As Barry goes, so goes the World Cup

I think I must be one powerful guy.

Really, I mean, look: I just spent some time in Barcelona, right? Spain.

And I’m about to go to the Netherlands.

Well, the World Cup final is this Sunday, and who’s playing in it? Yes, indeed: Spain and the Netherlands.

We know this can’t be a coincidence; the odds are too much against it, something like 1,759,438 to 1. Or thereabouts. Whatever. It’s not possible that it just, you know, happened that way.

No, sir-ee, this is better than Paul the psychic octopus, and no mistake! I have me some strong juju working. Y’all better keep that in mind.

What do you call that?

In her new blog, The Thrifty Epicure, D. gives her recipe for minestrone, and notes something about the pronunciation:

As I ordered the minestrone, the waitress looked at me as if I had strange things coming out of my head, and I finally had to point to the board so that she could see I really was ordering something from the menu. "Oh, you mean mine-strone?" She was incredulous at my pronunciation of "Min-est-roney", and seemed to think we were saying it that way to mock her.

That one seems pathological (the waitress simply had no clue), but I run into various Americanized pronunciations of foreign foods all the time, and it often amuses me.

Of course, there’s cruh-SANT for “croissant”. I never expect Americans to get French words right (try “bouillabaisse”, for another great one). The “croi” combination is hard, and I’m prepared for folks’ not knowing that the “nt” shouldn’t be pronounced distinctly, but makes the “a” nasal. But, really, we should at least be able to open up the “a” a bit, and say cwa-SAHNT; that’d be tolerable.

The Greek meat sandwich called γύρος, transliterated as “gyros”, isn’t a plural and is not like the first syllable of gyroscope. It’s not “a gyro”, but is pronounced, approximately, YEE-ros, with an unvoiced “s”. Order it that way, though, and unless the waiter is Greek you might get the same puzzled look that greeted D. at Dunkin’ Donuts.

But Italian foods can be the funniest, in part because Italian-Americans themselves have done a lot of Americanizing, adding that on to the southern Italian practice of not pronouncing the final vowels. “Manicotti” becomes ma-na-COTT, for instance, but that’s not going to cause any confusion. Try ordering a sfogliatella, though, as sfo-lya-TEL-la, and things are different — they pronounce it FOO-yuh-DELL.

And “pasta e fagioli”, a soup whose name means “pasta and beans”, is called pasta fa-ZOOL here in New York.

A colleague told me an amusing story, many years ago. Her pre-teen son invited a friend of his over for dinner, and the friend asked what they were having. “Pasta fazool,” was mom’s answer. Her son’s Italian-American friend was especially fond of pasta e fagioli, and enthusiastically accepted the invitation.

At dinner, my co-worker served up plates of elbow macaroni with ground beef and tomatoes — their non-Italian family just thought that “pasta fazool” was a fanciful name for pasta with stuff mixed into it, and had no idea that it was really a specific thing. “This isn’t pasta fazool!”, said the friend, disappointed.

He later got his mother to invite the family over for real pasta e fagioli, to show them how it’s supposed to be done.

Japan, part 4: the language

A glance at any Japanese text makes it clear that the script is fully alien to us, and a reading of some of the fractured translations makes it clear that the language works very differently. Consider, for example, the nonsensical t-shirt the child is wearing, in the photo to the right. Is it a poem, translated to English from Japanese? Is it something else? What does it mean? How did it get this way?:

Special girls park

Do you know

Special park

Your smile

make all 100%

happy

That was the only entirely nonsensical thing I saw while I was there, but there were some other interesting translations. A sign that said, “Our bus is carrying out piston operation from the Himeji station southern entrance to this hotel.” One admonishing, “Eating and drinking in this place should withhold.” Instructions for using an intercom that told you to “Release the red button when you hear.” Well, when you want to hear, or, as we would really say it, “Release the red button to listen.”

Japanese doesn’t use articles as English does, and in their translations they often seem to randomly sprinkle definite and indefinite articles, with little regard for usage. At one meal, I ordered something that was translated as “Duck, and the salad of a sweet potato,” expecting to get a main portion of duck, with some rendition of sweet-potato salad on the side. What I got was a salad of mixed greens, dressed with a vinaigrette and topped with a few slices of duck and some diced yellow sweet potato. Good, but not what I expected.

They also appear to use pronouns differently, resulting in some sentences that are entirely lacking in pronouns (the subject has already been established, so they’re not needed). In a description of a historical battle, one sign talked about the army this way: “In a dangerous storm, turned off a light and suppressed a voice and marched for a surprise attack.” It’s an odd sentence, and yet it’s entirely understandable.

Written Japanese uses four scripts — five, if you count the use of Arabic numerals (which is handy: whatever else we can’t read, the numbers, including times and prices, are readable to us). The most complex script is kanji, literally “han characters”. This is the script adopted from Chinese, and it is mostly readable by the Chinese (the characters are spoken differently, so the Chinese can’t understand spoken Japanese, but they can read what’s written). There are a great many ideographic characters, and there’s little hope of reading this without serious study.

There are two kanas, phonetic scripts: hiragana and katakana. It’s not clear to me when they use one as opposed to the other, but each of these has only about 50 phonetic characters, and these are easily learned (I haven’t yet, but I will before my next trip there), allowing one to sound out things that are spelled in the kanas.

I say they’re “phonetic”, but they’re not strictly alphabets: each kana symbol represents a syllable, and each Japanese syllable consists of a lone vowel, or a vowel preceded by one of nine consonants: K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, and W. So there are kana symbols for ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, and so on. There are a few variations: si turns into shi instead, for example, and ti becomes chi, tu becomes tsu, and hu becomes fu. There is a syllable-final n, which is said with some form of nasality, depending upon the subsequent syllable and the speaker’s accent.

Four of the consonants can be modified into related ones using diacritical marks: k can become g, s can become z, t can become d, and h can become b or p. Finally, if the -i version of a consonant is followed by ya, yu, or yo, the i sound is dropped and the result is a single syllable. For example, the katakana for “Tokyo” would be トキョ, which is not read as “to-ki-yo”, but as “to-kyo” (but Tokyo is normally written in kanji, as 東京).

The fourth script is romaji, Roman characters — transliteration into English characters. That’s mostly seen as initials and other abbreviations, things like “JAL”, “JR”, and “NHK”. It’s also used to make things readable to foreigners, and there’s enough of that in the transit system, street names, and the like to help one get by. The subway station I used, near my hotel in Tokyo, was 京橋, but it was also labelled Kyōbashi, so I didn’t have to figure out the kanji to know where I was (the station was also numbered, G10 (station 10 on the Ginza line), to make things even easier).

