If you have time and don't hit any kinks along the way, by all means try to crank out something along these lines. I banged this one out pretty quickly, but admittedly I was already VERY familiar with this site.

But don't freak out on game day if your parking lot and plaza look a little like this...

Or this...

All I'm saying is that it couldn't hurt to learn the "rotate" tool beforehand. Apparently, this generates more heated debate on the forum than Iraq, so if you do decide to learn to draft non-orthogonally (just in case you need such an evil thing), you're better off keeping it to yourself.

Number of Five Year Olds I Could Take in a Fight

2008-02-06T00:04:00.002-05:00

WW2BALA (Part 5): Get Your Big Rocks in First

2007-10-06T17:09:00.000-04:00

Today, I'm taking a philosophical detour from the otherwise straightforward ARE advice I've been typing out lately. If you came here from the areforum, make sure you check out my previous posts: Who Wants to Be a Licensed Architect (Parts 1 to 4).

I was told this story once. It's cheesy, but I still apply its lessons to almost everything I do. You may have heard it before, but here it goes:

A teacher held up a glass jar, and filled it to the top with rocks. He asked his class if it was full, and they said "Yes." Then he poured some gravel and shook the jar until it filled up all the gaps.

"Now is it full?"

"Yes."

Then he poured in some sand until it filled in all the gaps.

"Now is it full?"

The class was getting wise to his game and shouted "No!"

He finished by adding water until it filled in all the gaps.

The point is: get your big rocks in first.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with the ARE? We'll get to that next time...

Who Wants to Be a Licensed Architect (Part 4): Site Zoning

2007-09-20T22:32:00.001-04:00

Site Zoning

This is easy to practice for, but I personally think it's one of the trickiest vignettes. The rules are simple: draw your building envelope and secondary building area. However the wording is so tricky (to emulate the real-world labyrinth of zoning hell) that it's more a test of reading comprehension than it is a test of architectural knowledge. READ THE PROGRAM TWENTY TIMES. I did.

Here's how I approached this problem in practice and on test day:

I try to be very precise, at least to the one-foot increment to which your cursor snaps. I know the scoring algorithm gives some tolerance, but no one seems to know how much. Imagine drawing your ground line in section and one of your points is two clicks off (that's two feet). Then you end up having to project a vertical line halfway between these two points. Even if you're super precise, the software doesn't let your vertical lines snap to the ground line, and the point you might need to project from could be located at some fraction of a foot. Added to that, if you're two clicks off again, and maybe another two clicks off the top, I'd wager to say that all these compounded inaccuracies could lead to a downgrade.

The very first thing I do is turn the 10' x 10' section grid into a 5' x 10' grid. Buildable heights are usually given in five-foot increments (e.g. 45 feet above benchmark elevation, 65 feet above west property line, etc.). But they give you a crappy 10' x 10' grid on which to draw your section. I break down the Y-axis into 5-foot increments. Here's how:

Zoom into the left Y-axis of the section grid such that you can notice the one-foot snap increment of the cursor. At (0,100) draw a 5-foot radius sketch circle. Now, while still in the "sketch" command, click on (0,110) then (0,120) and so on until you've filled up the entire Y-axis. Where these circles touch clearly marks the five-foot increment. Look at the sample solution below to see what I mean.

Now do the same for the right axis. Theoretically, doing one axis should suffice, especially if you set the cursor cross hairs to full-screen, but in reality, when you're zoomed in, you can't see both axes. Anyway, if you get good at this software (as you should) this process should take less than a minute.

Next, I start to draw all the setbacks on the plan. Pretty self-explanatory. The only suggestion I would make, though, is to use 25-foot RADIUS sketch circles for the high-water-line setback instead of 25-foot diameter circles. I do this for two reasons: because they're easier to place on the high water line since you drag and drop them by their center and because using larger circles more closely approximates the actual curve you need for your setback.

Next, I use sketch lines to project the contour lines to the section at the points where they intersect the section line. Having the section grid divided vertically in five-foot increments comes in handy here.

Once my ground line is in place, I start transferring the other setbacks onto the section. Make sure you get your diagonal sun-access setback on there (your exam will most likely have one of these as well). Anyway, here's my sample solution (click on it to enlarge):

Who Wants to Be a Licensed Architect (Part 3): Site Grading

2007-09-13T22:41:00.002-04:00

Before continuing, make sure you read Parts 1 and 2 first.

Site Planning: SP

I'll start by saying that I read the Kaplan guide for all the graphic sections, including SP. I'll continue by saying that's it's totally unnecessary. All you need to know is how to draft using this clumsy-ass software in your sleep. The only way to do that is to use the practice software from NCARB's site: http://ncarb.org/are/tutorial2.html

The nice thing about the graphic divisions is that you can practice for them while watching TV, while traveling, etc. I was getting sick of spending all of my weekends at the library. It was good to get away from NY, even if I had to be glued to my laptop. Each vignette has its own tricks that you need to know. Once you figure them out on the practice vignette, there won't be any surprises on the exam.

Site Grading:
1. Know what a swale is and how to draw them.

2. The program will indicate a maximum allowable grade. Use sketch circles to make sure your topo lines aren't too close together, particularly in the middle of your swales.

3. Don't disrupt the grade around trees or existing buildings.

4. MAKE SURE YOU PROTECT THE UPHILL CORNER OF YOUR BUILDING FROM WATER.

Just having a swale on either side of your building won't necessarily protect that uphill corner. If you can draw a fall line (the path that rainwater would take) between the uphill entrances of your two swales, then a stream of rainwater can hit your building. One swale should slightly overlap the other.

When I took my exam, I ripped through this vignette first, since it's the easiest. I then did site zoning, which requires a lot of re-reading. I actually found a bunch of errors on my site zoning solution. With about five minutes left, after I was confident that I wouldn't find any more zoning errors, I double-checked my grading solution. I zoomed in to make sure none of my slopes exceeded the maximum allowable (20%).

Then, for some reason, I decided to zoom out to double check that I read the contours right. In my haste, I had misread the map the first time around! Uphill was actually downhill! The swales I cut into the hillside were actually ridges I built up! Four minutes left... After two minutes of furious clicking, I was able to get the correct swales roughly triangulated in. Then a few sketch circles to make sure maximum slope wasn't exceeded. I spent the last thirty seconds fussing with the swales making them pretty and round. The point is: learn this program like the back of your hand.

Here's my sequence as I go through this vignette:

1. Draw a sketch circle with a 2'-6" radius. Then copy it a few dozen times.

2. Visualize your ideal drainage pattern, i.e. two fall lines around the concrete pad. If you can't visualize it, draw two sets of sketch lines around your pad, one on each side.

3. Reshape each existing contour that intersects the pad. Begin by dragging a handle to define the vertex of each swale's "V." The vertex should lie on your ideal fall line.

3. Continue reshaping by dragging two more handles, one for each side of the V's mouth.

4. Once you have all the Vs in place, start shaping the legs of each V so they curve around the pad and each other.

5. Though it's not required, I usually round off the vertex and the mouth of each V with a few extra handles (two extra for the vertex and two extra for each side of the mouth).

6. Drag your sketch circles in place to make sure you didn't exceed the 20% maximum grade. If you did, you should be able to regrade everything in about a minute.

7. Finally, make sure you didn't regrade where the program doesn't allow, e.g. the trees or the existing lights.

Anyway, here's a sample solution (click on it to enlarge):

Next time, we move into the magical world of site zoning. The fun never ends.

Who Wants to Be a Licensed Architect (Part 2): CD, BD/MM and PD

2007-09-12T23:49:00.001-04:00

Here's the second installment of my synopsis for those taking the ARE. For everyone else, I'll be back to my sarcastic self, complaining about who knows what eventually. Right now, my the blog belongs to the architects.

If you're still reading, I assume you got here from the ARE Forum. Make sure you check out Part 1 of this series.

As I mentioned in my last post, I broke the tests down into three groups of three. This post deals with how I studied for the first group: the non-technical multiple choice.

Construction Documents: CD

First I skimmed the AIA contracts: A201 and B141, both with commentary. You can find them here:

http://www.areforum.org/guest/Construction%20Documents%20and%20Services/A201-1997Commentary.pdf
http://www.areforum.org/guest/Construction%20Documents%20and%20Services/B141-1997Commentary.pdf

These contracts are extraordinarily repetitive. So I didn't think it was crucial to retain everything you read. After fifty or so pages of legalese, (and the accompanying architectese commentary) you get a general idea of where culpability and responsibility lie according to the AIA. Of course, you'll probably encounter a lot of things that contradict your own experience. That's the point to these exams. To argue how the profession should be conducted, i.e. the architect has total control and no responsibility. Forget the real world of contract alterations, non-paying GCs, and architects bending over backwards to please the clients' changing whims despite their legal rights. You're only going to be tested on the standard documents and the magical world they represent

There are other contracts beyond A201 and B141 you should know, but I didn't bother. There's enough reading to do as it is.

Then I studied Kaplan. Between your real-life experience and what you read in the AIA contracts, this stuff is pretty common sense.

Brush up on your hazardous materials, i.e. architects don't have a damn thing to do with them! There are notes on the FTP site that say as much, but spread out over multiple pages.

