Winter On The Equator

And when I hit the glass ceiling at this place, I can quit and become a condom tester...

2009-02-24T01:12:00.005-05:00

I have an announcement to make: my job search has ended. After eight months of pavement-hitting, my feet have finally stopped moving. Here is where they landed:

I was wandering around the Upper West Side last week, and there it was, right in front of me: the Greatest Job of All Time. Bonus: when I start, I'll finally get to wear my favorite shirt to work.

Speaking of ladies' unmentionables, I stumbled across an ad for Fupa.com last night. Needless to say, with a name like Fupa, I had to check it out. Turns out (as you know if you just clicked the link yourself) it's an online gaming site. Funny -- I always thought it was something else.

Caption translation: "I wish New Yorker cartoons weren't so abstruse and pedantic"

2008-12-04T01:09:00.010-05:00

Check out this cartoon from this week's New Yorker:

Ha! Classic.

Get it? See, there's this bald guy, and he's sitting at home thinking something in French, maybe about how he wishes he weren't bald. It's funny cause it's true.

[Not to condescend, but I thought I'd clarify just to be sure -- sometimes The New Yorker's cartoons can be a bit inscrutable, as they cheerfully admit themselves. It's also kinda funny -- funny ironic, not funny ha-ha -- that the artist of the above cartoon, Bob Mankoff, is the cartoon editor of the magazine and author of the "I Don't Get It" Cartoon IQ Test from Nov. 3rd's Cartoon Issue. Expect to get a few letters about your own cartoon this week, Bob. Va te faire foutre!]

WOTE's (2nd) (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-11-04T01:35:00.002-05:00

If 48 million votes were "perfectly" distributed, theoretically the presidency could be won with just 22% (48 out of 213 million) of the electorate's support. Twenty-two percent!

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

"How Much Is Your Vote Worth?" in yesterday's Times.

[When I was looking at the electoral map a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that there is no way California has "only" twenty times as many people as Wyoming or Alaska. I was going to write a quick entry about that particular flaw in the electoral college system (the others have been well-documented), but it looks like the Times beat me to it. They should really hire me, those guys.]

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

WOTE's (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-11-03T14:38:00.006-05:00

Back in the good old days -- i.e., before 1824 -- presidential candidates did not campaign for the job. As Jill Lepore writes, in a recent piece in The New Yorker, "In keeping with the tradition of the first five American Presidents, [John Quincy] Adams considered currying favor with voters to be beneath the dignity of the office, and believed that any man who craved the Presidency ought not to have it. Adams called this his Macbeth policy:

If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.

Jackson's supporters leaned more toward Lady Macbeth's point of view. They had no choice but to stir: their candidate was, otherwise, unelectable. How they stirred has shaped American politics ever since."

No shit. In other words, we have Andrew Jackson to thank for all this crap we've endured the past 20+ months.

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

"Bound for Glory," by Jill Lepore, from the Oct. 20th New Yorker.

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

Next Time on WOTE: Natalie Portman and her Strange Attraction to Pompous, Overeducated, Underemployed Bloggers

2008-10-12T15:33:00.007-04:00

Homunculus blogs and the world follows.

To wit --

July 18, 2008: I discuss -- I mention -- the WBNA for the first time in my life.

Four days later: The biggest event in the history of the league takes place; hockey moms and Joes-six-pack learn what WNBA actually stands for.

Coincidence? Possibly.

Beginning of August: Homunculus visits a friend in Denmark for a week.

The weekend I return: Major stories about Denmark appear in not one, but two of America's finest newspapers.

Coincidence? Unlikely.

Sept. 3, 2008: Homunculus becomes the first blogger in history to devote an entire entry to the Saguaro cactus.

And today: The Times reports on a disturbing new trend in Arizona: Saguaro cactus theft.

Coincidence? Not hardly.

I shall henceforth be known as Homunculus J. Delphic, the Vatic Oracle of the Blogosphere.

WOTE's Quote du Jour*

2008-10-11T15:24:00.008-04:00

"If I were a dictator, which I always aspire to be, I would write it a little bit differently."

-- John McCain, on the Wall Street bailout bill

Quote du Jour courtesy of:

"Lipstick on a Pig: A 2008 Campaign Quiz," in this week's New Yorker (the Politics Issue)

My only comment that is not a much-too-obvious joke is, How did this not get more coverage?? Seriously, if you Google the quote, only three links pop up, and two of them are from The New Yorker piece. (Then again, if you Google "John McCain" & "dictator," you get 1,080,000 results, so who knows.)

(Then again, again, if you Google "Barack Obama" & "dictator," you get 1,070,000 results. Don't you just love the Internet?)

* Despite its title, not a regular feature of WOTE. To be used only when I have no original thoughts of my own, nor any "WOTE (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day" to use as equally indolent filler.

Fathers & Sons, Fathers & Dogs

2008-09-30T19:53:00.003-04:00

Overheard on my run tonight:

A 7-year-old blond boy, to his father: "Dad, don't you think pumpkins should be for all seasons?"

His father: "Maybe."

For what it's worth, Little Towhead, Homunculus is with ya: If there's one thing a pumpkin should be, it's for all seasons.

Overseen on the Times online today:

"Man dives in to save dog from shark in Fla. attack." I'll say this for the dude: Brotha loves his dog. But seriously, what is up with guys jumping into the water to fight sharks with their bare hands? And just because I would never ever ever do that, does that make them braver than me?

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-09-26T14:57:00.007-04:00

Back in the day, the audience sometimes participated in classical concerts. Once, when Franz Liszt was beginning a performance of the "Kreutzer" Sonata, listeners began calling out "Robert le Diable!" -- meaning that they wished to hear instead Liszt's fantasy on themes from the Meyerbeer opera. Liszt acceded to the demand and launched into his "Robert" fantasy.

Then he did "Freebird."

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact courtesy of:

"Why So Serious?" by Alex Ross, from The New Yorker

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

A Moosetacular Birthday

2008-09-15T19:02:00.015-04:00

Today was my birthday. For the big day, Mr. and Mrs. Reilly sent ol' -- 1 year ol'er -- Homunculus a pair of boxers from their recent trip to Alaska, home of bitchtastic vice-presidential candidates and, apparently, punny undergarments. Here, check 'em out:

(Yes, that says "GLUTEUS MAXIMOOSE.")

Homunculus say, Thanks Mom & Dad! -- but an even better gift would have been the chance to squeeze S-Palin's gluteus maximoose on live TV. Mmmm.... glutilicious.

3 Signs I Need a Woman

2008-09-14T00:08:00.012-04:00

1. It's 10:15 on a Saturday night, and I am alone at home.

2. It's 10:15 on a Saturday night, and I am alone at home playing Rock Band.

3. It's 10:15 on a Saturday night, I am alone at home playing Rock Band, and I am suddenly finding myself attracted to my drummer avatar, "Belladonna Gauttustix." (Get it? "Got-two-sticks"...) *

* In my defense, she is pretty boomin'. (See below.) To all the men out there who own the game, create a female avatar with a Goth attitude, a "Belladonna" facial structure, minimal height, and maximal, um, voluptuousness. Then dress her in the following:

magenta "Dancing Queen" hairdo
navy-blue Vater® Drumsticks camisole
"frillseeker" miniskirt ("Give your fans chills when you wear these frills.")
fluorescent-green "slouchy stirrup boots"
highway-patrol mirrored "Miranda" sunglasses ("You have the right to perform. Anything you play can and will be heard by your fans.")
yard-dog-cuff bracelets

Now, don't lie. You just popped a stiffy too, didn't you?

Bella Gauttustix.

...and speaking of corruption, convictions, and monumental idiocy in a leadership position...

2008-09-11T23:21:00.009-04:00

...Thailand's prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, was forced to resign on Tuesday for accepting payments for work he did on a Thai cooking show while in office. Apparently Samak made four guest appearances on a show called Tasting and Complaining (in America, this is known as "dinner with Bubby & Zadie"), and pocketed, for his hard work,

[drum roll, please]

$2,350!

Wow, talk about poor choices. I make that much with four blog entries, and I don't get paid for this blog. If only we could have nailed Bush for something like that.

Fortunately for Samak, he will probably remain in office anyway, since his party is naming him its nominee for the upcoming parliamentary vote to determine his successor -- "an outcome," says the Times, "that would seem to defy the spirit of the court ruling." Ya think? The Times would seem to be understating that one.

"The appeal in the defamation case is scheduled to be heard on Sept. 25, when Mr. Samak plans to address the United Nations in New York," according to the Times. "The court said he would face an arrest warrant if he did not appear. Mr. Samak has said he is confident that he will not be ousted while he is away."

Good thinking, Sam, 'cause it's not like that exact same thing happened the last time a Thai prime minister left town to make an appearance at the UN. Ah, Thailand, you never fail to amuse. (It just occurred to me that Thailand is like the half-witted, flakey friend in the group who can't get his act together to save his life, but you keep him around anyway because you know you'll have some crazy-ass stories to tell the next day.)

I miss you, Thailand, and I'll be back soon, no matter who's in charge and fucking things up.

An Enormous Dick. Head.

2008-09-09T15:25:00.029-04:00

Last week was a rough one for Homunculus. His sunburn started to peal, causing his arms to resemble molting snakes, and his raging case of mid-summer hemorrhoids, which he had vanquished and left for dead, returned with a burning vengeance. His job search continued to yield frustratingly fruitless results, as did his lady hunt. (In a sadistic attempt to profit off his misfortune, HJR’s friends -- both of them -- have started a pool based on which will happen first, Homunculus finding employment or Homunculus finding boobies?) Speaking of employment searches and copulatory disasters, John McCain and Bristol -- er, Sarah -- Palin took center stage last week -- and appeared to be a success. The pundits all agreed that McCain accomplished his goal of impressing even Homunculus with his acceptance speech. Not good for America, not good for Homunculus (who, despite growing up pampered in Silicon Valley, is now definitively a member of the working class (and by "working class," I mean lower-middle class, not people who are actually working)). To top things off, my beloved 49ers opened another embarrassing season by losing to a team quarterbacked by a member of Palin’s Christ Squad.

So, bad week.

Fortunately Steve Warshak was there to cushion the blow. "Who is Steve Warshak?" you ask.

I’m glad you did.

Warshak is the founder of a company called Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, best known -- or, more accurately, only known -- for a "natural male enhancement" product called Enzyte, the commercials for which you’ve surely seen if you watch a lot of ESPN Classic at 3:00 a.m. They feature "Smilin' Bob," an average-looking middle-aged man, and a jackass of biblical scale, who can’t stop smiling because of the improvements in his sex life. Here he is in action, sort of:

Now, be honest. How much would you pay to wipe that grin off Bob’s face with a swift kick to his naturally-enhanced male parts? I’d pay $60.00 -- which, coincidentally, is exactly the price I would not pay for a packet of Enzyte. Yet being profoundly retarded is the least of these ads’ transgressions. They prey on the single largest (as it weren’t) insecurity of every man (your humble blogger excepted, of course) and parlay those insecurities into ill-gotten revenue with patently false promises. In short, Warshak is a textbook mountebank.*

Or rather, he was a textbook mountebank. Now he is a textbook case of white-collar crime. In February Warshak was convicted of 93 -- ninety-three! -- counts of conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering. (I still don't know what money laundering is exactly, but I know it has something to do with being a ginormously corrupt piece of shit.) Last week Warshak was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered, along with several other defendants (including his 75-year-old mother!), to forfeit more than $500 million. Tough break there, Steve.

Here is a picture of the dickbreath:

Note the faintly dickish sneer, reminiscent of Maddox's "pedosmile." Good luck with that in the clink, cockbrain.

You might be thinking at this point, "Why does Homunculus seem so worked up about this? I bet he must be one of the millions of mediocrely-endowed men bilked out of hundreds of his hard-earned dollars." Wrong! You couldn't be more wrong. I simply love watching these pricks get caught. The only thing that gives me as much pleasure as when some homophobic senator gets caught tapping his foot under an adjacent men's room stall is when one of these greedy corporate bastards get nailed for fraud and money laundering. Yes, I live a petty, petty existence. But we've got to find joy in the little things, no?

After reading about Warshak and laughing maniacally for several minutes, I checked out his company's website. There's nothing too douchey about the site, though perhaps the "Berkeley in the News" page should have been a red flag for potential customers: every one of the "news" items was written by the company itself. Not too surprising.

What was surprising is that apparently Warhak and his dickolytes are still hiring. Well, lord knows ol' Homunculus could use a job. So, I applied. My cover letter is below. I'll keep you posted.

* I'll admit it. I only included that sentence so I could use the word "mountebank" in a blog entry. Finally.

To: recruiting@bpn.com

From: HomunculusJReilly@WOTE.com

RE: employment opportunities at BPN

Dear Sir or Madam (probably Sir):

After seeing Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals in the news last week, I explored your website. I am responding to the open invitation on your “Job Opportunities” page to apply for a position with BPN.

Idon’t need any of your products myself (particularly Enzyte… if you know what I mean ; ) ), but I have plenty of friends who have tried them, and I have always been fascinated with both biochemistry and creative writing. I recently completed my MFA in fiction at [HJR's grad school]. In addition to a near-perfect grade point average and exemplary written recommendations (available upon request), I served as the editor of [HJR's lit mag], the graduate program’s literary journal.

Besides my "official" accomplishments, I (believe it or not!) study microbiology and pharmaceutical biochemistry in my spare time. Finally, I am “intelligent, imaginative, and ambitious” (especially imaginative), the qualities you stated you most desire.

My resume is attached. I hope to talk with you to discuss my additional accomplishments and how I can contribute to your continued success. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Homunculus J. Reilly

P.S. I am willing to relocate to Cincinnati.

P.P.S. You need to update the “In the News” page of your website.

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-09-03T16:47:00.002-04:00

The stem of a single Saguaro cactus plant can retain up to five tons (5 tons!) of water.

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

Planet Earth.

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

Great Danes

2008-08-28T14:33:00.013-04:00

I recently returned from a weeklong trip to

Denmark

, and Homunculus is here to say: them’s country has gots it going on. There is nothing rotten in the state of

Denmark

.

To compare and contrast:

When you get off the plane in Bangkok (which, compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, operates like a Swiss watch), you wend your way through the airport’s hallways before being dumped into an enormous pile of bemused chaos, also known as the passport control area. It is a shit show of Bangladeshian proportions. Think the DMV, minus the aid of deli-line numbers. For 10-15 minutes you veer uncertainly between serpentine masses, which may or may not be lines, before settling into a definite spot in a queue -- which may or may not be twice as slow as the adjacent one -- for the next 45 minutes.

In Copenhagen, by contrast, I got off the plane and walked twenty yards to a kiosk manned by two guys who looked like this:

God I miss Stefan Edberg.

The blond family in front of me was processed in about thirty seconds; I was done in ten. I had my bag ten minutes later, and three minutes after that I was on the subway for a short ride to the city center.

The rest of the trip went just as smoothly. Everything in Denmark runs on time, and everyone speaks flawless English. The streets and buildings are pristine. More people bike, it seems, than drive; I heard one car horn my entire week there.

It had been seven years since I'd visited Europe, and after three years of extensive travel in second- and third-world countries, I have to say, Denmark was a pleasure. The section on Scandinavia in the international chapter in Americ a the Book sums it up nicely: “Scandinavia has blended cold, hard Teutonic efficiency with European social liberalism to create five of the cleanest nations on the planet. You can literally eat off the sidewalk in Copenhagen.” That's true. I did.

Not everyone there is blond, but, well, a lot of them are. Here are some pictures I took of blond people:

(And here is what these girls will look like in 20 years, if my trips to the bars in the touristy area were any indication:

)

Coincidentally, on the day I returned there were two major articles about Denmark and how much it kicks ass (what are the odds of that?). Thomas Friedman wrote his column about the Danes' ecological ingenuity, and this piece in the Washington Post explores the now-repeatedly-reproduced statistic citing the Danes as the happiest people on earth. Having seen it firsthand, I can corroborate everything in those stories. I would say that being there made me ashamed of my country, except that I was already ashamed of my country before I went. Then again, as my new Danish friend replied after I forwarded her the piece from the Post, at least we still have Paris Hilton. True that. We'll always have Paris.

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-08-22T16:25:00.003-04:00

Though they are not talked about much, humans had prehistoric ancestors called the Boskops. Their brains were much bigger than ours, and they may well have been smarter than we are. And it may have been their very intelligence that did them in. One hypothesis is that they were so thoughtful and peaceable that when we came along -- with our smaller brains, inconveniently wired through the limbic system, making us warlike and aggressive -- we simply wiped them out.

