the semicolon and I; past, present and future

Yesterday I was rummaging to my bookshelf, filled with books of people long gone from here, looking for some excitement. Boy did I get it: Eats, shoots and leaves, by Lynne Truss. You native English speakers probably already heard of it. It’s a book about punctuation; as in the stuff that is not letters or whites-space in a sentence.

Only the lack of candles and subsequent forced sleep withheld me from reading this masterpiece in one go. For within its pages it was revealed to me that I’m just a larva in the land of punctuation. Not once in my life did I seriously reflect upon the history and culture behind the stuff that holds our text together. I’m ashamed at how long I have dabbled in the shadows of ignorance; and I’ve got a journalism degree for Chrissakes (I’m not a native English speaker though; so don’t start sending me gloating know-it-all criticism all of a sudden!). But my eyes have opened now. At least I now have a framework that can aid me in reflection. With that in hand I can hopefully tear down the wall before me, composed of years of habit, and push on through to the valley of concious choice.

I was a bit afraid of reading it though; for I just discovered the semicolon not so very long ago. If you would run all the posts of this blog through a simple program counting the ratio of semicolons to text, I’m sure you will see an exponential upward curve. I enjoyed the semicolon, because I felt it was mine. When do you ever see people use the semicolon nowadays? I felt sophisticated. It was MY punctuation mark.

In all honesty I didn’t have a clue of its proper use. I just guessed. And I gathered that my readership wouldn’t know either, and so would take my word for it, so to speak, and admire me for being so bold and knowledgable to dare to use the semicolon.

But this book could set me straight. Dispel my improper use. I could afterwards still feign knowledge of course, but in my heart I would know I was raping language, and I would not use it anymore; disgusted by the way I had treated it all those months. My love for a punctuation mark stabbed to death by language-conventions.

And then another thought crept up: have I grown so old as to start caring about conventions? Isn’t language a mallable ball of mud; of which we are the masters? Isn’t it us who dictates the language? Much like we should dictate our will on society, and certainly not the other way around. Have I become a part of the punctuation establishment? In truth I couldn’t find the answer to that question. And before you know, you are sucked into contemplating the fundaments of your core convictions. Yes, the book is THAT deep.

When I finally arrived at the treatment of the semicolon, I had already been led through epic battles over the comma. The comma is a punctuation mark to fight for, so it seems. People have been hanged for its improper use (well, the author actually dispels this myth a bit, but hey). Great man had defended their right to its spurious use, and equally great man had denounced it with great bravado: ‘threatening each other with ashtrays’, we learn, over the correct punctuation of ‘red, white, and blue’.

So the stage was set for the elusive semicolon. But as you probably already gathered, there was disappointment ahead. Not in my way of using it though, but it appears the semicolon has social issues. Never before had I picked up a sign that there appears to be a pecking order in the ranks of punctuation.

Invented by the godfather of printing, the Venetian Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515), who incidentally also invented italics, the semicolon is indeed a dying breed. Newspapers prefer short sentences. People in general are unsure of its use. But this fate doesn’t grant it a free pass to status however. Yes, the of the semicolon requires skill; but many a prominent writer looks upon it with disdain. George Orwell tried to do without in Coming Up For Air. Donald Barthelme thinks it’s “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”. Lynne mentions the word middle-class a couple of times. A punctuation mark! Middle-class! Yes, the author is English, and no, she doesn’t adhere to this conviction herself; but still…

And with this cheap and unfounded insinuation, the dye was cast. I couldn’t shake it off. Old wounds, barely healed, ripped wide-open; blood splattering in all directions. The semicolon was middle-class. Therefore I was middle-class. What makes matters worse is that I AM middle-class. It was confirmed. I am of the class that pays lip-service to the rich, while serving as a buffer against the poor; grey, spineless and unimaginative. I am grey, spineless and unimaginative; because I love the semicolon.

The (working-class) writer then goes on to expound on the weak character of those writers – not all middle-class – that DO love the semicolon. Writers that succumb to the lure of the semicolon seem to have a hard time to get away from its orbit. The semicolon is like heroine. Some famous 20th century writer supposedly proclaimed on his deathbed that he ’should have used less semicolons’. Virginia Wolfe couldn’t kick the habit, and George Bertrand Shaw wrote T.E. Lawrence concerning his use of colons and semicolons, stating that   ‘you are no more to be trusted with a pen, than a child with a torpedo’.

And I have to admit it is true. The semicolon is under my skin now; begging my left-hand pinky to push the button. But I’m glad I am aware now. And after a night’s sleep, I don’t care what Lynne says anymore. Me and the semicolon can make it work; with mutual respect; like a middle-class couple; until death do us part.

