燕

Public service announcement: my AIM screen name is going to be changing in a few days. Despite my attachment to it-- we've been together for a decade now, give or take-- there's no logical reason to keep AOL anymore. With AOL gone, I don't think there's any way to keep Scryer1.

The new SN is Damaskena. Shouldn't be that hard to remember, right?

Since I'm often asked . . . my Scryer1 SN was originally a small joke on my behalf. Scrying, of course, is using an inanimate object to access information or events happening far away, or to communicate with those who are distant . . . and how, then, is a computer so different from a mirror or a pool of still water?

It lends credence to the theory that any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

And a joyous Yuletide to one and all, by the way.

"I know we're going to win," Bush told reporters at the White House. "Our troops need to hear not only are they supported, but that we have got a strategy that will win."

For once I agree with Bush. So, Mr. President, what is this strategy? The troops are just dying to know.

In fact, more than 2100 of them have been dying to know since this little shindig of yours started. I'm not dying to know, thank the gods, but I admit to being a little curious.

Quote lifted from this article.

This section of the Onion, as ever, made me laugh out loud. Just like the above article didn't. Especially the first of the Narnia and C-Section quotes.

Twenty things I want to do before I die, in no particular order:

1) See Jereusalem without dying (unless, of course, I'm resurrected from the dead three days later and let continue about my way. Though I can do without the Roman torture methods beforehand, thank you).
2) Become fluent in Japanese.
3) Move to England.
4) Become an editor at a major publishing house.
5) Write and publish a book.
6) Have a child named after me.
7) Become a good cook.
8) Tour Europe by motorcycle.
9) Adopt a child.
10) Visit Tibet.
11) Take the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Russia.
12) Buy a wonderful old house and fill it with curiosities gathered on my travels.
13) Learn how to play another instrument well.
14) Be owned by many, many cats.
15) Swim with dolphins.
16) Have an SO.
17) Learn how to sail a Real Boat.
18) Have grandchildren and spoil them mercilessly.
19) Make an angelfood cake as good as the one my roommate made that one time.
20) Buy one of those wonderful ghatto marrionettes in Venice.

It's been a busy weekend.

It rained yesterday, with a fury matched only by the way it rained on Wednesday, when I taught one class of students the expression, "it's raining cats and dogs." I spent most of it in my apartment, but come afternoon the rain had slacked somewhat, and I grabbed my umbrella and my courage and headed for Momoyama.

花がさまつり　(since I only know one of the required kanji . . .)

I was early for once, but the meeting place was a Media down the hill from the huge vermillion tori, and they were playing the ad for Advent Children over and over, so I didn't much mind. Once we were all assembled, we headed over under still-grey skies to the apartment complex that had invited us. The lobby was decorated with a small gold-and laquered shrine crowned with a phoenix; the hall beyond it was full of brightly-colored umbrellas made of consecutive rings of plastic flowers. The apartment complex itself surrounded a small open courtyard, shielded from the inclement weather by a huge tarp. We were herded to an underground room to don happi coats and headbands, then we waited around for events to unfold. Waiting was fascilitated by beer, and by watching the hordes of small children in miniature happi running back and forth. Most of the women and children, and some of the men, were wearing happi; others were wearing black trousers with red and purple sashes around their waists, over white wrapping-- to stabilize their backs? They also had large black cushions strapped over their shoulders.

At a certain point wooden boxes of sake were handed out, and a man with a bullhorn shouted out the kannpai and other anouncements before everyone began to flow out into the street. I nabbed a purple umbrella decorated with maple leaves and bells on my way out. Somehow we all ended up in the covered shopping arcade that was nearby, where all the men in black trousers assembled around a huge wooden box crowned with three massive red-and-gold layers of flower-umbrella.

At some sort of signal that I completely missed, the men hoisted the shrine into the air and onto their shoulders. And then they proceeded to parade the thing through the streets, led by others who were carrying the other huge flower-umbellas and the horde of women and children in blue happi. Every once and a while they would halt, and then to a very basic drum-and-chant-- "fi-to! fi-to! fi-to!" and "oi-oi-oi-yo!"-- would perform a bizarre dance that involved everyone holding the shrine hopping back and forth from one leg to the other. At either end of the shrine were long ropes held by women whose job was to stabilize the shrine and keep it from going forward/backward/left/right, which it was constantly in danger of doing. Once in a while they even hoisted it all the way up into the air on outstretched arms and shook it up and down.