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, by Gary Lynch & Richard Granger (by way of the Times)

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-08-18T15:40:00.003-04:00

One out of every four species on earth is a form of beetle.

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

The Audubon Insectarium, New Orleans's newest museum

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

W(hy) N(ot women's) B(asketball as long as it involves chicks shoving each other onto their) A(sses?)

2008-07-25T15:17:00.001-04:00

Can it be a coincidence that less than a week after I mention the WNBA for the first time in my life, the biggest event in the history of the league takes place?

No, it cannot.

Or can it?

Yes, it can. And who should be in the middle of it all but my new favorite player, Cheryl Ford, whose police mug shot (below, again) I featured last Friday. Ford tore her ACL in the game, and is now out for the season. Unfortunately she got injured on an earlier play, not in the fracas itself, which would have made her "I'm afraid of contact" quip that much more ironic. Or less ironic. I'm not sure which.

"There's no doubt that there has been a tremendous amount of attention," WNBA president Donna Orender said, "but it's not the type of attention that we seek."

Perhaps another marketing axiom is now in play: There's no such thing as bad press. Don't get me wrong. Homunculus isn't about to hunker down with a Cosmo and his bitches and turn on a WNBA game. But if a brawl breaks out, he will watch the highlights. Online. The next day.

[Cue chauvinistic catfight meow sound & scratching-claw gesticulation.]

Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Oh yeah? Well I'm descended from King David. Biatch.

2008-07-23T16:59:00.004-04:00

Last week I saw Mongol, the 2007 biopic about Genghis Khan. It was the first movie from Kazakhstan ever to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, and has been a surprise crossover hit here (by foreign-film standards, anyway). However,

[WARNING: Spoiler Alert!!]

it sucked. Trust me. The biggest surprise for me came after the film was over, when I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and found out that 88% of critics liked it.

How can 9 out of 10 experts be wrong? Some, like me, would say that a) the experts are actually morons and b) Homunculus is never wrong. But I think this is also a case of a foreign-film bias at work. With Hollywood coming up empty so often, critics are desperate for films to praise; foreign films fit the bill. First, and most significantly, only the best movies from other countries make it over here in the first place, so foreign films are inevitably better, on average, than our own. Also, though, foreign films are foreign, and when we think of the words "foreign film," we think of smart guys with elbow patches writing peer-reviewed essays about decontextualized sapphic undertones. We think of Bergman and the French New Wave, Fellini and Kurosawa. Black-and-white. "Non-narrative" structure.

Yet most foreign films, even the ones that make it over here, are just slightly better versions of our own indie films. Mongol isn't even that; it is just a slightly better version of our own shitty big-budget epics. The director, for all his skill with action scenes, basically comes off as a film-geeked-out adolescent with a hard-on for blood and medieval weaponry. My suspicion is that he's seen Braveheart a few too many times.

Here is a plot synopsis:

Little Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
Teenage Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
Young-adult Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes, starts war, loses war, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
Adult Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes, starts war, wins war, becomes emperor of the Mongols.

And that's where things get interesting -- and where the film ends.

Rumor has it the film's producers intend to turn it into a trilogy. If they do, they might want to check out Wikipedia. I had remembered reading something once about how some ridiculous percentage of Asians are descended from Genghis Khan. So when I got home, I looked up ol' Temujin on the web to see if I could find anything about that. Sure enough, the Wiki came through, as always. According to Zerjal et al [2003] (my favorite Central-Asian microbiological genealogists, incidentally), "about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the men in the world)" carry a Y-chromosome link to "male-line descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives." According to Homunculus, that's about 15 million mini-Khans running around the Steppe (plus about 15 million more Genghis-ettes). Not bad. The dude must have been like Warren Beatty, Wilt Chamberlain, and Warren Jeffs rolled into one. (Homunculus, for his part, would love nothing more than to have 8% of the Western world in 2853 A.D. composed of little Homunculi. Ladies?)

The film, needless to say, turns Genghis into an uxorious romantic. (In its defense, Mel Gibson's teeth in Braveheart were anachronistically well-polished, as was Russell Crowe's chest in Gladiator.)

Mongol also spurred a memory I had of a quote I read a long time ago from the Khan about what really turned him on. I googled "genghis khan quotes" and -- voila! -- found what I was looking for:

WOTE's (as-Fun-as-a-Quote-Can-Be) Quote du Jour

"The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters."

I think we can all agree on that.

Seriously, this dude was one of history's all-time badasses, right up there with Napoleon, Vlad the Impaler, and that guy who tackled a shark from behind and gutted it. For the filmmakers to characterize the Khan as a philosophizing family man, as opposed to the warmongering firestarter he actually was, is a bit of a stretch. It would be like casting, say, Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

Oh.

Next Up: The Dick B. Cheney Dildo Factory

2008-07-23T16:05:00.001-04:00

Here is my favorite news story from the past week. God bless the Bay Area, my home sweet home.

WOTE: "I'm Single & Lonely, and Nobody Actually Reads this Blog." I WOULDN'T SAY THAT. WOULD YOU?

2008-07-18T15:53:00.002-04:00

I was checking baseball scores on ESPN.com today when an ad for the WBNA caught my eye in the upper-right-corner of the screen. In case you’ve missed it -- and, given that it’s the WNBA, you probably have -- the newest ad campaign features several of the league’s stars repeating common criticisms of the game from non-fans (a.k.a. men) -- "Women’s basketball is a joke," "You couldn’t pay me to watch women’s basketball," etc. -- and then countering the slights with some serious fire. "She wouldn’t say that," it says on the screen. "Would you?"

Um. Call me a chauvinist douchebag (you wouldn’t be the first) (in fact, you’d be the third this week), but do you really want us (i.e., men) to answer that?

My favorite ad stars Cheryl Ford of the Detroit Shock, looking like she just polished off the world's fattest blunt (below). "I'm afraid of contact," she says to the camera, "so you can post me up all day long." Then, in silence, the world's most non-rhetorical rhetorical question appears on the screen: "SHE WOULDN'T SAY THAT. WOULD YOU?" And then the WNBA's new motto: "EXPECT GREAT."

With the campaign, the WNBA is breaking a cardinal rule of marketing: never highlight your weaknesses, even obliquely (and certainly not explicitly). It's like they teach you at the college career center: In your cover letters and interviews, never qualify yourself with a "but" -- "I know I’m not the most qualified for this job and I don’t have that much experience and I smoke a lot of opium, but I learn fast and work really hard..." Not smart.

Because if you’re like me (and let's be honest, we all have a little Homunculus within us), your first instinct is to accept the negative statement at face value and dwell on that.

Coke: "It rots your teeth and gives you diabetes."

WE WOULDN'T SAY THAT. WOULD YOU?

Um. Yes. Yes I would.

Speaking of ad campaigns, Match.com says it's OK to look. So I did. And I have to say, I was impressed. There are a lot of quality women out there who love to laugh, love their jobs, love to travel, and are just as happy in jeans and a sweatshirt as they are in a cocktail dress.

Below is the profile of one woman I was not as impressed with. Unless it's actually a man pretending to be a recent immigrant, in which case it is one of the most brilliant things I've ever read. My favorite line -- and it was tough to choose just one -- is the part about how she likes being lowered down from mountains, because I'm pretty sure even a perfect Broken-English translator wouldn't be able to decode that one.

[By the way, I know I am a terrible, terrible person for posting this. But I already knew that when I woke up this morning, so -- no change there.]

I SEARCH A REAL TRUE LOVE!!

28-year-old woman
Glen Cove, New York, United States
seeking men 30-42
within 50 miles of Glen Cove, New York, United States

About my life and what I'm looking for:

I the usual girl. To me of 28 years. I adhere basically to old principles. I very much want to find the love, the the man with which I can lead the rest of days of the life. I shall care of such person who will find and will appreciate in me understanding, trust, honesty, charm...

For fun:

I look films with participation, Yma Turman. Also I listen N'SINK,

Micle Jackson, etc. Like to experiment
hairdress and a fashion. I dream to visit in the Egyptian pyramids.

My job:

I work as nurse in hospital. I like the work because it is pleasant to me to
Bring in advantage of people

My ethnicity:

I white. I do not accept racial hatred, and I think that all people are equal the World

My religion:

I concern to Christian orthodox religion

My education:

I have finished the Yaransk State university on a speciality the bookkeeper and have received the red diploma

Favorite hot spots:

As I love skiing, I would like to visit where many mountains
And to be lowered from top of mountain. Also I have dream to jump off with a
Go down from a parachute together with my favourite person.

Favorite things:

When in the street the rain to me is pleasant to read books. My favourite (loved) author Mark Twain.
Love comic and interesting programs. To like me vegetables and fruit.
Bananas and peaches. I prefer a free fashion. From music I prefer classical

Last read:

Recently I started to read the novel, but also and to like to read secular magazines to
Keep abreast all have placed, occurbing in a society.

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-07-15T15:54:00.003-04:00

Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage.

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

"Penny Dreadful," from The New Yorker, 3/31/08

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

Piggy-backing on My Pig-Bashing; Plus, Booty Sweat

2008-07-11T16:19:00.002-04:00

Apparently the intelligentsia read my post on Tuesday. Here is more on Helms, this time from Salon:

"Let us now praise Jesse Helms"

"Jesse Helms is not dead"

And here is a new energy drink I will not be trying.

And May He Rest in Peace Amongst Many Gays, Blacks, & Foreigners

2008-07-08T17:37:00.002-04:00

When I read on Saturday that Jesse Helms had died, my first reaction was, He was still alive? I must have gotten him mixed up with Strom Thurmond or some other long-irrelevant, recently-buried asshole.

After seeing the headline, my second reaction was this:

I knew Helms was notorious for his staunch conservatism, but I didn’t know a whole lot more than that. Most of us, including yours truly, have very little sense of how policy is actually made in Washington. We judge our legislators from the sidelines, and usually from the cheap seats. We go by what we see in the news: the small minority of bills that make headlines, the sound bites Jon Stewart pulls and then mocks. We hear that some Republican senator from Oklahoma has sponsored a bill approving more oil-drilling in Alaska and we think, Fuckin’ Republicans -- they’re all earth-wrecking pricks.

In reality, of course, it’s much more complicated than that. Having read "inside the Beltway" books like Washington, by Meg Greenfield, I've gradually taken on a more measured stance. A lot goes on behind the scenes, and most of it is not sophomoric bickering. When Politicians from opposing parties claim they are friends who just happen to "respectfully disagree" on many issues, my impression is that, more often than not, they are telling the truth, even in this era of bitter partisan politics.

Put aside the fact that they’re more ambitious -- and, eventually, more corrupt -- than the rest of us, and politicians are just like everyone else. That is to say, they are multidimensional, complex, flawed but generally well-meaning people. Check out former targets-of-Democratic-scorn in less malevolent settings -- Bob Dole on Letterman, Newt Gingrich with Ali G -- and you'll see on display the qualities that got them elected in the first place . Even Robert McNamara comes off reasonably well -- not as a hawkish ideologue, but as a reflective intellectual with his heart (yes, heart) in the right place -- in Errol Morris's phenomenal documentary Fog of War.

It follows, then, that maybe there was more to Jesse Helms after all. Maybe he was reflective. Maybe he had a heart.

Maybe not. I read his obituary in the Times, and here was my third reaction:

What a dickhead.

I could be compassionate and liberal-minded and say that nothing is ever so simple. Nothing is black and white. But "black-and-white" pretty much sums up Helms’s own limited thinking (in more ways than one), so why not apply those same standards to him now? Ultimately the guy was a backwards-thinking, intolerant bigot, and that is how he should be remembered. I read about his career and was reminded of everything Helms stood for and fought for, and I was able to put aside my humanism and drop the benefit of the doubt I had briefly given him.

America would be better off without people like him, and so will the afterlife -- wherever his happens to be.

And in other news, equally worthy of the Times:

"Pringles, Never a Chip, Found to Be No Potato Snack, Either."

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-07-03T15:05:00.006-04:00

The Finnish equivalent of "Freebird" is "Paranoid," by Black Sabbath. At concerts in Finland, the audience is often heard shouting "Soittakaa 'Paranoid'!" ("Play 'Paranoid!'").

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact courtesy of:

Rock Band. Which rocks.

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

WOTE’s (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day*

2008-07-02T15:57:00.003-04:00

By weight, the most abundant creatures on earth are krill. A single swarm can weigh up to 2 million tons. One species, the Antarctic Krill, makes up an estimated biomass of over 500 million tons, roughly twice that of humans. Crazy.

(As-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact Courtesy of:

The 2006 BBC series Planet Earth, which is required viewing for anyone who lives on earth.

* Sort of like Harper’s Index, but even more funner.

"Fair & Balanced With the Facts We Make Up"

2008-06-30T16:23:00.002-04:00

It may come as a surprise to some of my fans -- especially those of you who write in praising my brilliance and asking where you can find the book version of WOTE -- that Homunculus is actually looking for work right now. Some would call it "unemployed." I prefer to think of it as being in a "transitional period" -- for many, many months.

Anyway, I saw this job post the other day:

Position: Fact Writer

Company: FOX News Channel

Industry: TV/Cable

Job Duration: Full Time

Job Location: New York, NY USA

Job Requirements/Responsibility:

FOX News Channel, a fast-paced 24-hour television news operation in New York City, is seeking a Freelance Fact Writer for its information center.

Responsibilities include writing on-air facts and press conference quotes for daytime programming. Individuals must have strong writing skills, be able to handle multiple assignments and deadlines, and work well in a team atmosphere. Excellent communication and writing skills are also required.

A bachelor's degree is required.

Fox News Channel is an EOE.*

* However, we do not like black people.

Fact Writer. I like that. Could they have come up with a less transparent euphemism?

Okay, so I made up the part about black people. But the rest is verbatim. Note that applicants not only "must have strong writing skills," but "excellent communication and writing skills are also required." Apparently FOX does not consider redundancy an important element of strong writing, and apparently FOX doesn’t consider redundancy an important element of strong writing.

Then again, if you’ve ever watched FOX News, you knew that already.

Hookers: Never Funny

2008-06-24T17:15:00.002-04:00

Last winter I was at a party with my friend JC, and I was telling a story about our time in Bangkok together. As a natural-born raconteur with countless astonishing experiences under my belt, I have a vast anecdotal repertoire, and so I do not remember which story it was. But since it took place in Bangkok, it naturally involved hookers.

I should probably state at this point -- I should definitely state at this point -- that neither JC nor I ever, uh, *partook* during our time in Thailand. But I guess I made a quip implying otherwise -- a transparently facetious quip, but still -- because a few nights later JC called me to discuss.

JC and I are Generation-Y males who live in the same metropolitan area. We therefore never call each other just to chat or “reconnect” or, certainly, to discuss anything of importance. That would be so gay. Our phone calls rarely progress beyond where and when to meet up later that night. Which is why I was surprised when JC called me the following Sunday night. “Homunk,” he says.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Never say the word ‘hooker’ when we are around women ever again.”

Apparently JC had encountered trouble with his previous girlfriend when another girl, a mutual friend of theirs, (falsely) accused him of hiring hookers in Thailand. It took him nearly a week to put out the fire.

Skip forward to last month. I was out to dinner with M. (not her full name), a girl I was dating, and some other friends. The friends asked where M. and I met. “I picked her up on the street down in Far Rockaway,” I said. Funny, right? The guys around me thought so; they laughed. M. did not.

Five or ten minutes later, long after the discourse had progressed to other topics, M. leaned in towards me and whispered, not smiling, “No more hooker jokes.” I nodded, surprised that it was still on her mind, and continued on with my General Tso’s.

[M. and I broke up two days later, though it had nothing to do with the hooker joke, I assure you. She said my intellect, bank account, and penis were too large for her. (She wasn’t the first to complain on those fronts, but what can I say? -- I’m not going to stop being myself just to appease my bitches.)]

Anyway, clearly this is a touchier subject than I would have guessed. Having listened in on conversations in which female friends of mine earnestly discussed whether they could even date a guy who had slept with a prostitute, I am well aware of the stigma attached to men who have partaken. It takes a certain kind of dude to regularly solicit hookers. Lonely, perhaps. Ugly, insalubrious, weak-willed, fiscally irresponsible, or some combination thereof. (Think Eliot Spitzer.) Not the most attractive qualities, to be sure.

Still, it’s not that big a deal. Many men, including many men who possess none of the qualities above, have hired hookers. And anyway, we’re talking about the female side of things here, not the male: namely, women’s aversion to prostitution as a concept. For American women, that aversion seems to present itself as discomfort at best, disgust at worst. As JC said during our conversation, “Girls just look at it totally differently. The idea of it really bothers them.”