One thing that adds to the image of written Japanese as daunting is that words using these scripts can be intermixed in a single sentence... and Japanese doesn’t use spaces between words, so it all looks like one long string of scribbles. Look at the sign in the photo to the right, from the top of Mount Misen. You can see all five scripts on it — kanji, katakana, hiragana, romaji, and Arabic numerals. Click here for a detail of the middle right side of the sign, where one sentence contains four scripts, and I’ve annotated which is which.

Because all Japanese syllables end in vowel sounds (except for the syllable-final n), an adjustment has to be made when they adopt a word from another language, such as English. Such words are normally spelled in katakana, and vowel sounds are inserted to make them spellable — and pronouncable — in Japanese. Ice cream comes into Japanese as アイスクリーム, ai-su-ku-rii-mu (and definitely not as the Japanese words for “ice” and “cream”). Some of the loaners are amusing; what we call “french fries” are called フライドポテト, fu-rai-do-po-te-to.

Mostly because of the difficulty in reading Japanese words, I learned essentially no Japanese while I was there, which is disappointing. I arrived armed with three basic words: hai (はい, yes), arigato (ありがと, thank you), and kudasai (ください, please (in some situations)). Not knowing when to use the third properly, I didn’t use it. I sprinkled the other two liberally. And I didn’t really learn any more. That certainly made it clear how important it is to my learning to see a language written, and to be able to read it.

One final point, bridging language and culture: as I mentioned in the post about Japanese culture, the ability to write beautifully is considered an important skill, and many of the Japanese cultural treasures consist simply of handwritten text. Moreover, rulers were expected to possess this skill, and there are many examples of poetry hand-written by emperors of the past, letters written by the emperors’ wives, and so on. A poem should look beautiful on the page, in addition to being beautiful to hear.

The Japan album in my photos includes a number of examples from the Tokyo National Museum, including the one above left, which I like a lot, and which mixes pictorial art with calligraphy.

Japan, part 3: the food

Today, we get to what may be the most important part of any foreign trip: the food. A friend once asked why, when I talked about my travels, I always talked about the food. “Why do I care what you ate?” Well, that friend was clearly not a “foodie”.

And, of course, the food in Japan is mostly very different to what we generally get here, so it’s particularly worth making one of these pages less empty for.

Where to start? Well, perhaps with the local dishes. Hiroshima is known for an item called okonomiyaki, お好み焼き. Actually, okonomiyaki is served throughout southwestern Honshu, as well as in the rest of Japan, but Hiroshima lays claim to being the place that does it right. So we had to try it for lunch one day, much as one has to get a cheesesteak when one visits Philadelphia. Okonomiyaki (see the photo to the right; click to enlarge) starts with a thin pancake formed on a grill. When the pancake is turned, it’s piled up with stuff — here, cabbage, noodles, bean sprouts, and whatever meats and seafood you’ve ordered. The whole stack is then finished with a lightly beaten egg and turned over again, with a weight put on it to really get it cooking (that’s where you see it in the photo). To serve it, the guy turns it over again, plates it, and lays on some sweet/salty sauce. It was very tasty, and very filling.

For another local specialty, we go to Itsukushima (Miyajima), where they make little filled cakes called Momiji manju. Manju, 饅頭, are made throughout Japan, in various shapes and forms; the Momiji manju are specifically in the shape of maple leaves (Momiji, 紅葉), and they come with all kinds of fillings. The red bean paste filling in the photo to the left is the most common. Other fillings include custard, cheese custard, green tea, chocolate, and various fruit jams. When I first saw them, I expected them to be hard cookies. They not; they’re soft cakes, with a generous filling. You can buy them individually wrapped for less than a dollar apiece, and they’re very good!

Also on Itsukushima were a number of shops selling grilled fish-cake snacks on skewers (photo to the right; I don’t know the Japanese name for them). The wide variety was quite intriguing, and it’s too bad we’d just eaten lunch before we saw the snacks, or we would surely have tried some of them. Octopus and spring onion; cuttlefish foot; asparagus and bacon; burdock... they sounded very interesting! I’ll certainly try some if/when I’m there again.

Eel is very popular in Japan, and I’ve had it here in the U.S. in Japanese restaurants. There are two varieties: anago, 穴子, saltwater eel, and unagi, うなぎ, freshwater eel. It’s served as pieces of sushi, layered over rice in a bowl as a donburi dish, and, as seen to the left, wrapped with rice in nice little packages as onigiri, 御握り (these are made with unagi, which are grilled with a light spreading of barbecue sauce). Think of onigiri as a Japanese hamburger. (And in Tokyo, I had an unagi pizza.)

And while we’re on donburi, 丼ぶり, we should talk about katsudon, カツ丼, breaded pork cutlet served with onions and egg over rice. In Japan, the egg is left a little runny, and serves as a sauce for the dish. Katsudon is another very earthy, filling dish, a good stick-to-your-ribs lunch on a chilly day.

The Japanese do like eggs, and seem to serve them as part of many meals. I’ve already talked about the okonomiyaki and the katsudon, which both have egg in them. Perhaps you’re familiar with tamago, the tightly rolled omelet often served as part of a sushi meal. Breakfast omelets are different, done more like French omelets and very much in the French baveuse style, still runny in the middle. One popular egg concoction, omuraisu, オムライス, is widely served — it’s an omelet filled with fried rice (and the word is an example of adapting western words (“omelet” and “rice”, here), which I’ll talk more about when I talk about the language). The original omuraisu (right, a plastic model from a shop window) involves fried rice with chicken and ketchup, but there are many other variations, and I saw restaurants that specialize in them. I plan to devise my own favourite variation to make at home.

The most “different” meal I had was when a few of us went to a Japanese buffet restaurant. Except for the rice, noodles, and vegetable tempura (which was served at room temperature), we didn’t know what anything was — all the labels were in Japanese, and most things didn’t look familiar. We tried most of what was there, and were delighted with the surprises, even if each of us liked some things more than others. The tastes and the textures were sometimes unexpected. The only problem is that we still don’t know what we ate, so we couldn’t ask for it elsewhere.

Of course, tea, 茶, is ubiquitous. We were usually offered the choice of black tea or “Japanese tea” (green tea). Sometimes there were more choices, of specific varieties. Alexey and I went into a cafe in Himeji and had some tea flowers, those bundles of tea leaves that blossom in the hot water. And that seems a good photo to leave you with, there to the left.

It was a good food trip.

