Zinn: I'm much more suspicious of Frodo than you are. I've always viewed him as one of the most malevolent actors in this drama, precisely because of how he abets people like Gandalf. He uses a fake name, Mr. Underhill, just as Gandalf goes by several names: Mithrandir, the Grey Pilgrim, the White Rider. Strider is also Aragorn, is also Estel, is also Elessar, is also Dunadan. He has all these identities.

Chomsky: We call those aliases today.

Zinn: But is Sauron ever anything but Sauron? Is Saruman ever anything but Saruman?

Chomsky: And now, with Frodo in the midst of a hallucinogenic, paranoid state, we meet Strider.

Zinn: Note that the first thing he starts talking about is the ring. "That is no trinket you carry." A very telling irony, that. It is the kind of irony that Shakespeare would use. It is something Iago might say. And did you hear that? "Sauron the Deceiver." That is what Strider, the ranger with multiple names, calls Sauron. A ranger. I believe today we call them serial killers.

Chomsky: Or drug smugglers.

It's too bad it's just a parody. The real thing might look a bit like David Brin's article J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress, where he argues

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord"?

Or might they instead have thought they were the "good guys," with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return ... bringing more rings.

"Then would you read a Sustaining Book that would help comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?"

Pooh, quoted in "Abridged Too Far," a Salon article about the evils of poorly abridged children's books.

Even after being imprisoned for stealing motorcars, even after having escaped prison, and even after having spent a bitterly cold night in a hollow tree, incorrigible Toad is capable of the most delicious grandiosity. Now, the adapted version simply says, "Shaking the dry leaves out of his hair, [Toad] crept out of the hollow and marched off, confident and hopeful, though a little hungry."

Grahame, on the other hand, treats us to Toad's view of his situation:

"He was warm from end to end as he thought of the jolly world outside, waiting eagerly for him to make his triumphal entrance, ready to serve him and play up to him, anxious to help him and to keep him company, as it always had been in the days of old before misfortune fell upon him ... the green fields that succeeded the trees were his own to do as he liked with; the road itself, when he reached it ... seemed, like a stray dog, to be looking anxiously for company.

Roxie Campanella, widow of (Brooklyn!) Dodgers Hall of Fame catcher Roy, died last week at age 77. An excerpt from the LA Times article by Bill Plaschke:

Several years ago, while visiting with Roxie, I wondered whether there was any part of her that was relieved that Roy had left for a world where surely he could stand and run again.

She began crying.

"Of course not," she said. "I miss him. I miss him every day. He was never a burden, never once. How can someone you love ever be a burden?"

Soon, I, too, was crying, mourning my pathetic ignorance.

The old saw is that people can remember seven things, plus or minus two. The original research paper doesn't quite say that. It says, " the span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember." It's not that we can only remember seven things, it's more that we can only (barely) process seven random things. You can remember all fifty US states if you work at it, but if I read you a list of rural Chinese townships you (if you are in the 5/6 majority of the world) will be a bit pressed to remember the sounds of even seven, much less reproduce, spell, or locate them. To get past the seven barrier, we use all sorts of memory tricks, usually unconsciously. Entire phrases can count as one - you can remember "noon," "9 am," "next Tuesday," and "July 4, 1776" about equally well - each one in a single chunk.

I spend a lot of time in class surfing the boundary between adequate and inadequate chunking. When I understand all, or all but one of the words in a sentence, I can rattle it off, modify it, reply to it, recognize it, no problem. When I memorize sentences, at first I'm completely off but eventually I hit a threshold and my mistakes change from complete missing clauses and incomprehension to putting "min venner" (my friend) when the actual sentence is "han" (him), because I am recalling the meaning of the sentence (easy), not a sequence of marks on paper (hard). I'm really bad at picking up vocabulary; often I can feel a word slipping right through my head and I know it won't, it can't stick. It took me over a year - I wasn't even in China any more - before I could remember that bus is "qiche." I've eaten my own height, if not weight, in "double snail's toe" pastries from the corner bakery (not the one across the street, it sucks; the one three blocks away in Christians Torv) and I ask them what it's called every time and you could take away all my chocolate and I still couldn't tell you what it's called in Danish.