So, the question I pose to the ladies out there is: Why? Why do you seem so repulsed by hookers and the men who keep them in business? My own feeling, shaped, admittedly, by a small libertarian streak -- I believe prostitution should be legal, as should drugs, trans-fats, etc. -- is that, as services go, prostitution isn’t all that different from any other. It is the oldest profession for good reason: it’s a service people want. Maybe even one they need, not unreasonably. (Hierarchy of needs: water, food, clothing, shelter, sex/companionship.) And while it’s not a career path I’d recommend to my daughter (too much contact with lawyers and politicians), I recognize that not everyone’s life ends up the way they planned. It’s not like hookers dreamed, as little girls, of becoming hookers. It’s just how they get by, one day at a time.

Homunculus say, show those tarts some compassion. And have a sense of humor about them while you’re at it. Michael Scott once pointed out that there are certain topics that are still off limits to comedians: JFK, AIDS, the Holocaust. (“The Lincoln assassination just recently became funny: I need this play like I need a hole in the head.”) Homunculus say, let’s keep hookers off that list. “I hope to someday live in a world where a person can tell a hilarious AIDS joke,” Michael says. “Still one of my dreams.” Amen to that. And amen to hookers.

A hooker.

Transgressive

2008-05-05T23:25:00.003-04:00

When people ask me about the gender breakdown at my school -- a formerly-all-women’s quasi-neo-countercultural liberal-arts college -- I joke that it splits about 40 – 40 – 10 – 10: forty percent straight women, forty percent lesbians, ten percent straight men, ten percent gay men. To be fair, at least a third of those lesbians are probably bisexual (I highly recommend this school!); a Venn Diagram might better depict the demographics than a bar graph.

With the general election not yet in swing -- it’s tough for the student body to stump for the Democrat when they don’t know the Democrat for whom to stump -- the latest passion project to play here was the recent move made by Transaction, the student-run transvestite/ transsexual-advocacy group, to abolish gender-biased bathrooms on campus. Late last semester, Transaction’s members -- many of whom were born with, ahem, members -- requested a campus-wide transition to gender-neutral bathrooms, “since a number of students’ gender identities are not the same as their biological sex,” as the campus newspaper reported.

Controversy ensued, of course, though not for the reasons one might have expected. Many of the bathrooms on campus were -- are -- “gender-neutral” to begin with, insofar as they have no urinals, only toilets, and are open to both men and women. Meanwhile, the remaining bathrooms, many of them men’s rooms, possess urinals and are therefore required by state law to remain men’s rooms (or, more precisely, men’s-only rooms). Transaction thus targeted a limited number of ladies’ rooms. Their proposal succeeded, and the dozen or so transgender students on campus now have more options.

One problem is the unavoidable side effect of the bill, which must have been transparent to anyone with a little foreskin-- er, foresight: Since the converted restrooms are now unisex, they are open to men as well, leaving fewer ladies’ rooms -- or, more precisely, fewer ladies’-only rooms -- on a campus predominated by women. PMS or long lines at intermission it ain’t, but the reduction in ladies’ rooms is still inconvenient news to the females whose biological sex matches their gender identity -- a drag, as it were, for the women not in drag.

The main controversy, though, has surrounded the signs on the doors. Transaction requested that the logo on the unisex bathrooms -- the traditional, internationally-identifiable stick-figure man, side by side with the traditional, internationally-identifiable stick-figure woman -- be changed to something gender-neutral. Here is what the school came up with:

Right. Well then. You can probably see where this is going--

...and when you’re done snickering, I’ll continue...

OK, good--

Oh. Sorry. Not done yet? OK...

Yeah, good? Good.

Now, as I was saying, you can probably guess how this turned out. According to the school newspaper, Transaction “argued that the current design -- an individual sitting on a toilet and reading a book -- was unsatisfactory, since it produced giggles in those who viewed it. They felt that these giggles deterred the desired message of gender-neutral bathrooms from being communicated.” Incidentally, those two sentences not only produced giggles in me when I read them but also deterred the desired message of the article from being communicated. A case of life imitating art imitating life.

Compounding the issue was the fact that the co-chairs of Transaction “interpreted the individual as a ‘man’ sitting on the toilet” -- as opposed to, say, a “woman,” whatever the hell that is. Transaction issued this formal statement in response: “We found the signs that have gone up to be neither gender neutral or [sic] even clearly indicative that they are restrooms.” Amen to that, sister! (Or brother!) The school’s response was that the above logo is what’s now being used in Scandinavia -- much to the offense, one presumes, of Danes who don’t read on the throne. (N.B. Upon reading that, Homunculus, for one, couldn’t help wondering if Sweden’s transgender blondes are as smokin’ as their natural-borns. Or at least, say, Britain’s natural-borns.)

Ultimately, the giggle-producing logo’s lifespan proved transitory. Transaction’s alternative suggestion was a sign labeled simply “Restroom,” with a picture of a toilet underneath. Sounds reasonable enough. The student life committee, however, found that one less than transcendent; they continued accepting proposals. Homunculus, I need not tell you, submitted a few of his own. Here is a sampling:

TRANNIES WELCOME

Unfortunately, the powers that be found my proposals unsatisfactory, since they produced giggles in those who viewed them.

In the end, the Student Life Committee went with a simple line-drawing of a toilet (similar, I've heard, to a piece at the MOMA called John in Profile.) Transaction, meanwhile, isn't finished. The latest word is that their next order of business is also loo-related: the transformation of two of the school's most heavily trafficked bathrooms.

You go, girls!

Let's Say You Want to Date an Objectivist Asshole

2008-04-28T20:00:00.002-04:00

Those of you who have resorted to online dating or are considering it would be well-served to check out this article from yesterday's Times. (I read it myself, but only for entertainment -- Homunculus's problem, as you know by now, is juggling his many lady-friends, not finding them in the first place.)

Should my pipeline of celebrity-blogger groupies ever run dry (God forbid), here are three niche dating sites I will not be joining:

www.TheAtlasSphere.com
www.DateMyPet.com
www.STDmatch.net

And here's my favorite quote from the article, by James Hancock, of Orillia, Ontario, who met his wife on TheAtlasSphere.com:

"Women who don’t know or follow [Ayn] Rand tend to just accept what they’ve been told. I can’t be with someone like that in the long-term."

God bless you, James. And may I just say, your wife is a very lucky woman. I expect to find her on RepublicanSingles.com by the 2012 primaries.

The Booger Man

2008-01-10T07:40:00.001-05:00

For the last two weeks -- maybe it was a karmic spank-back for the Spanx® episodes -- I’ve been suffering from the most persistent, painful booger of my life. To even call it a booger is to do it gross justice (as it were). It is more like two tentacular masses, one for each nostril, crustily coating my nasal cavities and emerging as true boogers only once they have been unceremoniously dislodged from their brothers-in-tissue, by a tissue, and extracted from their home.

Not that I feel bad for them. On the contrary, I have launched myriad attacks on the little buggers -- left and right (nostrils), from all angles, pinkies and index fingers alike. Sometimes, Kleenex; other times, it’s bare-knuckled brawling. The pinky nail has been my most potent weapon. (I highly recommend it as an alternative to the index finger.)

Now, I don’t have to tell you that there are few things in life as satisfying as a successfully picked nose. An itch scratched. A sinus cleared. Tangible rewards for the effort. I can’t shake the feeling, however, that while I win the occasional battle, I am losing the war. My victories have been tainted by the growing sense that this may be a war that cannot be won with conventional weapons. Far too often, I leave the battlefield empty-fingered. Just as often, I retreat with little but a bloody fingertip to show for my digging. Even my victories are pyrrhic: a nice, solid booger, under the nail… followed by a ghastly trail of blood. They’re like the aliens from Aliens. Kill us, they taunt, and pay the price, motherfucker.

On the bright side, they have not metastasized -- boogers cannot metastasize, according to webMD.com. But they do seem to have mutated into a highly evolved species of regenerative superbooger. Pick one, and another grows back -- bigger, badder, bloodier, and boogerier than the last. The insides of my nose have been left a raw, bloody mess.

I’m not sure how it started. It could have been the cold, dry winter air. Or maybe a virus of some sort, or my deviated septum. Regardless, it has to stop. And only self-restraint will stop it. I hereby resolve -- my New Year’s Resolution, nine days late -- to cease and desist with all future picks in this particular booger war.

I am counting on my environment to provide backup. Tomorrow Winter on the Equator leaves for the equator. In winter. Homunculus and the rest of the Reilly family -- Mr. & Mrs. Reilly and Sister Homunculussa -- are heading to Costa Rica ("Coast of the Rica" en Americano) and the soothing humidity of the tropics. I make no guarantees, but I have a good ol’(factory) feeling that change is in the air. If I could smell right now, it would smell like victory.

Out of My Cupboard, Out of the Closet

2008-01-09T06:20:00.001-05:00

First Jodie Foster, now Toucan Sam...

Next week: Mr. Peanut.

2K8: Year of the Homunculus

2008-01-07T18:33:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year to all my fans.

This post is mostly just to let you know that, fortunately for the blogosphere and mankind as a whole, Homunculus is still alive and well and as bitter and petulant as ever. I apologize for the hiatus. I've had my hands full fending off the tenacious approaches of many beautiful women. (What is it about the holiday season and its concomitant magnetism for ladies towards brilliant, ruggedly handsome bloggers? I've never understood that.) (Also, Martin Lawrence as a movie star? I've never understood that, either.)

If you've found yourself pulled in as many directions as I, and you're still looking for the perfect gift for those special ladies in your life, allow me to recommend Spanx's® Slim Cognito Seamless Control Panty®, from Sara Blakely's® "Power Panties"® collection. I know, I know... It's shameless for Homunculus to plug a product in a not-for-profit blog. But I gave a pair of those babies to each of my six girlfriends for Christmaskwanzaaramadanakah, and they were an unqualified hit. I haven't heard from any of my significant others since then, but I know they loved the gift because they all smiled and said thanks when they saw what it was.

[Other gifts that have worked worked well for me in the past (take note, fellas):

gym memberships
plastic surgery gift cards -- for nose or tits! ("rhinoplasty" or "breast augmentation," as the "doctors" call it)
personalized bowling balls
pole-dancing ("for exercise") courses
crotchless panties
crotchless jeans
Goodfellas: Special Edition DVD (to watch together)
crotchless skirts
Oakland A's season tix (2, to go together. Sometimes.) ]

You Can Call Him Al, Nobel Laureate

2007-10-23T00:08:00.002-04:00

As you’ve probably heard by now, my main man, Al "I’m too sexy for this White House" Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week for his Inconvenient Truth-spreading. With the prize, Gore joins a long and venerable list of shiny-happy olive branch-waving peaceniks, including Henry Kissinger (1973), Yasser Arafat (1994), the I.A.E.A. (2005), Bono (2012), and Angelina Jolie (2018).

In all seriousness, though, Homunculus was thrilled down to his Birkenstocks for Mr. God -- er, Gore -- and just as thrilled that the Nobel committee took this blog into consideration when it made its decision. I mean, I knew the committee members read it; I just didn’t realize they would rely on it to the extent that they’d rip it off nearly verbatim in their press release. Check it:

"(Mr. Gore is) probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

Well put, gentlemen. So well put, in fact, that maybe you weren’t the first ones to put it in the first place? Does this ring a bell?…

"By far the loudest and most charismatic megaphone [for the issue] has been, and will continue to be, Al Gore."

Sound familiar? No? Hmm. Well then, how about this one?…

"Gore has seemingly single-handedly brought climate change to the front: the front pages of the newspapers, the forefront of the public’s conscience, the frontburner of policymakers’ policies that need making and remaking."

Coming back to you now, isn’t it? I thought so -- 'cause you read it here two months ago. That’s okay. I’m sure you have some original ideas of your own…

"If the profile of the issue had not been raised with An Inconvenient Truth, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s [the co-winners of the Peace prize] reports this year would not have had nearly as much impact, experts said." *

Who are these so-called "experts" the Times cited? I’ll give you a hint: "they" are one man, and he is an impossibly brilliant blogger whose first name is Homunculus. Also, his last name is Reilly. And his middle initial is J. (Okay, that was five hints.) Here is what those "experts" said in August:

Well put, Homunculus. I can’t speak for my fellow media elite, but when I read the Nobel committee’s official announcement, four words immediately leaped to mind: Winter on the Equator.

No matter. In the spirit of, you know, peace and shit, Homunculus will let this one slide. So, bygones. (Also, my lawyer, Uncle Marty, told me I don’t really have a case. Apparently blogs are not copyrighted. What’s up with that? Furthermore, apparently records indicate that no one reads this blog. What’s up with that?)

Besides, it seems that the Nobel committee staffers aren’t the only ones shamelessly misappropriating my prized I.P. Here is Times columnist Bob Herbert, the day after the announcement:

"The first thing media types wanted to know was whether this would prompt Mr. Gore to elbow his way into the presidential campaign. That’s like asking someone who’s recovered from a heart attack if he plans to resume smoking."

And here is House Representative Rahm Emanuel, who was a top aide in the Clinton administration:

"Why would (Gore) run for president when he can be a demigod? He now towers over all of us because he’s pure."

I agree, Bob! I agree, Rahm! In fact, I agreed with you two months ago!…

I don’t want Gore to run [because] I think he can do more for the world as an environmental activist than as a perpetually-compromising politician with his hands tied by political adversaries and omnipotent corporate interests. Besides, how would he make headway with the environment if he were also dealing with terrorism, the economy, health-care reform, the Iraq War, and the myriad other high-priority problems presidents juggle on a daily basis? True, the President of the United States is the Most Powerful Man in the Free World. But consider this: Even if Gore were to win, would he really get that much more accomplished in office than any other similarly-minded Democrat? If Gore sticks to his role as Mr. Green, on the other hand, we could end up with the best of both worlds: a Democrat manning (or "womanning," as the case may be) the country and Gore himself manning the rest of the earth. Unfortunately, today’s bitterly partisan political climate -- to say nothing of our checks and balances, bureaucratic inefficiency, and ubiquitous corruption -- prevents our elected leaders from initiating ground-breaking, potentially unpopular legislation. Politicians fight the battles they can win; artists and advocates fight the battles worth fighting, whether they will be won or not.

You might say that "With [The] Prize, Gore Is Vindicated Without Having to Add President to [His) Resume." If you were the Times last Saturday, in fact, that is exactly what you would have said. You might also have said that Gore was vindicated long before he received the Nobel, that he was doing okay with the Emmy, the Oscar, the reported $175,000 he receives for speaking engagements, the scores of hot young ladies who hurl themselves, bewitched, onto his undeniably sexy rolls of flab -- and, most of all, with the online tribute he received from an anonymous expert two months before a bunch of Scandinavians knew which way was up.

* Were you as pleasantly surprised as I to see that Al’s old buddy Newt “See? Newts are green!” Gingrich even got in on the hosanna-fest? Well, sort of. In minimally-veiled backhanded fashion -- that is to say, in Republican fashion -- Gingrich half-praised Gore: "In a way Vice President Gore, by raising the intensity of the issue, by talking about it, raised the challenge for those of us who think there’s an alternative to say, 'O.K., right emotions, wrong answer.'"

30 Things NOT to Do Before You Die

2007-09-17T14:35:00.003-04:00

If you saw the Sunday Styles section of the Times several weeks ago ("10 Things to Do Before This Article is Finished"), you know that Life Lists are seriously in vogue. There are countless books dedicated explicitly to the concept, including Fifty Places to Play Golf Before You Die, 101 Things to Do Before You Turn 40, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (the best-seller that spawned a successful travel documentary on the Travel Channel[1]), and the 1001 Books/Movies/Albums/Paintings You Must Read/See/Hear/See Before You Die series, which, were you to attempt to read, see, hear, and see all 4,004 items, would take nearly 142 years. (I calculated. ) There is also a recent novel, The Next Thing on My List: A Novel, by Jill Smolinski, which merely utilizes the (high-as-a-skydiver) concept as the premise, and which will surely be adapted into a mediocre, mid-budget movie. And speaking of upcoming mediocre, mid-budget movies, there's one of those, too: The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. There’s also a popular website (www.43Things.com) and a ubiquitous ad campaign (Visa’s "Things to Do While You’re Alive"). Even The New Yorker, that pantheon of the highbrow, joined the parade. Last week’s issue includes an article entitled "My Life List," in which John McPhee, that human pantheon of the highbrow, guides us through the catalog of strange foods he has consumed.