Japan, part 2: the culture

No discussion of a trip to Japan could be complete with some comments on Japanese culture, and how it appears to an American. When I made my first comments about the trip, on arrival in Hiroshima, I said this:

My first real exposure to Japanese culture was something I hadn’t been told about and wasn’t expecting: when train personnel left one Shinkansen car at the front, to go to the next one, they opened the door, turned to face the passengers, and bowed, before turning again and going through the door. The conductors did this, and so did the young women pushing the food carts. Every time.

When my colleague and I checked into our hotel rooms in Himeji, we had a similar experience. After getting our room keys, we made for the wrong elevator — the end where our rooms were uses a different elevator. A woman on the hotel staff, who was sitting near the elevator we went to, asked to check our room keys, and saw that we needed to use the one at the other end of the hall. In the U.S., she would probably have just pointed and said we needed to use the elevator down there, but this wasn’t the U.S. She led us down the hall, running ahead of us. When we got to the other elevator, she motioned with her arm as if holding the doors open for us. And when we got in and pressed the button for our floor, we saw that she was bowing to us, and she held the bow until the doors closed.

A few things occur to me about the custom of bowing. In these cases, it’s clearly stating that the people involved — the train crew, the hotel staff — are in positions of service, and are putting us above themselves in the social hierarchy, at least for the moment, at least while they’re serving us. No response is expected, and, indeed, it would be odd for the train passengers to try to bow back to the crew.

We do have some sense of not turning our backs on people: when we leave the house of a friend, we don’t usually just walk out and go — we turn back to face them again, and we wave. But our process of acknowledging someone in the way the Japanese do isn’t formalized as it is there, and it’s certainly very common for someone who’s serving us to simply turn away without a word or gesture, and walk away.

We also shake hands, of course, and that’s also very different. For one thing, it’s approximately symmetric: you offer your hand, I accept it, and we shake hands as peers, whether or not we are. There’s little difference in form between shaking hands with me and doing so with the President of the United States.

The bow, though, is very much asymmetric. First, and most obviously, it is simply given, and does not require any acceptance from the recipient. The depth and length of the bow can be adjusted, varying the statement that it makes. It’s a much more interesting and flexible social custom than the handshake.

There’s some perception that Japanese society is more relaxed, but that’s clearly not true in general. There’s a great deal of pressure to produce, succeed, move ahead; office workers often work long hours, still seen coming out of their office buildings at 8 or 9 at night. And you can always see people running on the streets of Tokyo, crisp-suited men and smart-skirted women running to catch a bus or a train, running to cross the street, or just running to get to where they need to be.

But what does seem to be true is that the Japanese place a great deal of importance on down-time, craving quiet and simplicity. Places to relax are austere, to western senses, with very simple furnishings and calming decor. A park or a garden will have a simple bench in a clearing, but it will be in a place where you can sit and hear water quietly running, or leaves rustling very gently.

The complete opposite of that is the tolerance for crowds. When I visited the Tokyo National Museum, the Heiseikan building, which houses special exhibits, had two exhibits of Japanese cultural treasures. Some of these were things used in the emperors’ houses, and much of the rest were scrolls and panels of writing — the writing of the adopted Chinese script is an art in itself, and the ability to make words look beautiful on the page is a renowned one.

The special exhibitions were very popular, and I arrived soon after the museum opened, at a very busy time. The special-exhibit halls were extremely crowded, and what really surprised me was that as I entered the first hall, I encountered a thick crowd, five to six people deep, packed against the glass. There was no hope to see anything without pressing into the crowd and being moved along with it. It seemed more like a Black Friday “door buster” sale than a scene at a cultural museum. I don’t know what was going on in people’s minds, but no one seemed to think this was at all unusual. As for me, I was very happy to finish the special exhibits and move on to the much more serene Honkan building.

Their smoking policy is interestingly reversed from ours: there are areas of the cities where they do not allow smoking on the sidewalks (though note on the sign that the fine is only about $10 for smoking, littering, or failing to pick up after your dog^[1]; the fine for doing graffiti is up to $500). But most restaurants do allow smoking, and it’s hard to find non-smoking restaurants, or even ones with effective non-smoking sections. So, in many places, one can smoke in the restaurant, but one has to put out one’s cigarette before going outside.

Speaking of the sidewalks: they are blind-friendly. The photo to the right (click to enlarge) shows a sidewalk in Himeji — Hiroshima and Tokyo both had these as well. The yellow strip has texture that can be felt under foot, and the ovals tell the direction the sidewalk goes. When the texture changes to small circles, it designates an intersection or turning point. I suspect there’s a national law that mandates this. It seems useful.

The syllable for "four" sounds like the syllable for "death", and so the number four is associated with death and is considered unlucky. Things don’t come in boxes of four, for example, and buildings do have 13th floors... but skip the fourth floor, as you can see in the photo to the left, of the elevator panel in my Tokyo hotel.

This is one case, at least, where we have it better than the Japanese: “triskaidekaphobia” is just such a cool word.
 

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^[1] And, by the way, I saw very few dogs, in particular contrast to New York City.

Japan, part 1: the sights

As I’ve started writing about the tourism part of my trip to Japan, I’ve realized that I have a few things to say about it that can readily be split into separate posts. To avoid one really long one, I think I will, indeed, do it in parts. And, so, here’s the first bit, about the sightseeing. The full set of posted photos is in my Picasa album; this will include links to some specific shots.

[Update; the list of the other parts: the culture, the food, and the language.]

I started the trip in Hiroshima, where the meeting was, and so I did my first bit of sightseeing there. I had part of a day before the IETF meeting started, and, as I noted in August, I was particularly interested in considering the end-of-World-War-II bombing and seeing how the city had been rebuilt, I started by walking around the area, and then went to Peace Memorial Park, set up to remember the victims and to promote world peace.

Hiroshima is situated along the Seto Inland Sea, at the spot where the Ota River empties into the sea. The Ota splits, there, into a number of smaller rivers. The Motoyasu is the branch near where I stayed.

The city itself is, as I said in August, a modern city, and one that looks largely like any other such, with office buildings, hotels, restaurants, and shopping areas. There’s a Starbucks in the NHK building across the street from the meeting hotel (the ANA Crown Plaza). There are several major shopping areas nearby, and, as here, they’re frequented by young people spending money on fashion. A town like any other.

Until you see the “Atomic Bomb Dome”. Originally the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, it sits near the bridge over the Motoyasu that was the target point for the bomb, which detonated a few hundred feet away, and 2000 feet in the air. It’s remarkable that a significant portion of this building remained standing, considering that it was so close to the center of the blast. It has been left as it was, as a memorial, and is registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first of three I visited on this trip.

