Halfway down the Danube

Armenian: the verb of being

We did the numbers last week, and we found they were a mixture of familiar, sort-of familiar, and what the hell.  What about the verb of being?  Let's give it a whirl.

Armenian is an Indo-European language, so it has a standard structure for the verb of being: three persons, me you him, times two numbers, singular or plural, equals six verbs.  Just like French or Spanish, right?

First person singular "I am": yes em.  Okay, that's not so bad.  Obviously related to the Latin ego sum, the Italian io sono, and -- most closely -- the Russian ya sam.  No problem there.

Second person singular, "you are": du es.  Ho!  How easy is that?  The pronoun is German, the verb is French!  Yeah!

Day 12: Veterans Day (observed)

My great-grandfather was one of the last living World War One vets in Wisconsin. Which means as a wee lad, I got to hear his stories about poison gas attacks! He'd chew tobacco -- Wisconsin grew its own tobacco, mainly by Norwegian farmers -- and spit the juice into a gas victim's open mouth. If they reacted, he knew they were alive. If they didn't, he was pretty sure they were dead. (You don't need poison gas to try this.) This letter from Fritz Schmidt captures some of his voice.

Which brings me to this:

Should there be a dissolution of the Green Bay Packers, Inc., the undivided profits and assets of the Green Bay Packers, Inc., shall go to the Sullivan-Wallen Post of the American Legion for the purpose of erecting a proper soldier's memorial, either by building, clubhouse, hospital or other charitable or educational program, the choice of which the directors of this corporation shall have advisory control.

This clause in the Packers charter lasted from 1923 to 1997, after which the United States no longer participated in any foreign wars, making it unnecessary.

Basically, the Green Bay Packers existed for my great-grandfather's personal amusement. He was too stubborn to buy shares, though.

Oh yeah, the score: 34-0, against the Vikings, at Lambeau. Some teeth of mine have not seen sunlight for years until today. People say Belichick is cold to run up the score; but do you know what true coldness is? McCarthy putting in Aaron Rodgers as QB. (Who passed more yards than the Vikings' entire first half in two plays: 11.)

Bali, plus ten

Ten years ago, Claudia and I met for the first time.

Met face to face, I should say.  We'd been meeting online for a few months at that point.  We were both active on the same mailing list.  One day I e-mailed her off list -- in all innocence -- to ask about a fine point of Turkish grammar.  We started mailng back and forth and, well, one thing led to another.

Day 11: Towards a grand unified theory of the wingnut

The New York City Math Teacher sent me a sociology working paper by Gambetta and Hertog: "Engineers of Jihad". (Hm. This sounds like something Crooked Timber would post about. Henry Farrell loves him some Gambetta. [checks] Yup. Dude, provenance.)

Anyway. It's well-known in wingnut studies how common engineers are in such movements as evolution denialism, global warming denialism, Holocaust denialism, Reagan worship, Rand worship, and other associated phenomena of the radical right. Conversely, you don't see a whole lot of engineers at the local womyn's center or food co-op (even though, women and food! and most engineers are still men. My sister has a story to tell about that).

Turns out it's cross-cultural.

We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists.

Daniel Davies claims it has to do with Adorno's f-scale (Davies calls it the f-type). Take the Adorno challenge and find out!

In related research, Rich Cohen investigates the influence of the 'Stache. This seems to be an accident of history amplified through network links.

Day 10: Most secret origins usually don't involve tequila

Some maniac at the gym recently told me about another maniac. Jeez. It's too bad running stresses the living [deleted] out of my right hip and knee, because this really sounds appealing.

Except for the urinating while running part. And the wrecking a Lexus through projectile vomiting part.

Zen Saturday: St. Martin's

Here's a Buddhist parable.  (N.B., I am not a Buddhist.)  It's from memory, so I may have some details wrong.  If anyone knows the full version, do say.

A Buddhist monk came to a province of China where, until then, Buddhism had hardly been heard of.  He built himself a small hut of sticks and took up residence on an otherwise undistinguished hillside. 

Soon the province was buzzing with the news that a strange holy man had arrived.  The words reached the ear of a powerful Taoist alchemist who lived nearby.  The Taoist immediately gathered his potions, powders and magical apparatus and took himself to the monk's hut by the hillside.

For Simon

I thought Simon might find this interesting (and somewhat melancholic) :  The mulberry tree in front of the house changing its leaves, and the house entrance (a part of the house that is least changed, from what I understand.) 

Sick Day

Took a sick day yesterday.

The details are unpleasant and can be elided.  Basically, 48-hour crud.  I pushed myself through the first day but said "hell with it" on the second. 

Woke up at 5 am; Claudia found me when she came downstairs just after 6:30.  She instantly realized something was not right, since I am never up before her.  It's like seeing a fish floating on its side, or a cat eating grass... the animal is behaving in a deeply wrong way.