So about half the time I do okay in class and the other half I just fail, hard, over and over, and when I fail it's usually because I don't know all the words and so I simply cannot do the substitution drills or the grammar exercises. Yes, I understand that verb has to be duplicated when changing the sentence into a "Først ... og så ..." (First ... and then ...) structure. I just don't know which, out of three words I don't recognize, is the verb. And each time the teacher hums the theme from Jaws (I'm not making this up) one more word that I knew at home disappears from my working vocabulary. (I gather that some people work well under pressure. I've never claimed to be one of them; maybe that's because I plan a lot or maybe that's why I plan a lot.)

The point of this ramble is that Wednesday, the entire class collectively failed to prepare adequately and so the substitution drill was a miserable failure and had to be aborted, and our class was out half an hour early. At least, that's how the teacher saw it. I found that conclusion unlikely. I know I studied about my usual amount, and if that's inadequate to complete these exercises in class then I'll just repeat every level and refuse to apologize for it. I would like to offer up this comparison. The way these drills work is that the teacher reads and we all repeat the full sentence, and then the teacher reads one word or clause to a student and the student repeats the entire sentence, substituting the new word(s) where appropriate. This is one from lesson 5:

Det er præcis    det samme som personummer.

       næsten

       ikke helt

       slet ikke

(That is [precisely | nearly | not quite | not at all] the same as a person-number.) The teacher says, "slet ikke," and you say, "det er slet ikke det samme som personnummer." And here's one from lesson 8:

Det er svært at koncentrere sig, efter at man har set en god film.

                                 efter at man har været i biografen.

                                 efter at man har været på kursus i 3 timer.

                                 efter at man har været ude i universet.

(It is difficult to concentrate, [after one has seen a good film | after one has been to the movies | etc]). Yeah, must have been the students' fault. We're all lazy no-goodniks who, aside from showing up for 3.5 hours of class three nights a week and doing 2-3 hours of homework and prep three other nights, really don't put any effort into learning Danish and probably don't deserve to speak it. The problem certainly couldn't lie in teaching materials that ask students to simultaneously master substantial amounts of new vocabulary, new pronunciation, and new grammar each and every lesson, could it?

The reality, of course, is that we get overloaded with new items, and our chunking breaks down. These sentences have thirteen words. At least two or three have tricky pronunciation. The fact that the "at" is pronounced here, whereas it is silent when it comes directly after a comma, is an item, as is the fact that the "at" is pronounced "uh." I think "har været" is past perfect tense of "er" (be), but I had to scan the vocab pages of six previous lessons before finding it to confirm, and that was after I saw it in written from. "Koncentrere" (concentrate) is a reflexive verb, hence the "sig," which is a reflexive pronoun but I don't remember which one; maybe it's "myself." Don't forget that it's pronounced "sai" (like the English word sigh - hey, new mnemonic!) because the g causes the i to drop three levels to an a, and then becomes an "i" sound itself, as long as the word is emphasized. If it's not emphasized, then I think it becomes just "suh."

So there could easily be 15 items to remember in this sentence, and I don't see how even a good student is going to have more than half of them down pat, so you're still left with 7 items - right at the threshold. Now please do ten of these in a row without making a mistake. Of course, if you are a fluent Danish speaker then you can probably chunk the entire first clause as one item, and chunk a bunch of the helping verbs and prepositions, and you are down to a very manageable 3 or 4 chunks per sentence, and you wonder why nobody can repeat it back to you.

In fact, I don't mind the insanely aggressive lessons. I'd rather get pushed, fail to master it all, and repeat, then breeze through simpler stuff and learn less. What I do resent is the attitude that I feel just below the surface (and emerging from time to time) of four of the five teachers I've had so far, that because we aren't speaking fluent Danish already we are somehow weak or stupid or immature, and should be browbeaten and cajoled. I guess this is a professional hazard in language teaching, and I know from my own teaching and from interactions with people who don't speak fluent English that it's really hard to separate fluency and perceived intelligence. But it's disappointing that the top language school in as competent a country as Denmark can't manage to train their teachers past this point. On the other hand, we also got a handout about new class fees (most of us pay nothing, as class is subsidized by the state - though I'm a taxpayer so it's not exactly free) which said, among other things, "please remember that your attendance rate and absence rate is recorded and may be used by the authorities if you apply for permanent residence permit or Danish citizenship," and if that doesn't make American readers want to go out and hold the line against the wave of "English-only" legislation and xenophobia, then nothing will and we have little to be proud about.