Across the Motoyasu from the dome is the main part of Peace Memorial Park. The park is home to a number of memorials that sit throughout it, as well as to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. That last contains the Hall of Remembrance, which includes a wall showing photos and names of the recorded victims, and computer touch-screens that let you look up victims by family name.

I did a lot of thinking while I was in the park. I was also snagged by a charming group of uniformed school-kids, who asked me about my trip as part of an assignment for their English class. That took a lot of the heaviness away, and helped focus on the “peace” aspect.

The Friday after the meeting saw a bunch of us take the ferry to Itsukushima, colloquially known as Miyajima, Shrine Island. The island, in the Seto Inland Sea, is quite a tourist spot, known for the Itsukushima Shrine, a major Shinto shrine that was the second UNESCO World Heritage Site on my trip, and for Mount Misen, towering over the island. The torii (gate) to the shrine is one of the most photographed sights in the area, and the view from the top of Mount Misen is wonderful — it’s a pity the weather wasn’t clear that day.

Miyajima is a very touristy place; did I mention that? It’s full of places to buy tourist stuff, including things like little models of the torii and of the five-storied pagoda, models of the Shinkansen bullet train, and so on. We checked out a shop where they sold nothing but chopsticks, and we saw a machine making Momiji manju, a filled maple-leaf-shaped cake — more about that when I post about the food.

There was also a Shinto wedding going on while we were visiting the Itsukushima Shrine. A very different affair from western weddings, it involved little or no talking, at least during the portion we saw. In the photo, the bride is on the right in the back, the groom is on the left, and the woman between them is taking things, such as a goblet to drink from, to each of them in turn. The only sound is dissonant music, unusual to western ears.

On Saturday morning, a colleague and I took the train to Himeji, up the coast near Osaka, to visit Himeji Castle — my third UNESCO World Heritage Site of the trip. The castle was built in the mid-14th century, and has been repaired, rebuilt, restored, and expanded since then, arriving at its current form in the early 17th century. It was inhabited by various ruling families until the abolition of the Japanese feudal system in the late 19th century.

Near the castle is the Koko-en Garden — a very pleasant place, and you can buy a discounted combination ticket to see both the castle and the garden. The garden also offers a formal tea ceremony, which we did not have a chance to see.

On Sunday, we took the Shinkansen to Tokyo, and got on the Yurikamome — part of the Tokyo metro transit system, and entirely run by computers — over the Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba, an artificial island that was built in the bay. We spent the afternoon there at the Miraikan — the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. The Miraikan is an excellent museum, with lots of hands-on stuff and cool demonstrations. They had to chase us out when they closed.

I had Monday and part of Tuesday in Tokyo on my own, and I spent Monday walking around, checking out the Imperial Palace (which one can’t go into) and the East Gardens and the Kitanomaru Garden (which one can). My hotel, the Yaesu Fujiya, is on the border of the Yaesu and Ginza districts, the latter of which is the famous, trendy, upscale, international shopping district of Tokyo. It’s not the place to go for things Japanese — there are French, Italian, British, and American stores throughout Ginza, along with plenty of expensive restaurants. And at night, the district sports lots of neon.

On Tuesday I tried the subway system, and found it very easy to use. The odd thing is that while all the ticket machines are touch-screen systems, they do not all run the same software, and only some of them have an option to use English. So one has to check out each machine, looking for one that has a touch-screen “button” that says “English”. Anyway, I rode the Ginza line from the Kyobashi station to Ueno, and went to the Tokyo National Museum, a place that showcases the art and culture of Japan.

And that ended the trip: back to the Tokyo train station, on the Narita Express to the airport, and into the plane to ニューアーク (nyuu-aa-ku, Newark). I’ll soon have other parts of the Japan series, talking about the culture, the food, and the language.

Stockholm: the tourist part

Having posted my IETF report for the recent Stockholm trip, I’ve now gotten things together to write up the tourist part of the trip. If you just want to see a bunch of the photos, go to my Picasa album.[1] If you’d like to hear what I have to say about things, read on.

Stockholm is a city on a set of islands, located on Lake Mälaren where it meets the Baltic Sea. The islands are separated sometimes by a fairly wide bit of water, and sometimes by just a narrow stream, so it’s often not clear how to refer to the water. Many times, we wanted to say “the river”, sometimes, “the canal”. And there are parts that are officially called “bays”. But they’re all blobs, branches, arms, legs, and tributaries of Lake Mälaren.

The parts where we spent our time were the downtown area (lower Norrmalm), which is actually on the mainland; the attached eastern district of Östermalm; the islands of Kungsholmen, Södermalm, Skeppsholmen, and Djurgården; and the Gamla Stan (Old City) area, comprising four more islands, Stadsholmen, Helgeandsholmen, Riddarholmen, and Strömsborg. Home base for this part of the visit was the Nordic Sea Hotel, right next to Central Station. Except for a day outside town, we walked everywhere.

Gamla Stan, which literally means “Old City”, is very picturesque, very characteristic, and very touristy. There are many shops, most trying to sell you stuff to take home. There are lots of restaurants and cafés, some of them quite pricey (we spent SEK 400, about $55, per person for dinner at Mårten Trotzig, so that wasn’t bad for a nice dinner). There are churches and museums to visit, and, of course, there’s the royal palace. We caught a bit of the pageantry as the guards rode in on horses, and such... but the crowds were thick, and it was hard to see much (here’s a Wikipedia photo). Not surprisingly, this is a very busy tourist season in Stockholm, with beautiful weather and school vacations.

South from Gamla Stan is Södermalm, roughly translating to or “south district”. Being farther from the city center, this was decidedly less touristy, and we spent our time in two areas: Götgatan and “SoFo”. The north end of Götgatan also has the Stockholm City Museum.

Götgatan is a long shopping street, with plenty of restaurants and shops to check out. We walked it down to the bustling Medborgarplatsen, then headed east on Folkungagatan. Off in that direction, and south, is the area called SoFo. New York has SoHo, for “South of Houston”; Södermalm has SoFo, for “South of Folkungagatan”. And they’re similar in character in some ways, with funky cafés, shops, and galleries. We browsed some of the shops, had coffee and a pastry in the retro-cool Café String, talked with the proprietor of the Nyagatan restaurant (traditional Swedish cuisine, in the midst of many other ethnic varieties in SoFo), and walked through the tree-lined Katarina Bangata — one of the many pleasant, tree-lined walkways Stockholm has in the center reservations of the streets.

Another tree-lined street, Karlavägen, leads into Östermalm, the east district, an area of nice residential neighbourhoods and more streets of shopping, pubs, and cafés. It was on Karlavägen that the Barry med öl photo I posted last week was taken. And it was at Östermalmstorg (Östermalm Square) where we browsed the saluhall (indoor market) — full of counters selling fish, meats, cheese, desserts, and jams — and grabbed a spot of lunch one day.