If you have time, you should try to read the Kaplan Architectural History guides, since those questions are scattered through all the exams. Also, there will be a few BD/MM-type questions, so it might be worth reading Kaplan's BD/MM as well. But not essential.

There are random things you should know early on because you'll need it on more than one exam. Things that come to mind are:

formula for the area of circle
number of square feet in an acre
fundamentals of acoustics (yes, they asked an NRC question on CD)

The forum's FTP site had a good PDF on Building Commissioning that I thought was helpful.

That's all I can think of now. I thought this was one of the easier exams because most of my IDP experience involved contract documents, namely drawings. Of all the exams, this one involved the most "common sense." I left the exam feeling that I could have passed or failed, but I think that was mostly because this was my first exam.

Building Design/Materials and Methods: BD/MM

Since so much of my experience is apartment and office renovations, the only materials I know are interior finishes.

Actually, interestingly enough, I had already read Kaplan's BD/MM two years earlier when I was first planning to take the ARE. Life took a few twists and turns, long story short, two years later I didn't feel like re-reading it, so I read Ching's Building Construction Illustrated instead. Much of Kaplan, surprisingly, was still in my head from two years earlier.

Many on the forum recommend Allen. If you're not intimidated by that Bible, then go for it. Personally, I couldn't tell you where to start. I think the index alone is longer than the Kaplan books.

Again, the test had plenty of questions that could have been on CD or PD.

Pre-Design: PD

Kaplan. That's all. Nothing else.

There were a significant amount of CD, BD/MM questions on the exam.

Next post, I'll start discussing the graphic divisions.

Who Wants to Be a Licensed Architect (Part 1): Overview

2007-09-11T22:48:00.003-04:00

I've taken a break from the typical geo-political rantings to talk about the Architect Registration Exam. OK, now that all the non-architects have left the room, this is going to be the first of several posts geared toward the aspiring licensee.

There are a thousand really good posts on the ARE Forum giving overall advice and final synopses for this ordeal. Here's mine. I know the ARE is getting overhauled in 2008, but hopefully some of this information will still be helpful.

Why get licensed?

I don't have a good answer. The tests are expensive. The study guides are expensive. Your salary won't increase just because you got licensed. For me, I took the tests because I broke up with my girlfriend and needed the distraction. Bad reason, but hey, I'm licensed now.

Where did you start?

If you haven't already, register on areforum.org. Without it, I wouldn't have passed.

Here are some great posts that helped me out:
http://www.areforum.org/forums/forum10/20076.html
http://www.areforum.org/forums/forum10/3595.html
http://www.areforum.org/guest/GraphicNotes%5B1%5D.pdf

Any other tips before we get started?

Take your tests as soon as possible. You should, theoretically, be able to rack up your IDP points in three or four years. Take your tests immediately thereafter. You only get dumber after college. I waited almost a decade after I graduated, so I was three times as dumb as when I was first eligible to test.

Also, I know it sounds like BS, but I spent a week or two learning the basics of speed reading. I'm a very slow reader, but learning simple techniques like not mentally vocalizing your words, pacing with your finger, not unintentionally re-reading material really helped me breeze through the study guides for the non-technical multiple choice divisions (CD,BD/MM, PD) which tend to be pretty repetitive. However, studying for the technical divisions (ME, GS, LF) required more thorough reading and sample problem solving. I'd allow more time for those divisions.

I'd heard that listening to classical music helps you study. I tried it and found it helped my concentration, my memory, and it filtered out the ambient noise from the "interesting" people that normally hang out in the Mid-Manhattan Library. Usually, I listen to rock, but I couldn't concentrate. A little Mozart on low volume did the trick. Wagner and Beethoven were a little too distracting (great composers, but their crescendos happen to come in right when you're almost done memorizing the mind-numbing array of masonry joints). If you don't have an extensive classical music collection, subscribe to some free classical-music podcasts. Magnatune has tons: http://magnatune.com/podcasts/

Which study guides did you buy?

None. I was freelancing at the time, which is a fancy way of saying I wasn't working. On my tight budget, it was hard enough to cough up the $1300 for the exams. But I did use the Kaplan (formerly ALS) guides at the public library. For all the New Yorkers out there, the Mid-Manhattan Library (the small, ugly one opposite the ostentatious Beaux Arts one) has all the study guides hidden on the third floor. You can't check them out, but I found it more productive to study there anyway. For everyone else, become friends with your librarian and convince them to carry the Kaplan guides in their reference section.

I really didn't know what my other options were. The forum has a lot of info, but I didn't know how to navigate it all. I didn't know about "Allen" until after I took BD/MM. Ironically, after the whole testing ordeal was over, I realized that "Allen" was one of my college textbooks collecting dust in my parents' attic. I was probably better off not knowing I had it, because it's a bible and I did alright without it. For those who don't know, this is "Allen."

I borrowed the ALS sample test CD from a friend. I found them, if nothing else, to be a confidence builder. If any of you work for a big firm, or know someone who does, you probably have access to these sample tests as well. I definitely recommend them.

I did buy two books by Francis Ching: A Visual Dictionary of Architecture and Building Construction Illustrated. I did read some trash talk on the forum about them, but they worked for me. I'm more visual than verbal. If Sesame Street had a few A.R.E. episodes, I would have been set. Ching was the next best thing. His illustrations are a lot better than Kaplan's. Plus they make a better architecture reference for work than the Kaplan guides do. You can buy them both at Amazon for $56. Click here.

I know a lot of people swear by ArchiFlash (flash cards). I didn't bother because I was cheap. I'm sure they work well, but they're pretty expensive. I think most people who are smart enough to finish architecture school can do alright without them.

Rich's study notes are very helpful. You can find them on the forum's FTP site scattered throughout the various division folders.

As I mentioned, I wasn't working at the time. If any of you can afford to take a leave of absence to study for the multiple choice divisions, I'd recommend that. I know some people can work full-time and read a couple of hours each night. If you have the discipline, do it. Otherwise, take the leave of absence. Whatever you do, don't let this exam-taking nightmare drag on for years. It's not worth it.

The graphic divisions are actually very easy to study for. It's really just about practicing the software, which you can easily do in the evenings while watching TV. Dorf's seminars and solution books come highly praised on the forum. I didn't use them because I didn't have free access to them (unemployed and cheap, remember?). A good portion of the knowledge contained therein can be found on the forum, especially in Professor Dorf's own prolific posts. Incidentally, Professor Dorf passed away while I was still taking these exams. His knowledge and surprising availability will be deeply missed. Just through his omnipresence on the forum, he definitely helped me pass the graphic divisions.

How the hell did you manage to not work all that time?

I have very understanding cousins that let me crash on their couch. I would clean the apartment often, dog-sit for him when I could, and leave town every chance I had to minimize the annoyance of an unkempt wannabe architect camped out in the living room for months on end. Taking the graphic divisions in the middle allowed me to road trip to catch up with friends I hadn't seen in a while. It broke up my tenure on my cousins' couch, allowed me to keep in touch with old friends, allowed me to mix study with a little sight-seeing, and I think my cousins were actually happy to see me again when I returned for my final stretch (at least I hope they were). I also spent some of the time practicing the CAD software at my parents' house. It's amazing how understanding parents can be when you're trying to better yourself professionally.

You'd be surprised how far your savings will stretch when you live a no-frills life and don't have to worry about rent or pride.

How long did it take?

I averaged about two weeks of study per division. Three weeks for the harder divisions. I would take days off here and there to tend to family matters and to give my cousins their space before I became more of a nuisance than I already was. I began studying February 1st. I took my last exam July 2nd. Five months total. I could have finished sooner if I were a more confident test-taker, and if I strictly adhered to my original goal of finishing before the weather got better. Testing in summer is tough, especially if you're addicted to the beach like me.

How did you do on the tests?

I happened to pass every division on the first try. But I didn't, by any means, master any of the material. I wanted to be done with these things as fast as I could so I kept my studying to a minimum.

My confidence was pretty low walking out of every test, especially ME. I didn't learn that much during my various internships. I've done everything from interning at a large corporation, to swinging a hammer on a framing crew, to working as a construction superintendent, to designing at a boutique firm. But when it came to preparing for these exams, there were definitely chinks in my armor. NCARB, if you're reading, I'll be the millionth and first person to say that IDP is broken. If there were more questions on CAD layer standards or what font to use for punch lists, I would have felt much better about these tests. But 99% of the content was stuff that I learned, forgot, and haven't used since college. The fact that I passed them all the first time around is a testament to the fact that the Kaplan books work, the ARE Forum kicks ass, and possibly that one of my friends belongs to a secret society.

Where did you take the tests?

I took most of my tests at Penn Plaza in New York. The 15th floor is better than the 17th floor, because it has windows. I read (and believe) that people test better in rooms with natural daylight.

Sometimes I had difficulty scheduling the date I wanted, since Penn Plaza is a popular test site, so I took BP in Philly, where I have a sister, BT in Delaware, where I have a cousin, and LF in Jersey, where I stayed with my sister again. It helps having a big (and supportive) family.

What order did you take the exams?

I agonized over this for a few days. I read and re-read so many posts. In the end, I'm happy with the order I chose, and it gels with advice I got from others on the forum.