Day 9: Stay classy, Minnesota

Let me be clear: Minnesota the state has a lot of class. (They also have a great state fair, which I haven't been to in ages.) Their football team, well. (You know that thing? They didn't even clean up the wrappers.)

Random Friday links Friday!

Today's Inspiration collects cool commercial art from the '40s and '50s.  I am just old enough to remember some of this stuff... I spent a certain amount of my middle childhood reading through my grandparents' collection of old magazines.  (Man, Readers Digest used to be good.)

I'm not sure who Stookie Allen was, or why he was interested in Armenia.  Anyone? 

And while I'm at it -- this is a bleg rather than a link -- has anyone written a decent history of the Caucasus during World War One and after -- say, up to the time the USSR took over?  I've been trying to piece that history together and, damn, it is not easy.  It's complicated to begin with, and then there are few good English-language sources, and then it's all very fragmented... the Transcaucasus countries all have their own history books, and the Armenians aren't interested in what was going on in Georgia.

Arabkir

We live in a neighborhood called Arabkir.  It's named after the town of Arabkir, on Lake Van, in Turkey.  There aren't any more Armenians around Lake Van anymore; our neighborhood was settled by refugees from the genocide.

When Arabkir was founded, back in the 1920s, Yerevan was a small city of maybe 60,000 people.  Our neighborhood was originally a satellite village.  Over the decades, the city grew and sort of digested Arabkir, and today it's mostly just another district.  There are some little neighborhoods that still don't feel like a city, though, and we're fortunate enough to live in one of them.

Our neighborhood was laid out in the 1950s, and you can tell.  The streets are on a peculiarly inconvenient not-quite-grid pattern with lots of dead ends.  They don't have names, just numbers -- "Arabkir Forty-One", and such.  There are no sidewalks, no parks, and no playgrounds.  Just down the street from our house, someone put a junkyard, right in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood.  And now it's gone from Soviet to post-Soviet: the roads are crumbling, while at the same time hideous new McMansions are sprouting like mushrooms.

Day 8: Target demographic

La Loca got me a gift subscription to Esquire magazine, and the first issue arrived yesterday. Thank you! Esquire is apparently MAXIM for men who can read. It also features a regular column by Chuck Klosterman, who unsettles me, since we seem to share many neural pathways (we both use the word 'anyway' in exactly the same way, for instance).

Anyway. Turning past the article on Mrs. Kucinich, and facing the pinup of Scarlett Johansson, I find the statistical breakdown of Esquire's "Women We Love":

The prototypical woman we love is a thirty-six-year-old brown-haired actress from New York. She is 5' 6" and her name is Jennifer. She might have a small, unobtrusive tattoo.

... you know, there are saner professions.

The Pure Product of America: Ha!

Hush, you. And what's with the anti-tattoo bias? Come on, Esquire. Close doesn't count.

Mm, a recipe for short ribs. I may have to try that.

Day 7: The Scrapening

There's a reason I don't post every day.

Hm. I could talk about my new light therapy lamp! which I love. Even though I've only used it for a few days, I don't feel like I just got off the red-eye from Anchorage. The user guide warns, "Overuse may cause irritability, excessive energy, or difficulty falling asleep at bedtime." That second point reminds me of the phrase, "lasts longer than four hours," you know? As for the other two points, how could anyone ever tell.

Anyway. I do have some thoughts on NBER Working Paper 13550, Measuring Ancient Inequality, by Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert, and Jeffrey Williamson, but I need to write it up more coherently. I also send Doug a cool recent molecular biology paper every week or so just so I have someone to talk to about this stuff. If Doug has a preference?

I also have a Caucasus story. A friend of mine is of Bakuvian descent. During one of the back-and-forth massacres early last century, a gang of armed thugs broke into her great-grandfather's home. A short conversation followed: "Dude. We're Jewish." The thugs: "Oops. Sorry about that."

In the office

Here's a brief sketch of where I spend my days.

I'm Chief of Party (COP) of a USAID project.  What the project does is a story for another post.  The project office is not inside the Embassy, but in an office building on the edge of downtown. 

The project employs about twenty-five people.  There are two Americans: me, and Bill the telecoms guy.  Everyone else is Armenian.  All the Armenians are fluent in English, though, so my Armenian hasn't improved much.

I've been here about twenty months.  The project is about four years old -- I took over from the first COP a year ago March. 

The project will last about six more months.  It was originally supposed to last for five years, which would have kept it going until October 2008.  But the dram-dollar exchange rate is just killing us.  When the project opened its doors, back in 2003, the Armenian dram was around 550 to the dollar.  Today it's 325 to the dollar.  Everything we buy in Armenia -- rent, office supplies, payroll -- has become about 60% more expensive.  Part of this is because the dollar has fallen generally, but part is because the dram has strengthened.  Why the currency of a small country with a big trade deficit should have appreciated so much is, again, a story for another post.  Key point: the five-year project has become a four-year-and-seven month project.