Joining Östermalm with Norrmalm (the north district — the city center) is the new bridge area (Nybro), consisting of Nybroplan (new bridge field), Nybrokajen (new bridge quay), Nybroviken (new bridge bay), and Berzelii Park. What’s interesting is that there is not actually a “new bridge.” A bridge was originally planned over the bay, replacing the old bridge in the 1840s. But King Charles XIV decided to have it done as landfill instead, turning the whole area into a land-bridge.

Walking along the quay to the west puts us on Raoul Wallenbergs Torg — not actually a “square”, but a very seriously elongated rectangle, a strip along the bay extending to the Djurgårdsbron, the bridge to the island of Djurgård. There one finds a number of museums, including the Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum) and the Vasamuseet (Vasa Museum), as well as Gröna Lund (Green Grove), a popular amusement park featuring a concert venue and three roller coasters.

We saved our museum visits for Monday, our last day in town... without realizing that most of the museums, including the major art museums, are closed on Mondays. So we didn’t get to see the National Museum or the Moderna Museet. But the Nordiska Museet (of Swedish culture) was open, as was the Nobel Museum at the Swedish Academy on Gamla Stan, so we saw those and enjoyed the day.

I have some square-dance friends in the Stockholm area, and we spent a beautiful, sunny Sunday with them, visiting out-of-town areas. Arne and Birgit took us to Taxinge Slott, which has a fabulous pastry kitchen — it’s hard to pick just one thing to have... so we didn’t — and Gripsholm Slott, one of the royal palaces. Add a nice late lunch on the shore of Lake Mälaren and some wandering around towns in the sun, and... ahhhhh.

A few words about the language

Of course, you know how I love language, so, of course, I had a nice time coming to understand bits of Swedish and figuring out how to pronounce things passably. I learned, for instance, that former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld’s surname is properly pronounced with a guttural sound, as the German “ach” or the Scottish “loch”, for the “skj”. Similarly for the “vsj” in the Stockholm district of Älvsjö, pronounced, approximately, “EL-*oo” (IPA ɛl-ɧœ).

There are two other interesting things about Swedish pronunciation. One is that they hold some consonant sounds for longer than we do. The other is that they use low and falling tones — it’s not tonal to the extent that Chinese is, and I don’t think it changes the meanings of words, but the combination of the tones and the long consonants gives Swedish its characteristic rhythm and sound. I can’t do either of them with even the most remote hope of being right. And, of course, if one does it wrong, one just sounds like a dufus, so I didn’t try. Maybe at next year’s Fürstenhagen dance I’ll buy Arne a beer and ask him to teach me.

As with German, Swedish makes long words by stringing modifiers together. That can make the street names hard to get along with, but a few tricks help. First, gata or gatan is “street”, väg or vägen is “way”, and torg or torget is “square”. So chop those off the end when they appear. On the beginning, we’ll often have Ny (new), Gamla (old), Norr or Norra (north), Söder (south), and so on. Chop those off too, and it becomes easier to figure things out. Kungsgatan becomes “King Street”; Gamla Brogatan becomes “Old Bridge Street”, and Norrmalmstorg becomes “North District Square”. Even if you can’t make sense of the bit in the middle, sorting out the prefix and suffix makes it much easier to figure out where you are. Gyllenstjernsgatan is a long name, but Gyllen - stjerns - gatan quickly turns it into “Golden Star Street”.
 

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[1] Note that I’ve switched to Picasa from Flickr because of the latter’s silly limits on what free accounts can do. Competition is a good thing.

E-II-R at 83

On this date in 1926, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary [Windsor] was born in London. You might call her “Elizabeth, Jr”, because her mum was called Elizabeth as well. And there was no thought of her becoming Queen, then. Her uncle Edward had that right, being older than his brother Albert — her father — and Edward’s heirs would inherit the throne from there.

And, indeed, when Elizabeth was ten, Uncle Edward became King Edward VIII, on the death of his father, Elizabeth’s grandfather. No surprise there. The surprise came within the year, though. It’s often said that Edward abdicated his throne because his impending marriage to Wallis Simpson, an American — and, so, not of noble blood — gave him no choice. The truth is that the proposed union caused a political upset at the highest levels. Rather than see the government fall into resignations and a disruptive general election, Edward, who could have stood his ground and remained king, chose to step down.

That put Edward’s eldest brother, Albert, Duke of York, on the throne. Interestingly, he chose the royal name George VI, to draw support through his father, even though he had a younger brother called George. So there was King George, and Prince George. Well, I think people figured out who was who.

This put Elizabeth next in line for the throne, as the heir presumptive — “presumptive”, not “apparent”, because if George VI should have a son, she would be bumped into second place.

But George VI did not have a son, and a 25-year-old Elizabeth became queen in early 1952. Her 57-year reign (so far) is a long one, but not yet the longest. George III — the king from whom we wrested our independence — ruled for 59 years, and Victoria held on for more than 63 years.

 

Today is also the birthday of my friend and colleague, and occasional commenter to these pages, Jim Fenton. Happy birthday, Jim.

Myths about Germany

I’m looking forward to my usual square dance trip to Germany in May, and as I think about it, and as I look for some light blogging, I thought I might talk about a few myths about Germany that seem to be common (certainly not universal, of course) belief in the U.S.

Myth 1: They always put the verb at the end of the sentence.

German verbs are sometimes put at the end of the sentence, but not always. It depends upon the construction of the particular sentence. For example, to say, “I’m going to the bank,” you’d say “Ich gehe zur Bank”, which, literally translated, says, “I go to the bank.”[1] If you then ask my friend if he’s going with me, you might say, “Gehst du mit?”, using the separable verb mitgehen. The verbs certainly aren’t at the ends of the sentences here.

But you might say, “Möchten Sie zur Bank gehen?”, meaning “Do you want to go to the bank?” But the literal translation of that would be “Do you want to the bank to go?” Here, the verb is at the end of the sentence.

So, it depends.

Myth 2: Their words are so long because they tack all the adjectives onto the word.

Not the adjectives, but the attributive nouns — nouns that are used to modify other nouns.

So, a small, red room is “ein kleiner roter Raum”. Nice, short words. On the other hand, a heating-oil storage room — note all those attributive nouns — is “ein Heizöllagerraum”, and the word length starts to build.

So, yes, it’s true that many of their words are long; not because of the adjectives, but because of the attributive nouns. I once saw a package of sanitizing bathroom cleaner, where the word for what it was had to wrap all the way around the box because it was too long to fit on one side.