What could we have done in class? We could have done more of them as a group, to give us time to repeat and memorize the clauses in class and without individual pressure. We could have interrupted the sequence of public failures before they became contagious and even the best students were completely helpless. We could have opened our books so that we could read along. But no, it was a failure of will and ability and preparation on our part, and there was nothing to be done but to move on.

I'm really learning a lot that will help me the next time I do a teaching stint.

Going to a fast-paced language school like KISS, you get to have a lot of different teachers in a short time. I've had five in three months, although two were just for one class each. And if you pay attention, you can learn a lot about teaching. (All of the teachers are infinitely better than I was in China, but all of the teachers at KISS have professional qualifications and months of training.) I try to avoid jumping to conclusions about people, and I usually fail. And often I'm wrong - I was in despair after the first day of the phonetics class but Bent has turned out to be my favorite KISS teacher so far.

Anyway, when you're in a language class and paying attention, there's a lot of different things you could or should be paying attention to.

• Mentally converting written Danish words to the correct pronunciation
• Including glottal stops and gutteral vowel sounds
• Emphasizing the appropriate words
• Listening to your own pronunciation
• Listening to the teacher's pronunciation
• Knowing the correct positioning of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Knowing the actual position of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Remembering memorized sentences
• Remembering the meaning of words
• Remembering rules of grammar
• Applying rules of grammar
• Knowing your turn in the class sequence
• Knowing the current class modality (is the teaching echoing what we say or echoing only words we did wrong)
• Determining whether the word the teacher just said to you was a correction of your pronunciation in the last sentence or your prompt for the next sentence.

In order to function in class, you need to be doing at least four or five of these things at once, and in order to excel you need to be doing almost all of them. It's impossible to do them all consciously, so you have to prepare as much as possible so as to automate many of these things and then just think about one or two current problems plus whatever the teacher directs your attention towards. On a good night, on material I've prepared well for, I can just about pull it off - keeping three or four threads active semi-consciously and focusing on one at a time. If you are doing all of this and you make a mistake, you usually have the correct answer somewhere in your head, and to retrieve it you simply need to be nudged in the right direction - given a hook or a clue that your subconscious can use to focus your thinking mind in the right direction. And sometimes our current teacher does this. Unfortunately, her first reaction to mistakes is usually one or more of: gasps and dirty looks, banging her fist on the table, feigned shock, or "criminal!" or "do you want to make your teacher cry?" The effect of any of these, and especially of the fist-banging, is simply to trigger the fight-or-flight response. Since humans didn't evolve in an environment where pronuciation and grammar were immediate life-and-death concerns, the human brain doesn't typically retain this information when reverting to fight-or-flight. It flushes everything that doesn't pertain to possible incoming sharp teeth or claws, escape routes, or physical counter-attack. I'm amazed when any student ever gets anything right on the second try - I'm usually only able to by saying things that I know are wrong - which triggers a fist that I can ignore because my act of choosing to say something wrong grants me a bit of control - while working my way back to the correct answer. It's probably not the best way to pass the class, but it's the best I can do to perform the learning act in this environment.

So, despite my efforts not to jump to conclusions, as of week three in this latest class I'm willing to say that I don't care for the teacher.

Today, Sunday, the temperature is over 10 C and the sun is shining through a bit of haze and very scattered clouds. It's a week early (it's not even the Ides of March yet) but it feels like spring. Yesterday, it was right at freezing all day, the sky was almost featureless gray, and a mid-afternoon rain developed into mid-afternoon wet snow.

Guess which day Peter and Branimir and I went to the beach and to the royal park at Klampenborg?