Custom activity-update howto

After a discussion on #sugar, I noticed that setting up a custom update-mechanism for Activities/XO bundles on XO’s is a bit of a lost art. I had to dig through the Sugar code a bit to get a clear understanding. I’ve updated the laptop.org wiki (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_updater), but it might be useful to give other deployments a heads-up on what’s involved through this syndicated post.

So the XO has a nice gui activity-updater, accessable by opening the control-panel, and then choosing the activity updater. Figures. The updater gives you two valuable functions: Updating existing activities, and installing new ones. At the moment the updater can’t be instructed to delete certain activities though, which is to bad, because otherwise deployments could contain just about all the administration of activities within one central place.

Out of the box an XO will check a default wiki-page on the laptop.org wiki. The XO expects a list of links to relevant builds of activities, together with some metadata embedded in the span/div that surrounds it. The XO will loop through all the activities in your Activities dir, it checks if it’s got a custom update url defined in its activities.info file. If so it’ll try to update from that url. Either way, it will also check the version on the page and will use the highest one. If it finds a newer build, it will include it in the list of suggested updates. If the XO finds an activity that’s not yet installed it will also be included in the list, but new activities will not be checked for updates from the url defined in its activity.info file.

As a local deployment you would want to control yourself to which version you want to update. You want to make sure the new version works for your build, and for your objectives, and not the ones of some random guy that happens to updates the according wiki-page. So what you do is point the XO to an update page under your control, which points the XO to the activities you want to put on it. To override the default update page, put a file with either /etc/olpc-update/activity-groups or /home/olpc/Activities/.groups on your system, with the relevant update urls on different lines (yes, you can have multiple).

At OLE Nepal we manage the activities on the schoolserver. So we’ve got a canonical set of activities in a folder reachable through http. In the same folder we put a dynamically generated page in the right format. A cron job checks the folder every hour, grovels the activity/info file of every one of them, and writes out a page with the correct metadata. In this way managing the right set of activities becomes a drag-and-drop affair.

As for the format of the page, take a look at a snippet from our page generator script, invoked by a little cron script:

def makeItemString(actId, actVer, actUrl, actName):
    return """
      <br/>
      <span class="olpc-activity-info">
          <span class="olpc-activity-id" style="display:none;">%s</span>
          <span class="olpc-activity-version" style="display:none;">%s</span>
          <span class="olpc-activity-url"><a href='%s'>%s</a></span>
      </span>
    """ % (actId, actVer, actUrl, actName)

So the updater will search for nodes with have olpc-activity-info as class name. Then it also wants to know the activity-id, the activity-version, and the activity-url, all extracted from the activity info file in the XO bundle.

As written above, if an installed activity has an update-url defined in its activity.info file by the activity creator, the XO will check the url for a version greater than the one in the groups file url. The latest version will be installed. This is seen as a feature, but I disagree. The url of some random page should NOT be checked. Again, we want to have control over what gets installed, and we can’t leave the risk of broken activities to chance or evil activity-developers. So I hacked the Sugar updater code ever so slightly and put it in our pilgrim local build:

The simplest way to not check the activity.info url is to open /usr/share/sugar/shell/controlpanel/model/updater.py and edit refresh_existing to not call _retrieve_update_version, but assign the values it would return if no update-url was found; so a tuple containing:

(0 if _DEBUG_MAKE_ALL_OLD else act.get_activity_version()), None, None, 0

And since the updater doesn’t check for new versions of new activities, we don’t need to make provisions for them.

And that’s about it. This gives us control enough over which activity is installed on our deployment XO’s. Cases not covered though by this mechanism are new bundles installed by the children themselves, and children installing versions newer than the ones we put in the schoolserver (which can be remedied easily enough by making sure the first tuple value above is always 0). But I’m not sure not addressing them should be regarded as missing features, or wanted behaviour.

[update] I sent a mail with some of my thoughts to the sugar-devel list and C. Scott Ananian layed out some excellent ideas for enhancing the updater to resolve to deficiencies mentioned above.

Twit

As I reviewed the posts I made on this site, I found them a bit on the long side. They were very much against the grain of current internet practice. Internetters unfortunately have lost the power of concentration these days. It was different in my time you know!

This is the age of Twitter I have found out. For you not in the loop: On Twitter people can sign up for blogs. The blog-entries for which shouldn’t be longer than a sentence. The whole thing is drenched in a little social networking sauce. So you can follow how many profound insights your friends or whoever can squeaze into a sentence. Surprised I was when someone on the internets in all earnest referred to a Twitter discourse about Gaza.

