If there is a Heaven...

... for book-hungry infidels like me, then these places would do nicely:


Do check out the rest of them here. I swear, I had goosebumps browsing through these...

The teacher is a mecha!

And kind of hot, actually. Well, she would be, if she didn't sit on the zomg-freakout bit of the uncanny valley:

More from MSN News. I don't know about you, but I think she looks a bit familiar... Ah, here we go:

Epic corkage!

This has to be the coolest way to open a wine bottle in the universe:



Well, it sure beats poking the cork in with a stick anyways....

From that guy on the 5000 yen note

I'm not sure if he's still on it, though. Anyway, I'd read Inazo Nitobe's Bushido: The Soul of Japan and came across this paragraph:

Have you seen in your tour of Japan many a young man with unkempt hair, dressed in shabbiest garb, carrying in his hand a large cane or a book, stalking about the streets with an air of utter indifference to mundane things? He is the shosei (student), to whom the earth is too small and the Heavens are not high enough. He has his own theories of the universe and of life. He dwells in castles of air and feeds on ethereal words of wisdom. In his eyes beams the fire of ambition; his mind is athirst for knowledge. Penury is only a stimulus to drive him onward; worldly goods are in his sight shackles to his character. He is the repository of Loyalty and Patriotism. He is the self-imposed guardian of national honor. With all his virtues and his faults, he is the last fragment of Bushido.

I just laughed when I saw that. Not because I disagree or find it a preposterously simplistic view of the university student* but because of the sheer contrast with a previous encounter with the shosei, found in a book written by no other than the bloke on the 1000 yen bill, Natsume Souseki (after whom my cat is named). But of course, the book is I am a Cat, and here's what the shosei looks like there, from the very first page:

I am a cat. As yet I have no name. I've no idea where I was born. All I remember is that I was miaowing in a dampish dark place when, for the first time, I saw a human being. This human being, I head afterwards, was a member of the most ferocious human species; a shosei, one of those students who, in return for board and lodging, perform small chores about the house. I hear that, on occasion, this species catches, boils, and eats us...

Shortly after that, if appeared that this particular shosei found our protagonist too small and scrawny to be worth eating and flung the poor devil into a clump of bamboo grass. Man, I love that book. If you haven't read it, do. You might find yourself tempted, like me, to learn Japanese because of it.

* In my experience, university students are usually found at the bottom of pint glasses in the Student Union pub. Or urinating on your doorstep. Or your car. Ah, British education...

Travels on the Net

I often tell people I mostly live on the Net, and sometimes they ask what on earth is it I do there*. So here, I'm-a bring you a wee slice of what I wolf down each day:

Chun Li cures melanoma! I kid. The researcher's name is known by civilized people (that is, those who actually know where a Chinese surname is supposed to go) as Li Chun. What actually caught my eye was the bit about using targeted nanoparticles, which is always exciting.

Bill Gates unleashes mosquito swarm into crowd! Hokay, perhaps an exaggeration. It was a wee jar. And they were clean, i.e. no interesting diseases on them. I'm sorry, I'm Malaysian, skeetoes are a fact of life round here, I snap 'em out of the air with chopsticks and, as such, am not impressed in the slightest by such a gesture. Still, props to the guy for chucking USD169 million towards a good cause. Epic win.

Try my kung fu! I've been teaching myself how to use sai off Youtube, mostly from this chap here. Yep, I know, it's not even vaguely the same as learning from the dojo but exercise is exercise. I'm not going to pretend for even a moment that I'm a capable combatant with sai, but hey, I find performing the kata relaxing, and a good workout. Each of those things weigh about as much as my heaviest bokken so this is proving most useful for building up the strength and stamina I need for my eventual return to kendo. If you like the look of sai, do check this out for supreme sai l33tness. I personally like it better in hakama. As for self defense, you want self defense? Here's your self-defense.