I broke the (discouragingly numerous) nine exams into three groups of three: three non-technical multiple choice, three graphic, and three technical multiple choice. That is to say:

non-technical multiple choice:
Construction Documents (CD)
Building Design/Materials and Methods (BD/MM)
Pre-Design (PD)

graphic:
Site Planning (SP)
Building Planning (BP)
Building Technology (BT)

technical multiple choice:
Mechanical and Electrical Systems (ME)
General Structures (GS)
Lateral Forces (LF)

This order really worked out. There is a lot of overlap in the first three sections. Ideally, I would have studied for those three together and taken all three on consecutive days. When I took CD, they threw in a few BD/MM questions that I didn't know. On BD/MM, there were a few PD questions.

But let's face it. It took you long enough to qualify to take these tests. You're probably eager to get started (as was I). I started with CD because as a CAD monkey, that was pretty much my expertise. I'm sure others can commiserate. If you want to jump into CD without studying for BD/MM and PD as well, by all means.

I put the graphic sections in the middle for two reasons. First, it would be a good break from the library, which I knew I'd be camped out in for one-and-a-half months just to get through the first three tests. Second, I didn't know how hard they would be, and I knew it took longer to get your results back for the graphic sections than for the multiple choice, so I didn't want to take them last, in case I had to retake. The order I took them in made sense in that they went from macro to micro, i.e. you went from designing site plans to designing buildings, to designing ramps and staircases.

Saving the technical for last was a must for me. The previous months of studying countered the brain atrophy caused by a decade of architectural internship. I needed to exercise my brain for a couple of months before it was in any shape to learn how to do math and think logically again. Beyond simple arithmetic and the occasional Pythagorean theorem, most of my math involved knowing my structural engineer's and MEP's phone numbers, which were on speed dial anyway. I picked the order I did because ME seemed like a logical extension of BT, which involved some mechanical design. GS is the next logical step because you'll relearn a lot of structural concepts that you need to know before getting into the specifics of LF.

Any tips for game day?

Yeah. Don't study too much the day before. If you don't know it yet, you won't at this point. I've been told that you should ideally not study for 24 hours before an exam. I found that I did alright if stopped studying by 5pm the day before.

I usually watched a lot of Jeopardy (on DVR) the evening before. I like the show, and I think it works out the parts of your brain that spit out useless information. I don't have scientific corroboration for this, though.

I scheduled my exams as early in the morning as possible. Caffeine is still effective. I'm also all about eating fruit, which I'm otherwise not too religious about. I think a heavy breakfast (my usual) would start to induce a food coma mid-test. I'd avoid testing in the afternoon. You'd be stressed out all morning, and caffeine usually wears off by then. No chance making a Starbuck's run before time runs out.

For the multiple choice tests, as soon as I sit down, I take my scrap paper and write the numbers 1 to 100 (or however many questions are on the test) in one or two vertical columns with blank space to the right of each number. I do this before I finish the intro questionnaire, so take your time. The timer hasn't started yet. Then, during the exam, I race through and answer all the easy ones. Anything involving math, no matter how easy or hard, I'd draw a division sign next to that number on my scrap paper. I'll know to come back to those on the second pass. Yes, I could write "M" for "Math" but that could stand for "Mark". Incidentally, I use the computer's "Mark" feature sparingly. If I marked every question I wasn't sure of, 80% of the questions would be marked. As such, I only mark questions that I have absolutely no clue on. Questions that I'm pretty sure on but not 100%, I'll draw a question mark next to that number on my scrap to remind me to double check that ONLY if I have time left over. There were tons of question marks.

I also use the numbered scrap to help me work through harder questions. If I'm stuck, I'll write out "A, B, C, D" next to the question, and then cross out the choices I can eliminate. If I still can't find an answer, at least I can come back to it later and see which ones I already eliminated.

I do the same for the annoying Roman numeral questions. You know: I only, I and II only, III and IV, etc. I'll write out the Roman numerals, and then circle the ones that are possible. Then I'll see which choices have that combination. If I'm still stuck, I'll write out "A, B, C, D" and then eliminate from there.

For the graphic divisions, I'll get into the specifics for each test later. But for now, the only tip I can suggest is CLEAN YOUR MOUSE. The minute you spend will save you so much time over the next six hours. If you don't know how to clean a mouse, take a look here. By the way, you can use your fingernail instead of a knife, as they suggest. Also, when you scrap the dirt off, make sure it doesn't fall back into the mouse. When it's loose, you have to turn the mouse over and shake it till the dirt falls on your desk.

Next post, I'll get into specifics for how I approached each division.

Christian Activists Interrupt Senate's Hindu Invocation

2007-07-13T00:52:00.001-04:00

The sanctity of this great nation was violated when a Hindu priest, Rajan Zed, was invited to give the opening prayers at the US Senate. The same government that brought us segregation and the Iraq War had its moral high ground compromised when it was forced to tolerate the following invocation:

Let us pray. We meditate on the transcendental glory of the deity supreme, who is inside the heart of the earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of heaven. May he stimulate and illuminate our minds.

Lead us from the unreal to real, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. May we be protected together. May we be nourished together. May we work together with great vigour. May our study be enlightening.

As you can imagine, these blasphemous pagan words of peace and enlightenment are a threat to our American way of life. Fortunately, Christian activists were on hand Thursday*, July* 12 to voice their discontent at this infiltration of polytheism into our Senate* and into our God-given democracy*.

George Washington, Neptune, Venus, and Mercury looked down from atop the Capitol Rotunda in disbelief at this Hindu priest's audacious affront on America's Judeo-Christian monotheistic ideology.

The Apotheosis of Washington, by Constantino Brumidi depicting the ascension of George Washington into the pantheon of Roman gods.

*The consequential fact that Thursday, July, Senate, and democracy are respectively named for a Norse god, a Roman emperor who claimed to be a god, a Roman legislative body of pagans, and an Athenian political system of pagans is totally unrelated to the fact that polytheistic thought should not be tolerated by our society, no matter how peaceful or enlightened, especially now, during our war against religious fundamentalism.

Something, Something 1783

2007-07-02T15:43:00.000-04:00

Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown by John Trumbull. Oil on canvas, 1820.

On what date did America win the War for Independence?

I don't know. I know it happened someday in 1783. They didn't teach us this apparently trivial piece of history in social studies.

Why the hell not!

They teach us that America's independence was born on July 4, 1776. If you call the seven years of murder, rape, and plunder that ensued independence then we're using different dictionaries.

What's the big deal about a bunch of draft-dodging delegates talking big with their quills while farmers and blacksmiths are getting their innards bayoneted?

Let's take a hypothetical. Suppose you decided to celebrate the day you finally got a freeloader out of your house. Would you celebrate the day you told the dead-beat to get out, or would you celebrate the day you actually threw his shit out onto the sidewalk some seven years later?

I'm not really sure why the 4th was the day chosen to commemorate the Declaration of Independence. Only two people signed that day. Almost everyone else held out until August 2nd, and one person didn't even sign it until 5 years later.

Most countries celebrate their independence on the day a riveting speech was made to the public. The declaration wasn't read to the public until July 8, 1776. That's when the first celebration occurred.

And even then, public opinion didn't change. Loyalists remained loyalists and separatists remained separatists. The French, who eventually bailed us out, weren't convinced that we could really win against England until the victory at Saratoga.

So why don't we celebrate that?

If this document were the inspiration for Americans to take arms, then I would recognize the legendary significance placed upon it. However, Americans were already fighting for more than a full year before July 4, 1776.

The Declaration of Independence merely stated what most Americans were already thinking and, indeed, were already doing for over a year.

If you must celebrate words over action, then why not the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which was more ahead of its time than the Declaration of Independence?

Better yet, why not celebrate that forgotten day when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown.

We may have claimed our Independence on July 4 (really August 2), 1776, but we didn't actually cash in until something something, 1783.

WeWeBro

2007-06-16T01:50:00.003-04:00

So I met up with some friends on Varick and West Houston. I don't make it over to that part of town often. Ironic since I used to work in SoHo.

What do you call that part of town? In a city that prides itself on having an abbreviation, acronym, backronym, or onomatopoeia of some sort for almost every street, how come this part of town doesn't have a name?

Is it SoHo, since it's South of Houston? I doubt it. This area's kind of grungy. If you have to walk more than ten minutes to buy a two-hundred-dollar pair of sunglasses, you're not in SoHo.

West Village, maybe? Hmmm...no sex shops, no falafel, no streets that magically intersect themselves.

Chinatown, perhaps? Nope, the signs are still in English. Chinatown's northward march is still a few years off.

It should have a name. You'll wind up there enough that you wish you knew what to call it. There's a definite character to the place. Industrial. Not smoke-belching-Bayonne-New-Jersey industrial. But also not SoHo's warehouse-turned-artist-loft-turned-fourth-home-for-the- mega-rich-too-hip-for-the-Upper-East-Side industrial. It's somewhere in between.

I say we call it WeWeBro. West of West Broadway. That's where the change occurs from Coco Chanel to "what's that smell?" Where twelve-dollar martinis give way to two-for-one happy hours. Where instead of Mercer Street cobblestones, the streets are paved with Jersey-bound gridlock.