Everybody’s doing it. Or at least, you know, making lists about doing it. Freeman apparently wants to attain the perfect golf swing, which may or may not be more attainable than another goal that should be on his List if it isn’t already: playing something other than the Stately Black Man Performing Voiceover Narration to Tell the Story of a White Protagonist. Jerry Rice evidently has more modest aspirations: he wants to visit Rome before he dies. (Jerry, if you’re reading this -- and I know you are -- I’d be happy to schedule your trip for a small charge -- say, a percentage of your Dancing With the Stars appearance fee.)

Having already accomplished many of the feats Listed in the Times story -- skydiving, seeing a dinosaur fossil, swimming with dolphins, living in a beach house, developing a more positive attitude[2], and so on -- ol’ Homunculus has little use for such a List himself. Rather, as someone who sees the glass half full of emptiness, I have chosen to live a slightly different List. My Life List, formulated in 2004 after a particularly nasty bout of gonorrhea (which I contracted, ironically enough, after conquering one item on my previous To-Do List), represents an inventory of things I want to avoid doing before I die.[3]

Thus, without further ado -- life is short, after all -- here is my List of 30 Things NOT to Do Before I Die:

1) Read Fifty Places to Play Golf Before You Die.
2) Play golf in fifty different places.
3) Play golf fifty more times.
4) Pass up the opportunity to have sex with Rachel McAdams if presented with the opportunity.
5) Get a Prince Albert.
6) Visit all of Central Asia's "Stans."
7) Name my son Stan.
8) Name my daughter Stan.
9) Read Pride & Prejudice.
10) Eat a Rocky Mountain oyster.
11) Have my parachute fail on me while skydiving.
12) Have a dolphin eat me while swimming with one.
13) Live in a house built by Habitat for Humanity.
14) Have a threesome (the uncool kind).
15) Watch Michael Bay's entire oeuvre.
16) Watch Kevin Smith's entire oeuvre.
17) See the Eagles in concert.
18) Meet Paris Hilton. *
18a) Bang Paris Hilton. *
18b) Contract Herpes. *
19) Meet Britney Spears.
19a) Bang Britney Spears.
19b) Contract retardation.
20) Find God.
21) Visit Somalia.
22) Visit Irkutsk.
23) Visit Arkansas.
24) Have a shit fit, perhaps literally, as a doctor I just met takes a pen knife to the crown of my jewels and slices away a patch of the most sensitive flesh on my body. *
25) See Stonehenge. (Heard it's overrated.)
26) See Ayres Rock. (Ditto.)
27) See Rockys II, III, V, & VI.
28) See Spider-Men II*, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, & IX.
29) Have my back waxed.
30) Make a list of things to avoid doing before dying. *

[1] According to the Times article, Patricia Schultz, the author of 1,000 Places, has visited about 80% of the places listed in the book. The Times sounded impressed, but shouldn't she have had to visit all the places to write about and recommend them? Isn't that like Ebert leaving a movie 20 minutes early and then giving it a thumbs-up?

[2] Ha! Just kidding.

[3] Incidentally, dying is actually number one on my list of things to avoid. However, in light of the technicality that one cannot die before dying, it has been left off the List.

* Too late.

A (now) open letter to "The World Leader in River Cruising" -- The Follow-Up Response (+ the Response to the Follow-Up Response)

2007-09-16T15:42:00.001-04:00

Dear Mr. Reilly,

I have looked into this matter, and here is why you received more brochures (there actually is logic behind it.)

Rather than things happening in real time, we run reports and update systems on a weekly or bi weekly basis. Your initial request to be removed from the mailing list was on August 31. These requests are input into the consumer database every Wednesday, which means it was actually recorded on September 5. The brochures were sent out to you on September 7 because that list of (potential) customers was compiled on August 27, which was before we had even received your initial request. That August 27^th list is the last list you are included on.

I hope this eases your mind a bit, but if Charmin ever goes out of business, you could always start a side company with all your extra Viking brochures.

Please let me know if Murphy has decided you haven’t had enough, and you keep getting them. If that happens, I’ll change your address in the system to our office address here in Woodland Hills. That should correct the problem.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Eve Rowlands

P.S. If you ever decided to become a ‘blogger’ and write a weekly rant about random companies you have issues with (I’d love to hear your grievances with the Men’s Wearhouse) let me know.

Let me reiterate how much I love this woman. Also, for those amongst my loyal readers who occasionally doubt the veracity of my bloggish exploits and/or exploitive blog, let me assert: I did not make up that P.S. (Even ol' Homunculus could not concoct a coda that perfect.) Let me also assert: Fuck you.

And now, my response:

Dear Ms. Rowlands,

Funny you should ask...

winterontheequator.blogspot.com

Enjoy & self-edify.

Sincerely,

Homunculus J. Reilly, "Blogger"

A (now) open letter to "The World Leader in River Cruising" -- The Follow-Up

2007-09-14T16:14:00.001-04:00

Dear Ms. Rowlands,

After receiving your solicitous response to my complaint, I reversed my position re. Viking River Cruises® and immediately recommended you to everyone I knew, including people I had only known for several minutes. Unfortunately, in the two weeks since our correspondence I have received two more pieces of junk mail -- an oversize postcard and a full-color brochure -- from your apparently desperate company (or "sinking ship," if you pardon the pun). It could be, as you stated, that they were sent before "(you) personally (took my) request to (your) Marketing department"; however, the more recent item arrived only two days ago, so this seems doubtful.

I recycled the items, as I always do, but don't let that assuage your conscience: recycling isn't the same as conservation in the first place. (Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio!) Please check on that request you made to the Marketing department, and while you're at it, personally instruct them to shove all mailers with my name on them up their asses.

With further appreciation in advance,

Homunculus J. Reilly
"Customer" #1145086482
Coral Gables, FL

A (now) open letter to "The World Leader in River Cruising" -- The Response

2007-09-01T13:31:00.002-04:00

Mr. Reilly,

I just wanted to thank you for a very entertaining request to be taken off the mailing list. I have personally taken your request to our Marketing department to ensure you do not receive anymore mailers.

I just wanted to let you know that your witty response was handled. Thank you for a great end to the week, and I do sincerely apologize for the superfluous amount of mailers. If after two weeks you still receive something, please contact me directly at the email address or phone number listed below and I will personally take care of it for you.

Eve Rowlands
Specialist, Onboard Sales Program and E-Travel Consultant
Viking River Cruises, Inc.

Well slap me silly and call me Judy. Wow. Not just cordial, but grammatically competent and timely to boot. I hereby retract everything I said to, and about, Viking River Cruises® (especially the part about raping a poodle -- in retrospect, that was sort of wrong). In point of fact, river cruises rule, and Viking River Cruises® in particular especially rule. If you are planning a vacation, and you are a well-dressed upper-middle-class straight white couple (okay, yes, I watched the DVD), let it be known that Homunculus officially endorses Viking River Cruises®, the World Leader in River Cruises... by far.

A (now) open letter to "The World Leader in River Cruising"

2007-08-31T15:17:00.001-04:00

Here is a message I sent today to Viking River Cruises®. In the pull-down menu, I categorized the missive as "Other":

Dear Viking River Cruises® -- "Exploring the World in Comfort"®,

Over the past eleven months, you have sent me 24 postcards, 19 full-size, full-color brochures, and, yesterday, an informational DVD extolling the sine qua non virtues and (year-round) limited-time-only savings of "the world’s leading river cruise line... by far." I don’t know what I did to deserve such treatment -- perhaps I raped a poodle in a previous life -- but I can assure you it had nothing to do with ever signing up for your mailing list.

I am thus writing to say: Please stop. First of all, I’m a grad student with a household income of approximately negative $25,000 a year; I cannot afford a Russian hooker in Far Rockaway, Queens, much less a Russian river cruise. Secondly, the 19^th full-size-full-color brochure was no more convincing than the 18^th. Besides wasting your time and money, you have, with the junk mail you’ve sent to me alone, laid waste to enough trees to (ironically enough) build a riverboat. (That you are based in Woodland Hills, CA only makes such ecological irresponsibility more egregious.)

In summary, you are the most annoying company in the world... by far. (The Men’s Wearhouse is a distant second.) I have already told everyone I know to never take a Viking River Cruise®. If you do not want me to start also telling people I don’t know, cease with the junk-mail carpet-bombing operation at once.

Much appreciation in advance,

Homunculus J. Reilly
"Customer" #1145086482

P.S. River cruises suck.

Harry Potter and the Predicament that Revealed Him to be a Selfish Little Prick

2007-08-13T12:37:00.002-04:00

For those of us who believe that chess, and not Harry Potter worship, is the only acceptable “geek pursuit” for people who still want to be regarded as essentially normal (I’m sorry, but standing in line for seventeen hours dressed as a Hogwart automatically disqualifies you, even if you’re nine), the first installment in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, stuck a thorn in our collective side. In the book (which my girlfriend at the time forced me to read), and again in the movie (which my sister forced me to see), Harry and his dweeby friends match wits, in a climactic battle, with some sort of magical force that, if memory serves, can telekinetically transport enormous chess pieces with the skill of a Grandmaster but cannot think of a simpler way to vanquish three 11-year-olds. (The scene is reminiscent of the famous match between a knight and Death in the (recently)-late, great Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, except that Harry et al.’s duel is not a metaphor representing life’s profoundest mysteries, and also it was directed by the guy who made Bicentennial Man.)

When the chess studs of the world saw that scene, they nearly punched holes through their computer monitors (and they would have, too, if those monitors did not serve as their sole conduits to the outside world). In merging what some still perceive as a pastime for “nerds,” “dweebs,” “geeks,” “losers,” “antisocial misanthropes,” “bald hairy fatties,” and “28-year-old virgins” with the youngest member of the Holy Triad of Obsessive Geekdom (Lord of the Rings, or “LOTR,” and Star Wars being the founding members), J.K. Rowling set us board-game heroes back two or three decades, maybe more. How many handsome, charismatic pawn-pushers will it now take to return the King’s Game to the badass status it enjoyed pre-Potter? No muggle knows.

What all those Harry Potter geeks who are not also chess geeks (and I pity the adolescent who is both) do not know is that a close examination of the climactic game in The Sorcerer’s Stone exposes their hero as a pusillanimous little wanker. In last Sunday’s New York Times’s chess column, Dylan Loeb McClain analyzes the game from the crucial point (the “Sorcerer’s Stone Position”) at which Harry and his fellow whelps have to nerdily strategize their way out of what appears to be certain defeat. Those who remember the film will recall that Harry comes up with the solution, ordering Ron (as a Black knight -- a subconscious homage to Bergman, perhaps?) to sacrifice himself for the good of all wizardkind. As McClain reveals, however, there was a faster way to win: Harry (as a Black bishop -- a subconscious nod to the kid-friendly Catholic Church, perhaps?) could have sacrificed himself instead! McClain seems blasé about the decision (“2…Bc5 wins faster, but Harry gets axed”), probably because he cannot use the phrase “self-serving bastard” in a family newspaper, but the rest of us know better. Harry had a choice: a) martyr himself in the name of Wizardly Honor and endgame expediency, not to mention the cutting of a decidedly mediocre movie by several seconds, b) or sacrifice his best friend. He chose (b), the poltroonish prick. If that cowardice had come to light earlier, you can bet I wouldn’t have been the only muggle rooting for Voldemort in the final installment.

You Can Call Him Al, Savior of the World

2007-08-07T15:27:00.001-04:00

After several blogs about timeless but admittedly marginal topics like sadistic entomological bar tricks and magic stomach hairs -- nugatory feuilleton, I concede -- Homunculus would like to get serious. For one day, at least. This entry will therefore be devoted to a subject even more important than the imbalance of my nut sack: the fate of the earth. Specifically, I would like to pay tribute to former Vice-President and current Inconvenient-Truthteller Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., who, besides being the second-sexiest man alive, has seemingly single-handedly brought climate change (née “global warming”) to the front: the front pages of the newspapers, the forefront of the public’s conscience, the frontburner of policymakers’ policies that need making and remaking. You go, Gore! From beneath the stale glow of dim but environmentally-friendly fluorescent bulbs, Winter on the Equator salutes you.

{Inconvenient Digression: The name of this blog, Winter on the Equator, does not refer to one potential repercussion of global climate change, although Homunculus is well aware that the double-meaning of today’s topic adds yet another clever nuance to a blog whose hallmark is its nuanced cleverness. Most of my devoted readers -- i.e., my mom and dad -- still think this blog is called what it’s called because it was conceived in the wintertime while I was living in Thailand, near the equator. That was part of it -- more paronomasia for ya -- but there was another, more prominent reason. Check out the epigraph of WOTE’s much-ballyhooed debut column (5/13/06) for the answer.}

I don’t have any figures to back me up,

{Inconvenient Favor to Ask: I would love some figures to back me up, and I’m sure some figures of the sort are available to those who are more resourceful than ol’ Homunculus. So if you are that sort, maybe you can look up some study by some media-studying center (the Center for Media Studies, perhaps?) and post your findings as a comment, below.}

but it seems as though climate change has really {Inconvenient Pun (x2!) Alert} boiled into a hot-button issue within the past twelve months. Before Gore’s Inconvenient Truthfulness, the environmental crisis, handicapped by the unfortunate distinction that it was never actually news, rarely made headlines. When it did, those headlines could generally be found in only serious and liberally-bent magazines like The Atlantic or The New Yorker. If there was “news,” climate change merely served as the backdrop to the sexier or more immediately relevant topic: celebrity awareness (“Cameron Diaz buys a hybrid!”), say, or tourism implications (“It’s January, and there’s still no snow in Switzerland!”).

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth -- its subsequent box-office success, the media blitz that accompanied that success, and its important (if undeserved) victory at the Oscars -- global warming has finally gotten hot. It’s no longer “old news”; it’s now continually breaking news that, by virtue of its oldness, has suddenly reached its breaking point. One day there’s a story on NPR about a zero-emissions house being constructed in England; the next day ABC News is doing a feature on a summer camp in West Virginia devoted to environmentalism. Sales of SUVs finally go down; sales of hybrids finally take off. Live Earth makes its auspicious debut. Mayor Bloomberg takes a bold and controversial stand against urban traffic and pollution. (He loses, but “congestion pricing” breaks into the American vernacular with a single push. You just wait: By 2015, Weehawkenites will be paying $20 to drive through the Lincoln Tunnel at 9:00 a.m. -- and half of ‘em will be doing it in Priuses. {Inconvenient Curiosity: What is the plural of Prius -- Priuses or Prii? Or maybe Hippopotamuses? Meese?})

{Inconvenient Trivia: Speaking of recent environment-related media coverage, I recommend checking out The New Yorker’s recent profile about Virgin founder Richard Branson and his conversion to the cause. Here are two stats from the article that blew my mind:

There are 45 light bulbs in the average American home; reducing that number by just one would be equivalent to removing nearly a million automobiles from the road.

{Inconvenient Trivia-Within-Trivia: Lisa Simpson makes a similar reference in The Simpsons Movie, after her unsuccessful “An Irritating Truth” PowerPoint presentation in Springfield City Hall. The movie is worth checking out, both for its general funniness and its environmental crisis-driven plot (“eee-pa!”).}

{Inconvenient Movie-Quote-Within-Trivia-Within-Trivia: “Welcome to Alaska! We pay every resident $1,000 to allow the oil companies to ravage our natural resources.”}

For an average 747, the pre-takeoff journey from the docking station to the runway requires two tons -- two tons! -- of fuel.}

I credit the surge in awareness to two main factors. The first, paradoxically enough, is the Iraq War. In a twist that could be described as “Dubya”ously ironic, Bush’s war, the most sordid tale of this decade, could turn out to have one happy ending: providing fuel for the war on climate change. Operation We Love Oil, with its catastrophic impact on oil prices, has forced most Americans to rethink their priorities when it comes to their beloved cars. For the first time since the early 1990s, when Americans realized they needed four-wheel drive to commute to work, sales of SUVs and light-trucks decreased last year. Sales of cars that get more than 12 miles a gallon, meanwhile, have finally recovered.

Count on those trends continuing. Despite the record-breaking prices, most economists agree that the cost of gas is still too low here. But fear not, all ye pure free-marketers: every blunder our Idiot-in-Chief makes brings us one step closer to catching up with the rest of the world. Thus, today Winter on the Equator salutes you, too, Mr. President! And if your role in making Americans finally care about the environmental crisis somehow surmounts your impending legacy as Worst President Ever, WOTE will give you your due in a column entitled “Unintended Positive Side Effects of Otherwise Retarded and/or Disastrous Endeavors” (also to be featured: Christopher Columbus, Ross Perot, Romeo & Juliet).