Don't try his kung fu! In the search for nice kata to copy and practice, one also finds a fair number of deviants. And by deviants I mean facepalmingly pretentious little goits who take a perfectly decent martial art, stick in some cute but utterly meaningless flourishes and then try to sell it as a martial art. Like Ultimate Fail over here. However, there's something to be said for guys who actually do have the mad skills and decide to break the mold to take a martial art and make a performing art out of it. The results are kinda pretty, actually.

Happy birthday to Darwin... but fuck the Associated Press for having the gall to suggest that evolution is "in controversy" anywhere other than in the deluded little minds of Creotards.

Malaysian politics = epic fail! In case you didn't know already. On 8 March 2008, the Opposition finally made it's voice known, breaking the ruling party's 2/3 majority in the Dewan Rakyat. w00t. Still, I'll say that I presently feel more than a bit vindicated for not voting. Why? Because democracy in this country (indeed in many countries) is a fucking joke, the simple reason being that democracy being what it is, it serves the utilitarian ideal of maximum happiness for the maximum number of people if and only if the voting populace is reasonably enlightened and well informed enough to choose in favour of what serves the greater good. If, however, the greater bulk of the voting populace are selfish, petty and gullible** then democracy simply becomes shorthand for tyranny of the masses, with power going to the best salesman. In Malaysia, democracy means trying to choose between the least of all evils. Thanks to Malaysian politics, our newspapers are borderline worthless rags, fit only to wrap up the morning's nasi lemak. So, where to go for decent news?

Malaysia Today is pretty much as good as it gets, really. RPK's for the most part neutral, unbiased and has a sense of justice which I mostly agree with. The only point of contention in which I seriously oppose RPK is his stance as a Muslim apologist. Most of my regular readers (all three of them) know by now that, like many who bear the 'A' on their blogs, I view all the Abrahamic religions as a cancer that needs to be eradicated. Of course, one could do worse than to look to a decent historian for political commentary. My uncles inform me that the political blogs also make for good reading. I'm not convinced. Some of those bloggers might do well to act their age for a bit.

Whatever the case may be, recent events have shown that the 8 March victory has achieved nothing other than to take the mudslinging to new depths. Meanwhile, over at the KLSE...


Oh, yes, I do indeed think that certain people have better things to do than fuck about over who gets to wear the big hat in the state next door. Petty little bastards.

And when it all gets too much, one would do well to remember that, no matter how dire things look, no matter how much this world gets you down, there exist a good number of reasons to smile and hope. Here's one:



And that's it from me for now. That cat's starting to harass the Roomba again...

* And by there I mean here. Um.

** e.g. Republicans, anyone who takes the Star's political commentary seriously and 90% of those who commented on this article posted in Malaysia Today, among others. To their credit, at least Republicans for the most part have the decency to stfu and deal with it until the next election.

Props for good thinking: Hotel in a 747

Here's an idea with some serious win: Take an airplane, no longer airworthy, park it somewhere out of the way and turn it into a hostel...



How cool is that? Almost tempts me to leave the lair and start travelling...

Dickens and Liquid Crystal = Joy!

I've just liberated this handsome little device from the uncomprehending clutches of my parents and I have to say, I love it!

I daresay I've been trawling the net way, way too long. The tides of pop culture have pulled the English language quite some distance from the days when books were written with pen and paper by lamplight. English, as we see it today, in magazines, newspapers, books and that crucible of memes, the Net, has become a leaner creature, driven by the needs of a rapidly accelerating world to convey the maximum amount of information with the minimum number of words.

In under an hour each morning, I'll be skimming Malaysian news*, IHT, BBC News, Wired, Al Jazeera, New Scientist and Scientific American. If the mood takes me, I'll sample bits and bobs of the blogsphere, grimacing at pretentious pseudopatriotic blowhards, laughing at fundies or pondering the intellectual integtrity of a peer's post. Back in the real world, within arm's reach is a pile of linguisitics texts to devour, printouts from Edge.org, a small stack of Japanese books with an accompanying BIG stack of Japanese dictionaries and sod knows what else in the fearsome ranks of archfiles of reference material I've printed. In the bathroom, a pile of Skeptical Inquirer, Scientific American Mind, Popular Science and New Scientist. In my car, Bertrand Russell's Unpopular Essays, because I need something fun to read in KL's traffic jams. And by my bed, science fiction of various grades, ranging from trashy WH40k to the stuff that makes you think, by the likes of Alistair Reynolds, Vernor Vinge and Huxley, supplemented by 3 volumes of Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe, assorted manga and a majestic, leatherbound tome: Bullfinch's Mythology. Oh, two majestic leatherbound tomes! The other one is the complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy - all 5 books of it.