The SoHo Grand, however, will have to change its name to the WeWeBro Grand. Either that, or relocate the fifty feet across West Broadway. Hey, sacrifices will have to be made.

But once WeWeBro becomes part of the Gotham lexicon, trendy artist-loft seekers will come, followed shortly thereafter by the pseudo-Bohemian jet-set. When that day comes, WeWeBro might as well get incorporated back into the its more fashionable neighbor to the east.

Well, not if they both get swallowed up by Chinatown first? How does NoChi strike you?

Stuff Magazine's Insult to Hindus

2007-06-04T16:54:00.000-04:00

Artwork in the June 2007 Issue of Stuff Magazine

In a recent issue of Stuff Magazine, the above artwork was displayed. While the intent may have been to show nondescript Hinduesque figures taking part in yoga, sex and alcohol, these images are easily identifiable as (clockwise from top) Ganesh, Hanuman, and Vishnu, among the most highly revered figures in Hinduism. Sex and alcohol are not, in and of themselves, offensive to Hinduism. However, the suggestion that Ganesh, the god of wisdom, drinks and that Hanuman, Ram's celibate servant, has sex most certainly are offensive.

I'd like to emphasize, first, that I support the magazine's artistic and constitutional freedom to portray Hinduism as such. However, whenever one insults another culture, be it through malice or—even worse—through ignorance, they should be held accountable for their decision. That's how dialogue works in an open democracy, and that's all we're asking. Here is my letter to their editor-in-chief.

Dan Bova,

The illustrations above the quiz on page 56 of the June 2007 issue of Stuff were questionable at best. C'mon, guys. You have the audacity to test our knowledge of yoga while showing Ganesh holding liquor and Hanuman having sex with a girl!

I understand your predictable attempt to use Hindu erotica to decorate your quiz. This despite the fact that sexual expression in Hinduism is relegated to ancient sculptures, dirty pictures behind closed doors, and PG-13 Bollywood films. We have British prudishness to thank for that. You're perpetuating a simple, outdated cliche, which is okay. Lame, but okay.

I do question, however, why you decided to throw high-ranking Hindu gods into the sexual mix. Hindu erotica never did. Why did you? You realize, of course, that Hinduism is a living religion. Over 800 million people (a million of whom live in the US alone) might take religious offense to seeing the gods they still worship cast in such an uncharacteristic and arguably unflattering light, not to mention all the non-Hindu South Asians (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, atheists and agnostics included) who would take artistic offense at this distortion of subcontinental culture.

I'm not going to get into freedom of speech. I support your right to be offensive. If you were trying to make a bold, controversial statement like Serrano did with his photograph of a crucifix in a glass of urine, then come out and say it. I'd respect your audacity and drop the issue because, personally, I find religious debates boring and pointless. But I'm sure 800 million other people would love to take it from there.

If, however, your point was to be lighthearted, then come out and admit your art department are a bunch of morons that don't know a damn thing about their subject matter or artistic intent. It seems like they got the Vedas (ancient scriptures) confused with the Kama Sutra (a book about human sex). Sounds trivial, but that's as stupid as confusing the New Testament with Madonna's Sex book. If I were to depict Jesus and the Twelve Apostles in an orgy, I could rely on my constitutional right to do so. But I'd also expect to get a lot of angry letters, and I'd certainly expect to get my ass fired as should you and Ian Robinson, your art director.

Sincerely,
Snehal Avichal

PS: For the record, Ganesh is supposed to have four arms instead of six, and Hanuman should look more like a monkey and less like the Grinch.

If any of you reading this post feel intellectual, artistic, or moral outrage that a major publication could make such a mindless move, please raise awareness by doing any of the following:

fill out Stuff's feedback form online at: http://www.stuffmagazine.com/feedback,
email your thoughts to the editors of Stuff Magazine at: editors@Stuffmag.com,
click on "email post" below to send this post to others you know and/or to the editors of Stuff,
link to this post in your blog,
add this post to a social bookmarking site like Digg or Stumbleupon (you can use the Digg link below).

Feel free to leave comments below. Before leaving comments about freedom of speech and artistic expression, remember that WE SUPPORT FREE SPEECH (see bold statements above). This letter is not asking for censorship. It's just advocating dialogue with the editors. CRITICISM DOES NOT EQUAL SUPPRESSION OF RIGHTS.

Invoking Hitler

2007-05-30T22:44:00.001-04:00

Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-30-122

Get Ready to Beat Hitler - Canadian World War II Poster

Whenever you want to start an unnecessary war, what's the easiest way to convince otherwise intelligent taxpayers to ignore America's dismal historical relationship with war?

You heard (read) me. America has a dismal military history. It started great. The American Revolution was the classic David-versus-Goliath. But then it went downhill from there.

We lost the War of 1812, contrary to popular belief. Washington was burned to the ground and the Treaty of Ghent didn't concede anything to the US. The British simply stopped kidnapping American sailors (a major cause of the war) because they didn't need them after the defeat of Napoleon.

The Mexican War launched America's legacy of starting foreign wars on dubious security and humanitarian grounds. "American blood on American soil my ass!" to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.

The Civil War wiped out a generation of men and did little to improve the lives of former slaves who couldn't really vote until a hundred years later. As far as keeping the Union together, somebody better tell that to all those guys that still wave Confederate flags.

The Spanish-American War continued us along the Mexican War's skewed moral compass. Our subsequent annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines established the notion of "government of the people, by the people and for the people as long as it was set up by America first."

Sanford Dole's (of Dole Pineapples) overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy established the time-honored tradition of American businessmen doing whatever the fuck they want in foreign countries.

World War One was like the Civil War, but with machine guns and mustard gas thrown in for kicks.

Which brings us to World War Two, the crown jewel of American foreign policy, so spectacular that it paved the way for American global supremacy, the best economy the world had ever seen, an endless string of Hollywood war films that make us feel so good about ourselves that it's almost not worth mentioning the subsequent failures of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. (Normally I'd be inclined to call Afghanistan a success but something about Americans still getting killed there six years later seems off; as far as Korea, an ongoing fifty-year war which has recently degenerated into a nuclear standoff with a delusional psycho doesn't seem like a success story).

Which brings me back to my original question: How do you get reasonable people to bankroll an unnecessary war? Answer: Say the word "Hitler."

Just compare any third-rate dictator or two-bit war lord to a Teutonic genocidal maniac of abnormal military acumen in charge of the largest and most technically advanced army ever raised at the time and capable of annexing neighboring countries at the drop of a hat. Just doing so evokes happy images of Anzio, Normandy, and Bastogne (well, happy if you are fortunate enough to have not actually been at those battles). It evokes memories of a happier time when victory meant toppling a head of state by neutralizing the army that protected him. A happier time when wars could be fought by moving lines on a map. A happier time more glorious than the muddy days of armed militias, guerrilla warfare, child soldiers, insurrections, and urban combat.

How do you get reasonable people to ignore the fact that America has never ever been victorious against guerrilla warfare? Do what Bill O'Reilly does: tell them they're fighting Hitler.

Less Action, More Talk

2007-05-11T16:40:00.002-04:00

Patrick Henry's "Treason" speech before the House of Burgesses in an 1851 painting by Peter F. Rothermel

What do you look for in a presidential candidate? His (or her) views on foreign affairs? Maybe their economic plan? How about abortion?

I say "F--k all that!" You can't judge a president by what their policies were before they got to the White House. Shit happens. Day becomes night, South Carolina secedes, Abraham Lincoln (whom you elected on an anti-war platform) suspends habeas corpus, raises a two-and-a-half-million-man Army, and commemorative chess sets have never been the same.

What about Woodrow Wilson, the pacifist president of Princeton? He was re-elected because he "kept us out of the war." But a few submarine attacks and one Teuto-Mexican telegram later and this Ivy-league intellectual outlaws free speech, bans the German language, and suddenly we're embroiled in Europe's trenchy, gassy little war.

Thomas Jefferson changed his tune about a strong central government and Hamiltonian economics when he finally got to sit in the big chair and realized, "Fuck it! I'm buying Louisiana."

Or, remember when Dubya was still an isolationist on September 10, 2001?

As much as it kills me to put Jefferson in the same group as Lincoln and Wilson (or Dubya in the same group as thinking people), the point I'm making is that a candidate's political views or voting record are virtually irrelevant before they become the single most powerful person in the world (after Bill Gates). Something about that Oval Office can turn Mahatma Gandhi into Genghis Khan.

Which is fine. I'm all for change and adjusting to one's environment. For me, though, a better gauge of one's ability to lead is the ability to speak. Not talk. Speak.

"That's bullshit. It's not what you say, it's what you do," I've been told countless times.

But that's what a president does: speak. Lincoln didn't lead the North on horseback with a saber in his hand. He lead through oration, a seemingly dying art. His Second Inaugural Address is how he set the tone of reconciliation (not revenge) in the last phase of war. Of course that was undone by an armed thespian, but you catch my point.

None of us can know what goes through one's mind when they inherit the Earth. That person has to make decisions that none of us can predict. After that, the best they can do is convince the rest of us that it was the right decision. John Quincy Adams was, by most accounts, the smartest president we've ever had, and one of the worst. He had the ability to think, but he came off as a self-righteous ass when he tried to convince everyone else. He accomplished nothing.