So I was faced with a dilemma: I could stand at the sidelines and moan and gripe about what progress brings us, or I could jump in the fray, and ride this brave new wave of social conduct. My heart and soul say: ‘Sidelines!’, but my lust for adventure and my fear of being left behind won out.

But I don’t need Twitter to pen down shallow soundbites. The text-saving capabilities of this blog wil suffice just fine. So here we go. My private life (now public) during Januari Twitterized:

- Spent New Years eve dancing to bad R&B, until a bit before midnight angry party-goers beat up the DJ, and after he still wouldn’t quit, threw his equipment from shoddy table on the dance-floor

- Daily power outage (loadshedding) went up to 14 hours a day

- Went to see Ghajini; hindi version of Memento: half comic love story, half violent action-movie, with song and dance!

- Interns weren’t allowed to get into the Department of Education computer lab on Wednesday because student protesters had blocked the entrance to said department

- Loadshedding went up to 16 hours

- Rumour has it that the high loadshedding hours are due to the government wanting to force money and gasolene guzzeling diesel plants down our throats, so as to ensure some shady deal

- Area of my home is out of water, perhaps because there’s not enough electricity to pump sufficient water our way

- We are rationing our showers

- Office battery backup broke down

- I am a wee bit stinky

- Started smoking again

- Water truck to pump 8000 litres of water in our underground basin for about 1300 rupees (13 eur) didn’t come for some reason

- Went to Nagarkote for the weekend with the house-girls to trade the cold city for the cold country-side

- Mountains are pretty

- Loadshedding went up to 18 hours a day

- Stopped smoking again

- Am getting a wee bit tired of loadshedding

- The whole household, many of whos inhabitants don’t dislike animals, is plotting the death of the neighbourhood dog, who is driving us insane with rabid barking EVERY SINGLE NIGHT

- Mac, MP3 player, mobile phone, DS, 2 XO’s (one for battery swap) are adhering to a strict make-sure-it’s-plugged-into-the-wall-at-night-and-when-away-because-you-never-know-when-the-power-is-back-on policy

- Started smoking again

- Water is dripping into underground basin again from regular sources, just a few hours after our ad-hoc water truck finally came

- Loadshedding hours went down it seems; rumor has it they’re experimenting with new hydro-plant

- Am less stinky

- Finally reading up on Bash scripting, as I’m a bit ashamed of my admin skills in this area

- Am absolutely horrified (HORRIFIED ( HOR – RI – FIED )) at the godawful brysantine inconsistent mess Bash dares to present us as its syntax

- the idea of programming through program return values and processes is kinda cool

- Found out that an infected red swollen eyelid the size of a wallnut does not attract the opposite sex half as much as expected

- Lost again playing poker

- Missed Ministery of Sound, who alledgedly played at Platinum just before we arrived

- Felt like a script-kiddie-hacker when I, as a reluctant soldier in Microsofts officious volunteer army, armed with a Linux live cd, cracked XP admin password to unlock locked user account of roommate

- Stopped smoking again, due to sickness

- Had to prospone Nepali artist interview once again (sorry Ram!)

- Finally got what I was craving for for (four?) months: a birds-eye view of the Linux kernel, while reading Linux Kernel Development 2nd ed. (really as an excuse to get away from Bash)

- Am reminded again at how ugly C really is

- Sorda, kinda started smoking again

- Power cuts are a practical way to curb my Weeds viewing addiction

- Got woken up today by a puppy licking my face

- The posting of this post has been constipated due to puking and pooping and tummy problems for about a week

Moving along

The path from the ring-road to my house is littered with speed bumps. It’s ridiculous. There are nine of them all about 20 metres apart. And that’s on a road that’s really some sort of shopping street for the most part, and the road is to small to be able to drive fast in anyways.

I thought it was just my street but a few weeks ago I actually came across an article in the paper which complained about this practice, which apparently is being practiced all around Kathmandu. It seems to me that the bump-layers get a quota per district and they just lay them all at once just to be done with it.

Have you noticed that fate seems to follow exactly the same pattern: Lay lots of speed bumps all at once just to be done with it.

‘Fate spins it’s little web’. Yeah right. Like it’s a delicate operation. ‘Fate bulldozes your house’ would be more apt a lot of the time.

Point in case:

I’m gonna move in the next couple of days. Not once, but thrice. Yes thrice!

1) Tomorrow I’m gonna move in with a couple of Australian girls and an American one. Here, in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Moving-to-Rotterdam gift from '95. Part of the '08 Rotterdam moving preparation photo series. Curtosy of Marja.