The second and far more influential factor in bringing urgency to the movement has been Gore’s noble crusade to spread the truth about climate change, no matter how inconvenient it may be. His multi-part thesis -- the climate crisis, as he calls it, is real; the scientific evidence is incontrovertible; we caused it; now we must fix it, and soon -- is nothing revolutionary. But the previously deaf ears on which those truths had fallen have finally seemed to perk up. As critical as that core message has been the resonance of two of its corollaries: first, that climate change is literally earth-shattering, and second, that it is not a political issue but a moral one. Or, to use Gore’s catchy refrain, it’s not a matter of “red-versus-blue”; the problem is “green.” Gore’s traveling road show, and especially his film, have brought more attention to the cause than all the Earth Days and sporadic Time and Newsweek features from the past three decades combined. As for Live Earth, we may never know how many converts the event garnered -- one hopes it might become an annual thing -- but it seems safe to say it was a success, and that it would not have occurred without the inroads forged by Gore’s earlier proselytizing.

In the Branson feature, Daniel Kammen, a professor at Berkeley and the founding Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), refers to the movement’s crucial need for a leader, an apostle. “The Word” is out there; now Mother Earth needs a St. Paul -- a Gandhi, an MLK, Jr. -- of her own. “What is still lacking here is what I call the ‘third wave’ of environmentalism,” Kammen said. “The first wave was Rachel Carson: recognizing the problem, and understanding that we need to protect the environment. That led to Stage 2: the system of regulations and taxes that helped make it possible to implement the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other vital legislation. ...[But] Kyoto is not going to save us. No global treaty is going to be sufficient. We also need a couple of big actors. What we need is a charismatic megaphone.” Kammen considers Branson to be one of those actors, and here’s hoping he’s right. But by far the loudest and most charismatic megaphone has been, and will continue to be, Al Gore. (And yes, I’m aware that I just used the words “Al Gore” and “charismatic” in the same sentence. That’s what saving the world can do for a dude’s rep.)

Once he no longer had to worry about campaigning for office or serving his constituents, Gore was finally able to take his pet cause and run with it. In the four or so years since he emerged from wherever it was he disappeared to -- clean-shaven and sartorially respectable again -- he has run a long way. The race still has miles to go, of course, but Gore is clearly the champion of this cause. He has a chance to do for environmentalism what Martin Luther King did for civil rights.

Which is why, unlike most members of the unofficial Al Gore Fan Club {Inconvenient Question That Begs: Is there is an official Al Gore Fan Club?}, I do not want our boy to run for President in ’08. I’ll admit it: I got the chills during the Oscars when it appeared, for a moment, as though Gore would announce his candidacy, Governator-style, to a billion people on live TV. (Of course, those chills could have been due to the fact that he was standing next to a goateed and tuxedoed Leonardo DiCaprio. Homunculus, secure in his heterosexuality, freely admits that Leo is positively dreamy.)

First of all, as much as I admire the guy, he’s still pretty much a big nerd. Yes, he’s been a “charismatic megaphone” for this one cause, but that doesn’t necessarily make him the type of charismatic personality that wins elections. Before seeing An Inconvenient Truth, I had heard the buzz about the “new and improved” Gore. “Surprisingly hip,” the media tabbed him. “Relaxed and unrestrained.” “No longer pedantic, wonky, or condescending.” Then I saw the film. Sorry, but I’m not buying. No doubt, Gore Version 2.006 was new and improved. But relaxed and unrestrained? Um, no. Hip? I don’t think so. The criticism pundits had of Gore in 2000 -- that he is a college professor at heart, not a politician -- was, for me, only confirmed by the film.

{Inconvenient Wishful Thinking: I would love to see Gore’s film remade as a blood-boiling courtroom drama -- Inconvenient Truth meets A Few Good Men. Cut to...

Tom Cruise: I want the truth!

Jack Nicholson: You can’t handle the truth! It’s just too inconvenient!}

Call me a pessimist, but if Gore were to join the race, I have little confidence that he would not, once again, find himself ill at ease in that all-too-familiar terrain. I can easily picture the new and improved version, under the intense scrutiny of a national campaign (not to mention the counsel of another batch of overpaid consultants), stiffening up and reverting back to Version 2.000 -- that is to say, pedantic, wonky, condescending, decidedly unhip. Gore would make an excellent President, to be sure, but we Dems are looking for someone to get excited about. In other words, someone exciting enough to get non-Dems excited. Professor Gore conjures up too many painful memories of Dukakis, Kerry, and, well, Gore himself. We want a Kennedy, a Clinton (Bill, that is). Who knows? -- Obama could be that guy. Even Edwards. (Hillary is a Clinton in name, not electability. But that’s a topic for another day.) But not Al.

{Inconvenient Musical Interlude:

Dear Al,

We know you’re soft in the middle now

Your post-2000 life was so hard

There were incidents and accidents

There were hints and allegations

But you had your photo-opportunity

If you take a shot at redemption

You’ll end up a cartoon

In a cartoon graveyard

What if you run now

Who'll be my role-model

Now that my role-model is

Gore, Gore!}

The second reason I don’t want Gore to run -- {Inconvenient Clarification: Yes, I’ve only named one reason so far -- all my Inconvenient Interruptions have just made it seem like more.} -- is that I think he can do more for the world as an environmental activist than as a perpetually-compromising politician with his hands tied by political adversaries and omnipotent corporate interests. Besides, how would he make headway with the environment if he were also dealing with terrorism, the economy, health-care reform, the Iraq War, and the myriad other high-priority problems presidents juggle on a daily basis? True, the President of the United States is the Most Powerful Man in the Free World. But consider this: Even if Gore were to win, would he really get that much more accomplished in office than any other similarly-minded Democrat? If Gore sticks to his role as Mr. Green, on the other hand, we could end up with the best of both worlds: a “Gore-y” Democrat manning (or “womanning,” as the case may be) the country and Gore himself manning the rest of the earth. Unfortunately, today’s bitterly partisan political climate -- to say nothing of our checks and balances, bureaucratic inefficiency, and ubiquitous corruption -- prevents our elected leaders from initiating ground-breaking, potentially unpopular legislation. Politicians fight the battles they can win; artists and advocates fight the battles worth fighting, whether they will be won or not.

Assuming, then, that Gore continues to serve his post as Inconvenient Truthteller, the question becomes, Is it too late to turn this thing around? Are we all, as the French say, totally fucked? In the film Gore claims that, scientifically speaking, it’s still not too late. Like a smoker and his lungs, the damage we’ve inflicted thus far is not irreparable. If we act now -- if the world works together to develop new technologies and enact sweeping lifestyle changes -- the present course of climate change can be stalled, perhaps even reversed. But those, as the French say, are big fuckin’ “IF”s. Enormous, earth-sized “IF”s.

My prevailing memory of An Inconvenient Truth is of Gore declaiming and PowerPointing his way through the first 90 minutes of the film to the pernicious and incontrovertible truth about the climate crisis, only to wrap up by stating that we still have a chance to win this thing. To me he sounded more like a coach urging on his team, down 10 with one minute to go, than a true believer. In the end, the one aspect of Gore’s message I couldn’t embrace was its optimism. Yes, we have Priuses/Prii, but what about alternative energy? What about the difficulties of imposing and enforcing regulations on the dozens of rapidly growing Third-World countries? What about the half-billion Chinese who will soon be first-time car owners? As another venerable American, Kermit the Frog, would point out to Mr. Gore, it won’t be easy going green.

Then again, that’s the difference between people like Al Gore and people like ol’ Homunculus. Positive thinking, baby. That’s why he’s an inspiring world-changing leader and I’m an embittered, out-of-work blogger. {Inconvenient Metaphor: I stand on the equator, feel a breeze, and think, It must be winter; Al Gore stands on the equator, feels a breeze, and thinks, It must be summer.}

So go to it, Al! Keep up the good work. Do us proud. Keep at it, don’t give up, et cetera and all those other platitudes. The world needs you now more than ever. And if you do succeed in the end, if you can save us all, think of the rewards! (In addition to the continuation of human life on earth, I mean.) The Nobel Prize... the adulation... the eternal gratitude of all mankind for the remainder of human history... the scores of insanely hot chicks hurling themselves upon you when they otherwise would have approached you only to ask if you had Bill’s number. Maybe even-- just when you thought it couldn’t get any better!... maybe even another tribute in Winter on the Equator. Hell, if you can make a believer out of the ultimate pessimist -- a man who can stand on the equator and claim it's winter -- you can accomplish anything.

My Father's 20 Rules of Life *

2007-07-31T15:19:00.001-04:00

1. Always be the second-fastest car on the road.

2. West Coast road and highway signage is superior to the rest of the country’s.

3. New Yorkers are bad drivers because they get their license later than most others, and it is always better to learn things when you’re young.

4. Never play a New Yorker who challenges you to a game of ping-pong.

5. Never play poker with someone who has more money than you and isn’t afraid to lose it.

6. When leaving the house, always have something with you to read.

7. The size of a hotel’s swimming pool is directly proportional to the luxuriousness of the hotel.

8. If you’re in an electronics store and need help, find the pear-shaped and/or Asian guy.

9. Dutch people are tall. Also, they are more like Americans than any other nationality (excluding, perhaps, Canadians).

10. Real estate prices aside, the San Francisco Bay Area is the greatest place to live; if you can afford it, there is no reason to live anywhere else.

(10a. But if you're not already here, please stay away -- traffic and supermarket lines are bad enough as it is.)

11. Eat your fiber. And start young. Also, organic is not a fad.

12. Every disease is at least partly contagious, even those that are considered “genetically programmed/predispositioned” and/or “environmentally triggered.”

13. Always, always carry it on if they let you.

14. Drugs and prostitution should be legal. Immigration should not be. Gasoline and cigarettes should be taxed through the roof and then the clouds. California should be two states. The highways should move, not the cars.

15. Always double-check the bill -- restaurant, credit card, whatever -- before paying it.

16. Doctors are bad businesspeople.

17. Republicans are bad people, period. If you vote Republican, it’s because you are either selfish, stupid, or both.

18. Unless you’re a police officer, a criminal, or a biathlete, there is no reason to own a gun.

19. The further east you go from California, the more people smoke: East-Coasters smoke more than West-Coasters, Europeans smoke more than Americans, and the Japanese smoke more than anybody.

20. It’s not a morning without a glass of orange juice.

* Caution: May not apply to life in the 21st century.

Revival of the Fittest

2007-06-25T15:55:00.001-04:00

When I was living abroad, my friend Ed told me about a bar trick that so transcended the standard scope of run-of-the-(gin-)mill bar stunts that it could easily be upgraded in the Pantheon of Trickery to “Legitimate Magic Trick.” I was skeptical at first -- Ed’s tales tended towards the hyperbolic -- but he swore he’d seen the trick turned twice himself, first-hand, and with his own two eyes.

Here is what you do:

Step 1. Think like a Boy Scout: Be prepared.
Setting: A bar or pub where houseflies may be found (see below -- “Materials Needed”). Usually this will be a bar with an outdoor seating section or patio, but a sufficiently shady dive bar may also suffice.
Materials Needed: housefly (alive), glass of water, coaster (optional), spoon (optional), 2 TB table salt

Step 2. Catch a fly without injuring it. The best way to do this is to wait until the fly alights on the interior rim of your water glass or beer mug, then trap it inside with a coaster. You can also use the palm of your hand. If the fly prefers to buzz around rather than alight on drinking utensils, you can try the ancient Chinese cupped-palm clapping method to trap the fly.
(Warning: Do not use chopsticks. Man who catch fly with chopsticks can do anything -- except this trick… for fly likely end up kaput.)
(N.B. Although this is the first real step in the trick, it may be the most difficult, involving as it does agility and adeptness to secure the fly, and even more skillfulness to do so in a harmless fashion.)

Step 3. Knock out the fly. With the fly trapped between the water and coaster, pick up the glass and shake vigorously. Slosh the fly around until it becomes sufficiently disoriented.
(Using beer instead of water may augment the disorientation process, though the effects of alcohol on insects have not been thoroughly researched.)

Step 4. Drown the fly. Once unconscious, the fly should soon become waterlogged and sink slowly but steadily to the bottom of the glass. If it does not, you may abet the sinking process with a spoon (or, God bless you, your finger). The fly now appears drowned and dead.

Step 5. But wait.

Step 6. Wait some more. It is unknown how long you can actually wait without killing the fly, but some spectators have claimed to have witnessed comas as long as twenty or thirty minutes.* It is a bit like sex in this respect: the longer you can hold out, the more dramatic the climax.

Step 7. Play it up. With the fly long since drowned and “dead” at the bottom of the glass, bet any and all dubious witnesses that you can bring it back to life. Gather a crowd around, even those who missed the first half of the trick. Throw twenties on the bar to show you’re for real. Smile at the ladies. Wink at them if you’re the type of guy who can pull off a wink. Then tell everyone to prepare to be astonished.

Step 8. Revive and astonish. To bring the fly back to life, simply pour all contents of the glass -- water and “dead” fly -- onto the bar, counter, or table. Pour two tablespoons of table salt on the fly, forming a miniature salt mine/gravesite. After several minutes, the fly will miraculously crawl out of the salt pile, no longer dead, and soar away as spirited as ever. The crowd will cheer. The guys will slap your back and congratulate you. The chicks will kiss you. You will be a hero. Fame and glory will follow.

Sound apocryphal? My friends and I thought so too, so we decided to find out for ourselves, and we ended up getting more excitement than we could have hoped for.

I thought the first real step, catching the fly, would cause us the biggest problems. For one thing, flies do not routinely alight on the inner rims of water glasses. How many opportunities would we have? For another thing, flies are fast little fuckers. It’s not like we invented the fly swatter because wads of Kleenex were doing the trick. Nevertheless, my friend JC trapped the first fly that landed on his glass under his coaster. He sloshed the fly under tow and pushed it down with his straw. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit that we were never able to keep the fly fully submerged. Whenever we pushed him under, he kept floating back to the top. But he was definitely unconscious -- he was completely motionless the whole time -- so I don’t think our experiment’s results should be dismissed as partial or inadequate.) With the fly floating upside-down between chunks of ice, we put the glass aside and finished our breakfast.

About a half-hour later, after we’d paid the bill and had our table cleared, we resumed the experiment. We dumped the contents of the glass -- water, ice, and “dead” fly -- onto the table. (Lest you think us ugly Americans, I should point out that this was an outdoor café.) We covered the little guy with salt and waited, then waited some more. Sure enough, within four or five minutes the fly stirred beneath its briny grave, like a phoenix rising from its ashes (I know what that looks like, incidentally, because we’d performed that particular revival trick several months earlier). The clumped grains of salt at the top of the pile began to slide away, down the side of the mini-volcano. A tired wing emerged, then the other, and then a pair of antennae and a quadruplet of bug eyes. He surveyed us exasperatedly, then rolled his four eyes -- perhaps this wasn’t the first time a group of scientifically-minded diners had done this to him.

And then, the real surprise. An ant, alerted by the Homo-sapienic “Ooh!”s and “Ahh!”s from above, crawled onto the table and scuttled towards the fly. He sniffed once or twice, then ran back under the table. A second or two later -- it couldn’t have been more than three -- the ant returned, accompanied by about two hundred of his closest buddies. In a veritable insect blitzkrieg, they charged at the fly from all directions to execute the dramatic coup de grâce.

As we all know, there’s nothing like an entire entomological infantry brigade literally nipping at your heels to encourage a little hustle. Our new friend, who, to that point, had been taking his sweet time with his reversal of being temporarily dead, suddenly snapped to life. Vibrating like a dog shaking itself dry, the little guy flapped the remaining salt from his wings and took to the skies, lending credence to his species’s common name and leaving an army of disgruntled predators with nothing for breakfast but a soggy heap of sodium chloride.

My friends and I cheered in astonishment. The guys slapped each others’ backs. The girls kissed the boys. We were heroes. We soon became famous throughout Southeast Asia.

The fly, meanwhile, died several days later, having a two-week lifespan and all. That made us sad, but we later heard he died in his sleep a happy bug, reminiscing about his two victories over certain death and surrounded by his 271 children and grandchildren.

* Devoted readers of this blog -- both of you (hi Mom & Dad!) -- will recall that the fly isn't the only common household pest with the ability to hold its breath a freakishly long time (see "Big, Black, & Nasty" -- 10/14/06). On a related note, I'm not sure what it is with me and sadistic abuse of insects. I swear I wasn't one of those kids who hung out on the driveway roasting ants with a magnifying glass.