Conversely, Dubya is one of the worst thinkers we've ever had. What he shares with John Quincy Adams, though, is the ability to come off as a self-righteous ass. I'm not going to get into his idiotic decision to invade Iraq. But I will say that a Lincoln would have made a better case for the war, and our security force there would be a lot larger and multi-national than the 92-percent-American "Coalition of the Willing." It's not that hard to convince Europeans to invade a third-world country, no matter how unjust the cause. There's a reason so many places in Africa have French, English, and Dutch names.

Otto von Bismarck (through oration, effective writing, and liberties with the French language) was able to unify the German confederated states by convincing them that France was a threat. France! He totally pulled the case for the Franco-Prussian War out of his ass, but Berlin was better off for it. Hitler (whom many mistakenly assume was a good orator) really didn't have to work that hard convincing Germans that he was better for them than the weak Weimar Republic. His problems arose, however, when he couldn't make the same case to the French, British, or Russians, and Berlin was worse off for it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the people I consider great leaders are often people whose policies differ from mine. I don't care whether or not you uphold the Constitution. Let's face it, that's just a piece of paper written two-hundred years ago by wealthy landowners, a piece of legislation that had to be broken before greater things could happen like abolition, progressive reform, social security, and keeping the Union together. So, by all means, break the law if you have to. Start bullshit wars. Spend my money, even if it's something I wouldn't spend my money on. But convince me and enough people around the world that there's a method to your madness. Otherwise, go back to Texas.

Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

2007-05-08T23:36:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, writer Kurt Vonnegut died earlier this year. In death, he still has the ability to inspire those among us who express ourselves in the written word.

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut gives advice to the aspiring writer:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

How Does a Ribbon Support Our Troops

2007-05-02T23:08:00.000-04:00

The other day, it finally happened. My magnetic “Support Our Troops” ribbon fell off my bumper. It was a yellow one. I immediately put “buy new ribbon” on my ever-increasing mnemonic to-do list. Maybe I’ll get one of those snazzy red-white-and-blue ones this time.

Then I thought,—which I try not to do if I can help it—“What do these ribbons mean anyway?” They’ve been ubiquitous for the past six years. Do they still mean anything?

I know, I know; they mean “support our troops.” But what does it really mean? Being the nerd that I am, I decided to get academic about it. No, I didn’t go to the library. I’m too lazy for that. I went where all unambitious know-it-alls go: Wikipedia. There I learned more than I ever could have hoped to know about ribbons.

First, I learned that this family of ribbons is properly referred to as “awareness ribbons.” They come in all colors. I knew that red ribbons signified AIDS/HIV awareness. I didn’t know that it can also mean “Pro-life.” That’s bound to cause confusion, especially since these two camps are often on polar opposites of the political spectrum.

There’s apparently also a brown ribbon which represents colorectal cancer. I don’t know...a bit too literal for my taste. Brown can also mean anti-tobacco. What do you do if you’re a chain smoker who’s against colorectal cancer, or, dare I say, you’re a non-smoker who’s for colorectal cancer?

I could belabor the whole color spectrum and mention the colors that represent everything from water quality to Amish support, but I really should rein in this digression. Which brings me back to yellow. I was much surprised to discover that a yellow ribbon carried a veritable library of meanings. They are, and I quote from Wikipedia, “cancer (particularly bladder cancer and testicular cancer), liver disease and liver cancer, missing person and missing children (‘amber alert’), deployed soldiers (‘support our troops’, POW/MIA, Gulf War), equality, endometriosis, teen suicide, suicide prevention, spina bifida (pale yellow), adoptive parents, sarcoma, hydrocephalus or hydrocephaly, hope, come home, sarcoma (yellow with sunflower).” Wow! Say that five times fast.

Given the global political climate of the past few years, I think it’s safe to say people understood that I meant “support our troops.” But in retrospect, that was a pretty non-committal and politically gutless statement that I was proudly proclaiming from my car’s rear bumper. I mean, does anyone not support our troops (terrorists and insurgents notwithstanding)?

Admittedly, I bought the ribbon in the early post-9/11 days when formerly sane people took to verbal and physical abuse against “pigmentally enhanced” persons, especially ones unkempt and generally disgruntled-looking like myself. Those tense days subsided, but I felt the ribbon still suited me. After all, my brother is in the Army, and I certainly support him and his friends. He has a lot of love for the Army, so by extension, I do as well. But do they really care that I have (had) a ribbon on my car? I know they much more appreciate it when I buy them a few rounds of drinks here or send my brother a care package they can raid over there. They’d probably appreciate it more if I enlisted, learned to use an M-16, and accompanied them on patrols, but let’s not get carried away here.

What's worse is that a forced subtext began to evolve around this ribbon over the years. "Support Our Troops" somehow came to mean "You Don't Have to Like Bush, Just Don't Question Him or Our Troops Will Die." I'm pretty sure that's not what I want my car to say, especially since I think our troops have been dying (as have Iraqi militants and countless more Iraqi civilians) in days when Americans agreed with the President and in days when they disagreed with him.

I try not to get political with my brother or his friends. When they’re not in the desert, the last thing they want to do is talk about being in the desert. Over the course of many conversations, though, I gathered that some of them are glad we went to Iraq and some aren’t. It all depends on which part of the war they saw. And since none of them has seen the entire war, they are just as lost as I am regarding what’s really going on over there.

We’ve come a long way since the 60s when well-intentioned but misguided kids shouted, “Baby killer,” to returning troops. Servicemen these days are fortunate in that most civilians do support them. But lately, there have been two types of civilians: those who think we should stay in Iraq despite the fact that there is no end in sight to the violence, and those who think we should leave despite the fact that there is no end in sight to the violence. Unless I, or anyone else, can break the political and rhetorical stalemate, it really doesn't matter whether or not I replace my bumper magnet.

This Arab-Israeli Thing Is a Flash in the Pan

2007-04-27T20:05:00.000-04:00

There's a consensus among most people that there will never be peace in the Middle East. As a self-professed cynic, I don't particularly take issue with such a negative view. I, for one, believe mankind has the innate ability to disappoint even the blindest of optimists.

As a dilettante of history, however, I take issue with the relative short-sightedness of this statement. If someone said, "There will never be peace," I would have to say that I agree. Whenever the anomaly of peace broke out in one part of the world, the status quo of violence and poverty would break out somewhere else. In fact, oftentimes, peace in one location is gained through the exploitation and suffering of others abroad. One could make the case that peace in Western Europe and America was so gained. Since that's not the focus of this tirade, though, I won't follow up on that argument.

Why does the phrase specifically say "peace in the Middle East," as if the Middle East were specifically immune to peace? Are you saying the rest of the world is a natural cradle for peace? I would agree with you if you didn't include Europe (who have been killing each other every day from the Pax Romana to the Balkan Wars), the Americas (who were killing each other before Columbus, and have been getting slaughtered everyday since), Australia (the aborigines didn't wipe themselves out), Asia (does "land war in Asia" ring a bell?) and Africa (need I say more). So yes, I would agree that compared to Antarctica, the Middle East has a particular propensity for violence.

I always hear people say "There's always been war in the Middle East." I'm assuming they're not talking about the wars among the Kurds, Persians, Sunni, Shia, Turks, etc. namely because it's doubtful they've heard those words before. I assume they mean the war between the Arabs and the Jews, the two words they're likely able to spell.

Islam was established in the seventh century AD. People seem to think, therefore, that Arabs and Jews have been fighting everyday since. The truth of the matter is that Jews have been persecuted for millenia: by Egyptians, Babylonians, Romans, and Christians. Not Arabs. During the Crusades, Jews and Arabs peacefully co-existed.

Jews and Christians did not. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians, unable to explain why post-Roman-Empire life sucked, blamed a lot of their troubles (poverty, chaos, plague) on the Jews. Things came to a head in the late 1800's when Russia started large-scale extermination of Jews. It's about that time that European Jews started migrating to Palestine (present-day Israel). As this area was already occupied for over a thousand years by (you guessed it) Palestinians, tension was soon to follow. Fast-forward to Hitler and the Holocaust, the world decided that Jews needed a safe haven (and by "world" I mean Europe and the US, and by "safe haven" I mean Palestine). One thing led to another, Palestine became Israel, mapmakers stayed in business, and the Middle East has been none too peaceful ever since.

Essentially, though, we're talking about a conflict that's about a hundred years old. In the grand scheme of things, that's hardly an epic confrontation for the ages. England and France had been at each other's throats for a thousand years. In fact, one of their wars was called "the Hundred Years' War." It makes the Arab-Israeli thing look like a flash in the pan. Today, however, we take Franco-English peace for granted.

What about the French and German thing? They'd been fighting each other since before the Protestant Reformation. The Wars of Religion, the War of the Reunions, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War One, and its over-cinematized sequel were just a few of the confrontations coloring the histories of these two nations who once lived only to wipe the other off the face of the Earth, but today are trying to figure out how to get the Brits to finally embrace the Euro.