"The year before, I was walking on the street, nobody recognized me at all. Nobody. I was Mr. Nothing," [Pavarotti] said. "But the day after the performance on the television, everybody stopped me and everybody applauded me. And then I understand the power of television, and I realized what means television, and I began to make love to television, to have television on my side, to devote myself to television."

After the electrocution in New York, Con Ed tested about 260,000 underground structures, manholes, metal plates and service boxes and found less than 1 percent of them had stray voltage, company spokesman Joe Petta said. Still, two more dogs were shocked in New York this week.

Note the fallacy that Con Ed puts forth - they imply that things are okay because less than one percent of the New York electical plant has stray voltage. The AP reporter, by using the word "still," perpetuates the fallacy. Do the math: up to 2,600 manholes, etc, have stray voltage - why is it then surprising that two dogs were shocked in a week?

Of course, if you want to get a better idea of how many dogs we would expect to get shocked, you would have to guess or measure how many dogs there are, how frequently they get walked, how many potentially (electicity pun - hah!) dangerous objects that contact per walk, how many objects with stray voltage have lethal current, how many dog owners notice, how many who notice report the incident, etc. Still, if there are a few thousand objects in New York that may kill by touch, two zapped dogs a week isn't surprising.

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:04:22 -0400 (AST)
From: Nathan <nathan>
To: Joel Aufrecht <joel>
Subject: Re: Greetings

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Joel Aufrecht wrote:
>
> My question is: (ask the buddhist) someone stole the bicycle light
> from my bicycle, which I discovered this morning.  How do I stop
> feeling pissed off and violated?

There are certainly a number of ways of going about this.

You are a very intellegent person, so perhaps you want to take this as
a great opportunity to see how your mind works and explore this
feeling. Some questiosn you might ask yourself, is "if this feeling is
a real thing, then it should have a color, a shape, a location, or
other identifying marks, what are these? Is this feeling a single
feeling or does it have parts, and if it has parts what are they?"
Actually try to answer the question, and watch what your mind does.

Another method is comparison.
-If one was following the news, one might have noted that in the fall
of 2000 the election was stolen in the United States, losing a bike
light is nothing to be upset about compared to having your rightful
leader cheated out of office.
-Or how about the massive theft of taxes from the American taxpayer,
to finance a campaign of demoralizing, bombing, beating, raping,
killing, and stealing from the Iraqui people. Losing a bike light is
nothing compared to losing 79-Billion dollars, or your life, liberty,
and/or pursiut of happiness.

Contemplation of impermanence.
-At one point or another, you will lose everything that you have ever
owned. This is true of all people. Your life is short, and precious.
You will die, why waste your precious life away wishing harm on others
who will also die in due course?
-Nothing lasts forever. Even the greatest mountains are slowly ground
into sand by the weather, leaving nothing in their place. That bike
light too will break, buying a new one means that it'll be longer
before you have to replace your bike light again.

Compassion.
-If someone was willing to steal a bike light things must be quite bad
for them. Usually if someone could afford it they'd just buy one
right? So if someone stole your bike light, perhaps they are already
suffering more than you are.

If you were the type of person who was interested in faith, devotion,
or perhaps just turning the tables on your habitual patterns you might
recite the "four immeasurables", with this loss in your mind.
{
  May all beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
  May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
  May we never be separated from the great happiness devoid of
      suffering.
  May we dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression
      and prejudice.
}
You could even replace the "all beings" and "we" with "the person who
stole my bike light". And watch what happens after you say that about
a dozen times slowly. (repeat as needed ;)

There are lots more I'm sure.

> I was thinking of putting the recharger (without which the light
> won't last long) outside near the bicycle, with a note and some
> money.  I feel like this is going through the motions of not being
> possessive but really I'm still pissed.
>
I wouldn't put out the recharger or money, I think that's just rubbing
it in. If you wanted to write a note, I would suggest politely
explaining that you can not find your bike light, and ask if anyone
can help you find it. Be sure not to accuse anyone of stealing, that
just makes things harder to sort out. Keep it simple, don't get
dramatic. Be happy and thankful if someone returns it.