Point is, I'm one of those people who are firmly of the opinion that one can never read too much. I've been wolfing down information for quite a while now, often simply for the sake of it, SO... I did find in the garden of literary and intellectual wonders that I surround myself with a particularly rare and radiant blossom in the form of Checkov's Uncle Vanya. It came with the ebook reader, one of a hundred literary gems** that now sit in a slim device of steel, leather and semiconductor wafers (with all the right buttons in all the right places! What a triumph of engineering design!) on my desk, though more often, these days, in my hand.

I'd never read Checkov, and was enamoured of science very early in my life, so for a very large part of it, classics were something I read because I simply had to know.

*Brief interlude. Haruka wants her chin rubbed.*

Where was I? Checkov! There is a singular beauty to the language as written in his day, and its such a joy to read after days and days of Pinker's pedantry! To be fair, given Pinker's subject matter (I'm halfway through The Language Instinct), pedantry is a necessary evil, especially for a schmoe like me who's never studied linguistics, let alone cognitive linguistics, at uni before. As such, seeing English put to work by the hands of such masters as Wilde, Shaw, Dickens and the like is a much-needed break from the relatively clipped, emotionless drone of news and popular science texts.

I luv the ebook reader. All I need now is a steampunk version of it and I can die happy...

*The travesty that it is...

** I was very chuffed to find Darwin's On the Origin of Species was among them.

This isn't quite how I remembered 西游记...

... or Journey to the West, for all you non-Chinese-reading foreign devils* out there. Anyhoo, this clip just came to my attention:



Fan Girl's kinda hawt, I think. But then again, I'm one of those shallow bastards who think Zhang Ziyi's irresistibly hawt when she's angry. Check out the Youtube channel for monkey fun. For the benefit of those who don't get what's going on, here's the short version of the lyrics, translated by yours truly:

Fan Girl: I have a big fan. You can't have it. Stupid monkey.

Monkey: I'm off to help the monk get scriptures! Can I borrow your fan?

Ghost Girl: Well done, monkey! Here's a pill that'll keep Fan Girl from blowing you away.

I know I'm really curious how they've managed to breathe some fresh air into 西游记. As I recall, it mostly consisted of that damn monk getting kidnapped by demons, after which he'd get rescued by the monkey and his buddies, again and again and again - a feature that lends itself very well indeed to the production of the more shallow breed of anime:



Any decent anime connoisseur would know the type - on and on for 26 episodes without actually seeming to go anywhere, heralding just another 20-something episodes of the same damn thing, eventually resulting in such aimless monstrousities as Naruto (>200 episodes, ongoing), Bleach (~200 episodes, ongoing), One Piece (375 episodes, ongoing!!!) or Slam Dunk (>100 episodes). *yawnz* Btw, Gensoumaden Saiyuki up there runs for a merciful 50 episodes. Doesn't mean I could be bothered to watch it, though.

But an opera? 西游记, MINUS the repetitive** crap? Gotta get me some of that...

* Fear not, it's nice being a foreign devil. I'd know, I'm a foreign devil wherever I am on this Earth.

**Story-wise, STORY-WISE...

How does one translate 壬生義士伝?

Nope, my Jap just ain't that good yet. Officially, 壬生義士伝's English title is When the Last Sword is Drawn. Those of you who've been following this blog since it's inception (both of you) will know it's a rare thing indeed for me to spend a post ecstasizing about a movie. 壬生義士伝 presently stands as my favourite movie of all time, though I'll be first to admit it requires the viewer to have a measure of understanding regarding certain aspects of Japanese culture, particularly the fabled Way of the Warrior, Bushido.