How about Rome and Carthage? They fought a series of wars (the Punic Wars) that lasted over a hundred and twenty years, which ended in Carthage being destroyed, rebuilt hundreds of years later into a newly prosperous city, only to be reconquered by the Byzantines (Rome's Eastern half). Today, we don't think about the irreconcilable differences between Rome and Carthage, mainly because the only thing most people know about Rome is the pope, and the only thing most people know about Carthage is that their greatest general was the bad guy in The Silence of the Lambs.

War will always be with us. But it does migrate from one part of the world to another. There's no reason to believe that the Middle East will hold the exclusive rights to it when the rest of us are due for our turn.

Om Namaha Snehalay

2007-04-27T18:01:00.001-04:00

I came across this photo of myself taken at a temple in South India. Something about my blank stare reminds me of ashrams.

I've stayed at ashrams before. They're pleasant. But some of them are creepy. And by creepy, I mean cultish. The thing that separates a place of tranquil introspection from an ego temple is usually an ominous portrait of the founder staring at you no matter where you go. I've said it once and I'll say it again: I'm all for idol worship. But worship deities with many arms and animal heads who have bigger things to worry about than what's in your wallet. Worshiping a walking, breathing man with children to feed and bills to pay seems like a karmic-fiscal disaster waiting to happen.

On the flip side, when I decide to start a cult, I know exactly which photo I'm going to put on the walls.

Second Blog: SneTV

2007-04-27T10:15:00.000-04:00

So I started a new blog. It's where I'll be posting video and movie clips I come across. I started posting clips to this blog, but I decided there's enough free video out there to warrant another blog. Have a look-see.

http://snetv.blogspot.com/

Sixteen Words About New York

2007-04-21T16:26:00.000-04:00

bright night
white lights
dim people
abound tonight
narrow buildings
narrow street
narrow minds
prada feet

How Many Architects Does It Take

2007-04-20T01:21:00.001-04:00

This light fixture by Ingo Maurer reminds me of a joke I made up a while ago.

Q: How many architects does it take to change a light bulb?

A: 18

One to forget to include light bulbs in the specs,

One project architect to bitch about it on the punch list,

Another to figure out how to record this problem on the company's new standard field report,

An individual to question why this item needs to be put into a field report if it's already on the punch list,

An HR person to fire that individual,

A project manager to reject the GC's change order for labor involved in screwing in the aforementioned light bulb,

Another architect to send a memo to the electrical engineer suggesting he do a pre-inspection punch list and remedy any violations to local electrical codes (e.g. insufficient lighting, unscrewed light bulbs, etc.),

Another to receive the engineer's reply which states:
a) The aforementioned procedure is not in the MEP scope of services and;
b) It's just a goddamn light bulb. screw it in your damn self!

A studio coordinator to place this correspondence in central filing where it was never seen again,

A golden boy to spearhead a Light Bulb Task Force,

Someone on some Steering Committee somewhere to quash that Task Force,

A rag-picker to take the initiative and propose an alternate light bulb that doesn't need to be screwed in, costs 100 times as much, requires that the entire floor be rewired, and comes with a nifty glow ring,

A design director to ensure that this alternate light bulb doesn't, in any way, reduce the project's number of useless curvilinear elements,

A project architect to issue a bulletin advising the GC to provide (i.e. furnish and install) this alternate light bulb, with no change to project Time or Cost,

A project manager to sit in on the conference call where the GC describes precisely where the Owner and Architect can shove the aforementioned light bulb,

A VP with a large expense account to fly out to the client and personally assure him that light bulbs are, in fact, non-essential elements in this unique project type and that the client should take this into consideration when the architect's contract comes up for renewal,

One project manager to bury all unexpected light bulb-related costs in a magic invoice entitled "miscellaneous",

And one project architect to hand the client a flashlight.

Memorandum

2007-04-18T01:16:00.001-04:00

I burned out at the ripe old age of 24. This is how i did it...

Memo990819SA

This correspondence is cordially sent to touch base and give you all the heads up, in the spirit of "keeping the lines of communication open," while endeavoring to not keep anyone out of the loop, as is often to case when one enters this challenging phase of the fiscal year, which makes it all the more difficult for us to put our best foot forward in the interest of forging ahead, so that we might avoid turning our wheels, which, no doubt, jeopardizes the synergy we have all been trying to keep on top of, as we bounce ideas off each other, ensuring that the ball gets put in their court, so that we might more efficiently raise the bar in keeping with our continued commitment of value engineering our strategic options that may prove, in fact, to be more "sustainable" than originally forecast in the numerous visioning sessions that have paved the way for this very correspondence, which is, by the way, in direct violation of office and firm-wide administrative standards, which explicitly mandate use of, but not limited to, Office Form "Memorandum", with appropriate cover letter and transmittal, a copy of which must be "cc:'d" to all applicable studio directors, studio managers, studio coordinators, project managers, CAD monkeys, and aunt or uncle of one's choice, which is, effectively, the only way to proactively get the grass roots approach on board, thereby steering clear of things falling through the cracks, like the purpose of this very correspondence for instance, or even the unmonitored use of run-on sentences in inter- and/or intra-office communications, whichever the case may be, which may, in turn, send up smoke signals, after the dust had already settled, only once again to take off and hit the ground running to get the juices flowing, so that I might take this opportunity to commend everyone for the bang up jobs they've done, but also to convey the message to take note to keep current all databases of information (post-it notes, palm pilots, etc.) because on this day at precisely 5:02 PM I fucking quit.

Mongols or Mughals?

2007-04-12T21:00:00.000-04:00

Recently, I was watching a documentary about the Taj Mahal, and the narrator posed the seemingly harmless question: “How could warriors as ruthless as the Mongols build something as beautiful as the Taj Mahal?”

The extraordinarily simple answer I yelled back at the narrator was, “They didn’t, you idiot! The Mughals built it!”

After I got back into my “happy place” and contemplated the unhealthy frequency of my TV-yelling episodes, I got to wondering how many people actually don’t know the difference between the two. I don’t think my high school history books even mentioned the word “Mughal.” They just glossed over the whole Mongol thing, depicting the largest empire in history as simply a backdrop for the adventures of a certain Italian explorer for whom a children’s water sport is named.

The confusion doesn’t reside exclusively in this hemisphere either. Most of my friends and family from India don’t fully grasp the difference. When pressed, the more intellectual ones will posit that Mughals are latter-day Mongols.

That’s not right either!

As I felt another episode coming on, I began to wonder why this widespread bit of ignorance got me so upset. There are many pieces of trivia that everyone seems to get wrong—like thinking that Sydney or Melbourne is the capital of Australia or thinking that Finland is part of Scandinavia. But this Mughal/Mongol issue is entirely different. This issue is the tip of the cultural ignorance iceberg that makes people do really, really stupid things, like entering land wars in Asia. But I digress…

Mongols were notoriously violent nomadic warriors—certainly not above wholesale rape—that represent the greatest horse-riding tradition the world has ever seen. We would consider their religion to be pagan. They came from Lake Bajkal north of China. They looked Asiatic. They wore funny hats with long flaps on the sides. Their leader, who unified them in the thirteenth century, was Genghis Khan. They didn’t build the Taj Mahal. They didn’t build much of anything. As I said, they were nomads, and nomads aren’t renowned architects.

About three hundred years later, long after the collapse of the Mongol Empire, one of Genghis Khan’s many, many descendants—Genghis got around, in every sense of the word—began the Mughal dynasty. His name was Babar—yes, like the elephant. Mughals were Turks, not Asiatic. They were good were on horseback, but they weren’t born in the saddle like the Mongols. Mughals were Islamic. They didn’t wear funny hats. They wore funny turbans.

Now, you might rightly say, “Well, cultures change. The Mongols changed their ways, adopted Islam, lost some of their cavalry know-how, and settled down form their nomadic ways,” to which I would unnecessarily brusquely rebuke, “But the Mongols didn’t change! They were still nomads roaming around north of China. They no longer had an empire, but they still wore those funny hats. In fact, to this day there are still Mongols—we call them Mongolians—wandering around on horseback with those same funny hats.” I would then take a deep breath and try to get back into my “happy place.”

The confusion comes from the fact that Babar and his upstarts from Persia used the Mongol name (“Mughal” is the Persian word for “Mongol”) as a means of “reclaiming” some of Genghis Khan’s lost empire. This is the same as Prussian and Russian rulers who used corrupted local words for Caesar (kaiser and czar respectively) to reclaim parts of the obliterated Roman Empire. But our history books distinguish between Prussians, Russians, and Romans. Why don’t they distinguish between Mughals and Mongols?

I, myself a man of moderate cultural savvy, used to picture Genghis Khan as a Chinese person, wearing Chinese clothing, building Chinese buildings, and doing Chinese things. Later, when I was told that the Mongols built the Taj Mahal, I pictured Genghis Khan wearing a turban, building Islamic buildings, and doing whatever one does when one isn’t doing one's two hundred wives.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that Genghis Khan slept every night in a yurt and traveled constantly on horseback in a very uncomfortable wooden saddle, as do about half of Mongolians to this very day.

Fascinating!

I guess what I’m saying is that Mongolian nomadic tradition is a culture unlike any the world has ever seen. We would all be a little better off—intellectually and militarily—if we took the time to learn about this intriguing yet politically unpredictable part of the world. We can start by not confusing Genghis Khan with the people who built the Taj Mahal. And maybe I could spend less time watching TV and more time reading self-help books.