How's that for an answer?

-Nathan

===

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 22:17:36 +0100
From: Joel Aufrecht <joel>
To: Nathan <nathan>
Subject: Re: Greetings

> How's that for an answer?

It exceeded all expectations.  Would you do me the honor of posting it
on my blog to share?  I will endeavor to do as many steps as I can.

>
> -Nathan
>

... One major problem appears to be that the government wrote this EUR 156M/month anticipated revenue into its budget already. That is why those road-building projects are on hold and those 70,000 jobs are "endangered". Yes, that's right. Someone let a contract for a complex, highly-distributed system, of a sort which did not exist anywhere before, with a non-trusted, indeed partially non-trustworthy, user group numbering in the millions, that would cost of the order of a billion euros and ~450 technical-person-years to develop, which was to be in full revenue service inside a calendar year from development start date. And then apparently allowed the whole [German] road-construction industry to become dependent on that anticipated revenue, as well as part of the railways.

What Congress did in 1954, in an attempt to stimulate investment in manufacturing, was to “accelerate” the depreciation process for new construction. ... In the first few years after a shopping center was built, the depreciation deductions were so large that the mall was almost certainly losing money, at least on paper—which brought with it enormous tax benefits ....

Suddenly it was possible to make much more money investing in things like shopping centers than buying stocks, so money poured into real-estate investment companies.

My advice is simple. Death to Flash. If a consultant recommends that you use Flash in a website, run for the door. If you can trample him or her on the way out, consider that a bonus.

I'm typing the Danish numbers, cardinal and ordinal up to twenty plus every tenth up to a hundred (hundrede), into my language machine (you can play along at home - follow the link in the title, add some words to your personal list, and take a test), and I recognized a pattern. We have a test tomorrow on the numbers, in addition to the standard memorize-fifteen-sentences test, and when the test was announced and then the announcement repeated during the course of last week, I experienced and witness a sequence of reactions. First, denial of meaning - she said there would be a test and we filed that away but pretended that it didn't matter yet. Then anger - why are these numbers so stupid? (They're not much more irregular than English numbers, where eleven, twelve, thirteen, twenty, and thirty are nothing to brag about.) Then despair: I'll never make it; I'll never pass the test, I'll never learn the language. Then numbness - you just do it, and do it over and over. Acceptance may come next, but I've not gotten that far.

See the pattern? That's right, language learning is emotionally identical to grieving.

... Plus, the specific Dutch institution that oversaw Manhattan was not religious but mercantile—insofar as the East India Company noticed New Amsterdam at all (the place was by far its shabbiest outpost), it didn’t care what people there thought about God. It cared about beavers. It cared very, very passionately about beavers. If you didn’t get in the way of the beaver-pelt trade with Europe, you were an honorary New Netherlander.

I've finally finished the remedial phonetics stuff and am back on the main (fast) track at Danish school, meaning Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 5:15 pm to 8:45 pm. I ran into somebody who was in my original class; he's now in level four. I'm starting level 2. He said most of that class did not pass, so I feel a bit better. In my heart I still believe that missing that connection at SFO by a few minutes (the plane was still at the gate!) cost me six weeks. Anyway, the new class is fine. I actually grew fond of the people in my phonetics class, but I don't see them any more because they are all on the Tuesday/Thursday track. My friend Qin Xia changed to M/W/F for level two but she got put into the other level 2 class, so we only see each other in the hallway.

With level 2, lession 3, we are finally starting to count above fifteen. If you know anything about Danish and you have been following this story, you are probably eager to hear what I have to say about Danish counting. I vaguely remember the psychotic American helicopter pilot we met in Malmö ranting about Danish numbers, but he was the ranting sort.

Anyway, all I'm going to say is this. In Danish, 75 is pronounced with the syllables: "fem-o-ha-fears." This is written femoghalvfjerds, and has the meaning, 'five, plus half of a twenty less than four twenties'. That's all I have to say about Danish numbers.

In my opinion, a best-of-breed language would use Chinese numbering, which is strictly regular, strictly base ten, and comprises almost exclusively monosyllablic components (not counting a few dipthongs).