壬生義士伝 is set in the last days of the Tokugawa Shogunate, during which a wave of reform, sparked by the Emperor Koumei, resulted a state of civil war, with samurai siding either with the Emperor or, like the Shinsengumi, with the Shogun. The movie largely revolves around the lives of two ronin, members of the Shinsengumi : Saitou Hajime (斎藤 一) and Yoshimura Kanichiro.

If you're anything like me, you may be familiar with Saitou from his appearances in Rurouni Kenshin. If not, well, meh. Saitou's being Saitou. He did really exist, and did indeed have a reputation for being a stone-faced, cold-blooded killer with a rock-solid sense of justice. Saitou is also reputed to have been left-handed, though whether this is due to him favouring the quick, left-handed thrust of itto-ryu swordsmanship or actually wielding the katana left-handed, as depicted in 壬生義士伝, isn't too clear.

Yoshimura Kanichiro is completely fictitious, but that doesn't make the character any less interesting. When we first see him in the movie, we find in him both a masterful swordsman and, oddly enough, a money-grubbing country bumpkin who can't stop talking about his home province. What I can say, without giving too much away, is that the apparent avarice comes with a story behind it. A very, very sad story.

Kenshin fans can expect to hear familiar names, but not see familiar faces. For instance, Okita Souji, the genius Shinsengumi swordsman who expired of tuberculosis makes an appearance:

Not quite the same as the Kenshin version:

As I mentioned previously, appreciate this movie requires that one understand a little about the cultural and historical background in which it is set. Take, for instance, this scene:

Against overwhelming odds, Yoshimura draws both blades and announces his name and allegiance. The big deal? Well, long story short...

On the swords: The katana was designed to held in both hands. Rare indeed was the hero who wielded both blades skilfully at once, and Yoshimura was not one of them. The simple explanation is that, back then, life was cheap, honour was everything, and for a warrior, there was little more shameful than to die with a weapon still in its sheath. In the face of certain death, rather than try to up your odds of survival by keeping to the one blade that you're good at, it was far better to guarantee that you die with both blades drawn.

Name and allegiance: Announcing these things held a special significance in this context. Both the forces of the Shogun and Emperor believed they were each serving Japan best in an era where the separate feudal domains were, after centuries of war, coalescing into a united Japan. In this scene, Imperialist reinforcements arrived, bearing the Emperor's personal banners, loudly proclaiming that traitors would be shown no mercy. What shocked the Shogunate forces most in this skirmish was being branded as traitors, and their resolve thus wavered. Not Yoshimura, who, having left his master to serve with the Shinsengumi, refused to betray another master. This was no longer a matter of who's right or wrong, but a matter of a samurai's duty to his master, whether that master take the form of a feudal lord, the Emperor, an ideal or even Bushido itself.

壬生義士伝 offers many, many more such displays of Bushido spirit*, and I'd strongly recommend reading up briefly on Bushido and the Bakumatsu period before watching it. I for one adore this movie, and have watched it far too many times. Can't bear to watch it now. Kanashi sugite mireba naku da kara... <:')

Stuff worth reading to better understand Bushido:

Hagakure is always a good start, and seeing that it was actually written by a samurai, you have to concede that lends it a whole heap of cred.

The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, by Mishima Yukio is another good book, being a commentary on Hagakure's relevance in post-WWII Japan.

If that's not enough, hear it from Nitobe Inazou, author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan. He was even kind enough to write it in English...

Some would recommend Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings, but that book focuses more heavily on swordsmanship than the samurai ethic. That having been said, Miyamoto himself is indeed one of those people who bear two blades at once, for the simple reason that it sucks to die with a weapon still sheathed.

Now go see. You won't regret it, 'onest guv...

* A hell of a lot more convincingly than that monstrosity, Last Samurai, I might add.