Indo-European Languages Quiz

2007-04-08T15:23:00.001-04:00

Here's a quiz I made demonstrating the similarity among Indo-European languages. How linguistically intuitive are you?

Indo-European Languages Quiz

"Rebirth" My Ass

2007-04-08T02:05:00.002-04:00

The other day, I passed by a new housing development, and I noticed that the wood columns were covered with decorative fiberglass in the form of a Greek Doric column. Then I passed by a concrete high-rise with decorative pilasters on the facade, mildly reminiscent of a Greek portico. With my Greek-dar on high alert, I realized this throwback s*#t is still everywhere: in the Corinthian columns on the Beaux Arts-era New York Public Library I go to everyday, on the columns of the porch of my neighbor's house, on basically every bank ever built before 1960, and in countless post-modern crap built after 1980.

Despite all the talk about modernism liberating architects, why do we still look to ancient Greece? That's not a rhetorical question. It has a very specific answer. The answer is: because of the Renaissance.

I can sum up my thoughts of the Renaissance in three words: "F*&k the Renaissance!"

"What's wrong with the Renaissance?" asks the voice in my head.

My problem with the Renaissance is in the very pretense of its name. Renaissance means rebirth.

"Rebirth of what!" I bark back at...me.

"Rebirth of learning," I rebut.

That's the problem. The obvious implication of the name Renaissance is that the period preceding it was a time of stupidity.

F%#k that!

Bubonic plague aside, the Middle Ages weren't as medieval as Italian philosophers would have had us believe. The Middle Ages gave us the clock, the compass, the astolabe, Arabic numerals (which were invented in India, by the way), and the Magna Carta, which influenced our Founding Fathers more than the anomaly of Athenian democracy.

The party-line is that Europe instantaneously fell asleep when the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, and that it didn't wake up again until Brunelleschi built the dome over the Florence Cathedral in the fifteenth century.

Up until Brunelleschi's dome, while Italy was asleep, France was taking Gothic architecture to new heights, literally. French architects were forward-looking, constantly tweaking and warping Greek and Roman precedents to resolve new technological problems. Through trial and error, they invented and improved the pointed arch, the flying buttress, the ribbed vault, and so on. Italians, however, were always nostalgic for ancient Rome A) because they lived among the ruins, and B) because they were the descendants. But medieval Italians couldn't build like the ancient Romans. Neither could the French, to be honest, but they were coming up with new building methods that, if given the chance to develop, would have eventually surpassed ancient Roman technology.

But then along came Brunelleschi. His dome was a technological marvel for the time. It was the first time anyone was able to horizontally span as far as the ancient Romans. This gave Italians new street cred on the European construction scene. But instead of paving the way for more technological breakthroughs in architecture, it gave Italy's age-old hard-on for ancient Rome a new international stage. Just when pointed arches were making their way south into Italy, Italian architects went back to copying the comparatively inefficient semi-circular Roman arch. They concerned themselves with proportion and refinement, instead of innovation. The grandeur of Italy was embodied in how well they could copy the past.

Gothic Architecture, which admittedly lacked Italian refinement, became frowned upon. Their movement away from Greek and Roman decoration was considered idiotic instead of inventive. Eventually, as Italian superstars made their way up north, the French began recopying ancient Rome as well. My contention is that if Gothic Architecture had been allowed to run its course, its refinement would have followed as well as other technological innovations which only made it into the world of architecture in the last 150 years, namely the parabolic arch, the space-frame, cable suspension, iron and steel construction, and of course concrete, which took almost two thousand years to be reinvented since the fall of Rome. You'd think all those retro-Italians would have stumbled across that one sooner.

Eventually, the Italians did get bored with copying Rome (aesthetically, not technologically). Their buildings started taking on a newfound inventiveness and a sexy plasticity of space. Flat facades started to curve. Walls undulated. Stuffy critics called it Baroque, meaning bizarre. Then someone revisited ancient ruins, and decided that it would be thinkier to copy Roman (or better yet, Greek) columns again, only this time even more stringently than before. Hence, the beginning of the f#*king Neo-classical period, which never ever fully goes away. Just when you think it runs its course and innovation permeates the world of architecture, someone looks at a photo of a Greek temple and it starts all over again. Most recently, modernism almost killed it, but the whole decoration-is-evil-but-ugly-steel-and-glass-boxes-is-good thing got old, so people began to decorate again in the 80s. "But what should we decorate with?" asked the uninspired architect.

What else?

I'm a pagan, you're a pagan, he's a pagan too.

2007-04-02T13:41:00.000-04:00

Did you know that almost every language on the face of the Earth names the days of the week after the same planets? I kid you not.

Consider our days...

Sunday: sun's day
Monday: moon's day
Tuesday: Mars' day (literally day of Tiwe, Germanic god of war, which corresponds to the Roman god of war, Mars)
Wednesday: Mercury's day (lit. day of Woden who corresponds to the Roman messenger, Mercury)
Thursday: Jupiter's day (lit. day of Thor who, like the Roman god Jupiter, wielded a thunderbolt)
Friday: day of Venus (lit. day of Frige, who was the goddess of beauty as was Venus)
Saturday: Saturn's day

This works in French and Spanish...

dimanche/domingo: (this is a Christian change meaning God's day)
lunedi/lunes: day of lune (moon)
mardi/martes: day of Mars
mercredi/miércoles: day of Mercury
jeudi/jueves: day of Jupiter
vendredi/viernes: day of Venus
samedi/sábado: (this is a Christian change meaning sabbath)

This works in most Indic languages including Sanskrit, Hindi, and Gujarati...

Ravivar: Ravi means sun. Var means day.
Somvar: Som means moon.
Mangalvar: Mangal means Mars.
Budhvar: Budh means Mercury.
Guruvar: Guru meaning Jupiter.
Shukravar: Shukra meaning Venus.
Shanivar: Shani means Saturn.

This even works in Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan where the literal translation of the days' names are

sun's day
moon's day
fire day
water day
wood day
metal day
earth day

Fire, water, wood, metal and earth are materials associated respectively with (you guessed it) Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.

Since this convention is even farther reaching than the Indo-european influence (I'll write about that later for those that don't know what I'm talking about) theories abound that this system goes all the way back to the Sumerians, who themselves predate the Egyptians by a thousand years.

Notably absent from this system are Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Greek, and most of the Slavic languages. These languages have since taken to numbering the days because Judaism, Islam, and Christianity thought that naming the days after the planets was too pagan. The Roman Catholic Church tried to change the day names in Northern and Western Europe too, but it never took, evidence that they were weak compared to their Byzantine (East European) counterpart.

You can't fight the pagans. Don't even try. One god good. Many gods better.

Incidentally, paganism figures prominently in my story, no doubt attributable to my interest in comparative linguistics, comparative mythology, and the fact that I'm Hindu.

A Misunderstood Telegram

2007-03-31T22:38:00.000-04:00

Here is an example of how communication can break down in war, and not just with the enemy:

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, General MacArthur, charged with defending the Philippines, prepared for an all-out Japanese invasion. He didn't have enough men or supplies to hold off the impending attack. He asked Marshall for more men, more supplies. As the US was scrambling to invade Europe and defend her coasts elsewhere, Marshall wasn't in a position to send anything to the Philippines. He replied very politely by telegram, "We are giving you everything we possibly can."

MacArthur took this to mean reinforcements were coming (which they weren't). He met with his field commander on Bataan and gave him the good news.

US forces fell shortly thereafter and thus began three and a half years of severe treatment at the hands of their captors including the Bataan Death March.

The Sun Was Shining

2007-03-31T22:20:00.001-04:00

It was a brisk morning.
The sun was shining,
Yet we were caught in the rain.
I lay on the grass feeding the animals.
I hadn’t a care in the world.
Time stood still and it was good.

It was a brisk morning.
The sun was shining.
The artillery showered steel down on us all.
I lay on the grass, rats eating my still warm flesh.
I hadn’t a care in the world.
Time stood still and it was good.

Sleeping Life

2007-03-30T17:18:00.000-04:00

Waking Life is another movie I recently watched on a friend's recommendation. For years, people suggested this movie to me because I'm often found waxing philosophic, i.e. I often brood about how f&*ked up things are sometimes.

I guess if I liked this movie, I wouldn't have been so impassioned to write about it in this war-story blog. This movie was a huge let-down. I was looking forward to seeing a film with an unconventional method of storytelling. That I got. This film's intriguing animation and unique free-flowing progression was surpassed only by it's unconventionally annoying characters engaging in unconventionally pompous coffee-shop conversations more unconventionally full of disjointed literary quotes than any profound comment about the nature of thought itself.

If you want someone to achieve a higher level of consciousness, or a deeper level of thought, don't randomly quote D.H. Lawrence out of context. Why not show them something they've seen before, but in a different light? Apocalypse Now was more thought-provoking. That film makes you believe, for an instant, that the sociopaths are compassionate, that the psychos are sane, that war has a method, until you regain your senses and see everything as even more absurd than you had originally thought.. And they do that without engaging in grating, self-important name-dropping and academic masturbation.

