Thursday night I stopped by the grocery store in the evening to get supplies for enchiladas. This was exciting, because I haven't gotten around to much cooking lately. Also, my previous attempts at refried beans have been so disastrous that I thought I would actually look up a recipe and find out how one is supposed to make that fetching brown paste.

So the lady rang up my 200 crowns of food, and I was bagging groceries in my bike bag (you bag your own groceries in Denmark, and you buy or bring grocery bags, too), and my Dankort debit card was denied. Invalid card. I had 40 crowns on me, so I ended up having to abandon my purchase, with a long line of people staring at me. It was a lot of fun.

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Dankort from Privat (just a debit card) to a regular Visa. I kept my old card while waiting for a new card with the Visa symbol to arrive in the mail. The PIN showed up first, so I looked at it and did one of three things. Either I memorized it and threw it out, or I realized that I would be completely incapable of remembering something that way so I created a mnemonic and then threw it out, or I put the piece of paper somewhere. When the new card showed up, I couldn't remember which I'd done, and I couldn't remember the new PIN, so when I called to activate it the lady said that she couldn't even reset the PIN - she'd have to send a new card. It should not suprise you to learn that the next day I found the letter with the PIN.

So what happened is that, when the new card was finally mailed Wednesday, my Dankort was invalidated. I didn't expect this because it hadn't happened the first time a Visa was mailed. After the nice lady at the bank finished the forensic work, she suggested that I get a little cash while waiting for the new card. I got a thousand crowns, and last night I paid cash for enchilada fixings and tonight I will feast on Enchiladas. But first I have to go in search of tofu. The store I tried in Amager closed at 4:30 pm weekdays - hopefully it will at least be open today.

That's a big contradiction in Denmark: it was early in adopting real women's lib and having adult members of both sexes in the workplace, but retains by law the shop schedule that only works when each household has a homemaker. The only things you can reliably buy outside of the window of M-F 10-5, Sat 11-2 are snack foods, restaurant meals, and alcohol.

The Dark Side of Camelot. Seymour Hersh.
Hersh is back in the news because his New Yorker article was a big factor in breaking the Iraqi prison abuse story. Perhaps because of this, his 1997 book about Kennedy was on display in the Schipol airport so I grabbed a copy. Those who decry liberal media bias(1) will certainly enjoy all the dirt Hersh digs on one of the most famous Democrats. After reading the book I had to do some research to find out that Hersh is generally considered to have discredited himself with this book, making extreme claims on flimsy evidence in his drive to find the dirtiest truth possible. I think that overstates the case; at a minimum, he has plenty of people on record describing how extreme Kennedy's sex addiction was and (ok, here he starts stretching) how it may have impacted policy. More meaningful and damning were the description of Kennedy's mob ties, out-bribing of Stevenson in the West Virginia primary, and out-dirty-tricking Nixon in Chicago among other places.

An example of a weaker claim is

1. In 1962 Kennedy's defense secretary Robert McNamara awarded the TFX contract to General Dynamics over Boeing, even though Boeing's entry had won all four rounds of competition.
2. The FBI reported that the two sons of the head of security at General Dynamics broke into an LA woman's home and may have planted bugs
3. The LA woman was Kennedy's mistress

Hersh suggests that General Dynamics blackmailed Kennedy to select them. An alternate, simpler suggestion is that Kennedy was just giving pork to Texas.

In any event, it's a very entertaining and readable book and it gives a lot of perspective to mid-20th century American politics.

The Piano Tuner. Daniel Mason.
I thought about putting it down in the first few pages because the writing is a bit precious, but the voicing grew on me. Usually. To the extent there was a plot, I liked it. The fawning over Burma got to be a bit much.

1. As we all know, it's actually a bias towards making a profit and serving corporate masters.

An oft-noted feature of language is that it affords the routine creation of unique, never-before-uttered sentences. For instance. Today was mostly sunny, breezy, and not so cold, and so after heading down to the new mall (formerly advertised as the biggest in Scandinavia, a claim revised to biggest in Denmark after some belated fact-checking), I returned to my neighborhood and, after a mediocre sandwich and very good cookie, climbed the spiral steeple of Our Savior's Church with, for no particular reason, the chorus to "I Spent my Last Ten Dollars on Birth Control and Beer" stuck in my head. While I was presumably alone in my selection, I did squeeze past other musically entraced folk wending through the maze of wooden staircases, crossbeams, and ladders below the spire.
Tourist one: "Who waaaaaaants .... to liiiiiiiivve .... foREVarrrr ...."
Tourist two: "? ... Highlandah!"
Tourist one: "Qveen!"

The view was spectacular and acrophobic.