Links and stuff

Don't know if you've noticed, but I've been sneaking quite a few new links into the lists on the right. Been meaning to get round to introducing them, but got sidetracked many, many times for many, many reasons. I guess now's as good a time as any:

AnthroVlog and Digital Ethnography came to my attention from a fascinating Youtube video regarding anthropology and the growth of Youtube. Both are relevant to my interests in studying the impact of the Net on society at large and have quite a few worthwhile articles and reports. Well, most of the time. One of the papers I downloaded suffered from a painful lack of scientific method and consisted entirely of a so-called "Phd" engaging in dozens of interviews, no quantitative methods, not much qualitative methods and nothing even vaguely resembling a concrete conclusion. Suffice it to say that I'm still a bit bitter about wasting a couple of hours of my life wading through garbage and finding sodall. But really, do take a look at the video if you've an hour or so to spare.

TUFTS Centre for Cognitive Studies is the site of philosopher of science Daniel Denett's department in TUFTS University. Lots of goodies, mostly pertaining to cognitive studies, including this detailed thesis on memetics that I'm currently reading.

Panda's Thumb came to my attention due to its role in the ongoing extermination of the Creationist movement. It should be point out that it is in fact many other things, and in its own words:

"First, it is an example of jury-rigged evolutionary adaptation made famous by the late Stephen Jay Gould in an essay of the same name. Second, it is the legendary virtual bar serving the community of the legendary virtual University of Ediacara somewhere in the Ediacaran hills of southern Australia, growing out of the lore of the Usenet talk.origins newsgroup. And now it is a weblog giving another voice for the defenders of the integrity of science, the patrons of “The Panda’s Thumb”.

Much as in any tavern serving a university community, you can expect to hear a variety of levels of discussion, ranging from the picayune to the pedantic. The authors are people associated with the virtual University of Ediacara (and thus the talk.origins newsgroup), and various web sites critical of the antievolution movement, such as the TalkOrigins Archive, TalkDesign, and Antievolution.org."

On a more upbeat note, Kakiseni is the place to go when you need information on what's fun in Malaysia. No, really, there's lotsa good stuff going on in this country, despite anything those dirty little rags that pass as newspapers here have to say. If you're visiting Malaysia, make sure you check out this site first.

Call me a geek, but the only CSI I'd give a toss about is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a veritable bastion in the conflict between reason and superstition. I think of it as a more intellectual Mythbusters. Energy healing, qi punches, ghost sightings, UFOs, holy "relics" and of course religion all fall under the purview of Skeptical Inquirer and are given the thorough debunking they deserve.

And that's it from me for now. I'm a-go check out the papers and see just what those arseholes who run M'sia have been doing to put the 'merde' in Merdeka...

Diabolical new weapons: Levan's Polka

WARNING: Pressing the play button on these videos will very likely result in you watching them for longer than you thought you would.

I came across this clip a while ago on KillSomeTime.com, then stumbled on it again in Youtube:



I found out later that the song was by these people, Loituma:



The song has a massive following on Youtube and spawned more parodies than can easily be counted, some of which are actually kinda twisted:



And here's my favourite version, the Trance one, by Hatsune Miku:



As yet, I've NO idea what the hell is the significance of the damn leek.

Poetry!

It's a very, very rare thing indeed for a poem to grab my attention. I'm awfully old-fashioned when it comes to poems, that is, I generally expect them to rhyme. I will concede that, for certain individuals I'll make exceptions, for instance, Rives' performance at TED is well worth sharing:



However, this isn't really what prompted me to write this entry. I was enjoying Russell's History of Western Philosophy when this gem by Vaughan caught my eye. I've never heard of Vaughan before this, but these few lines struck me as being of such singular beauty that it would be a crime not to share them, so here they are:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled.

Quick message to comrades who smoke

The moral of the story is: If you must smoke, at the very least learn to make it look GOOD.

Ok, I've got to get me one of these...

Stumbled on this on Wired.com:



And then, all I'll need is a decent Oddjob bowler hat to go with it and I'm good to go...