Waking Life did have its moments. The early conversation about existentialism was surprisingly grounded and almost moving. I was hoping it was a preview of coming attractions, but then I found myself getting thrown from one annoying citation to another.

This film did for free thought what Pi did for math. It threw so many unconnected academic parlor tricks your way that it fooled you into thinking you learned something you didn't already know. Pi tried to impress you with a series of significant moments in math history, but ultimately couldn't tie random-ass trivia like the proportion system in Leonardo's Vitruvian Man to Max's quest to predict the stock market (why did they even bother!). Similarly, Waking Life threw together random pseudo-scientific citations and dead-philosopher quotes but couldn't even remotely tie them to the protagonist's struggle to wake up. My detractors will undoubtedly say that I missed the point. That the movie deliberately doesn't have a plot for a reason. That the movie is just supposed to make you think, to which I say, "Sorry. It didn't do that either. I've read books before. I didn't need to watch two hours' worth of out-of-touch intellectuals quoting those books."

Well, in a way, Waking Life did give me an Apocalypse Now moment: for an instant, it gave me insight as to why red-state illiterates hate Northeast thinky elite so much.

But I guess I find myself guilty of the very thing I hated about this movie: rambling for the sake of rambling. There is a method to my madness though. I, too, have a story inspired by theories and random historical observations. But I don't want them to drive the story and drown out any possible connection to the reader. I don't want to make a linguistics equivalent of Pi or Waking Life. But that's not helpful thinking. I should be asking myself, "What kind of story do you want to make?"

F@%k 300

2007-03-29T22:59:00.005-04:00

I just saw this flick the other day. 300 was pretty. Very pretty. But there's something that fundamentally bugs me about it.

I'm willing to forgive a lot. I know it's a stylized film, so I can get over the historical inaccuracies. I can get over the complete omission of the real heroes of the battle: Themistocles and his navy (any soldier in the US Army will even concede that America's global reach comes from its naval strength, something that China doesn't have even though their Army is much bigger than ours).

I can even forgive Zack Snyder's numerous rip-offs from the Lord of the Rings trilogy: the body-count competition between two of the Spartans is straight Legolas and Gimli; the elephants looked a bit too much like Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien's oliphants; I'm not the only one to think that the hunchback Ephialtes was a throwback to Gollum down to the way he was filmed overhead spying on the soldiers. Even at the end when one of the Spartans is mauled with a spear and defiantly drives it further through his own torso is a straight-up rip-off from Fellowship when the head Uruk-hai does the exact same thing. I can forgive these rip-offs because I'm a LOTR nerd (can't you tell) and if someone gave me a few million dollars to make a movie, I couldn't promise that Tolkien and Jackson wouldn't bleed though a little.

No, the biggest problem I had with the movie is "Why are the Spartans the good guys?" I can understand why a Greek might find heroism with Leonidas' suicide mission. After all, his last stand inspired the Greek city-states to unite. But why the hell would the rest of the Western world sympathize with the Greeks over the Persians?

"Because the Greeks gave us democracy," said the idiot who remembered hearing that in sixth-grade social studies class.

Wrong! The Athenians gave us democracy. But the Spartans didn't particularly like the Athenians, who were gay-bashed more than once in this film even though the Athenians supplied the conspicuously unmentioned navy. Furthermore, Athenian democracy was short-lived and pretty much died out after Greece united (er...were conquered by the Macedonians, you know, Philip II and Alexander the Great). America gave America democracy. The founding fathers and other Age of Enlightenment philosophers used the defunct Athenian example as romantic justification for their own risky and dissimilar (though thankfully successful) experiment.

"OK, the Spartans didn't give us democracy, but they stood for freedom," continued the red-state mouth breather.

What! Just because Leonidas said the word "freedom" a hundred times in the movie, doesn't mean shit. Westerners would have enjoyed more freedom under Xerxes' reign of religious tolerance than under Leonidas' military monarchy. Remember, the Persians are the ones who freed the Judeans from the Babylonian Captivity (I'm not making that up; read Jeremiah and Ezekiel). Monotheism owes more to the Persians than to their Greek pagan counterparts. (Side note: as a Hindu, I don't have a problem with "paganism," in fact, I'm rather fond of it, but I realize this is an anomalous opinion for an otherwise Western thinker).

Listen. Life in Sparta sucked. You were forced into early and harsh military training. Homophobes (apparently this movie's target audience) would not find their war rituals too savory either. While 300 may have questioned Athenian manhood and depicted Persians as oddly androgynous, they left out the fact that Persian scouts reported to an incredulous Xerxes on the eve of the last stand that they saw the Spartans ceremonially rubbing oil all over each other's naked bodies ("Not that there's anything wrong with that.").

And the Spartans decidedly did not stand for freedom. More than half of the Spartan population were slaves, an impressive statistic unsurpassed by the Persians, the Romans, and even the antebellum South.

OK. Maybe it's a race thing. It's natural for Europeans and North Americans to pull for their own. But Persians were white too! Persia later became Iran. "Iran" means "aryan." Even Hitler knew that. Just because the casting directors thought black and Arab actors would make better bad guys (another nod to Tolkien), doesn't mean that Darius and Xerxes weren't whiter than snow. One would be hard pressed to distinguish Spartans from Persians in a crowd. If racism's your thing, I'm not gonna open that age-old argument with you. But at least get your facts straight.

If you're Greek, by all means feel proud for the 300 (and the uncredited 700 Thespians). But why are the rest of us taking the wrong side? Even this Hindu has to side with Iran on this one.

So what's the story?

2007-03-24T01:01:00.000-04:00

It started as a story about war. I never really got war. I've always had a morbid curiosity for it. I've read that the best way to learn about something is to write a book about it.

Some might say that my curiosity comes from the fact that my brother is in the Army. In fact, this story implanted itself in my head about a year before he even thought about joining the military. It began when I started reading about World War One.

WWI is the embodiment of human suffering without cause. By the end, neither side had any illusion of victory. They fought for the sole notion that their tragedy would cause the rest of the world to stop fighting. Hence the moniker "the war to end all wars." If Hollywood made more WWI movies instead of glorified WWII movies, I suppose we would think twice about getting embroiled in land wars in Asia (as if Vietnam, Korea, and the Philippine Insurrection weren't reason enough).

Anyway, over the years, this story grew into a story about death, dysfunction, depression, and God. Standard light reading. Though, given my muddy theological beliefs, I'm not sure I should be capitalizing "God." But since religious controversy isn't what's driving this story, I'll keep it capitalized, though I'm sure the all too provocative "god" will creep into the telling here and there.

So why the stupid title?

Communication is an important theme in my story. Communication breakdown to be precise. No war is complete without it. No relationship either. Plenty of material to write about on these fronts.

You were saying about the title...

I'm getting to it. I have a few mechanisms for conveying communication breakdown, but the one that intrigues me most is the one caused by the language barrier. I love foreign languages. It has grown into something of an obsession in recent years. I find myself wasting hundreds of hours learning foreign alphabets, writing them, writing my name in them, then writing someone else's name in them, then city names. It doesn't stop. If I write "Puerto Escondido" in Cyrillic one more time, I'm gonna have to shoot someone. Hopefully incorporating the nature of language into my story (and inventing a mythology for the origin thereof) will get this obsession out of my system and validate all those hours that could have been better spent elsewhere. I have to believe that all those days learning to write Tamil won't be for naught. I can't even speak Tamil, but thank God I can write it!

Will you explain the F#$king title already!!

Alright! Chill! There's a theory that all syllabaries and alphabets are descended from Hebrew, which is considered the first phonetic writing system ever created. That creation marked the beginning of the end for the ruling priestly elite (everywhere except India, that is). You see, educating the masses was now as simple as teaching them a few dozen phonetic symbols, as opposed to tens of thousands of pictograms as was the case under Egyptian, Sumerian, and Babylonian rule. A person could now become literate by learning a relatively short alphabet. This is true for English. It's true for Greek, you know, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc., and it's true for its Hebrew predecessor, which begins with the similarly named aleph, beth, gimmel, dalth, etc. These last letter names literally mean "ox, house, camel, door." These letters would later bring down empires.

Resurrecting a dead story

2007-03-23T00:41:00.000-04:00

Ox House Camel Door. This is the working title of a story that's been festering in my head for almost a decade. Life takes you places so fast. Doesn't seem like it at the time, but somewhere in the pursuit of money, travel, wisdom, and women you tell yourself that they'll be time to write. You tell yourself that you're building up life experience that will inform your work. Then you pick up your head one day and see that ten years have gone by. If I died tomorrow, what will I have said?

After ten years, I've accumulated notes, outlines, and sketches scattered so thinly across beat-up notebooks more full of drawings and to-do lists than a work in progress. This doesn't include the endless computer files that evaporate into nothing every time I suffer a fatal hard-drive crash. As I'm not likely to implement a thorough back-up plan for my computer, and as I'm not mentally centered enough to guarantee that I won't kick that f&%king computer again, I think now's as good a time as any to get these ideas out of my hands and into someplace safer, like a remote server. Hence, the blog. I'll let the executor of my will figure out what to do with all of this stuff after I'm gone.

It's also a way for me to encourage my cousin in her writing. She stands a better chance of getting something published. This is more for her benefit than anything else.