Progress was slow but steady, all the way down the length of the shopping arcade, across the train tracks, and up the hill through the torii to the main gate to the shrine. I was glad of my umbrella before I was finished, since it kept me mostly dry through the whole experience, at least until the rain had stopped towards the end. I hopped up and down and chanted as enthusiastically as the next person-- well, possibly more enthusiastically then my fellow AETs, because I was absolutely ready to get carried away by the intoxicating rush of the whole thing. I even took my turn at hauling on the shrine ropes, trying to keep the thing upright and steady.

Eventually we got the shrine back to the apartment complex, a complicated endeavor due to narrow streets and low-strung power cables. Once it was back there were further dances from the umbrella-bearers, and the shrine was lifted once again for a last hearty dance before everyone tropped back into the courtyard . . .

. . . for food! And there was quite a spread, too, soups and curry and rice, maki and croquettes and fishcake and dumplings and tiny sandwiches and yakisoba and all of those foods that I don't know the names of but are becoming increasingly familiar to me. And more beer, of course, and sake, and everyone from the apartment complex laughing and talking. All the children were running around, chasing each other and behaving the way kids do no matter where in the world you might be. All the adults were enjoying themselves, some of them with increasing levels of intoxication . . . every once and a while someone would come by and try out their English (a surprising number), or somehow through a hodgepodge of Japanese and English we'd somehow manage to communicate. One AET, especially tall, ended up arm-wrestling a succession of Japanese guys, with both victories and defeats on both sides met with cheers and applause. When the party began to subside, all of us foreigners were rounded up and herded into a nearby apartment to socialize for a while with our hosts before we headed back to our respective abodes.

Was clicking around CNN this evening, as is my wont, and I found among the various depressing articles on Hurricane Katrina (perhaps the most depressing was the fact that Bush's approval ratings were higher than I expected. Great gods, what is it going to take before people realize? That and the attempts to mend his lousy hurricane-related public image, which had my torn between laughing and crying . . .), this article on a soon-to-be-released movie (soonish, anyway) called Brokeback Mountain.

This is particularly amusing to me because the director is Ang Lee, who is most famous for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but who also directed many other movies. The above, which is sadly becoming known as "the gay cowboy movie," is hardly a departure from his previous work, as anyone who's seen the Wedding Banquet would know.

I saw the Wedding Banquet back in my Asian film class last year. My professor had a strange fascination with showing us films featuring gay men, for reasons I was never exactly clear on. By the time we finished watching exerpts from Happy Together (said excerpts chosen by said professor and featuring several fairly explicit sex scenes), I turned to my friend and asked, "um, so, are we likely to find the professor at Chumley's on a Friday night?"

Her: "Um, actually, he's married. I've met his wife."

Me: "Well, I guess it's good that he has such an open mind, then."

Chumley's was my university's closest gay bar, in case you were wondering. Maybe that professor's just very comfortable with his heterosexuality . . .

A cookie to anyone who gets the joke.

Gyllenhaal, one of the leads, has a really sweet quote in the article, too.

Anyway, I want to see Brokeback Mountain now. Hopefully it'll still be playing when I come home around Christmas. Hey, vash_donutangel, want to go see it with me? Since we've already started a tradition of watching the Gay Channel until the early hours of the morning (oh gods . . . no more Erasure for at least five years, I think I still have mental scars . . .). Maybe you and I and Emm can make a Naninani Yakuza night of it, hm? Complete with Ben & Jerry's. In December!

Beware, outspoken and somewhat bitter politicking. Read at your own risk.

So, President Bush says that Sept. 11 was Pearl Harbor and the Afghanistan/Iraq wars are like WWII.

In both instances, according to him, America went to war only after the attack of a "merciless enemy."

So that would have been Japan in WWII. Of course Japan is an American ally now, which is undoubtably the conclusion Bush wants us all to reach. The deep and tearing irony of it, of course, is that all that occured after the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, completely leveling two cities, killing hundreds of thousands of people (most of them civillians), and smashing the world into the nuclear age.