Shusha

Because pictures say more than words, or something.

Here's the church I was talking about in the comments to Doug's Karabakh post.  No, not new, but it looks like new which is a startling contrast to the rest of Shushi which looks not new, at all.

This apartment house is right across from the church:

Pomegranate Tuesday

  Ever eat a pomegranate?

They're tasty, and good for you, and sort of fun to eat.  But at the same time they're kind of a pain in the ass.  You eat it by plucking out the seeds, a few at a time, and eating the sweet drops of flesh around them.  (The "arils", to be technical.)  Since an average pomegranate contains several hundred seeds, this takes a while.  If you try to speed things up, you'll crush the arils and get juice all over your hands and probably your clothing too. 

In which case you'll be sorry, because pomegranate juice is a bitch: it stains fast, deep, and for good.  It's rich in tannins, right?  That's what gives the fruit its interesting, astringent flavor.  So, imagine spilling a mixture of grape juice and strong tea on your new  Brooks Brothers shirt.  That's right -- it's never, ever coming out.

So you can eat a pomegranate quickly, or safely, but never both.  Basically it's a fruit for people with lots of time on their hands.  Or nudists.

Day 6: Just do it.

A Soviet poster a day. Madison Avenue didn't catch up until the 1980s. Peculiar.

American moonbase: the modern US embassy

Man, I remember when Vanity Fair was a silly magazine, one part fashion and two parts pretentious culture.  Now... well, it's still a silly magazine, but about every third issue has a good-to-excellent article on politics or current affairs.

As with many oddities of contemporary American culture, this can probably be attributed to the aging of the Baby Boomers.  They're just too damn old to walk around with Rolling Stone magazine any more.  But Vanity Fair has ads for really expensive clothes inside, so it's OK.

Anyway.  This special bonus post was inspired by this recent VF article on the monster US embassy in Baghdad.  The story of that embassy is fascinating -- it's going to cost $600 million, will be the size of Vatican City, and will contain its own power generators, water wells, drinking-water treatment plant, sewage plant, fire station, Internet uplink, telephone center (Virginia area code), cell-phone network (New York area code), mail service, fuel depot, food and supply warehouses, vehicle-repair garage, swimming pool, movie theater, and food court -- but that wasn't the part of the article that really grabbed my attention.  No, I was fascinated by the discussion modern US embassies generally, and why they -- in a word -- suck. 

Long quotes below the fold.

Day 5: Monday pre-dawn quarterbacking

That has to be the most nerve-wracking 11 point victory I've ever seen. Packers 33, Kansas City 22.

There are times, like at the end of the first half, that you remember Brett Favre has been hit in the head an awful lot. (In Packer lore, there is even the famous Concussion Touchdown.) And then there are other times, and you remember that, despite the years of wandering blind in the desert, Favre is still the Kwisatz Quarterback.

Smudge

Saw comet Holmes last night.

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but we get pretty good stars around our house.  First, we're high up -- it's not the Andes, but our house is about 1200 meters (4,000 feet) above sea level.  Second, while downtown Yerevan can get pretty smoggy, there's not a lot of pollution in our neighborhood.  And third, there aren't a lot of bright lights around.  So on a clear night, we can step into the back yard and see stars and more stars.

Lately the nights have been clear.  Gorgeous fall weather, cool and dry.  I walk outside after putting Jacob to bed and the Pleiades are just rising, a delicate bit of lacework against the purple sky.  Orion comes up over the neighbor's house just around bedtime, Mars blazing orange in Gemini.  It's nice.

The comet: it's not anything spectacular.  Not a blazing thing streaking across the sky.  The comet looks like a tiny little smudge.  It's "third magnitude", which means about as bright as a medium-bright star: bright enough that you could see it in a city or town, but just barely.  You have to stare a moment to see that it's a smudge instead of a star. 

On the other hand, it's pretty cool.  Comet Holmes is a short-period comet, orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  Most of the time it minds its own business, making an orbit every seven years and never getting bright enough to see.  But a couple of weeks ago it suddenly got around a million times brighter, and became visible to the naked eye.

A Sunday walk

Went for a walk with the boys today.

The railroad used to run right past our house.  Well, it still does, but they stopped running trains over a year ago. So the tracks are still there, rails and sleepers.  But abandoned.

We walked along the railroad for about a kilometer.  Since this is the former Soviet Union, the tracks are a fly-dump for all the neighborhoods they pass through.  Exploded bags of garbage are everywhere.  Shards of broken glass glitter from between the sleepers.  We passed four abandoned cars; the boys stopped for a few minutes to play "car" inside one.  It was full of shards of jagged metal, and -- I am not making this up -- someone had left a book of matches inside.  I lost track of how many broken fixtures and household appliances we passed: sinks, an oven, microwaves, a humidifier.  Basically, it was a walk along a very long, narrow trash dump and junkyard.