In other news, I'm on a month-long hiatus from Danish class due to scheduling conflicts. I watched the last seven episodes of Angel thanks to the magic of BitTorrent, and found the series finale far more satisfying than Buffy's. Unlike Buffy, which was consistently better than television until its often dreary deathmarch of a final season, Angel flirted with elements of mediocrity, especially in its fourth season, when its creative genius, Joss Whedon, split himself between three different television shows and his wife had a new baby. And where the show suffered most, I learned, wasn't in fact that Joss had less time to doctor the scripts. It was that his megalomania, combined with his overcommittment, meant that the production staff were unable to perform such basic duties as scouting locations and scheduling actors. This supports my working theory that most project (tv show; business; etc) fail bacause they get the easy things wrong, more often than because they get the hard things wrong.

Anyway, by the time I tuned back into Angel late in the last season, Joss was apparently back in full force, and I think the pressure of unexpected cancellation pushed him to write a better resolution than he might otherwise have indulged in.

In other other news, I now prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate. No word on how long this phase will last.

Lakoff: Also, within traditional liberalism you have a history of rational thought that was born out of the Enlightenment: all meanings should be literal, and everything should follow logically. So if you just tell people the facts, that should be enough — the truth shall set you free. All people are fully rational, so if you tell them the truth, they should reach the right conclusions. That, of course, has been a disaster.

Q: Meaning, for example, that if you tell people that the tax cuts are overwhelmingly benefiting the richest 1 percent of Americans at the expense of a balanced budget, liberals think people will naturally revolt against the measure.

Lakoff: Exactly. It never works. And liberals don't know why. They don't understand that there's another frame involved. Here's another example: I've been working with a lot of nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups of various kinds, including an environmental health group researching what they called the "body burden."

Q: The what?

Lakoff: The body burden — you have to hear it twice, right? It refers to the amount of toxic chemicals you have in your body. This group did a study with the Centers for Disease Control and found that there are vast numbers of toxic chemicals in our bodies, and in the bodies of newborn babies, in mothers' milk, and so on. I asked them how they were going to frame this. They said, "What do you mean? We're just going to put out a report with all the statistics, and they'll be so shocking that everything will change." So they did: a few papers ran it on page 17, some papers ran it a little but more. The next day it was done.

Q: But is that a failure of framing, or a failure of infrastructure, as in no public relations team, no properly prepared talk-show guests on staff?

Lakoff: It's a failure of the whole thing: not taking communication seriously and not taking conceptualization seriously. Anyway, they came back to me a couple of months later and asked how they should run a campaign on it. I said, "It's very simple. You call your campaign Be Poison-Free."

Why use the word "poison"? Because the framing of poison has a poisoner. It makes you look at who is doing the poisoning. Everyone knows what poison is — it kills you. Everybody knows that. Now of course you then have to run a serious campaign and have the money to do that and have the public relations support, which is harder, but the first step is understanding how to frame it.

Even though I've been using ACS and then OpenACS to run my website since 1999, and managing releases for about a year, I've never been able to keep up with upgrades on my personal site. I'm happy to say, however, that this weekend I got fully upgraded to the latest version. Probably the most visible change is internationalization. You can now browse this site in about eight languages, with more to come. The content is pretty much all in English, and likely to stay that way, but you can get a lot of the interface in other languages. I've also started to internationalize the little apps I've built myself. If you would like to translate some of the text on the site, let me know. I can give you access to the very nice web interface. You don't need to write code or upload files or anything - just type translations on the pages.

The other thing I've done lately is repair and update The Quiz. It now correctly recognizes you if you log in, so you can work at a sustainable pace, such as ten questions per day, until you finish them all. By which time I'll have typed in dozens more. Give it a try, and remember: all of the answers have been verified by professionals, so no arguments.

The Girl Who Played Go, Shan Sa.
If you are looking for a well-written, poetic, brief novel about love, sex, death, and the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, you will probably be very happy with this book.

Bangkok 8. John Burdett.
A very enjoyable and lurid crime novel from the point of view of an uncorrupted Buddhist cop in Bangkok.

Rush Limbaugh asserts that the reported torture Iraqi captives by US soldiers and mercenaries is "is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?"

There are a number of superbly executed fallacies here. The first is in the phrase "what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation;" eight words does all of this:

1. hide the reported rapes, sexual abuse, deaths in custody, and other crimes by focusing on a narrow set of reported crimes
2. gloss over the contextual difference: the difference between
   • physical and psychological abuse by cultural peers, with a known duration, within a known social order in which death is rare
   • physical and psychological abuse by foreign soldiers conducted in a prison on indefinitely jailed prisoners without due process or clear legal protections, in the context of an active war where death is frequent
3. link the Iraqi prisonors with Skull and Bones alumni, including George Bush and John Kerry, which:
   • diminishes the extremity of the victims' situation by associating them with free, safe people
   • hints at blaming the victims, because it's just an initiation, not prison torture

I won't go on. If you are still listening to and deriving enjoyment from this radio entertainer, I have to ask you: why? Do you like him because his smooth lies help you dissociate yourself from any lingering liberal/pinko/pc guilt? I can see how his version of the world is much more comfortable for Americans to live in, but it's not the real world. I don't claim a monopoly on truth, but surely this is beyond the pale.