And since this is the nuclear age, we have to worry about things like bothersome dictators coming up with "weapons of mass destruction," so much so that a president can use the merest rumor of them to drop our country into war.

Because the gods forbid that someone with a grudge against the US, far too common in this day and age, should acquire that destructive power. Even just a single warhead, strategically aimed, could mean the complete destruction of life as we know it.

And of course we would know, having already done it ourselves.

Bush also wants to equate himself with Franklin D. Roosevelt, which is also tearingly funny on a variety of different levels. One of those is the fact that Roosevelt helped to pull the US out of the Great Depression, wheras Bush's record is nowhere near so good. Since Bush was elected, millions of jobs have gone up in smoke, the economy's tumbled since it's highs during the Clinton administration, the deficit has balloned wildly to keep up with war expenditures, oil prices go higher and higher, and oh yes, looks like poverty's on the rise, too.

Geez, people, I'm going to Japan for a year, I'm not dying.

Unless you guys know something I don't . . .

Currently attempting to fathom the arcane mystery that is the publishing industry. Technically I work in the publishing industry, but the company I work for is very small and I'm only just getting involved in the publishing aspect. This article, lifted from Neil Gaiman's blog/live journal, is an excellent glimpse into its strange interior workings. I even spoke to my sister about it:

Me: You know, I don't think anyone understands the publishing industry except the publishing industry. You work for the government, it's kinda like that. No one understands how the government works except the government.
Her: I've got news for you, the government has no idea how the hell the government works.

Undoubtably true, and more than a little frightening. Although for something as vast and spralling as a national government, not horribly surprising.

This article on US relations with North Korea is a fascinating one. I have a more-than-passing interest in the issue-- you might recall my ruminations on a documentary I watched on the subject of North Korea-- and I think that the US is exacerbating an already fragile situation. Between the various wars of the last five years, the Korean situation, and the row over Bush's nomination for U.N. ambassador, I can't say the current administration is particularly adept when it comes to diplomacy.

Wow, understatement.

And of course, Bush wants the Patriot Act renewed, too. He goes to such incredible lengths to convince me to reconsider my opinion on him, he really does.

Lifted from lazy_as_a_cat:

A very eloquent speech from a Texan democrat. Please read it.

In case you didn't notice, there have been no posts regarding politics or the state of the nation on my livejournal since the election.

When most people on my friend's list were ranting about their frustration and anger, I was silent. There have been no reactions, no thoughts on national and international events, no links to articles or political cartoons or any of the things that used to litter my posts.

The reasons have been many and varried. The election was one of them, definately. When I found out that Kerry conceded, I spent an hour just sitting, trying very hard not to explode. How I would have exploded, I couldn't tell you. vash_donutangel put it exceptionally well, and quite adorably (in my somewhat bizarre opinion), in her post regarding the inauguration. Other people, such as Andy here, reacted and did better than I ever could. I haven't been reading the news very much; there are always other things that require my attention, and I haven't made the time to way I used to (I made an exception when the tsunami struck). About the most political thing I've done lately is answer questions for the 2010 government census because my roommates and I were randomly selected to participate.

That was kinda neat, actually.

I guess I'm just out of steam, for the time being. Oh, sure, things like this and this still amuse me to no end (did you read the sub-headline on that last one? Come on, that is hilarious), and articles like this still anger me, and articles like this make me feel that maybe not everyone's deaf, blind, and stupid. But I don't feel the energy I once did to write on it, which is my version of doing something about it.

I still think about it, though. I'm reading a book on one of China's far western provinces, Xinjiang. One of the most worrying things I read was how China used Bush's "war on terror" to justify a crackdown on minority groups there, saying that these groups had used terrorist tactics and were dangerous. Whether true or not, justified or not, it shows a government turning Bush's zeal and tendancy to use absolute statements to allow them to act in ways that might otherwise be frowned upon. It ups the liklihood of violent conflict breaking out, and throws negotiation, diplomacy, and international mediation right out the window.

Boromir's got a point, after all. I mean, what about the ninjas? And the bears with lasers? Huh? Are you going to remove them from international policy considerations? You can't just bypass them!