Das Leben der Anderen...

... is a frickin' AWESOME movie of a completely different order of magnitude. I'm not going to waste your time with a review of it, not when there's perfectly adequate ones here, here and here. Frankly, there's no arguing with a score of 93% from a site as harsh as Rotten Tomatoes.

It's set in the totalitarian regime of the German Democratic Republic in 1984, that is, while the Berlin wall was still up. To give you an idea of the strength of this movie, here's an extract of a monologue central to the plot:

The State's head office for Statistics on Hans Beimer St counts everything, knows everything. How many shoes I buy per year: 2.3, how many books I read in a year: 3.2, and how many students graduate in a year with a 4.0 GPA: 6,347. But there is one number not registered, perhaps because such a number hurts even the bureaucrats: suicides.

If you called the Beimler St office and asked, "How many people between the Elbe and Oder rivers, between the Baltic Sea and the Ore Mountains were driven to death from desperation?", then our oracle of numbers remains silent, and probably writes down your full name for the State Security, those grey men who take care of our country's security and happiness.

Since 1977 our country has ceased counting cases of suicide. "Murdering oneself". That's what they call it. This act has nothing to do with murder. It knows no bloodlust. It knows no passion. It only knows dying. The dying of hope.

9 years ago, when we stopped counting suicides, only one European country had a higher suicide rate: Hungary. After them was us, the country of the living breathing Socialism...

Really, seriously no kidding, this movie is a work of art to put Hollywood for the past 10 years to shame. My vocabulary in every language I know would not give sufficient praise for this movie. You must watch it. Herr Weisler defines everything a true hero should be. And I think he kinda looks like Kevin Spacey...

A couple of Hiroshis

A friend of mine who was just at the Rainforest World Music Festival had the good fortune of seeing Motofuji Hiroshi* perform live and not 20 minutes ago recommended I watch him. I did a search for "Hiroshi" on that dear old friend, Youtube and was pleasantly surprised to find I had encountered Motofuji-san before, in this clip:



I generally prefer to listen to taiko in an ensemble, e.g. Kodo or Yamato, but Motofuji Hiroshi is one of very, very few drummers with the mad skillz to be an ensemble in his own right.

On top of that, the search also turned up this nice little talk by Tasaka Hiroshi:



I think he makes some very valid points, indeed. And I love the way he obviously doesn't believe in the letter "v". However, being Malaysian (here we go...) some thoughts crossed my mind as he stressed the "wisdom of the crowd". I will say this as succintly and as accurately as possible: Here in Malaysia, the "crowd" is pretty fucking stupid. I'd better elaborate. This is not so much a fault of the "crowd" as much as a hideous failure of government policy in achieving an adequate standard of education**. Yes, Malaysia can read, write and count, most of the time. But the "crowd" is, for the most part, a bunch of selfish consumerist zombies. Very useful for driving an economy in the short-term, but very, very costly in terms of sustainability. The long and short of it is, Malaysia has hell of a lot of problems to address at all levels of society before it can even begin to think of the word "knowledge-based".

But seriously, when you think about it, Malaysia is NOT a player in the game of world civilizations, which is no doubt what Tasaka-san had in mind when he spoke of knowledge-based societies. More like the annoying baby cousin which everybody else has to elbow away from the board.

* For those of you unfamiliar with Japanese names and language, a Japanese name is usually stated surname first. They do switch it round sometimes for the benefit of foreigners, so this may lead to some confusion if you can't tell a Japanese first name from a surname.

** I have been very, very fortunate in receiving 7 years of British education to cure me of the silliness that is the Malaysian education system.

w00t! Rin'!

Stumbled across Rin' completely by accident today. Though I've always been a fan of Samurai 7, I didn't know until now that they did the ending theme song. Anyways, they totally rawk and I definitely recommend them to anyone looking for something fresh:







And they managed to dislodge Suzanne Vega out of my skull, too! I have to say, though, that Noh mask in the 2nd video freaks the hell outta me.