What is also true is that they use these umlauts that make their words nearly unpronounceable to most Americans.

Myth 3: They don’t have any speed limits on the roads over there!

There most certainly are speed limits on most of the roads. It’s only the Autobahn — the equivalent to the U.S. Interstate highway system, and the Motorways in the U.K. — that eschew speed limits, and only on the parts of those that are well away from busy areas.

As you approach population centers on the Autobahn, you’ll see signs slowing you down, first to 130kph (about 80mph), then to 100kph (60mph or so), and then perhaps to 80 (50). And you leave the busy area, the limits will be staged up again, until you see the sign you’re looking for: the speed limit number (or sometimes just a blank circle) with a gray slash across it. That means you’re on a section with no speed limit, and you can stand on the accelerator if you like.

Many a time, my host would be speeding along in the left lane, passing slow-pokes who were crawling to our right... and I’d realize that those “slow-pokes” were “crawling” at 85 miles per hour, and that we were doing 110mph or so. Not something we Americans are used to.

Also, not only do they have speed limits, but they’re enforced with randomly placed speed cameras. You’re never sure where they’ll turn up until you notice the tell-tale tiny red flash. By that time, it’s too late, and you’ll most likely get a speeding ticket in the mail soon (unless the camera’s memory is full; you can hope), resulting in a fine or suspension of your license, depending upon your driving record. Just like here.

Myth 4: You must get out of the way of other drivers or it’s your fault.

The way this is usually posed is that if you’re on the Autobahn and you’re in the left lane, and someone zooms up behind you, he can just plough into you and the collision will be considered your fault, not his.

This is, of course, stupidly silly. There may be countries where that’s the way they actually drive, law or not, but Germany isn’t one of them. People will certainly be annoyed with you if you drive “slowly” in the left lane (see above for the discussion of what “slowly” might mean), and the law does say you have to move over to let them pass (you can indeed be fined for moseying along in the left lane). But, no, get real: they’re not allowed to crash your car with impunity. Quite the opposite, someone going more than 130kph who is involved in a collision will likely be considered at least partially responsible. You can drive fast, but you have to be careful.
 

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[1] English is rather strange, in that we don’t use the simple present tense (“I go”) to talk about what’s happening in the present. Instead, we use the present progressive (“I am going”) for that, and “I go” is used in sentences like “I go to the store twice a week,” and “I go to that school over there.” In that, English differs from most European languages, which is why foreign speakers are likely to ask things like, “What do you eat?”, when they mean, “What are you eating [now]?”, and they’re puzzled when the answer they get is, “Pretty much anything except liver and anchovies.”

Got visa?

I’m at the IETF meeting in San Francisco this week, and a big topic of discussion, as has been for the last several U.S. meetings, is the difficulty of getting travel visas to the United States, especially (but by no means exclusively) for our technical contributors from China.

At the previous IETF meeting, in Minneapolis, we had at least 50 Chinese participants who couldn’t attend because they couldn’t get visas. I don’t have the numbers for this time, but it’s a bunch. And I talked with an attendee from a Chinese company who’s here on a Canadian passport and who said that almost no one from his company coming from China with a Chinese passport was able to make it.

People from other countries are complaining about it too. Some say it takes too long to get a visa — 3 or 4 months in some cases — and some are just denied.

These are not terrorists. These people are threats to no one. They have good jobs back home, in high-tech companies, and they’re coming here to do collaborative work with people from all over the world. There’s no good reason to deny them travel visas.

Because the IETF’s participants come from all over the world, the meetings move around, and the organization tries to divide every six meetings this way: three in North America, two in Europe, one in Asia. And as a result of the ongoing visa problem, they’re shifting more of the North America meetings into Canada. For 2010, two U.S. meetings had been planned, but it’s just been announced that the one in November 2010 will be held in Canada or Asia instead. Many participants are calling for an elimination of U.S. meetings entirely, in favour of Canada.

And the IETF has let the U.S. Department of State know. If they continue to refuse visas for legitimate business meetings, organizations like the IETF will move more and more of their business to other countries, resulting in significant revenue loss — both from the meetings themselves and from collateral tourism — for the host cities in our country. And it will not happen through the State Department’s ignorance. They know.

From Brooklyn to Montenegro

This item caught my eye because Lidija, who frequently comments here, is from Montenegro, the smallest[1] of the former Yugoslav republics. A Montenegrin[2] is on trial in Montenegro, charged with a murder in Brooklyn in 1990:

On Thursday, witnesses sat in Brooklyn courtroom and spoke into a video camera. Their testimony landed in a courtroom in Montenegro, where Smailj Tulja is on trial for the murder of Ms. Beal, who lived in the Norwood section of the Bronx.

Their words fought echoes, interpreters and occasional troubles with the video feed, as the witnesses were asked, in the occasionally vague style favored by the Montenegrin prosecutors, to remember events that took place decades ago.

We’ll skip the details of the condition of the victim’s body — it’s quite disturbing — and just give the medical examiner’s conclusion:

“The cause of death was listed as homicidal violence of an unspecified type,” Dr. Arden said.

Of course, as someone who specializes in computers and the Internet, I find the dual venue trial to be interesting. And I note that, while it would have been possible back in 1990, when the murder actually happened, it would have been much tougher to pull off. And now, it can be easily held over the Internet — in a number of ways.

Now there are, of course, a variety of commercial teleconferencing systems, such as IBM’s Sametime Unyte, Cisco’s WebEx, and Elluminate, as well as others. There’s Cisco’s high-end system, TelePresence, that would give a real punch to the proceedings. It could even be done in Second Life, or some other virtual world — imagine avatars of prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses moving around a virtual courtroom.

In 1990, the idea was quite far fetched. There was no World Wide Web. The idea that we’d all have laptop computers, that each computer would have high-quality audio and high-definition video, that we’d have the Internet bandwidth to support this sort of thing... was science fiction.

And now, in 2009, this item is on page 19 of the New York Times, barely noticed amid the other news.
 

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[1] If you count Kosovo, the independence of which is in dispute, Montenegro is the second smallest by area, but still by far the smallest in population.

[2] I’d have written “Montenegran”, but the Times spelled it with an “i”, and the CIA World Factbook entry confirms that spelling.

40 more years of this?

I’ve been thinking about what to say about the Gaza situation — no link necessary, and which one would I pick, anyway? Hm. On second thought, I’d like to link to PBS’s coverage from Monday night’s NewsHour, because it has two important conversations: Gwen Ifill talked with Palestinian official Riyad Mansour, and Margaret Warner talked with the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor. You can listen to the audio or read the transcript.

First, let me give a few thoughts of my own.