I Do... Hate You

2007-05-21T15:21:00.001-04:00

I get the Sunday Times. When news of Iraq, Iran, Darfur, North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Tibet, Kashmir, Congo, Chechnya, and Israel becomes too much for me -- not to mention the health care, economic, energy, environmental, and cultural crises that make up the “National Report” -- I turn to the marriage announcements in the Sunday Styles section. Then I get more depressed.

In theory, the three or four pages of vows -- with their anecdotes of courtship and romance and photos of smiling couples, their happy faces touching -- provide the only regular dose of cheer in the paper. In actuality, these theoretically happy announcements just make you feel worse about your own life. I promise you. The anecdotes of courtship and romance make you bitter that you don’t have an anecdote like that yourself, and the happy couples smiling at you are invariably better looking than you and your hypothetical-future spouse will ever be, even if you did have an anecdote like theirs to begin with.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of letting these theoretically happy people share their happiness with you, here is what a typical New York Times marriage announcement looks like:

Hannah Alexandra Shapiro, the daughter of Dr. Larry R. Shapiro and Melinda S. Shapiro of Great Neck, N.Y., was married yesterday to Dr. Tucker Harrison DeWitt IV, the son of Tucker Harrison DeWitt III and Cindy Janet DeWitt of Greenwich, Conn., at the Gables Yacht Club in Coral Gables, Fla. Rabbi David G. Axelrod officiated.

The bride and bridegroom met at Princeton, from which they graduated, she summa cum laude and he magna cum laude.

Mrs. DeWitt, 26, is an associate at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York. She received a law degree from Yale and was previously a clerk for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court. The bride’s father is the chief of anesthesiology at the Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream, N.Y. Her mother is the vice president of news broadcasting at CBS.

Mr. DeWitt, 27, is a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He received a Ph.D.-M.D. combined degree from Harvard. The bridegroom’s father was president and CEO of Morgan-Stanley. His mother co-directs the DeWitt Foundation, which was founded by the bridegroom’s father, who also serves as a co-director.

There’s good reason to hate these announcements, to use them as the protective layer between the litter box and the floor, as I do. With the exception of a few that include anecdotes about how the couple fell in love or how the guy proposed, which are even more nauseating than the boring ones (yes, I’m talking to you, Matthew Lance Slonim, who left an envelope entitled “The Quest for Yes” in your woman’s cell phone, a quest that ultimately took her on a flight across five states and ended in her grandfather’s nursing-home room, where Mr. Slonim was waiting, ring in hand -- cue index finger, open mouth, & gagging sound), every announcement lists the same prosaic details in the same prosaic prose. Do you think we care that Richard Primus went to Harvard? The dude’s 37. He graduated when the first Bush was president. Telling us where he went to college is akin to what they do at NBA games when they announce the starting lineups, and they say, “…out of Duke, Luol Deng!” Luol Deng is not “out of Duke.” He played one year at Duke. He is out of Sudan. Tell us something interesting about Richard Primus instead. Something unique, something criminal. Tell us how he received that eight-inch-long scar on his leg on an African hunting safari. Tell us why he made eight trips to Bangkok in a three-year span during the mid-‘90s. Tell us how many chicks (and guys) he banged before scoring with the lucky bride. Tell us anything other than the fact that his mother is a retired allergist and clinical immunologist who practiced in Groton, Conn.

Then there are the ones that make you wonder why they’re in the Times at all. Oftentimes the couple’s connection to the Tri-State Area is tenuous at best. The groom can be from California and the bride from Texas, the wedding was on Key West, and the couple will be settling in Chicago… and they post in the Times because the bride’s stepfather lives in Poughkeepsie. Cut us a break, will ya. Just invite the stepfather and leave it at that.

There. Now you hate them too. And so far I’ve only offered you small potatoes as fodder. Here are the big potatoes, my friend, potatoes big enough to be used for the au gratin served at a 250-guest reception at the Waldorf:

Mostly, you hate these people for the same reasons you hate Derek Jeter or Scarlett Johansson: for being young and rich and successful and talented, and for being far more attractive than someone who is young and rich and successful and talented deserves to be. You hate them for going to Princeton, like approximately one-third of the people getting married in the New York metropolitan area did. (The other two-thirds went to Harvard or Dartmouth. And once, there was a chick from USC.) You hate them for having their whole perfect lives perfectly planned out by the time they’re 27. And yes, admit it: you hate these newlyweds for announcing their newlyweddedness to the world in the first place.

So say it with me! Sing it from the altar of your 400-square-foot studio where you live -- alone:

Fuck you, Daniel Yaron Maman -- sorry, Dr. Daniel Yaron Maman -- for being a 28-year-old plastic surgeon with an MBA from Oxford, and for marrying an absolute hottie like Stacey Robin Harris despite obviously being a giant nerd yourself. And fuck you, Victoria Kathryn Potterton, who, after finishing at Dartmouth, are now graduating from Yale, at 26, with a combined medical and MBA degree. And fuck you, also, for holding the wedding at the Yale Club, whatever that is.

Fuck you, Yus -- yeah, you, Helena Yu and Anthony Yu -- who begin your medical residencies next month at Penn, and who coordinated your life together so expertly that you married partners with the same last name. And fuck you, Andy Bellin, the author of Poker Nation, whose mother was a model with Wilhelmina Models in the 1960s, and whose maternal grandmother, Countess Alicia Spaulding Paolozzi (I am not making this up, I swear), helped Gian Carlo Menotti found the Spoleto Festival USA and also drove for the winning women’s team in the 1958 automotive Tour de France (automotive Tour de France?).

Fuck you, John Marter Timken Jr., for being a descendant of John Adams and J.P. Morgan. Fuck you, Boji Wong and Benjamin Berkman, for having David Dinkins officiate your wedding even though he couldn’t even handle the duties himself (a rabbi/cantor also took part, presumably because Dinkins needed brushing up on his Hebrew chanting). And fuck you, Minor Myers III, for being named Minor Myers III, and also for getting married at Anderson House, the home of the Society of the Cincinnati, "an association of the descendants of officers in the American Revolutionary War, of which you are a member."

I hope you all get divorced.

The Bumper Sticker Project

2007-03-22T03:24:00.002-04:00

I attend grad school at a mostly-undergraduate, formerly-all-female, formerly-countercultural-but now-"alternative"(-because-"countercultural"-is-more-of-a-'60s-term), small East Coast liberal arts college. There are a lot of fundraisers for Underserved Bhutanian Transsexual Day Laborers Held Unjustly Hostage by Tsunamis. There are also a lot of bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lots.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the bumper sticker he has on his car. (They say you can tell a lot about a person by a lot of things, but so what -- stick with me, here. (Stick with me -- heh heh...)) It follows that you can tell a lot about a community by the bumper stickers they sport collectively, or even, I would argue, the fact that they sport them at all. What follows is a compilation of the bumper stickers I saw at my school. Note that this is not a selected list; I have no agenda here. (Okay, maybe I do have an agenda here. But I want to be objective in establishing support for my agenda.) The following were all the bumper stickers on cars in one parking lot (one rather small parking lot) on one day:

Committed to the Core

*Vote the Environment*

This car is on a low-carbon diet.

CoolDriver.org

WTF {picture of smiling Bush here}

{a 'W' with a line through it}

Let's not elect him in 2004 either

ear X-tacy

[I don't know what this means either. -- HJR]

{picture of mushroom cloud}

War is the real enemy

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Attack Iraq?

NO!

[Bush must not have seen this car when he made his decision.]

BE KIND In Memory of Louise & Buddy

Honor the Dead

Respond With Peace

{a number of symbols -- the Islamic crest, the peace sign, the male/female Roman symbols, the Star of David, the yin-yang circle, and the cross -- spelling the word
'COEXIST'}

Howard Dean for America

A Man of Quality Is Not Threatened By A Woman Seeking Equality

Make Art

Not War

Support Our Troops
Bring 'Em Home Alive

'COEXIST' [again]

THE LABOR MOVEMENT

"The folks who brought you the weekend"

CIVIL LIBERTIES
Don't Leave Home Without Them

Visualize Whirled Peas

And the following were all on one car (and check out the car below -- and note the type of car it is! Hullo, Prius??):

radiowoodstock.com

Creek Freak

{surrealist portrait of Janice Joplin}

{Grateful Dead icon}

2001 Support Your State Troopers

American Assoc. of State Troopers

As you know, I prefer to keep my bloggy identity anonymous, but I will reveal that I do not attend BYU.

Some days, though, I wish I did. I have to see those same damn stuckers every fuckin' day. It's almost enough to turn one Republican for a minute. Almost.

Do Your Ears Hang Low?

2007-03-02T00:35:00.002-05:00

It’s been said a million times: we all have our imperfections; we all have things we don’t like about our bodies. In our world of glossy dual-page spreads and celebrity idolatry, those imperfections -- the things, as it’s been said a million times, that make us human -- inevitably merge with what we dislike about ourselves and become the very things we cover up, disguise, minimize, lament.

Me, I’ve never worried all that much. And trust me: it’s not because I don’t have my fair share of asymmetries, blemishes, and strange-looking nipplage. I’m as bent-nosed as the next guy (or at least the next guy who got clocked on the schnoz by a Pogo Ball as an eight-year-old). I guess I’ve always just had bigger problems to worry about. Lately, however, when my obsessive-compulsiveness (one such bigger problem, incidentally) has flared up and rendered me particularly obsessive and/or compulsive, I’ve noted for the first time all the imperfections I previously merely noticed. My response has been neither lamentation nor the happy acceptance the same beauty magazines that airbrush their models exhort their readers to feel (“Embrace your curves!”). Rather, I’d classify my reaction as one of... oh, let’s call it amused curiosity. I look at my nipples and think, "Damn, that’s some fucked up shit right there. Nice going, Darwin." I suppose I view my nipples as proof that nature has a sense of humor.

Here is more proof:

When I urinate, it comes out in a spiral. I shit you not. (Er, I piss you not.) It’s true that once it hits the toilet bowl (or misses), it has already normalized into what I presume is the more traditional "taut spaghetti" form. But right out of the eye, it’s shaped like a helix, and it’s been like that as long as I can remember. [Incidentally, we have a urologist cousin who has made quite a name for himself (or as big a name as you can make as a urologist, anyway) by using his patients’ urination, uh, trajectories to determine the health of their, uh, urologies. Again, I piss you not -- his vanity license plate is "WEWEDOC." No joke. Anyway, Cousin Norm, if you’re reading this, feel free to drop me a line and let me know if I should get that helix thing checked out. (And also that burning sensation -- is that normal?)]
I have freakishly large pupils. An ophthalmologist once told me I had the biggest pupils he’d ever seen, which is basically akin to having the largest feet a podiatrist has ever handled, or being the best lay Paris Hilton’s ever experienced. In other words, it’s sayin’ something. Anyway, we all know what they say about guys with big pupils… That’s right: they end up with terrible red-eye in photos. I’m not the most photogenic person to begin with; eyes that glow like tale lights don’t help the cause. It’s ridiculous, really. If you were to look through my old photo albums, as I do whenever my unnecessarily dilated pupils don’t get in the way, you would find dozens of group shots of me with the people in my life. There -- those are my family and friends, smiling and presenting as normal, happy people. And that there -- that’s me, with my arms around them, looking like the spawn of Satan Himself.
My fourth toes curl under my third. That may seem impossible -- or at the least, impossibly uncomfortable -- given the mechanics of upright locomotion, and you’d think the same thing were you to see my toes (and you should be thankful you haven’t -- they’re not a pretty sight). But there’s really no better way to describe it: each of my fourth toes doglegs inward and slips neatly (if I may say so myself) under the middle of each third toe. And the only effect it’s had on my locomotion is on the shape of my footprints. Apparently the condition is genetic: my paternal grandmother’s toes do the same thing.
I can turn my tongue upside down. This is another one I’ve heard is entirely genetic. (My dad can do it; my mom cannot.) I can only flip it clockwise, though, and it’s far less exciting than the cherry stem thing (which my sister can do).
When I cross my legs, man-style (ankle on knee, rather than thigh-over-thigh, which, I still maintain, must have deleterious consequences on one’s sperm count), I can only go left over right. I assume this is a flexibility issue as opposed to a genetic one, but the disparity between the two positions is extreme: it’s not so much a preference as a physical limitation. I literally cannot put my right ankle on my left thigh without lifting it with both hands and then simultaneously pushing down on my right knee with my elbows. My New Year’s resolution for 2011 is to start doing yoga. Maybe that will help.
My left nut hangs lower than my right. I am pretty sure yoga will not fix this, but I’m not overly concerned, since apparently most men suffer from some, uh, asymmetry on one side or the other. (Yes, I looked it up.) (What, like you wouldn’t have?) My own discrepancy seems to be rather extreme, however, and widening every year. By 2019, when I have that right-over-left thing mastered, my left nut will be bouncing off the curb. On the bright side, it’s a well-known fact that left-nutted people are highly logical and facile with numbers; I credit the 800 I got on my Math SAT to my testicular imbalance.
There’s a strange hair that grows out of my stomach, at the bottom left can in my six-pack. It’s all alone and perfectly white and longer and finer than any other strand on my body (or head, for that matter). At least an inch, I’d say. And whenever I pluck it out, boing! -- it sprouts back at some random time, seemingly to full length overnight. I’m looking at it now, as I type this, and wondering if perhaps I should leave it alone this time, if it might not be a source of some power I just haven’t harnessed yet.
I cannot straighten my pinky fingers. When I hold out my hands in front of me, as flat as they will go, the pinkies remain slightly bent at the first joints, forming perfectly imperfect 170-degree angles.
My left ear sticks out further than my right. I noticed this particular irregularity a while ago, but it didn’t occur to me until a year ago what caused it: sleeping on my right side my whole life. As resilient as the human body is -- I assume it does what it can to maintain its symmetry -- twenty years of eight-hour load-bearing sessions will do that to a flab of cartilage. When I realized my sleeping habits were to blame, I immediately attempted to reverse two decades of habit by trying to fall asleep on my left side. The thing is, I actually prefer the aesthetics of my somnambulantly altered ear -- the "natural" one sticks out too much -- so sleeping on my left side into the mid-2020s would actually create an artificial symmetry more handsome than the original, plastic surgery be damned. The problem was -- and is -- that I can’t fall asleep on my left side. I thus settled for a happy medium: I now sleep on my back. My ears will be forever imbalanced, but only moderately so. Worse things, I suppose, have been borne of childhood.

So there you have it. That’s me: warts and imbalances and freakish disfigurations and all. My self-portrait is below. Since this will forever remain an anonymous blog and I will never post my photo, the MS Word drawing tool-generated version below is the closest you will come to glimpsing ol’ Homunculus. However, the devoted readers of this blog who know me -- i.e., my parents -- can attest that it is a fairly accurate representation of what I actually look like.

Now it’s your turn. If you’ve read this and become inspired to catalog and then reveal your own endearing deformities, please do so by posting them in a Comment below. The readers of this blog -- i.e., my parents -- might respond by growing brave themselves, and it could soon snowball into some revolutionary sociological experiment and eventually put every beauty magazine on the shelves out of business. That’s what my magic stomach hair is telling me, anyway.

Big, Black, & Nasty

2006-10-14T13:45:00.001-04:00

Supposedly the cockroach is the second-oldest extant species on earth, behind only the horseshoe crab. It first appeared over 280 million years ago, during the Carboniferous era. Then, four months ago, it appeared in my bathtub.

I’m not particularly squeamish -- growing up, I used to catch spiders with a tennis ball can and release them into the suburban wild. But cockroaches are a whole other can of carrots. They really bother me. And this one wasn’t your garden variety Manhattan roach -- you know, the one you find next to your shoes in the closet of your East Village walkup. Those are basically just enlarged beetles. This was a Bangkok roach -- the tropics, man -- and it was huge. Really fuckin’ big. The size of an offensive lineman’s thumb. And against the polished white glaze of the tub, it somehow looked even bigger, even blacker, even nastier. That’s what I named him: Big, Black, & Nasty.

Big, Black, & Nasty sat there and waved his antennae around in little ellipses, clearly awaiting my response. I wanted to kill him -- Thai Buddhism had not yet fully ensconced itself into my essence -- but I wasn’t about to go the route of the shoe or the rolled-up newspaper. I couldn’t bear the thought of the ensuing crunch. I could just hear it: crunch!!! I also couldn’t bear the thought of the ensuing cleanup. I had to shower later that night, and doing so whilst standing in the remnant bits of cockroach parts was another image I couldn’t bear. Indeed, there were many points related to the smashing of -- and resultantly smashed -- Big, Black, & Nasty that I couldn’t bear.