2) After having occupied the better half of a floor for four years the stuff I’ve got laying around in my old apartment in Rotterdam, Holland has gotta move because my old roommate is gonna move in with her boyfriend (She’s so selfish. Where am I supposed to live when I get back!).

3) I’m still on the contract of the house I shared with my ex in Eskilstuna, Sweden. She wants to move asap, but she can’t because she has to get my consent to leave the place. I hope she takes some of my stuff with her.

So my stuff all over the world is moving. Perhaps it’s a good thing. Perhaps all the stuff, and the people herding it, will be a bit closer to each other after all of this is done. But I am getting a bit tired of the logistics of it all.

The contract thing is the easiest of course. Filling in some stuff and faxing it. Then after a while there will be some stuff sorting issues but that will be of later concern. The other two sites are a bit messier at the moment.

Here in Kathmandu the situation is a bit weird in a way because I’m not just bringing my own stuff along. Just about all ex-roommates and ex-colleagues left in a hurry for one reason or another. I’m like a little left luggage department. Except for the fact that the luggage isn’t lost but the respective owners. Well, it’s always a matter of perspective of course. It’s just that for once I’m more sympathetic with the luggage.

In Feb I came here with two backpacks and some money in my pocket. Now the money is gone, it seems to have solidified in lots of junk. Which is not true btw. The money went into other things. The junk I inherited from the same people that I got the luggage from. So now all of a sudden I own a rice-cooker, lots of reed furniture (bed, couch, chairs, tables, cupboards, baskets, benches), loads of sci-fi books, lots of clothes that don’t fit me, garden chairs, two of those Italian stove-coffee-brewers (not actual people but those metal things with a beak), roti-creation-utensils, an electric heater, an army of plastic cleaning vessels, a unicycle and lots and lots more. Yesterday evening, when I started packing, I still went into this with the pack-half-an-hour-before-lift-off mindset of a backpacker: “passport, check! money, check! bag seems heavy enough to contain some clothes, check! Let’s get outta here.” I now see the error of my ways.

For the Rotterdam one I am not on-site. That’s a bit crappy. I’d like to know which trigger-objects of my precious memories will be preserved and which ones will be cast into oblivion by ignorant hands, operated by ignorant people.

I asked my roommate Marja to jolt my memory with some piccies. She complied and embarked on an odyssey of photo-shooting. She mailed me around 15 mails which all had attached to them around 6 photo’s. In the end I got 89 pictures worth of info on the state of all my Dutch belongings. Before I looked at the session I thought, for the sake of logistics, to salvage about two boxes. One for important papers and one for mesmerising purposes.

Grumpy old desktops. Part of the '08 Rotterdam moving preparation photo series. Curtosy of Marja.

I should never have looked at those pictures. The greedy little reptile part of my brain took charge quite vigorously when my head tried to democratically decide on the individual pieces. It issued veto after veto and in the end I wanted just about everything except for my old clothes and the array of desktops in the hallway that over the course of four years seemed like ancient dinosaurs, left in the dust by Moore’s law.

Here in Kathmandu I just finished the BIG SORTING. I’m a bit anal about that. All and every item has found it’s brethren. The heap of batteries is lighting up the night. Lots of flirting, lots of rubbing skin, in an electric frenzy that can’t last till morning. Candles ignite with joy seeing loved ones long gone, weeping for those that burned up to quick. But nothing is in boxes yet. And it’s getting late. In my optimism that all will sort itself out I didn’t press my friends hard enough to come and help me, and so I’ve got no sure confirmation. Well, we’ll see about that in the morning.

Cheers to relief-aid

Since I’m living here all by myself in my beautiful three-storey Bagdol abode, I’ve been looking around for a new place lately. Preferably with some other people, cause I don’t really like to live alone. Yesterday I went to check out an apartment very close to my work. I would/will (I dunno yet) be living with two Australian girls from the Hash and so we talked a little the evening I was there. One of them is involved with the flooding that happened some months ago in the east of Nepal. She told one of those classic stories of social horrors that’s hard to comprehend for us mere worker bees.

Just a quick recap: last August the Koshi river broke through it’s eastern embankment (through the collapse of a dam I believe) and flooded a big part of the flat, fertile part of Nepal, the Tarai. Then the water streamed on into the Indian province of Bihar. About 60.000 Nepali’s had to move and about 3 million… let me repeat that… THREE MILLION Bihari’s had to high-tail it. Leaving flooded farmland, dead cattle and destroyed crops which would have been eaten by the locals of course, and which is vital for the rest of the country.

I learned from the room-girl that the water still hasn’t been sealed up yet (the breach grew from 300 meter in August 18 to over 2 km due to erosion). We in Kathmandu probably only have felt this directly in that the loadshedding (scheduled power cuts) hours have gone up; a/the dam(s) alongside the river supplied power. But there’s still running water over farmland, villages and such. I don’t know how much land, and how much people is/are affected, but that isn’t the biggest problem here.

In a couple of months it’s gonna be monsoon season again. Room-girl was quite sure that they couldn’t seal the hole before that. So enormous amounts of water in river, breach not sealed yet… Not good. Embankment will erode once more. Again massive floods.

Now that’s a natural disaster. Force of nature, bad planning, perhaps… no, probably not enough resources allocated. But there’s quite a vicious social horror story attached to this. Which makes this whole thing damn right evil, if not purposefully then through negligence to investigate the issue by the responsible policy-makers:

All those 60.000 people had to go somewhere, right? Most of them went to the big cities, and so a lot went to Kathmandu. As a LOT of rural people went to Kathmandu over the past years. Policy-makers would rather want them out, so now they offer these people the sum of 150.000 rupies a person (could be wrong by a couple of zeroes) in relief-aid IF they sign this piece of paper that they march right back to their ruined farmland and homes and dead buffaloes and wait for the next flood to displace them. Just what the neglected, poor, ethnic-tension ridden Terai needs… Ain’t that evil?

I wouldn’t even mind if someone out there on the interwebz could harshly point out to me where in my post I tried to rape reality.

Taxi driver

Yesterday I took a cab-ride out of my previous life. From the tourist district Thamel to my place in Bagdol, about 15 minutes away, but not before the driver delivered Anoek at her place in Leinchaur. Beforehand we haggled the price down to 250 rupies (100 rupies ≈ 1 euro). After the Anoek-drop-off, I got into somewhat of a surreal conversation.

a totally unrelated picture, and not a good one either, but it was the only one I had with a cab in it

For a while now I’ve been wondering about how much cab-drivers earn around here. I’ve always been hesitant to ask though, because I knew I would be embarrassed by the reply and I was afraid they would be too. Yesterday however things started off a bit the other way around. The cabbie wanted to know a bit about my housing situation. How much did I pay for the rent (about 5000 a month in an ideal situation), did I have a nice garden (yes I do!), do I have air-conditioning/heating (no, and I’m gonna suffer in the next few months).

The for me nameless driver was talkative, but serious. Tired and inquisitive; not the social-overflowing-chitchat kind of driver who is normally the one to drag/strike a conversation out of nothing. For some reason his composure enticed me to return fire.

So I asked him about his monthly wage, his home-town and his living conditions. The conversation was scary. Not because his answers were shocking. Exactly the opposite actually. He gave an account of the state of things that was so polished in details, so standard, that it seemed to flow from the hands of an unimaginative novel writer. The details he gave to color in his life, without me asking for it, his frankness, his background, even the numbers concerning wage (all are divisible by four) were in harmony somehow. It almost seemed he was taking the mickey out of me.

You should know that in Holland, in the nineties, we had this tv-program called Taxi, in which some actor engaged his passengers in conversation. We on the couch could see the end result on our screens. Ever since I’m paranoid that I’m being filmed in the cab. (In Rotterdam these days, this is standard fare btw (excuse the pun), but those are security camera’s. Kathmandu is quite safe in comparison.) I’m pretty sure though that this guy had better things to do than fiddle with electronics. It just seemed like he wanted to get his situation across to the kind of person that has the leisure to read blogs.

So here it is, his life. As I said before, it’s not exiting. It’s the kind of story you hear all the time. Thirteen in a dozen. And you internetters are a jaded bunch, so you might just as well skip it.

He has been transporting people here in Kathmandu for 16 years. The first four years he was a riksha driver, the last 12 he was a cab driver. The chauffeuring trade isn’t all that easy in Kathmandu. There’s a lot of competition. Only government or NGO jobs are nice, because they’re relatively secure and pay good. Otherwise you’re usually on your own driving a cab: Small, square, white things without suspension, often adorned by their owners (haven’t spotted a women cabbie so far btw) with religious symbols or pics of Hindu actresses. He comes from a small village, the name of which I forgot, as well as the area it’s in. The living conditions were crappy. The hills around the village were bad for growing crops. So he left for Kathmandu. He still sends money home.

Almost none of the cab drivers here actually own their car, so they rent them. The money flowing in from rides every day is about 1600 rupies (so 16 euro’s), but almost all is lost, mostly to car-rent and fuel (the price of which has gone up very fast in the last few months). At the end of the month he’s got 2000 rupies left, which is less than 10 times what I make in Nepal, and about 100 times less than what I made in Sweden (which was pretty much the minimum for the kind of work I did). He pays about 1200 rupies a month for his room, the rest goes to food: Dal Bath (rice with lental soup and veggies) every day. Just one glass of roxi (clear, tasteless booze, comparable to the Dutch jenever) every night, the quality of which isn’t half as good as the pure stuff you get on the countryside. Then it’s time for bed. Repeat 365 days a year, except for Bandas (the strikes here that happen about once every four days) and the occasional festival.

And there are millions and millions and millions like him… of course.

That’s all folks.

Hedonism

As I’m writing this, I’m sipping on some rum and I’m smoking some cigarettes, alone in my house. I’m tired. My mind made this night the of the end of so many things, that I think I must have blown some symbol-repression fuse.

The most tangible of these is the end of my Indian brother. Not the end of his existence thank gods, but the end of his presence in my house, which for me is almost just as bad. Although your standard expat usually enjoys a lot of luxuries, dear friends are often hard to find, and even harder to keep. All those you cling to can be gone tomorrow, and most move along eventually, for one reason or another. Dev, my partying brother in crime, told me yesterday that he would be gone today, and so he did. Leaving me his spacious room and his almost permanent presence. Excuse me for a minute, while I dry my soaked face from tears.

festivals

Together we survived the Nepal festival season. The last month and a half I was trapped in a rollercoaster ride of indulgence, with severe effects on wallet and mind, both of which will take some time to repair.

In Nepal festivals are a dime in a dozen. It has got lots of ethnic groups, and lots of traditions. The two main festivals of the year, both just after the monsoon, are Dasain and Tihar. Dasain is the biggest of the two, but Tihar is also quite conciderable.

Dasain

The etymology behind Dasain has something to do with some god killing lots of other gods, if the explanations I got are correct, but etymology is secondary, if not tertiary or even a later -ry. It’s a family festival, so it kinda leaves us expats in the cold. It’s a fifteen day festival, and everyone at the office got a week off if they wanted. Kathmandu becomes deserted. Most people in this city has their roots in the countryside, so most go to their kin. Most shops are closed and the streets are deserted during the most important week. A very strange sight in this overcrowded place.

My band of misfits got by as good as we could. We got invited to a Newari party, which is always nice. Nice company and extremely nice food. One day we went kite flying Nepali style. Which means buying a dozen cheap kites, tying them to specially coated thread getting up on a roof and trying to cut the cords of kites of people standing on roofs nearby. Fun stuff.

Tihar

Just a few weeks later Tihar starts; the festival of light, which is five days in total. Lots of stuff is celebrated. Amongst others, cows, dogs wealth and siblings are worshipped/celebrated in one way or another. Effect-wise its a mix of Christmas and New Year. People decorate their house with colored, flashing lights, and ignite a lot of fireworks. The lights are mostly electrical now. Someone from my office gave as a rational explanation that these lights used to be (and still are in certain places) oil-candles into which the last of this years annoying insects are supposed to fly.

Before celebrating Tihar though, me, Dev and some others went away from the city a bit to the wildlife resort in Chitwan, which is so peaceful and quiet compared to Kathmandu. We didn’t do all that much there. I let an elephant soak me with river water though, while sitting on it’s back. And I swam in the human-eating crocodile inhabited river, next to our little resort. But I mostly enjoyed sitting by myself in the middle of the night, looking out for shooting stars, in actual NATURE. Without smog.

Then there was Tihar. As I’ve been told, Nepali people don’t do much charity donating, except for on the third and forth days of Tihar. Then social workers and children go to random or not so random houses and start singing and dancing, after which the people from that house will give money and food. The social workers will give the money to their cause and the children will often use it to go for a day-trip to the countryside.

A group of us had studied some Nepali and English songs and some Nepali/Hindi dance moves this last week. Yesterday we went round the houses of acquaintances to put practice into embarressment; in traditional Nepali attire, which a lot of us bought for the occasion. The night was,.. special. We didn’t practice all that well, and most of the non-Nepalis didn’t even have a clue what the Nepali songs actually meant. We were somewhat saved though by a sitar, some good dancers, some punjabi beats and the comic sight of those foreigners fumbling with their traditions. I for one got a bit tired at the end, singing ‘Deusi re’ for the x-th time, but it was fun though.

new year resolution

Outside my house now, the fourth day of Tihar (and incidentally the Newari new year) is slowly retracting it’s tentacles. I need some sleep. It’s not just the festivals. There’s been to much going on lately. Stuff that hides itself in the details and which I’m not gonna bore you with (sounds heavy huh!). I need to repent for my sins somehow (that’s just me trying to sound interesting of course). I’m gonna take it easy on the easy stuff… gonna stop smoking for the fourth time this week… gonna start being boring again…

Promises, promises…
No!!!! I’m out of smokes!!!…

Hard science tells you like it is

Any respectable blog has book recommendations. Or should have. This is a bold statement, I know, but someone has to make it. I won’t defend it now. I might never. But this IS a respectable blog. No controversy in that statement. So where’s the book review? Right under your noses. Read on brothers and sisters:

So I’m reading this collection of transcriptions of lectures of the late Richard P. Feynman. He’s supposed to be this hot shot physicist who did cool stuff all over the place. Like, ehh… helping in developing the atom bomb, I just learned from Wikipedia. Way to go! I wouldn’t know, cause I hardly know anything about physics. That’s why I’m reading this book: ‘Six easy pieces, six not-so-easy pieces.’ Those pieces are transcriptions from a selection of classes, part of a series of quite famous introductory courses on physics he gave once, called ‘the Feynman lectures on physics’.

In general they rock. The easy pieces that is. Very swiftly Feynman paints a picture of the state of physics in the SIXTIES. Yes people, the lectures are THAT old. But then again, science doesn’t move THAT fast for him to be obsolete. Neither does physics. Didn’t come to the hard pieces yet. Thought it to be smarter to write this now, before having to admit defeat to the three people and the cow that read this blog.

I’m sorry to have bored you with all these facts. Who cares about facts anymore. Lets talk about feelings: The cool thing about this book is that it ties up facts about very obvious things that you never thought about. Example: We’re just matter, moved about by forces. There’s some matter, and there are a few forces acting on it. And that’s it! All of the universe explained! So you’ve got gravity. That’s a force. But not the one that’s doing the attracting between atoms. ‘What!!!’, you scream, ‘it’s not????’. And I’ll reply, plucking an imaginary beard: ‘No, that’s what electricity is for!’. Mouths fall open. Slowly the crowd gets an applause in motion.

Oops, some facts crept in. But all this babbling in the paragraphs before, is just introductory static, leading up to this great quote from Feynman from that very book that this post is about; again about electricity:

‘More was discovered about the electrical force. The natural interpretation of electrical interaction is that two objects simply attract each other: plus against minus. However, this was discovered to be an inadequate idea to represent it. A more adequate representation of the situation is to say that the existence of the positive charge, in some sense, distorts, or creates a “condition” in space, so that when we put the negative charge in, it feels a force. This potentiality for producing a force is called an electric field. When we put an electron in an electric field, we say it is “pulled”.’

‘Yea! Well ain’t that the truth! Rub it in why don’t you!’, says our narrator, and he lapses into a fit of inconsolable weeping. Curtain drops. Three mice do a little dance in front of it, after which they go away in search of food. Audience leaves, feeling betrayed.

I can be a tourist too!

I am a tourist

I can! Really I can! I’ve been here since the end of February and I’ve been fighting tooth and nail against going on trips, seeing temples or doing anything smelling like fun, except for sports or going to the occasional party. God knows why. Or does he? Well, last weekend I did something wild: I actually did something!

Not on my own initiative of course. God forbid. Or would he? I went to Pokara. Which is a town. Dev thought up this therapeutic trip, and we got dutch girl Anoek along as an extra chaperon, so we would have some extra muscle-power along in case this experience would prove to much for me and I would have to be restrained against myself or my fellow beings. She has worked with mental patients or something, so she was a wise choice, even though she seems a bit bonkers herself. It rubs off I guess.

Pokara is about 5 to 6 hours away by mini-bus, and it’s outside the valley. It’s got some pleasurable features: It lies by a huge lake, you can see the Anapurna mountain range on clear days. But most of all, Pokara is quiet and relaxed. Which is a feature one appreciates very, very, very much, when living in Kathmandu.

Dev lived there for a while, while setting up wireless networks in the surrounding hills. When we arrived on Friday night he brought us to the hotel he used to use as a base. One can’t help but love the way it was run. When we arrived we were welcomed by a teenager/twenty-something dressed in a Guns ‘n Roses t-shirt. He was soon joined by his soft spoken colleague dressed in tank-top and sport-shorts. He clearly spent a lot of time in the improvised gym, right next to the reception.

As you might expect this whole tourist business took a lot out of me, so we went for a drink in the tourist/bar area. Which looked basically the same as the main tourist area in Kathmandu, Thamel, but then unravelled into a big string and then laid carefully as one street around the lake.

For the next day we had planned tons: watch the sunrise, row a boat over the lake, perhaps do some trekking… But even wording these plans of touristy things brought my body into wild spasms which left me twitching on the floor like a fish, while my hands were clawing at my throat. After my companions calmed me down with some cigarettes, we decided to do something which was at least related to work: we went to pay Dev’s old boss/OLE’s board member Mahabir a courtesy-visit and watched him being busy with wireless stuff.

That calmed me down, and after that we took it easy: drinking some coffee in this bar, eating something in that cafe. Meeting up with Dutch people we knew from Kathmandu. Familiar faces and routines are important for someone who was the state I was in. Not so much fun for Dev though, who is developing an allergy for Dutch people in general. But it was a worthwhile sacrifice in my opinion, and I thank him for it.

On Sunday, the last day of our stay, I decided to be strong, so that this therapeutic trip wouldn’t be in vain. We went to see a waterfall leading straight to hell, called Devi’s fall. Which is actually not named after a Hindu god, but after a western woman called Devis, who fell into it. Figures.

That escapade was a wild success! I did just about everything right I think. I took pictures of the right thing; namely the waterfall. I also got that half-empty ‘is this it?’ feeling that tourists get after seeing the thing they went to see and they’re not sure if they should linger around longer. We even went to the cave on the opposite side of the road and saw an underwhelming statue of Kali. We weren’t allowed to take pictures there, which defeats the whole purpose of a touristic outing in my opinion.

On the minus side I DID forget to buy a trinket at one of the surrounding stalls, and I’m not sure if I was ripped off properly. You live and learn.

That was it! Mission accomplished! We took a micro-bus to Kathmandu at around one, and the driver was everything I was promised before the trip and nothing like the one on the way to Pokara. He looked like a gangster and he drove like mad. <ALERT!! Animal cruelty > First he hit a chicken and then stopped so he or the crew could have it for dinner. He was really proud, you could see. A bit later he hit a dog, of which he was less proud, but thought was funny non-the-less. Goats and Buffalo’s were left alone for some reason. Cows were spared for obvious reasons. </ALERT!! animal cruelty>

Now I’m home again, and in relative good health. I feel this experience has strengthened me, and I’m confident that in a few months I will be able to attempt another outing, perhaps by visiting a few temples or something. Remember kids: if it doesn’t kill you it will only make you stronger!

Bike

Dev got a new cycle today. A crappy-cheap Chinese one, like me. And while the state of mine has stabalized a bit over the months, his problems are just starting. Now I don’t want to piss over Chinese mountainbike makers, but in the 24 hours that Dev had his bike, he broke his back spoiler, and his bike stand became so loose, it moved to stand position while riding; which can have fatal consequences when taking the wrong turn.

Compared to me though, he has a bit to go. In the few months I had mine, my left paddle broke off, my chain broke about 8 times until I got it replaced, my handle turned upside-down every few days, front- and back tire got punctured, I had to replace my back-brake cable, my gears in the front refused to go all the way up, my gears in the back refused to go all the way up, my back-brake connection broke, I had to recalibrate the sensitivity of my brakes a couple of times… that’s all I remember at the moment.

I know all the bike mechanics in the neighborhood intimately now. There are about five from home to work. One tried to rip me off by demanding 150 rupies (1.50 euro), but usually I pay about 10 to 20 rupies. Anyway, as I said, my bike is stabalizing. Nothing happened to it for about 2 weeks. Just this disconcerting noise in the chain. My biggest problem now is the incredibly dusty air, which gets between my lenzes and makes me cry out in pain.

And the other road-users of course who don’t give a shit about cyclers. Point in case: last week, when some guy decided to ram his motorbike in my back tire. With had as a result that me, my cycle, he, his motorcycle and his girlfriend rolled over the road like bowling-balls. My cycle’s only gripe was that its steering wheel was off-centre. My only defects were some blood on hand, arm, knee and foot. My blood unfortunately. From my wounds. I queried my assailants a few times about their state, but they didn’t react. Why I still don’t know. Not because they were unconscious, I’m pretty sure. The driver was trying to fit some piece of his cycle back in place, but motorcycles aren’t made of Lego.

More and more bystanders were gathering around, and I thought it was a nice time to get away, before it turned into one of those demand-money-from-the-foreigner charades. I’m ok now, thanks.