Syrian Memory #7

To show his devotion to God, St. Simeon the Stylite lived atop a fifty foot stone column for forty years . . . and if you visit this holy site, which is near the city of Aleppo, you can buy a St. Simeon Frisbee to celebrate his accomplishment.

Syrian Memory #6 (Catherine Screws Up)

We were lucky enough to accompany some US Embassy folks to the very high security "Austrian Position 16" in the Golan Heights-- though we had to pass through countless checkpoints and endure many extended radio conversations-- we were finally granted permission to go up the mountain and see the view: the post overlooks the Sea of Galilee and the Biblical farmland where Paul walked to see the promised land, you can also see an Israeli checkpoint and this is the area where the Druze-- members of a strange religion somewhere between Christianity and Islam-- negotiate cross-border marriages with megaphones to prevent inbreeding-- and on our way down the mountain, while I admired the fabulous mustaches that all the Druze men sported, Catherine realized that she left her jacket up at "Austrian Post 16," her nice Gore-Tex jacket that I bought her as a gift . . . and it took us six months to get that jacket back, finally a nice UN soldier from New Zealand got it to us when he was on leave in Damascus.

Syrian Memory #5

If you step on a land mine in the Golan Heights and hear that fatal "click," this is what you do: get someone to pile stones on your foot until you think there is enough weight to hold down the mechanism, and then cut your leg off at the knee and consider yourself lucky.

Syrian Memory #4 (Warning: This Is Gross)

While eating some pinkish chicken at a dodgy bar/dojo I contracted a parasite-- I won't go into details as to how the lab diagnosed that I contracted this parasite-- but the doctor was sure that giant intestinal round worms were living in my intestines . . . and according to Kara, our bio teacher, I should be quite proud that the little buggers made it to my intestines as full grown adults (8-9 inches long), as it is an arduous process: when you first swallow an ascuris,  it goes through the stomach and into the intestine and lays eggs, then these eggs hatch into larva, which molt and flow through the bloodstream to the lungs, and like salmon swimming upstream, the larva proceeds up the trachea, and then they are re-swallowed and they move through the stomach again, where they reside until you take a big pill, Zentel, and even after I took this big pill, things still weren't right, so I called the doctor and had this conversation: "I took the pill, doc, but . . ." and he said, "Remember, you injured your stomach and intestines, it will take a little while to return to normal . . . you are eating what I told you? Rice and bananas and tea?" and I said, "Yes, but how will I know when the worms are dead?" and he said, "You'll see them when they come out, of course . . . have a nice dinner."

Syrian Memory #3

We received two notes this week at school: note #1 was given to me in the middle of Public Speaking class and it said our school would be closing early as per orders of the US Embassy because of "demonstrations" in honor of Palestinian martyrs" . . . so we went to Kevin and Emmy's apartment and sat on their roof and drank beer and watched a mob of teenagers throw some stones at our school-- it was hardly a riot and the mob was also carrying text books and protractors . . . it was like getting school closed for a dusting of snow; note #2 was from the school nurse and it advised us that we should not eat at Station 1, our favorite schwarma joint, as ten cases of food poisoning had been reported in the past two weeks . . . so we will take that into consideration, but still, they do slice a tasty schwarma there . . . maybe it was a coincidence.

Syrian Memory #2

The Umayyad Mosque, the third holiest place in the Muslim religion (and the site has been a holy place for thousands of years: a temple to Haddad, and then Jupiter, A Greek Orthodox Church supposedly harboring the head of John the Baptist) is awe-inspiring-- fields of polished marble, walls of mosaics, and a monumental mosque housing a Shrine to Hussein (Mohammad's grandson) where Shiites were busy kissing a grate . . . the area was so holy that you couldn't wear your shoes, so I left my old stank Nikes in a pile of other shoes by the door, but when I returned, they had been stolen-- obviously the person who stole them didn't know that this was the third holiest place in the Muslim religion-- and then, conveniently, there was a youngster outside the gates of the mosque who took a quick look at the white man in his socks and immediately led me to the shoe souk-- where I'm sure he received a commission-- and his cousin sold me the crappiest pair of sandals in the Middle East.

Syrian Memory #1

While I am on vacation in Cape Cod and Kill Devil Hills, I have pre-loaded some thematic sentences for your reading pleasure . . . some of you might remember the long winded e-mail updates I sent out each week while Catherine and I were teaching in Syria; I have decided to revisit these in order to find the best moments and condense them into single sentences . . . so here is Syrian Memory #1: just after we arrived, my wife and I took public transportation to the ancient Christian village of Maalula, where the houses are nestled in the high desert mountains and painted a pleasant blue and where the people still speak the language of Christ, Aramaic-- and though I helped unload the vegetables from the van we did not receive a discount on our fare; we hiked above the town to visit the main attraction: the Shrine of St. Tekla-- here, supposedly, a woman converted to Christianity just before she was to be wed to a pagan man and she was flogged for this heresy, and then she fled and, miraculously, a beautiful gorge opened in the rocks to facilitate her escape and there is now a monastery at the foot of this gorge and inside the monastery are the typical relics and pictures and also a fountain where water drips into a basin and this water is supposed to relieve flatulence, and oddly, Catherine (who is never flatulent) drank from this fountain, but I did not . . . and in retrospect, this was my greatest regret from all our overseas adventures, that I didn't drink from that fountain, because sometimes, especially when I mix beer and ice cream, I wish I drank from that fountain.

More Style Over Substance

I couldn't really follow the plot of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I'm not sure if you're supposed to-- it's a modern parody of Raymond Chandler's byzantine style-- and the narration is overly ironic and stylistic, but I will still recommend the movie if you are in my age bracket (forty-ish) because it's more like a get together of old friends . . . hanging out with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer is a blast, they are natural entertainers, and though their dialogue isn't terribly significant in regards to the plot, and though it's certainly not as clever as the insignificant dialogue in Pulp Fiction, it's still worth seeing how the two of them deliver it-- they are both old pros: three severed fingers out of five.

I Choose Style Over Substance

After reading six hundred pages of the second George R.R. Martin novel, A Clash of Kings, I have given up-- and while I admit that the plot is awesome and epic, I need a few adjectives when I am reading a novel . . . a little bit of style, and so instead I am wading through China Mieville's densely described genre-bending Perdido Street Station, a tale of bestial love in the city that is a veritable bestiary, New Crobuzon, and though the book has a map at the start, you don't need it . . . you can just groove on the freaky descriptions.

Memories Live In My Skull

The first compact disc I ever bought was The Cult's Sonic Temple-- I was a freshman in college and I didn't even own a CD player yet, so I had to travel from room to room to listen to tracks, but I knew that compact disks were the future and I didn't want to spend any more money on cassettes (if I were really smart, I would have stopped buying music altogether and listened to the radio until I could pirate stuff on the internet . . . think of the money I'd have saved)-- and though I was a little disappointed by Sonic Temple . . . it wasn't as good as Electric . . . I still held on to it, but the second compact disc I bought was called Positraction, by a band named Live Skull, and, with noisy, chaotic songs like "Circular Saw," and "Amputease," it was a little too disorganized for my tastes at the time-- and none of my friends liked it either-- so I sold it back to The Band Box and it remained in their used CD collection for my entire stay at William and Mary (and then I think Whitney bought it and gave it back to me so I may have the CD somewhere in my house) but I pretty much forgot about the existence of the band until I was reading Michael Azerrad's excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and I came across this sentence in the Sonic Youth section: "Why did Sonic Youth succeed when all of their peers-- bands like Live Skull, Rat At Rat R, and the Swans-- eventually fell by the wayside?" and so I went on Amazon and gave Live Skull a second chance and they are much easier to listen to now, since I've been listening to post-punk and post-rock and no wave for years and my ears are better attuned to pulling melody and order from dissonance.

Things You SHOULD Worry About

Matt Ridley has convinced me not to worry about global warming-- near the end of his book The Rational Optimist, he makes a strong case that though it is certainly occurring, the effects won't be as disastrous as the worst of the doomsayers believe-- and he says our time could be better spent on more tangible terrors: "the four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke, and malaria," and he even shows that from a more aesthetic, environmental view, global warming is not the cause of the loss of biodiversity on earth: "the threats to species are all too prosaic: habitat loss, pollution, invasive competitors, and hunting," and then he returns to his thesis, which he believes will eventually solve these problems . . . he says, "so long as human exchange and specialization are allowed to thrive somewhere, then culture evolves whether leaders help it or hinder it, and the result is that prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands". . . as long as ideas can "meet and mate, to have sex with each other."

How Did You Miss This, Ridley? Maybe Because You're a Limey.

Matt Ridley, in his new book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, does a fantastic job of debunking the prevailing pessimism from previous decades: "In the 1960s the population and explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics"; he runs through each of these plus many other apocalyptic scenarios predicted by scientists (DDT, mass extinction, deforestation, the evils of the railroad, cancer epidemics in children, etc.) and then he comprehensively illustrates that none of these panned out in the devastating manner that was predicted and that the average lifespan, amount of leisure time, freedom from disease, and living conditions have improved over time for all humans-- but then he ends with the "great pessimisms" of today: Africa and global warming and when he describes Botswana (an incredible success story on a generally impoverished continent) he explains that they-- like many African nations-- are saddled with this list of failures: 1) they are landlocked 2) they have poor roads 3) exploding birth rates 4) AIDS and other diseases 5) they have never fully recovered from the slave trade 6) they were once colonies 7) their most promising industry-- agriculture-- is stifled by price controls and trade barriers 8) there is ethnic strife 9) the windfalls of resource wealth serve only to corrupt democratic politicians . . . but despite these problems, Botswana succeeded because of its good institutions-- "people could own property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves"-- and it was barely paid attention to "by colonial rule" and so had to develop its own policies, and as I was reading this I was waiting for Ridley to compare Botswana to America . . . if you look at that list of "problems," each and every one has a parallel to America when it was first developing, and the factors that allowed America to succeed-- good institutions and the fact that we were too far from Britain for them to really police us, also makes sense-- but Ridley never made this connection, perhaps because he is British (and I've yet to finish the final chapter and see what he has to say about global warming).

Who Would You Rather Not Be Sleeping With?

Season 3 of Breaking Bad and Season 4 of Madmen both use the same conceit to add tension, pain, and drama: an ex-wife that stays in the picture . . . but I'd prefer Skyler White as my ex, rather than Betty Draper . . . they're both cold, and they're both disappointed with their respective husbands, but at least Skyler is helping out with Walter's business (and if you've never seen Breaking Bad, you have time to catch up before the new seasons starts . . . the show is so good it's making me contemplate getting cable television).

I Learn Where I Stand

I've been recommending Malcolm Gladwell's books to my wife for years, and she's never read one-- but last week I saw her reading a copy of The Tipping Point . . . apparently if her friend Lynn mentions that a book is good, then she runs out and gets a copy, but I can recommend an author for the entirety of our marriage and this has no consequence.

Breaking News! Little Fins Make A Big Difference!

Apparently, I was not having alcohol induced vestibular problems while stand-up paddle boarding on the Raritan Friday morning . . . I took the board for a spin on Farrington Lake this morning, but I deflated it so I could snap the three little fins under the tail (the other morning I forgot to put them on, and you can't put them on once the board is inflated, so I figured: "How much do I need these little fins?" and the answer to that questions is: "A lot") and the board tracked much better and was far easier to paddle and ride and so the moral to the story is: little fins can make a big difference.

This Does Not Logically Follow That

Stand up paddle-boarding the morning after a late night of pool and darts at the Corner Tavern wasn't such a good idea . . . but the murky waters of the Raritan provided enough incentive to keep my balance-- despite hangover induced vestibular problems-- and so I did not fall in.

Some Information on The Information

Twenty years ago James Gleick's book Chaos yanked me from the morass of post-modern fiction into the world of deftly written science, and reading Gleick's new book, The Information, felt like a comprehensive review of my past twenty years of literary science reading-- all bundled into a tour-de-force history of information theory that starts with African drums and ends with the noosphere, with commentary seamlessly merged into the text from all the "characters" that I've learned to know and love:  Babbage and Turing, Dawkins and Shannon, Dennett and Hofstadter, Maxwell and his demon . . . who Thomas Pynchon famously used in his post-modern fiction, Heisenberg and Godel, Einstein and Von Neumann, and many more . . . but Gleick ends his book in a place that has outstripped what science has to offer, and so he relies on two of my favorite post-modern authors to conclude: Stanislaw Lem and Jorge Luis Borges . . . he uses Borges' metaphor for the universe, his story "The Library of Babel," to approximate where we might be headed: "The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms," but then Gleick ends with his own voice, more positive: "As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms . . . we walk the corridors . . . looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information."

Is This Sentence Correct? It Doesn't Matter Because You Can Dance To It.

Accuracy is only one strategy among many that an idea may use to survive.

I Respectfully Disagree

I like the premise of the blog 20th Century Motors and the author makes a compelling case as to why the hypothesis "College Basketball: Far Inferior To the NBA" is one of the "worst ideas in our culture," but he doesn't refute my Sweet Spot argument . . . it doesn't matter if they're the best athletes in the world: the court is too small for them and they are too skilled at shooting from distance for the game to look aesthetically pleasing; he also claims that Greg Gillis from Girl Talk is a "make believe musician" and again, his argument is clever, satirical and certainly holds water, but- once again-- he forgets aesthetics: Girl Talk is fun to listen to, a complex and layered distillation of the best of music from our time, and it reminds us that pop music isn't all that serious or complicated anyway.

Serendipity or Stupidity?

My wife has no idea how to start summer vacation, and so instead of swimming, reading, watching movies, and going out to lunch, she is painting multiple rooms in our house-- but she knows that not only am I useless at painting, but I also hate it-- and so she enlisted our friend's younger sister to help her; Rachel is a college student looking for some summer employment, and she's extremely artistic and so after the initial painting is done, she is going to paint bugs on Ian's walls (good thing he's not a regular LSD user!) and Star Wars Lego stuff on Alex's walls . . . but not only does she paint, she also does tattoos . . . and her older sister Liz, who is sort of like her agent, pointed out to me that she is a specialist in drawing the giant squid . . . which is the tattoo that I have always dreamed of, a giant squid and sperm whale locked in a great undersea battle . . . so is it fate that has brought us together-- long after my juvenile desire for this tattoo has faded-- or is it something more sinister?