Using a tennis ball can was also out of the question. For one thing, I didn’t want to put my hands that close to Big, Black, & Nasty. For another, cockroaches are faster, if not craftier, than spiders, and he likely would have dodged the can. And besides, I didn’t own any tennis balls at the time, and so I didn’t have any tennis ball cans anyway. So that was out.

Therefore, I decided to drown Big, Black, & Nasty. I figured that if I could just douse him long enough, he’d eventually drown, or at least lose the will to live, and I’d be able to force his legs and antennae and other extremities down the drain. After enough showers, I assumed, the rest of his body -- his head and torso (or thorax, if you want to be all technical about it) -- would eventually just sort of disintegrate into smaller parts and melt away, and I wouldn’t have to deal with cleanups or audible crunches or anything.

If you’re guessing at this point that this plan was not going to work, then you are smarter than I am, and I resent you for that. I was actually getting sort of excited about my scheme, partly because I would no longer have a two-inch-long cockroach in my bathtub afterwards, but also because the drowning plan allowed me to take advantage of the detachability of the removable shower head and the massage spray setting, both of which had gone unused theretofore. But as you already know and I did not, roaches are feisty little fuckers, and when I aimed at Big, Black, & Nasty and unleashed hell’s fury -- the greatest water pressure a developing country’s plumbing technology can offer -- the little fucker fought like a tippled Irishman. He started scrambling up the walls of the tub as if his life depended on it (when, in fact, it didn’t -- as you and he knew and I didn’t), his little two-kneed legs pistoning at about 4,000 rpm. With each dash he made up the walls, a stream of water was there to meet him and send him back down. He went left, I went left; he went right, I went right.

Soon, though, I had him pinned in the drain. He was helpless and no longer flailing about, so powerful was the stream of water pounding him from above. Unfortunately -- unfortunate, at least, in this case of extermination efficacy being the most crucial criterion -- I had one of those drains with several little gaps instead of one with a single hole big enough to fit, say, a drowning cockroach. So rather than flowing neatly down the drain and meeting his eventual doom in the ghastly entrails of the ignominious Thai drainage system, Big, Black, & Nasty instead had his body wedged halfway down one of the holes, his torso hanging there, vertical, like in those cartoons of fat guys getting stuck in their toilet seats.

I continued assailing him for another 10-15 seconds or so before stopping the flow and assessing the damage. Big, Black, & Nasty appeared to be a beaten bug. His legs had also been forced down into the drain, and his antennae no longer jutted out tall and proud, at attention. Instead they swayed sadly back and forth, like tree branches in a light wind, as if to say, “I surrender. These are the best simulacra of white flags I can render as a mere cockroach. Humans are clearly the superior species, and furthermore, I am your bitch.”

Of course, if I’d known better, I would have recognized Big, Black, & Nasty’s gesture not as a sign of capitulation but rather as a wily stratagem. He was actually telling me: “In truth, I am neither bushed nor battered. I am just putting on this pathetic show in the hopes that you, foolish human that you are, will falsely assume I am finished and will thereafter leave the bathroom and continue on with your meaningless existence... while I, Big, Black, & Brilliant, crawl happily back from whence I came.”

Well, I was not about to be outsmarted by an invertebrate, much less an arthropodic blattodea, so I waited the clever bugger (as it were) out. Sure enough, after a minute or so, Big, Black, & Nasty, foolish insect that he was, crept back out. “Back for more, eh?” I said to him, and then let loose another torrent. Big, Black, & Nasty immediately reverted back to Scared Shitless Insect mode, clambering up any wall he could find. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if he was surprised by my actions, even though I’d been trying to kill him throughout the duration of our relationship. I mean, what did he think I was going to do at that point? Call a truce, pick him up, and take him on as a pet?

________

It’s been said that if or when a nuclear holocaust annihilates life on earth, only two life forms will remain: cockroaches, and Keith Richards. Well, I don’t know who said this, but whoever did must have been joking, because there’s no way Keith Richards could survive a nuclear blast. A cockroach, on the other hand -- that, I now believe. If my little confrontation with Big, Black, & Nasty taught me anything (aside from how not to kill a cockroach, I mean), it taught me that we should treat other species -- big and small, nasty and pleasant alike -- with empathy and respect, if not mercy. (It also taught me to never give up, but that’s sort of cliché.) At some point in our fracas, I developed a real admiration for Blattella asahinai, a creature that has thrived on this planet for approximately 279 million years longer than we human beings have. It was an esteem bordering on kinship, I’d say, and one I’d never experienced with a lesser life form.

It was at this contemplative point that I unleashed my coup de grâce. Having once again trapped Big, Black, & Nasty in one of the drain’s gaps, I pushed the shower head within inches of him and really let him have it. It was the entomological equivalent of being trapped underwater beneath Niagara Falls. (I’d like to see Keith Richards survive that.) (I mean it. I really would.) And yet, unbelievably, the little shit persisted. I furrowed my brow into a scowl and screamed, “Die, fucker!” (Luckily my Thai neighbors weren’t bothered; in Thai, “die, fucker” means “now we eat rice.”). But Big, Black, & Nasty either did not listen or did not understand, or perhaps he couldn’t hear me, what with 100 pounds-per-cubic-inch of water pressure battering his ear canals. Whatever the case, he did not obey; he pressed on, Darwinist instincts in his primordial protocerebrum and Gloria Gaynor in his heart. How was this possible? How could he take such punishment? Even if the force of the spray didn’t do him in, wouldn’t he at least have drowned by now? (I later read that a cockroach can hold its breath for up to 40 minutes. This information, I don’t doubt, would have been useful before I decided on the drowning plan.)

I continued the assault, but by this point I was in pain myself. I just wanted the carnage to end, to put the poor guy, who had so earned my respect, out of his misery. I squinted in empathic agony and turned my head away as I fired, and it was at this moment -- and not three minutes earlier, when I embarked on this ridiculous, elaborate plot instead of just squishing the thing, or in eighth grade, when I stood at the side of the gym trembling in fear instead of asking Ashley Barnett to dance -- that I realized I was an enormous pussy. I was a pussy, and Big, Black, & Nasty was a valiant soldier who deserved to die a soldier’s death, quick and proud. I lay down my arms and peered down, hoping to find the Captain expired. And indeed, praise Buddha, it appeared he was. Big, Black, & Nasty was stuck upright in the drain, just as before, but this time he was not moving even a little.

Still, after the last near-death experience, one couldn’t be sure, and so I remained vigilant, eyes aimed intently downward, shower head in my hand at the ready. I was so sure he would suddenly pop back out, alive again, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and scare the living badingo out of me. Unlike Glenn Close and most moviegoers, however, Big, Black, & Nasty had no desire to kill Michael Douglas, and thus had no reason to continue living. After two more minutes of suspenseful quiet, still breathing heavily and sweating profusely, I dropped my weapon and declared victory. I saluted my vanquished foe and returned to my room, happy that I was a human and not an insect that had inadvertently wandered into the territory of a clearly superior enemy.

________

The next morning, when I walked into the bathroom, I was surprised to discover that Big, Black, & Nasty had survived after all (something you, of course, knew all along, but only because I told you, so don’t act all smart). Not only was Big, Black, & Nasty not dead, but he had escaped. And not only had he escaped, but he had left a path of -- I shit you not -- blood tracing his exact escape route! Yes, cockroaches bleed, and they bleed red, just like us (Keith Richards excepted). Splotches of blood the size of quarters trailed out away from the drain. As for Big, Black, & Nasty? Nowhere to be seen.

________

And as for me? Well, I didn’t sleep well after that, I can tell you that much. Every time I crawled into bed, I could just see Big, Black, & Nasty scuttling about, those menacing little eyes, those antennae waving around, slowly, threateningly, in that way of his. Once I even swore I heard the pitter-patter of those barbed little legs on the bathtub tile, as if to simply taunt me. I moved into a new apartment three weeks later, and three months after that I was chased out of Bangkok entirely, but that was by an insanely jealous Thai husband, not a cockroach. (But that’s a story for another day.)

I may be 10,000 miles away, but I can picture him now, frolicking amidst the innards of that drainage system, plotting his revenge, and swearing to his little cockroach friends: “I don’t care if I have to wait another 280 million years... The next time Homunculus J. Reilly comes to Bangkok, I’ll be waiting. Oh yes, I’ll be waiting, and I’m gonna get that son of a bitch, if it’s the last thing I do.”

Well, let it be known: I have a message for him, too. Now hear this, Big, Black, & Nasty, you smug little shit, and hear it well: Careful what you wish for, cause I’ll be ready, and next time it won’t be a fuckin’ shower head. So bring it on, smart guy. Bring it on.

Converted Asiaphile

2006-09-02T16:13:00.001-04:00

[Note: This was written in early August.]

Last week I got back from a really nice five-day trip to Hong Kong and Macau. In an unexpected way, the trip primed me for my imminent return to the States -- it turned out that in many ways Hong Kong was more like America than it was like Asia (or the parts of Asia I’ve been to, anyway). I was on the double-decker bus from the airport to the hotel, admiring the mostly empty three-lane highway and flawlessly programmed LED telling me exactly where I was and where I was going next (in both Chinese and English), when it occurred to me that it was my first time in a fully developed country since I’d left home ten months earlier. Everything in Hong Kong made sense; everything worked. It was nice walking on clean streets and maintenanced sidewalks. I liked that my street map matched the street signs. I liked that there were street signs. Those refreshing contrasts with Bangkok nearly made the trip on their own.

More than anything, though, the success of the trip reaffirmed my newfound affinity for travel in Southeast Asia. Before landing in Bangkok, I was never much interested in the region; it was far down the list of places I wanted to visit, much less stay. I certainly never thought I’d end up living here. I’d always been (and remain, to some extent) an avowed Europhile -- even now I find more romance in intimate cobblestone streets and 500-year-old piazzas than the supposed “exoticism” of strange-smelling Eastern fruits and packed Asian bazaars. But my various travels of the past year -- I’ve been to Cambodia, Laos, and all over Thailand, in addition to last week’s trip -- have converted me. Southeast Asia has a new fan.

For one thing -- actually, this is the biggest thing -- the region is so much cheaper than Europe. This advantage, I need not tell you, cannot be overstated, and it never gets old, no matter how rich (or poor) you are. If you’re a backpacker on a tight budget, you can travel comfortably on $15-20 a day. That can mean a two- or three-month vacation instead of the standard three or four weeks. If you have slightly more disposable income to work with, like I do, that means being able to afford pleasant sit-down dinners and hotels that would go for $100+ a night in Europe. It also allows for an occasional splurge or the uncommon joy of not paying attention to the prices on most menus. (I’ve lost count of the number of times my friends and I have enjoyed enormous, multi-dish feasts (beer included) without paying attention at all to the prices of the items, and come out at the end with a total bill of 500-600 baht ($13-15) for three or four people. “Ridiculous,” we always say, as we throw down the cash. It must be the way the super-rich live and eat in New York and London. Life, we’ve learned, is often remarkably easy -- ridiculously easy, one might say -- when money is no object.) If you’re relatively well off, you can live like royalty in Southeast Asia. My parents, who travel well but are by no means ostentatious, stayed in one of the finest hotels in all of Thailand (so fine, in fact, it had to call itself a “hideaway”) -- complete with private pool, 24-hour personal butler, and infinity-edge pool overlooking the ocean -- for the nightly cost of an upper-middle range Manhattan chain.

Most Southeast Asian countries are also easier and safer to navigate than other similarly cheap regions like South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Thailand’s roads are top notch, and from what I’ve heard, Vietnam’s and Malaysia’s are getting there. And in all my travels, I never once heard a story of someone getting attacked or mugged. Finally, there are the famously warm and laid-back people (or “locals,” as they’d be called if this were the second-rate guide book it’s rapidly beginning to sound like). “The Thais,” goes one saying, “are the nicest people money can buy,” and based on my own experiences and second-hand accounts, I feel comfortable applying the maxim to the rest of the region as well. There’s truth in the cynicism of the quip, but there’s a lot to be said for a smile, even one slightly tainted by the faint image of dollar (or baht) signs behind those smiling eyes. Because along with potential added income, those eyes glimpse other things when aimed at foreigners. Gone are the days when white tourists are exotic just for being white -- my parents still tell the story of the time they went to Japan in the early ‘70s, and the people/locals constantly approached them to marvel at and grasp my mom’s long blond hair -- but there’s definitely a curiosity there, a seeming amused interest in our lives and language. It’s a special treat, and one not imparted by fast-moving Europeans who cannot tell, or are too busy to notice, that you are different.

My trip last week was the last one I’ll be taking during my stint in Asia, which is fast coming to a close. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to travel internationally again, but it’s a good bet that my next trip will be in Southeast Asia. I’d recommend the same to anyone.

Ten's a Crowd

2006-07-31T08:53:00.001-04:00

One of the two things that, even after nine months here, continues to amuse me -- the other is the bar girl-sex tourist symbiosis -- is the gross over-employment throughout Bangkok. Whatever establishment you happen to patronize -- 7-Eleven or McDonald’s; bar, department store, food stall, or bank -- you can bet your baht there will be no shortage of young, solicitous employees there to service you. Everyone knows Asia is a pretty populace place. But most of us don’t consider Thailand a prime offender, and when we think of overpopulation, we generally think of crowded streets, noisy traffic jams, and unemployment, not too many happily employed middle-classers. Yet that’s exactly what you’ll find in Bangkok.

In many bars, on my many weeknights, there are three or four waitresses for every customer. I once saw 20-30 luminously clad bar girls in one bar, most of them wandering aimlessly or chatting with each other because there was only room for three or four girls to surround each of the two men who were there drinking that night. Several months ago a branch of the gym California Wow opened in the office building where I work. (Incidentally, it’s “the #1 fitness club in the world!” according to the tagline, which surprised me because I’ve never even seen a California Wow in California.) To promote the opening, the company stationed a cadre of presumably part-time employees -- fit-looking young men and women in clean white uniforms -- in the lobby to accost anyone who entered the building with brochures, flyers, and sign-up sheets. There must have been 15-20 of them -- and not once did they approach me. I entered the building and passed them almost every day for six weeks, and I never saw them make contact with a single potential customer. All they seemed to do was hang out by their counter, natter constantly, and crack each other up. I’m not sure how their manager would have appraised their performance, but for their part they were having a blast doing -- or rather, not doing -- their jobs.

Indeed, the main thing you’d likely notice if you had the opportunity to witness these undertasked packs in action (besides the obvious fact that they don’t have enough to do) is that they really seem to enjoy their work, no matter how menial the job. Take Bangkok’s countless massage girls. (Only the certified ones can really be called masseuses.) Bunched closely together in large groups -- half a dozen will suffice for a parlor the size of a studio apartment -- they sit in front of their parlors the way you see old Jewish or Italian women on the steps of their Lower Manhattan walkups in the movies. The massage girls’ first task, before administering the actual massages, is to win customers by harassing passersby. For the most part, they do that. But there are only so many passersby on many of the small streets, and only so much patience one can muster in a nine-hour shift. And so instead the women spend most of their time gossiping (“We gossip you!”), giggling, and chasing each other around like 6th grade girls at a slumber party. Who can blame them? Would you rather joke around with five of your best friends or earn an extra 50 baht (about $1.00) by rubbing down an old fat German tourist?

But the most egregious culprit in Bangkok’s over-employment phenomenon is 7-Eleven. Hands down. No contest. Not only is each and every store grossly overstaffed, but the population of 7-Eleven stores themselves is growing at an uncontrollable rate. It’s astonishing, really: new franchises literally open across the street or one block down from existing ones. Americans make jokes about Starbucks, but Starbucks is a veritable mom-&-pop shop compared to 7-Eleven here. It’s as if the owners give no thought as to what locations would actually be most profitable; instead, their business strategy is to simply blanket the landscape with as many stores as possible until the only place to buy a Pepsi in the entire city is 7-Eleven. There must be 200 of them in Bangkok, with 20-30 going up as I type this. Anyway, that’s not why I brought 7-Eleven into this. I mention it because 7-Eleven is one of the funniest places to visit in Bangkok (and not just because of the “shrimp crisps” and other gnarly Asian snacks they stock the shelves with). Inside every store you’ll find five or six uniformed employees, five or six of whom are doing exactly nothing. One time I counted -- as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up -- ten (ten!) employees in a single store. One of them was manning the counter and -- again, I am not making this up -- nine of them were hanging out in various spots around the shop doing nothing. There was a line in front of one register. On the counter next to the other register was a “Please use next register” placard. Here’s a joke I heard here:

Q: How many 7-Eleven employees does it take to ring you up?
A: Eight. One to ring you up and seven to ignore you.