...excerpts from Heather Mallick's column in The Globe and Mail, Saturday May 1, 2004.

My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly

By HEATHER MALLICK

[...] I appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Tuesday night to discuss a column I wrote welcoming the presence of American deserters in Canada.

[...]

I always say yes to American TV because how else are Americans going to hear about radical notions like feeding the poor and sheltering the gentle, or letting black people vote in Florida?

So I asked [...] for a car and driver and a makeup person to lacquer my face into immobility, and I did one of those remote-studio things where the host can see you but you can't see him and he asks you questions through an ear mike. And that's when the trouble started.

Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He talks to his trousers. You know the type. They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.

We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.

I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.

I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."

"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. [...]

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk. He then went into a mad rant about lefties [...] and how I was a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

Overnight, I received hundreds of e-mail messages from American men who think my private parts have gone communist, if you grasp my meaning. The saddest thing was the e-mail from kind Americans, apologizing for their "idiot," quivering with humiliation and praising me for having remained calm and composed under fire, not realizing that I was simply frozen with disbelief. I have replied to each one of the nice ones.

The whole degraded debacle and everyone's reaction to it, including mine, reminded me that Americans now have to cope with a new surrealism in public life. In the 1936 Spanish Civil War entries in a diary I read long ago, by someone who may well have been Stephen Spender, the writer describes an O'Reilly-esque scene. "A man squats and defecates in the street, without comment." Re-reading these diaries decades later, Spender writes, "What on earth did I expect him to say? Olé?"

"Only by intermittently exposing large numbers of male bodies to the risk of violent mutilation and destruction, can true masculinity and the health of society at large be adequately displayed and preserved."

On a completely unrelated note, we had F-16 flyovers today in Copenhagen, the beginning of a period of celebration leading to the Crown Prince's marriage next week Friday.

Ophelia's Revenge, Rebecca Reisert.

A fictional universe is still real, in a sense. If you ask what Spiderman's name is, there's a right answer. The original author may carry some extra weight in her universe, but she isn't god. A great film can create a second, related universe - Blade Runner, or the English Patient. And in some cases, such as Gregory Maguire's Wicked, the later author alters fictional reality. Maguire presents a more convincing, more real Oz than Baum did, and now the original books and the movie are the secondary materials, glossing over or hiding the embarrassing, grittier realities of social strife, racism, and alienation behind the Glenda, the Wicked Witch, and the rest.

Ophelia's Revenge, which is the story of Hamlet told by Ophelia, is more in the mold of "Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead," taking the original material as a departure point but very careful never to contradict anything in the source, instead presenting new history, revealing angles, and showing what happens after scenes end and the curtain comes down. It's quick-paced, makes real humans out of the characters, well written enough, but ultimately too respectful of the source to make enough space for its own story.

Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser.

Disappointing compared to his previous masterpiece, Fast Food Nation. That book set up a powerfully convincing argument one piece at a time, backed by years of dedicated reporting and research. Reefer Madness has the reporting, and even more footnotes, but does not satisfy at its goal: the exploration of the underground economy in the US. In part this is because it's too short relative to its huge subject, and in part it simply is too weak on actual economics, as opposed to statistics. Educational, a good read, but I wanted a lot more.

A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain.

Another book that fails to live up to its excellent predecessor. Bourdain tours the world and eats lots of weird food. The writing, and the thinking behind it, shows promise but never quite delivers any deep thoughts. Frequently very depressing, which I respect. The bad meals - the pet iguana, the poorly prepared sheep's face - are more memorable than the good ones, and sadder.

Bruce Schneier: So I am very much in favor of those sorts of things: hiring linguists at the FBI, getting investigative teams in place, tracking terrorist funding, interdicting communications, that stuff also works.

And then I also advocate stuff at the back end, emergency response, first response, whether it is police, fire, medical, spending money there helps us, again, regardless of what the terrorist plans are.

We can never anticipate the terrorist plans. Inasmuch as we do, they will change them, so by definition you can’t anticipate them. We can’t all say, “My God! They’re are going to attack the rail system! Let’s secure the rail system,” because then they’ll decide to attack something else.

Doug Kaye: So what are some of the examples of the expenditures that the United States is now making that you think aren’t well justified?

Bruce Schneier: You know, generally all of the big budget IT systems. CAPS II, the airline profiling system, is a complete waste of money. I think fingerprinting foreigners at the border, if you actually sit down and think about it, makes absolutely zero sense.

The following is Marine Lieutenant Colonel Strobl's account of escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps.