Saturday, January 20, 2001
Madagasikara No. 5: Vary Doesn't Vary
Rice, or vary, is an enormous part of Malagasy life. They eat a pound per person on average each day. In the highlands of central Madagascar the Betsileo people cover the hillsides in rice terraces (left; click for a full view) that seem to sink the sky into the earth.
Behind this beauty lies hours of back-breaking labour, from sowing, to harvesting, to threshing the dried stalks to dislodge the grain (right; click for full view). Despite this intense effort, Madagascar hasn't been able to grow enough rice to feed its people since the nationalisation of marketing in the 1970s discouraged farmers from producing more than their families needed.
The Malagasy eat rice three times a day, and even drink it: rano vola, a popular beverage, is boiling water swilled around the burnt rice stuck to the bottom of the pan, stuff that affluent Westerners would tip down the sink. (Some Western health stores do market rice 'milk', though, so maybe that's a potential export market for Madagascar.)
Malagasy rice is not the polished white grain of the East or West, but retains a slightly off-white colouring and earthy texture. Meat and vegetables serve only as flavouring for the rice, and the local flavours can taste odd indeed to an unaccustomed palate. Although Jane and I would usually stick to French-inspired dishes, in Ranomafana I tried a plate of 'Ravitoto sy Henakisoa'. This wasn't 'rabid potatoes' as she cheekily suggested, but 'porc, feuille de manioc, accompagnement riz/rougail': pork and spinach. Lots of spinach. And ginger. Lots of ginger. And salt. (A lot.) With rice. (Lots.) I ploughed my way through half the henakisoa before giving up and eating the rest of the rice on its own.
On occasions like this I'm forced to admit that my tastes are just too Aussie. I can't bring myself to eat the deep fried chicken heads sold by vendors at taxi-brousse stands. I can't eat much of the fly-blown meat I've seen hanging in the open air in small wooden butcher's stalls by the side of a muddy road. Even vegetables are a challenge when you know what they've been grown in. Which leaves only baguettes, bananas, and some of the best chocolate in the world.
But it cuts both ways. If they don't make me eat rabid potatoes, I won't make them eat Vegemite.
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Friday, January 19, 2001
Ooo! A good new blog (with accompanying journal) full of amusing banter. [Via Meg.]
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One of my trivial pet peeves is when webloggers remake their entire archives in their new design when they redo the front page. I don't know why this bugs me, since I have no problem with redesigning other sorts of pages and sites; perhaps it's because of the time-related nature of weblogs. The original design is part of the history of each page, and weblog archives are historical documents. Or something. Not that I lose any sleep over it.
But now that I'm developing quite a nice theme for this log of continuing design elements with changing photos and background colours, I find myself annoyed with the first few weeks of the Walking West 2 archives. The design I used temporarily just doesn't fit; it doesn't feel like part of this log. Somehow it even affects the way I read the words. Weird.
Here's my solution. I've remade the pages, but kept an example of the old design for historical reference.
It's really only important to an audience of one, but hey, I'm happy with it, and that's what counts.
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What do job interviews really tell us? (where 'us' = 'employers'). By the author of The Tipping Point. [Via Doc Searls.]
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Hmm. I write that this log doesn't have much tech comment in it, and then a few days later post a long piece of tech commentary, below. How perverse. To be fair, it seemed a little too personal to go in my IT commentary area, and a little too technical to go in my personal area, which left... well, here.
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Our flatmate is planning to turn his old second PC into a Linux box. Last night I read the first half of his Linux pocket guidebook. Gradually it dawned on me that hey—I know this stuff.
Sure, I've read all about Linux over the past few years. And I knew perfectly well that it was a Unix OS akin to those I used years ago on highschool and university mainframes. But I'd always figured that relearning all the commands and structural logic of Unix would be a chore, and never quite got around to it.
But now that I've actually looked at it, I realise that it's all in there somewhere, lying dormant in my brain. I know that file structure. I know those cryptic two-letter commands. I just haven't used them for a while.
It's a strange feeling. It's like hearing a language you haven't spoken since childhood and knowing most of the words. Now that I think of it, I experienced something like this a couple of years ago when I was helping my brother-in-law with his year 11 maths homework. I used to be very good at mathematics, but hadn't really thought about calc and trig for years. As we went through his homework over the weeks, it came back. Not all of it, but a lot of it. Lying dormant all of that time, through a decade of thinking about politics and human rights and tradition and culture and comedy and writing and a ton of other stuff.
If you stopped me right now, I still couldn't remember half the maths I used to know, but I remember the feeling of knowing. It's hard to describe. It was a sense of there being a huge, intricate underlying structure to the world, and of starting to see how it all fitted together. I can remember idly deriving from first principles the formula for the area of ellipses, and thinking, 'Ah, so that's how it works', like a musician figuring out the chord structure for a song. Perhaps that similarity is why music and mathematics are so often compared to one another.
Around the same time, I was also a programmer, with a similar feel for how the languages and systems that I used worked. I wrote clones of Space Invaders for the BBC Acorn and adventure games for the Apple II, and sent email to kids in other schools via a Unix-driven mainframe. Just as with mathematics, I was starting to see how the programming world fitted together.
When I finished my first degree, the common wisdom was that the computer science we had learned would be out-of-date within a couple of years of graduating. The message was clear: get a computing job now or miss the boat. I didn't get a computing job: sys admin held no appeal for me, programming computers was no longer as much fun as writing about human beings, and the only area I found really exciting, computer graphics, was still pretty raw. I ran with political science instead, and figured my computing days were over.
When the web finally drew me back into the fold a few years ago, I realised that being out of the field simply meant that I hadn't had to learn 5-10 years of technical detail which was now obsolete anyway. Contrary to the 'common wisdom', the basic structure of computer hardware, networks and programming hadn't actually changed much—surprise—and even if the details had, details weren't such a big deal. Details can be looked up; the important thing is to know where to look.
Given that I'd just written a thesis on tradition and change, none of this was particularly surprising. The IT industry (no longer 'computing'—the nomenclature has changed, the meaning hasn't) runs along at a breathless pace, always focussing on the 'next big thing', and forgets that it's an evolving culture and an evolving system of knowledge. Yes, its changes can look revolutionary at the time—Flash! XML! Transparent plastic!—but taking the broad view, what have been the real computing revolutions? Think about that for long and you'll end up with a surprisingly short list.
That's not to say there isn't a lot to learn, and to keep learning and relearning; to work efficiently in IT you have to keep a lot in your head at one time. But there's a core IT culture that changes more slowly than we like to think. Which is why in 2001 the OS scene is still dominated by Sons of DOS and Sons of Unix.
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Excellent geek humour lurking innocently in Amazon's reader reviews (via JZ).
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Thursday, January 18, 2001
Annual emissions of carbon dioxide by the end of the century could
make the eventual collapse of the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica inevitable. That, in turn, could trigger a significant global sea-level rise, and the loss of huge and densely-populated coastal areas.
The word they tactfully omit is 'overnight'. If the Ross ice shelf collapses, it won't muck around. Tsunamis to end all tsunamis. Now there's a cheery thought.
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A comparison of two films I've seen recently. Since everybody else seems to be reviewing them in depth, here's the Cliff Notes version:
| Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon | O Brother, Where Art Thou? |
| Based on an ancient Chinese legend | Based on an ancient Greek legend |
| Directed by quirky film-maker Ang Lee | Directed by quirky film-maker Joel Coen |
| Stars action hero Chow Yun Fat | Stars action hero George Clooney |
| Amazing vistas of Chinese landscape | Amazing vistas of Dapper Dan hair gel |
| Breathtaking kung fu scenes | Breathtaking banjo pluckin' |
| Floating fighters were a little unbelievable | Sirens were a little unbelievable |
| Really quite wonderful | Not quite as wonderful as usual |
Saw Crouching Tiger last week, O Brother this week. I much preferred The Big Lebowski to O Brother, even though most critics bagged it. In fact, I think Lebowski may be my favorite Coen brothers film—which given they also made Barton Fink and Fargo is saying something.
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I was going to write something else on Madagascar today, but instead I've written a letter to the newspaper. A story in The Australian's Higher Education section crystallised a bunch of thoughts that have been tumbling around in my head for years about PhDs and the Australian academic job market.
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Sorry to spoil the party, James. (But as you can confirm, my SDoTH solution was found the hard way.)
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Wednesday, January 17, 2001
First an About page, and now a Links page. Where will it end? (Right there, actually. But I figured it was about time I did something of the sort.)
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James has sent me a prize for solving one of his 'Six Degrees of Tom Hulce' challenges (Terry Thomas to TH in three moves. I used to be a dab hand at that Kevin Bacon stuff). Since he's not just some faceless corporation—I can personally vouch that he does indeed have a face—this is quite touching indeed. Thanks old chum.
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The mouse is dead.
I have nothing against mice personally—in fact I find their beady black eyes quite endearing—but we're currently sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and I don't fancy waking up to the pitter patter of tiny feet across my forehead. And Jane, who in most respects is a no-nonsense sort, has a thing about rodents—something to do with being a biologist and having to bump off dozens of them in the name of science. So the mouse had to die.
But he was a tenacious little bugger.
Last week I heard the trap go off under the sink while I was doing the dishes, and looked down at his prone form twitching beneath it... and watched the whole thing leap and bounce as he wriggled free, then darted round the fridge and away.
On Sunday, Jane saw him near the heater built into the fireplace in the living room. 'It's the mouse!' she cried. I crouched down to look, but saw only a mouse-shaped blob of fluff.
On Monday, I looked down from this chair and saw him sitting in the middle of the carpet, staring up at me with his endearing beady eyes before he zipped back behind the couch. That night I loaded the trap with peanut butter, a mouse favourite. When we came back from a movie it was licked clean, and empty.
I tried again with a piece of feta cheese and an enormous glob of peanut butter, setting the trap off on my fingers twice while placing it next to the heater. Yesterday I watched the mouse dart out again and again from beneath the heater and eat that whole enormous glob of peanut butter right down to the cheese. The trap didn't go off. The mouse was too light. My only hope was to keep feeding him peanut butter until he got heavy enough to trigger it.
Last night I smeared the trap again and set it even more carefully, on as delicate a trigger as I could. If this didn't work, I was going to buy a whole bunch of traps, dammit, and set them in a row along the wall: a Maginot line of mouse-traps, all poised to go off at the slightest hint of a breeze as he ran past, thwap! thwap! thwap! thwap! thwap!, turning the living room into an ungodly mess of mouse parts and peanut butter!
This morning, the tiny mouse was dead. His tiny nose thrust into a glob of peanut butter, his tiny head separated from his tiny body by a line of spring wire across his tiny neck.
I miss him. (Sniff.)
Brigghhhhht eyyyyyesssss, eatin' peanut butterrrr...
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Part of me wants to agree with Neale Talbot's assertion that weblogs are good for nothing... and then I read entries like this and this from Caterina Fake, small glittering gems of non-fiction writing, and have to disagree. Every now and then, every weblog has one: pieces too short to be an article, too real to be a short story, too good to be 'the most unimportant part of a web site'.
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Tuesday, January 16, 2001
Madagasikara No. 4: Bouli Bouli
Music forms an inescapable soundtrack for most journeys. Whether you like it or not, just listening to the radio stamps the time and place indelibly on certain songs, whether it's the Pet Shop Boys' 'West End Girls' in London in 1985, or Chumbawumba's 'Tubthumping' in New Zealand in 1997. And when you drive long distances by hire car or bus, as you do when you're travelling, you listen to the radio a lot.
Many travellers carry walkmans to tune out the radio and tune in their own soundtrack. I've done it myself in the past. But these days I've decided that tuning out the local music means missing part of the experience—and besides, tapes and CDs are just more stuff to carry. (Unless you take only one, and end up flinging it from the top of a tall cliff because you're sick to death of it.)
Admittedly, this strategy carries risks—particularly in Western countries. Because Western popular music has coalesced into one huge world-dominating cacophany, you're less likely to hear sounds that bear the mark of their particular place and more likely to hear sounds that you can't bear. ('How interesting. German bus-drivers like Celine Dion. What a marvellously varied world we live in.')
But somehow this becomes less of a concern the more foreign the country is. When you hear Michael Jackson on the radio in Thailand you don't think to yourself, 'Oh God, not old Wacko Jacko, someone switch the dial off the golden oldies station before I moonwalk up there and tell them to blame this on the boogie'—you think, 'My goodness, it's the King of Pop, fine purveyor of syncopated rhythms and carefully placed guitar riffs and children's choirs; how fascinating that he remains popular in South-East Asia; what an insight into the power of the Sony marketing department, erm, musical tastes of this country.'
So it was in Madagascar. Not 'For crying out loud, not Abba,' but 'Hmm, Abba; I wonder if this tape dates from the early years of the Ratsiraka regime before he cut Madagascar off from the world in the 1970s'; not 'The Vengaboys? That poppy dance nonsense they've been advertising on Channel Ten all year?' but 'Wow, it's just so surreal to be driving past mud huts and barefoot Malagasy with techno music playing!'; not 'Country and Western—give me a break!' but... okay, so I drew the line at country and western.
Fortunately, Madagascar is one of the world's melting pots, with a thriving musical culture all of its own. The Malagasy have a rich tradition of distinctive instruments made out of unpromising materials, like bamboo and gourds. Their Austronesian and African roots are reflected in Polynesian-style harmonies and African-style rhythms, and they've even adopted the French-style accordian and turned it into an unexpectedly musical instrument.
Malagasy music is 'world music' in all of its variety blended into one national style. It's danceable, it's lively, it's haunting, moving, and enchanting. (If you're after a good sampler of its more traditional sounds, try this compilation.)
But like many traditions, it's changing. Madagascar's musicians are blending the old sounds of Madagascar with the new sounds of Western popular music, using out-of-date synthesisers rustled up from God knows where. The effect can be great, or it can be the musical hybrid you least expected or wanted to hear: New Romantic world music. And if you travel anywhere by public transport, you'll hear a lot of it.
The average Malagasy taxi-brousse—converted minivans that serve as buses within and between major towns, jammed with twice as many passengers as they were designed for—has a sound system resembling a grade 7 science experiment, with woofers and tweeters replaced by megaphones. These blare out non-stop music for the duration, which on a short trip of two hours is bad enough, but on a long trip (4, 8, or 24 hours) is positively mind-altering. By the end, you'll be singing along to 'We're Going to Ibiza' and making plans to pick up the CD at that place in Jo'burg where you saw it for 50 rand on the way in. (Cough.)
But what do you do when the song etched in your brain isn't a Western song that you can buy back home? What do you do when you've heard its cheesy synths over and over again, have decided that it would make the perfect souvenir, and have memorized the words (kind of) even though they're in another language?
Less GESS na jampinaboot
Booz boozna BOOLI BOOLI
Less gess na jampinaman
Beet beetcha BOOGI BOOGI (repeat)
Hey-la hey-la hey-la WOO!
Hey-la hey-la hey-la WOO!
Hey-la hey-la hey-la WOO!
Hey-la, woah hey-la woo (repeat)
[Authentic Malagasy transliteration definitely not guaranteed.]
'Booli Booli' was everywhere. Every taxi-brousse driver played it. The chefs at Rianala Gite lodge in Ranomafana National Park danced to it. It drifted on the wind through the streets of all the major highland towns. It was impossible to ignore. I had to have this song.
But tracking down a copy looked like a daunting task. Most music was sold on cassette at market stalls, and more often than not as roughly-made home-taped copies. The major supermarket chain, Champion (with maybe a dozen or so stores in a country of thirteen million), carries some CDs produced for expats, tourists, and the few rich locals. Locating a song that may or may not be called 'Booli Booli' on the shelves of a supermarket or among hundreds of pirate tapes was going to be virtually impossible.
What I needed was a CD store, and there wasn't one in Tana, at least not in the downtown area. But in the town of Antsirabe, there was: a small place called M Music, which we visited on our second last day in the country.
It wasn't very big, and the shelves weren't very full: the entire stock numbered about thirty or forty CDs, or about a twentieth of my own collection, making me feel once again like an indulgent rich Western bastard. Behind the counter was a teenage Malagasy girl who looked reassuringly like the bored teenage girls who sell pop-music everywhere.
'Bonjour, mademoiselle,' I said, and then took the plunge: 'Avez vous...
Less GESS na jampinaboot
Booz boozna BOOLI BOOLI!'
It was crude, but it worked. The girl smiled indulgently and produced from behind the counter a home-made compilation CD-R with a laser-printed insert (something I definitely hadn't expected to see in Madagascar). Track four was 'Bouli Bouli' by Tempo Gaigy.
A quick listen confirmed it was the right track. How much, I asked? Oh no, she said, this was the master copy and wasn't for sale; but they could make a copy for 55,000 FMg (about US$9) if I came back that afternoon.
Sigh. It wasn't going to work. We had to get to Tana for a flight early the next morning. It looked like 'Bouli Bouli' wasn't meant to be.
She must have sensed my disappointment. She must have sensed that here were two tourists who had heard 'Bouli Bouli' every day for weeks, who would be going home heartbroken without it. She maybe even guessed that here was someone who could do untold damage to the fledgling Malagasy tourist industry by writing in his weblog about how disappointed he was not to get a copy of 'Bouli Bouli', thereby scaring away others who would fear that their music-loving hearts might also be broken.
Or else she saw 55,000 cold hard francs about to walk out the door.
Whatever it was, she sold me the CD, condemning her boss to burning a whole new master copy from scratch. I didn't care—I had 'Bouli Bouli'! And several other stomping Gasy hits of 2000! Now That's What I Call Mozika!
It's one of my most treasured souvenirs, and now you can hear it too, in this 39-second mp3 excerpt (625k).
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Man, but these 'writers and the web' interviews in Neale's Fantastical are good:
Why did you choose the web?
I didn't have any particular attachment to the Web. I would have taken any global medium with built-in distribution and a low cost of entry that wasn't controlled by mega-corporations and which appealed to literate, technically minded people while at the same time having the potential for massive popular attention. The Web just happened to be there.
[Lore Sjoberg of the Brunching Shuttlecocks.]
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At last, there's an About page for this weblog. Just when Neale is reminding us, once again, that it's all a pointless waste of time. (Not that that's stopped the launch of Plastic.)
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Monday, January 15, 2001
An essential download for testing out how your site looks under various browsers: the WebTV Viewer [via frownland]. And what do we find but yes, more CSS problems! To wit, WebTV recognises CSS-defined background images but not their repeat-x or repeat-y values, which can really screw things up big-time. Sigh.
More in this vein: AOL's webmaster.info pages.
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Greg Restall has posted some good links about academe and the internet. Now that it's six months since it was my job to read this stuff every day, I can start reading it for fun...
The story on Darkness in El Dorado is particularly interesting. Since I'm still vaguely in the anthropology loop (one step removed), I heard about this when the first wave of outrage erupted last September, and was as concerned about the allegations as most were. But the real story turns out to be much less black-and-white, as they usually do, and is a valuable lesson about the dangers of flame wars.
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Phew. It wasn't 46, it was 36. Much more bearable.
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