There’s a part of me that has to agree with what I heard a Palestinian citizen say on the radio: that there’s no excuse for the scope of Israel’s response. The level of destruction, death, and injury is far beyond what might be a reasoned retaliation to Hamas’s attack on Israel. It’s out of proportion, taking “shock and awe” farther than necessary. I also don’t believe that being supportive of Israel means that one must agree with everything they do — or, inversely, that any criticism is a sign of “anti-Semitism” or anti-Israeli sentiment. The U.N. — and the U.S., if our leaders should choose — can certainly condemn the response, while at the same time condemning the attack.

I’m also bothered by how many civilians are being killed and injured, and how many houses and neighborhoods are being destroyed. People who already have little are watching things blowing up all around them, and are praying — sometimes in vain — that it spares their streets.

On the other hand, Hamas did attack first, and Israel does appear to be trying to aim its attacks at Hamas targets, trying to minimize civilian casualties. They are claiming — and Mr Meridor’s interview is compelling, here — that Hamas is intentionally launching its attacks from civilian areas, ensuring that Israel’s response will have the result that it is, and hoping that it will soften the response and/or rally world support against a strong response.

For that reason alone, Israel argues, they must not back off.

For his part, Mr Mansour was not compelling. He dodged several of Ms Ifill’s key questions, about the purpose of the initial attack, about the expected response, about whether they’ve been able to work with Egypt, when they claim that Israel is being unresponsive.

It may be that Mr Mansour is trying his best to give an official response, when the actual problem is out of his hands — Hamas is splintered into factions, with little ability for Palestinian officials to control the more militant ones.

If that’s the case, it’s important for Israel to do what it has to in stopping those militant factions. And the Palestinian government must join in eradicating them. It will take serious demonstration of both desire and ability to do that before Israel will be able to put any trust there.

Legislators with spine

Not everyone will agree in general with the title characterization, but here:

LONDON — After nearly 12 hours of debate over two days, the House of Lords overwhelmingly rejected a Labor Government proposal on Monday evening that would have allowed the authorities to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without being charged.

The vote was 309 to 118, with many Labor members joining Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and independents in opposition.

The bill, pushed hard by PM Gordon Brown, only barely passed the House of Commons a few months ago (by a nine-vote margin). In a country that possibly has the most surveillance cameras per square mile of any on Earth, legislators have drawn a line at adding another two weeks to the four weeks that those accused of terrorism may already be locked up without charges.

Let’s note a few things about the current 28-day period:

1. It’s already the longest in the “free world.” In contrast, even our vile “USA PATRIOT Act” only permits 7 days.
2. Note that this is talking about people accused of terrorism. They haven’t yet actually been determined to be terrorists, and people are falsely accused all the time.
3. Note that this is talking about people who have not been charged with any crime. In other words, the police haven’t enough evidence — they may have nothing at all except a suspicion, perhaps something from a third-hand report or an anonymous tip. File charges against the accused, if you want to hold them.

Three cheers for the British legislators for standing up against their leader for what’s right and decent. Three cheers to them for not being the sheep that our Congress have so often been, agreeing, far, far too quickly to clamp down on civil liberties with the USA PATRIOT Act; agreeing to cede their power to declare war; allowing themselves to be bullied by the Bush administration into so many bad policies.

Lord West, the Home Office minister, isn’t pleased with the decision. Addressing the comparison of the already-long 28 day detention period with what’s allowed elsewhere:

“I don’t really care what any other country does,” Lord West, the Home Office minister, said during a powerful speech in support of the bill in the House of Lords on Monday evening. “You’re bloody lucky to live in this country,” he added.

Luckier after this decision than had it gone otherwise, I’d say.

Throwing the book at the driver

I’m just now back in town, so only a short one for today. Tomorrow will have the IETF summary, and Friday will be the tourist report.

When I got in the car and turned on the radio, the first news I heard was that Salim Hamdan has been convicted by the military kangaroo court tribunal, but was only convicted of “providing material support for terrorism” (he drove the boss around). He was acquitted on the more serious charge of conspiracy.

Prosecutors, the article says, consider this a “setback”, but it might well be a Pyrrhic victory for Mr Hamdan: despite his having been acquitted on the more serious charge, he stands to be sentenced to life in prison anyway.

Life in prison for chauffeuring the wrong guy. Now there is a failed career choice.
 

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Update, 7 Aug: Interesting. Mr Hamdan has only been sentenced to five and a half years, and the tribunal gave him credit for five years of it, for the time he’s already served at Guantánamo. Of course, the government can still choose to hold him as an enemy combatant (which will probably result in more legal wrangling). But if they don’t, he could be out in about six months.

Some wonderful antismoking news!

It seems that Bill Gates is adding $125 million to $350 million from Michael Bloomberg, the $500 million to go to worldwide antismoking campaigns over the next four or five years:

The $500 million would be spent on a multipronged campaign — nicknamed Mpower — that Mr. Bloomberg and Dr. Margaret Chan, director of the health organization, outlined in February. It coordinates efforts by the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, the health organization, the World Lung Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Foundation and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The campaign will urge governments to sharply raise tobacco taxes, outlaw smoking in public places, outlaw advertising to children and free giveaways of cigarettes, start antismoking advertising campaigns and offer their citizens nicotine patches or other help quitting. Third world health officials, consumer groups, journalists, tax officers and others will be brought to the United States for workshops on topics like lobbying, public service advertising, catching cigarette smugglers and running telephone hot lines for smokers wanting to quit. A list of grants is at tobaccocontrolgrants.org.

The campaign will concentrate on five countries where most of the world’s smokers live: China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Bangladesh.

I barely need to say it: this is fantastic news. The tobacco companies, faced with strong antismoking campaigns stateside, along with a number of lawsuits, settlements, and regulations, have long been targeting folks in other countries with their... um... product. Not that there hasn’t been a propensity for smoking in some of those places anyway, of course, but targeted marketing has made it worse, especially among women.

This will go a good way toward counteracting that. And it will include funding for helping people quit. That, coupled with plenty of pressure for cultural change — making it less normal, natural, and desirable to smoke — should really make a difference.

Thank you, Messrs Bloomberg and Gates, for putting your money into such an important effort.

Putting war criminals on trial

War criminal Radovan Karadžić has finally been arrested, after 13 years:

But on Monday his false identity was broken, his mask pulled away, and secret police officers arrested Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.

He had been sought by international prosecutors since he vanished from view in 1996.

If Karadžić lives to be convicted (Slobodan Milošević died before his trial ended), a good many people will feel the touch of justice.

It gives one hope that another war criminal might eventually face trial.