Day 4: His teeth came at you first

I once saw a picture of Lombardi smiling slightly, and I said, "That man is SO HAPPY." Quite honestly, I am surprised that the diocese hasn't started the first steps of the canonization process. Even the Lutherans would get behind it.

(H/t to Bad Mama, who has new baby pictures up! Pistachio is darling.)

Day 3: The Kräusening

Jonathan Meades on Stalinist architecture. (H/t to the New York City Math Teacher.)

Some things about Nagorno-Karabakh

I want to do some proper posts about this sometime, but it's Saturday and I'm blogging for a few minutes while the boys play outside.  So, some rather disjointed points about Nagorno.  You might see these again if I get more organized.

1)  Nagorno is beautiful.  Though it's only about the size of Delaware, Nagorno contains tremendous variety.  There's a piece that looks just like northern Italy.  Another chunk that looks like one of the cooler, greener bits of New Mexico.  The south is a flat fertile river valley; the east is rolling hills.  Drive half an hour and you're in a new microclimate, but you can always see mountains and trees.  It's nice.

Also, since Nagorno only has about 150,000 people, it's pretty empty.  (By way of comparison, Delaware has around 800,000.)  So, despite its size, there's an impression of spaciousness

Also-also, since Nagorno has almost no industry -- it all collapsed during the war -- the air is clean, there's not a lot of traffic on the roads, and the wildlife has come back in a big way.  Maybe not so great if you live there, but makes it nice to visit.

Counting to ten in Armenian

  If I have this right -- and maybe I don't -- National Blog Posting Month is November.  So, I post something on November 1, then again on November 2, and so forth.  On Armenian time, obviously.

This brings us to a topic I find absolutely fascinating: counting in Armenian.

Day 2: Carlos reluctantly steps in

Looks like Doug's Internet connection might be out. Okay, for the honor of HDTD.

It's Day 2 because the blog is on Yerevan time. Sometimes. I don't understand it myself. I suspect post-Soviet Schlamperei, because I usually do, but it's probably Bay Area server weirdness.

Let's see. I could talk about John Cole's apostasy from the Party, which you can watch unfold at Balloon Juice. Doug can sense me biting my tongue right now! And again! and a third time, and you know where too. But Johnny Pez comments there, so how can you go wrong.

The blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money mentioned Gail Bederman's book Manliness and Civilization in passing. I'm going to have to track it down. You know, it used to be that men worried about their masculinity would overcompensate by dint of physical and mental effort, like Teddy Roosevelt or Flex Mentallo. In this brave new millennium, it seems, they add another roll of fat, grow a neckbeard, pontificate about violence online, and in extreme cases write science fiction. I have no idea how this comicbookguyification of the American male came about.

Kung Fu Monkey guy talks about how a Irish bar in Chicago became an underground bar in Belgrade. Really? Where are the sponsor girls? why are they starting with beer (dark beer yet), and not crno vino? why are they playing the Clancy Brothers and not turbofolk? (You can tell.) But you could probably leave up the Chicago Bulls stuff -- or, given the Bulls' record in recent years, put it back up.

Okay, this is painful. twenty-eight more days.

National blog posting month?

Also known as NaBloPoMo.   The goal is to post something every damn day for the entire month of November.  There's a cute logo, which my wife has up on the other blog.

Lately my posting has been more like one post per month.  Maybe this would be a way to get back into it?

Who's with me?

Halloween night thoughts

I need one of those high-intensity light therapy lamps. No, it's not for my home advanced interrogation techniques kit. I have my kitchen for that. But I feel crazy jet-lagged -- I haven't been on a plane in months -- and I have this urge to roll a stick of butter in sugar and eat it. It's pretty clearly Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I just don't have the time for.

For Halloween this year I'm going to re-read James Merrill's The Book of Ephraim, which is creepy for multiple reasons. No one reads poetry anymore. (Me, La Loca, and Alice Notley, who has a new collection out.) It's by the son of the Merrill who founded Merrill Lynch, talking with spirits through a Ouija board. Not many Pulitzers are won via the planchette. Someday I should read Alison Lurie's Familiar Spirits, her memoir about its composition.

Also I should read Anna Kavan. A recent Doris Lessing retrospective reminded me of that. A friend of mine once told me to read Kavan, years ago, back when the authors we read had symbolic meanings for us. In hindsight, I suppose she would have chosen Ann Quin, had Quin been better known then. Anyway. I feel like I owe it to her, or to me, or maybe to Kavan? I don't know. But someone is owed something, I feel sure.

Boo.