No, I’m not really comparing them.[Yes, I am; see the comments section.] Nor do I think the latter is likely ever to be held accountable for his crimes. Still....

Ingrid Betancourt est libre...

...après six ans. Woo-hoo!

La ministra y su hijo

Spain’s minister of defense, Carme Chacón, who made news not only because she was Spain’s first female defense minister, but also because she was 37 years old and pregnant, gave birth to a boy on Monday.

MADRID — Spain’s first female defense minister, whose pregnancy became a symbol of Spain’s new commitment to sexual equality, began maternity leave Tuesday after giving birth to a boy.

The decision to appoint Carme Chacón, 37, defense minister in April raised eyebrows in Spain, a traditionally macho society whose new sexual equality laws placed the country, at least on paper, at the vanguard of Europe. Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero named Ms. Chacón to Spain’s first female-dominated cabinet, in which nine of 17 members are women.

Three cheers for the Spanish government, first legalizing same-sex marriage, and then getting serious about putting women in top positions in the government.

¡Y muy buena suerte y salud a Ministra Chacón y su familia!

A “government” in need of toppling

Stupidity at the top level of government isn’t limited to the United States.[1] The government of Burma — the military dictatorship that took over and calls it “Myanmar”[2] — is, beyond all sense and sensibility, refusing to allow most disaster-recovery assistance into the country:

YANGON, Myanmar — A trickle of aid shipments arrived in Myanmar on Sunday, more than a week after a powerful cyclone smashed the country, but the ruling military junta continued to bar major shipments to more than a million of the storm’s hard-hit survivors.

The junta is also continuing to deny entry to foreign aid workers, who relief officials say are needed to prevent more deaths.

How restrictive are they being? Well:

The United Nations World Food Program said that only one visa had been approved out of 16 it had requested and the aid group World Vision said it had requested 20 visas but received two.

The United States has put its navy in international waters in the area, ready to help if the proferred help is accepted. So far, it has not been.

OK, they’re reluctant to trust outsiders. But even more bizarrely, the government is turning away help from within as well:

MA NGAY GYI, Myanmar — When one of Myanmar’s best-known movie stars, Kyaw Dhyu, traveled through the Irrawaddy Delta in recent days to deliver aid to the victims of the May 3 cyclone, a military patrol stopped him as he was handing out bags of rice.

“The officer told him, ‘You cannot give directly to the people,” said Tin Win, the village headman of the stricken city of Dedaye, who had been counting on the rice to feed 260 refugees who sleep in a large Buddhist prayer hall.

Ah, but it’s not so bizarre — disturbing, but not bizarre. It’s the common problem of government taking the recovery supplies for itself, or for profit:

Even Myanmar citizens who want to donate rice or other items have in several cases been told that all assistance must be channeled through the military. That restriction has angered local government officials like Tin Win who are trying to help rebuild the lives of villagers. He twitched with rage as he described the rice the military gave him.

“They gave us four bags,” he said. “The rice is rotten — even the pigs and dogs wouldn’t eat it.”

He said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had delivered good rice to the local military leaders last week but they kept it for themselves and distributed the waterlogged, musty rice. “I’m very angry,” he said, adding an expletive to describe the military.

And...

Privately, some residents showed flashes of resentment toward the military for monopolizing the distribution of basic necessities. “These military men are notorious,” said a college student in Yangon whose family had to buy seven panels of corrugated tin to repair their roof. “They get these supplies free. They are donated by other countries, then the military receives them and sells them to the people.”

They’re also preventing people from helping if those offering the help are not favourites of the government. No setting aside of animosity during a disaster for them.

I’m just disgusted.

[In contrast, the normally secretive Chinese government is being very open about the recovery effort for the recent earthquake.]
 

Update, 8:20 a.m.: Some Myanmar Aid Reportedly Stolen

YANGON, Myanmar — The directors of several relief organizations in Myanmar said Wednesday that some of the international aid arriving into the country for the victims of Cyclone Nargis was being stolen, diverted or warehoused by the military.

[...]

The aid directors declined to be quoted directly on their concerns for fear of angering the ruling junta and jeopardizing their operations, although Marcel Wagner, country director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, confirmed that aid was being diverted by the army.

He also said it was going to be a growing problem, although he declined to give any further details because of the sensitivity of the situation.

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[1] Yes, I had to get that dig in.

[2] And, oddly, the U.S. government recognizes the name change. We usually do not officially recognize such changes made by juntas and provisional governments, and the U.K. and France still use “Burma”.

Crazy? Is he crazy?

From the New York Times article by Mark Lander, Austria’s Dungeon Man: ‘I Must Have Been Crazy’:

FRANKFURT — Josef Fritzl, the 73-year-old Austrian who imprisoned and raped his daughter for nearly a quarter century, said he knew his actions were wrong. But he denied that he was a “beast,” and he said that he thought constantly about freeing her from the underground vault where she was locked up, along with three of her seven children, whom he had fathered.

In his first public comments since being arrested last month — relayed by his lawyer and published in an Austrian magazine on Thursday — Mr. Fritzl offered a defense, by turns lurid and banal, of the indefensible. He also appeared to be laying the groundwork for a legal defense based on his mental state.

“I constantly knew, during the entire 24 years, that what I did was not right, that I must have been crazy to do something like this,” the magazine quoted Mr. Fritzl as saying to his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer. “With each week that I held my daughter captive,” he said, “my situation got crazier.”

“I must have been crazy to do something like this.”

Ya think?

Mr Lander gets it exactly right when he calls it a “defense [...] of the indefensible.” Yes, of course Herr Fritzl is crazy. Sane people don’t do this sort of thing. Sane people don’t lock people in the cellar and rape them, not for 24 hours, and certainly not for 24 years. The man is absolutely, completely criminally insane.

It bothers me that we (at least in the U.S.; I don’t know how they consider it in Austria) talk about people’s “innocence” because of insanity, the “insanity defense”. They’re not innocent; they’re guilty. It shouldn’t be a defense; it should be a mitigating factor in how we treat their guilt, in the punishment they get, or don’t get.

“Guilty, but insane,” covers it.

And then it remains to decide to what extent we want that insanity to affect his punishment. It’s very hard for me to step back on this one, and not want to have him sentenced very harshly. The sorts of punishments from Greek mythology come to mind: chain him to a rock and have wild animals claw his genitals off, to have them magically grow back and be clawed again.

It’s hard for me to accept that incarceration in a mental health facility is appropriate — is enough.

Mr. Mayer asked Mr. Fritzl if he wanted to die. “No,” he said, “all I want to do now is repent.”

I don’t know how his daughter feels, but I can’t imagine that repentence is possible.