Here’s another one I thought up just now. Have you ever wondered why they call it 7-Eleven when it’s open 24 hours a day? Maybe it’s because it takes between seven and eleven employees in each shop to keep things running at a barely acceptable pace. (Thanks, folks. Thank you very much. I’ll be here all week...)

Both the cause and effect of Bangkok’s labor surplus are visible throughout the city, in the form of Bangkok’s noticeably high female-to-male ratio. I don’t have any figures to back myself up here (and as much as I’d love some, the closest the Thai census-takers ever come to official statistics are loose approximations), I wouldn’t be surprised if the ratio is as high as 60 – 40. Yes, it’s evident inside the shops and bars, but you can also see it on the streets and on the sky train, especially in the downtown areas: high heels, short skirts, and long hair abound. And it’s not just the sex tourism industry. Young women flock here from the outer provinces by the hundreds of thousands to make money any way they can. All but one member of the administrative staff at my office, for instance, are female (probably 14 out of 15) -- all of them young and from the provinces. They, like all the others in Bangkok, know that no matter what job they end up finding, it will pay more than they ever could have made in Isan or Surat Thani. Some of them send the “extra” cash back to their families; others stay until they’ve saved enough to return home financially secure. And of course some end up staying.

Why Bangkok? Well, imagine an America with only one major city -- say, New York. If there were no others from which to choose -- no L.A. or San Francisco or Chicago -- and you had to make more money than you could ever earn in Iowa, where would you go? You’d have to go to New York, whether you wanted to or not. And you’d have to live in a shitty rundown apartment an hour or two from your job in the City, just as many of the bar girls and girls in my office do.

Mostly, though, Bangkok’s over-employment appears to be a win-win situation, at least on the surface. The employed are given an opportunity to earn their way out of poverty, while the consumer enjoys one major benefit of the effect: bargain prices. For all the doomsayers who warn that the days of Thailand’s Third-World prices are numbered -- “It’s only a matter of time before the prices here catch up with the technology,” they say -- I should remind you that as long as there are eight employees manning the counter at 7-Eleven, the prices of the shrimp crisps on the racks nearby will remain irresistibly cheap to Westerners (even if the shrimp crisps themselves aren’t irresistible.) It’s basic economics. Basic supply-and-demand, to be exact. In this case, the supply is labor. Because there’s so much of it, the managers and owners of the establishments can pay their employees low wages, which in turn allows them to sell their goods and services at commensurately low prices. The result: “normal,” or appropriate, prices for the Thais; great deals for tourists and ex-pats. As for the social ramifications of the resultant deeply stratified socioeconomic class system and the moral implications of an economy based so heavily on the sex industry... well, that’s a lesson for another day. I’ll be here all week.

Imagine that (if you dare)

2006-07-22T05:52:00.001-04:00

After I leave, when I think of the strange and memorable, and strangely memorable, sights I’ve witnessed here -- those “only in Asia,” or “only in Bangkok” moments -- I’ll think mostly of the images described in detail in the guidebooks and travelogues and witnessed by every visitor to Bangkok: full-grown elephants lumbering down the sidewalks, blinkers tied to their tails; transvestite and transsexual hookers (who can tell the difference?) grabbing at unsuspecting elbows; traffic jams at 4:00 a.m. So, I’d like to place here, for posterity, a definitively “only in Asia” image that I alone saw last night in my apartment building’s exercise room. On the treadmill next to me was a slightly overweight fellow-renter whose gender I couldn’t ascertain. But androgyny is not unusual in Bangkok. What was unusual was his/her attire: flip-flops, an untucked short-sleeved dress shirt, and a baggy pair of those shiny faux-silk boxers they sell on the street. Normally I would label such a getup the most inappropriate outfit one could possibly put together for exercise of any sort. Except in this case the workout wasn’t a workout at all. Asian Pat was moving -- calling it walking would be too kind -- at about one mile per hour. Probably slower. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a fully ambulatory person move that slow. Even the treadmill wanted to speed up. So there you have it: an out-of-shape sexless person in flip-flops and underwear getting in shape by moving as slow as is humanly possible. Only in Asia... let’s hope.

Short, White, & Hansuhm

2006-07-21T05:08:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I was sitting alone in the teachers’ lounge at our office, finishing up an e-mail at the end of the night, when one of the newly hired secretaries walked in. Like the other new members of the admin staff, she was young and attractive, from the provinces, with a high school education and an English vocabulary that couldn’t have totaled more than five or ten words. Also like the other secretaries, she had no work to do -- because of a Thai quota law that requires companies to maintain an acceptable ratio of Thai-to-foreigner employees, our office admin staff is ludicrously overstaffed -- and so instead she pursued one of the secretaries’ favorite workplace activities: striking up a conversation with an American teacher. I was happy to oblige. The problem was that she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Thai. (This has been a problem for me several other times too. And by “several,” I mean “shitloads.”) I think my Thai was actually better than her English, a statement that borders on numerical impossibility, considering that in nine months here I have only learned a few basic phrases (“Hello/goodbye,” “Thank you,” “Turn left/right,” “How much does that cost?” “How much do you cost?” etc.).

We thus engaged in one of those usually frustrating but occasionally amusing conversations that only take place in foreign countries. You know the kind I’m talking about -- those ridiculous slices of communicative best-efforts that consist of constant exaggerated gesticulations and speech slowed to the point where each person thinks the other will finally understand even though they absolutely never will. Except in this case, instead of trying to find a museum or bathroom, we were trying to learn about each other (which was more difficult than getting directions to the nearest bathroom, but which also made it amusing instead of frustrating). Ultimately we were able to communicate to each other where we grew up, where we lived in Bangkok, how much we liked our jobs, and how old we were, as well as the ages of our respective siblings. At that point I was content to declare the dialogue a success and return to my e-mail. Then she opened her mouth, rolled her eyes to their corners, as if searching for the words, and said, “You -- handsome.” I was caught off guard. All I could do was laugh and say, “Kahp khun kruhp.” I didn’t even know how to return the compliment. But I think I was smiling almost nonstop for the next two hours. Those two words -- two of the five or ten she knew -- made my night. Hell, they made my week.

No doubt about it: Bangkok is great for the self-esteem. As a white male, it’s tough to go a week here without being hit on in a club by a Thai woman (or man), complimented by a counter girl, or catcalled at by bar girls and street parlor masseuses. No matter that half the time (okay, most of the time) it’s coming from hookers. A compliment is a compliment is a compliment. If you don’t come to Bangkok for the sights, the food, or the women, I’d recommend a trip here for the ego boost alone.

I’ve had my own ego boosted three notches -- from Level 2 (Neurotic Self-Loathing Wannabe-Writer) to Level 5 (Occasionally-Confident Semi-Rich Dude) -- merely by living a normal life here for nine months. Bar girls run from their spots by the door to grab my arm as I walk by. “Come in, suh. Welcome, hansuhm gentleman.” “I have to eat dinner,” I tell them. “Come aftuh. Aftuh dinner, aftuh!” Beautiful Thai women in short skirts look me dead in the eye and smile as they pass by. (They almost certainly do this because the Thais value eye contact and have the disarming habit of staring you down, not because they find the random white guy walking past them irresistibly attractive. But a guy can dream, can’t he?)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called handsome here. I used to get my fruit shakes from an outdoor stand manned by three sisters. While one of them would blend my smoothie, all three would chatter at high speeds, shooting me furtive, guilty glances and giggling the whole time. Finally, one day, one of the sisters stopped the blender a moment and said to me, “My sister think you hansuhm,” and they all tittered some more. Last week, when I went to a dance club with Pen, a Thai girl I’m dating, I found myself surrounded, literally, by half a dozen of her friends. “You Pen’s man?” one of them asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You hansuhm,” she said, and kept dancing.

Now seems the time to reveal, for the record, that I am not particularly “hansuhm.” I don’t think I’m ugly, but I’m not all that good-looking either: I’m short, with big ears, bushy eyebrows, and a crooked nose. In any country, I would describe myself as decidedly average. Apparently, however, not everyone agrees; and Thailand is not “any country.” Here I am not short -- 5’7” appears to be about average for a Thai man -- and although being white is no longer anything unique here, it still carries currency (as it were -- if you’re a farang, the Thais assume, generally fairly, that you literally carry plenty of currency). Back home I’m a short white guy with cheap clothes and a bad haircut. In Bangkok I’m a rich, in-shape, worldly American with a cool beard. “Mr. Face Hair,” one bar girl called me as I passed her on the street. (That may not sound like a compliment, but it was better than being “Mr. No-Hair,” the appellation she assigned my friend Shawn, who is balding. That was us, as we walked down Sukhumvit Road: “Mistuh Face Hair! Mistuh No-Hair! Welcome! Come in, suh!”)

Amidst the novelty of being considered handsome are two other novelties: that of being hailed as such to my face, and that of the word itself -- handsome. In the States, one is only called good-looking out of earshot or to a third party or, in my case, by his mother’s middle-aged friends. That the women here are so willing to hand out a compliment about me, to me, is very endearing; that they do so using a word, “handsome,” that is a virtual linguistic relic, somehow makes the compliment that much more charming. Clearly Thai children are taught in school that “handsome” is the adjective used to describe an attractive man. Even girls from the countryside, who had no English in school, apparently learn the word and make it a staple of their limited vocabularies.

When I explained to some Thai college students that “handsome” is no longer commonly used in America, they looked surprised and asked me what is used instead. “Hmm. Well, maybe ‘cute’ or ‘good-looking,’” I said. “So, like, Leonardo DiCaprio would be cute, and George Clooney would be good-looking.”

“Ohhh,” they said in unison, understanding.

Then, feeling bold -- the sort of boldness that can only come with a Level 5 ego -- I tried my luck. “So which one would I be?” I asked them.

They paused for a moment and looked at one another. It appeared they didn’t know how to respond. I got nervous. I wished I hadn’t asked the question.

Then they all burst out, “Good-looking! You good-looking!”

I’ll take it.

5 Things the Thais Fuckin' Love

2006-07-05T05:51:00.001-04:00

The guidebooks tout Thailand as a land of paradoxes. Pick up a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide and you can bet good money it will discredit unsavory generalizations and emphasize the complexities and nuances of Thai culture. But really, don’t they do that with every country? In any guidebook introduction, you can find something to the effect of: “It’s easy to believe the hype and buy into the many stereotypes surrounding [insert name of nationality] and their country, but in fact [insert name of country] is a study in contrasts, a nation too richly diverse for stereotypes and broad generalizations.”

That’s true, of course. And yes, Thailand has its share of paradoxes. (For example, the relative priggishness of the media -- sex and violence are edited out on TV; cigarettes are blurred out -- vis a vis the notorious red-light districts that the government and police so willingly turn a blind eye towards. Right outside the windows of hotel rooms whose TVs censor Nicole Kidman and Jude Law making love on HBO are prostitutes pestering farang men and go-go bars featuring teenaged girls shooting ping-pong balls out of their hoo-haws.) It follows that any fair analysis of Thailand (or any country) should disdain with broad generalizations (all generalizations are false...) and instead delve into the contrasts, complexities, nuances, and paradoxes of its richly diverse population.

But what fun is that? And the Thais are nothing if not fun. (How’s that for a broad generalization?) Besides, I’m not fair and I’m not an analyst -- I’m just a neophyte blogger and ex-pat with seven months’ worth of experiences and observations to share. And little is as revealing about a group of people as a few generalizations and stereotypes about what those people enjoy and value most. I thus present here a few broad, unnuanced, stereotypical generalizations about five things Thai people fuckin’ love, in ascending order of how much they fuckin’ love them.

They fuckin’ love...

5. Shitty Thai pop. Before I arrived, I expected the popular music scene in Bangkok to revolve around shitty American pop. It was a natural assumption to make. You hear so much in the news about how, as Western economic models and individual liberties expand into developing countries, so too does Western culture, especially its pop culture. “They may not like our policies,” Americans like to croon, “but they still love our music and movies.” Stories about Arab rappers and Rolling Stones’ concerts selling out in China dot the nightly news. It follows that I fully expected to be assaulted, in every club and bar in Bangkok, by Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, and other clones I am already too old and unhip to name.

Turns out Thailand has its own brand of shitty pop. In lieu of former American Idols and other similarly packaged glam performers, my ears and good taste have instead been assaulted almost daily by equally generic and uninspired Thai vocalists. Sure, I’ve heard enough Black-Eyed Peas over the past seven months to last me a lifetime -- I will henceforth and forever associate “My Humps” with Thai strip clubs -- but the majority of awful songs that play on any given night in the clubs are still by Thai artists. (I use the term “artists” loosely.)

This discovery was both pleasant and disconcerting. On the one hand, I found it heartening and charming that they don’t just eat what America feeds ‘em. There’s a lot of national pride in Thailand; it’s nice to see the populace -- a proverbial little guy on the world’s stage -- adopt something their own. On the other hand, well, the music sucks. Most songs are just recycled versions of the most generic, unoffensive fluff that plays on American soft rock radio, with Thai lyrics in place of English. I wish I could think of a better adjective, but “cheesy” suffices. (To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it is the cheesiest bunch of cheese that ever cheesed.) The Thais only went partway in creating their own musical identity; what they’ve actually done is take all the worst aspects of Western pop music and accentuated that crappiness. (To quote Bart Simpson, “It’s craptacular.”) And yet the Thais, man -- lemme tell you: they eat it up. They fuckin’ love it. They mouth the words in food courts and scream out in unison their favorite parts on the dance floor. All you can do is cover your ears and smile. As for me, well here’s something I never thought I’d say: one of the things I’m looking forward to about returning home is being blasted by Gwen Stefani in bars and having nothing but Coldplay on the radio all day long.

4. Pork. It’s what’s for dinner in Thailand. No need for ad campaigns about “the other white meat” here. In Thailand, chicken and pork stand on equal ground, above all other meats. Beef is scarce and relatively expensive. Lamb is all but impossible to come by (except in Lebanese restaurants and on Soi Middle East). Duck is only eaten in Chinese restaurants. Most of the meals served with steamed rice at the outdoor a la carte establishments are various combinations of chicken and pork (sliced, minced, shredded, sausaged) with vegetables. Half of McDonald’s “burgers” are made of pork (including the much-hyped “Samurai Pork Burger!”). A restaurant on Sukhumvit called O’Brians [sic] claims that one of its most popular dishes is Pork Cordon Bleu [sick]. I’ll take their word for it.

A few months ago I asked one of my students, a boy who had spent several years in California, where I could find a good burger in Bangkok. He told me that Sizzler actually served the best burger he’d ever had, in Bangkok or anywhere. It was big and thick and juicy and delicious, he said. “Sounds good,” I said. Then he casually added that it was also made of pork, not beef. “Oh,” I said, trying not to look disappointed. But of course I was: when I’m in the mood for a good burger, I want a real burger, not a “pork burger.” If it’s made of pork, it’s not a burger; it’s a piece of pork -- no matter how big, thick, juicy, and delicious it may be.

Pork, which is incongruously called moo in Thai (shouldn’t it be oink?), has clearly avoided the stigma it so cumbersomely carries in the States. For one thing, there aren’t too many Thai Jews around. For another, Thais, like most Asians, don’t seem to have the same hang-ups that Americans do about what animals their meats used to be when they were alive. To the Thais, once it’s been skinned, sliced, and cooked, it’s not a pig anymore; it’s just food. Incidentally, this is also the reason most Thais won’t think twice about shelling out 20 baht at a street stall for a bag of deep-fried crickets. (Mmm... insectilicious...)

Last week my friend Shawn and I ate lunch at one of the ubiquitous outdoor establishments, which serve noodle, soup, and rice dishes for 20-25 baht apiece. The décor is decidedly minimalist -- you eat in 95-degree heat, on flimsy plastic chairs and foldout metal tables, with toilet paper serving as napkins -- but the quality of the food, the price, and “only in Asia” atmosphere outweigh the drawbacks. Shawn, who is American, told me that he doesn’t eat pork, which struck me as a particularly unfortunate practice for someone living in Thailand. “Are you Jewish?” I asked him.

“Naw, man. I ain’t Jewish,” he said. “I just don’t dig on swine.”

“Why not?” I asked him. Shawn explained to me that pigs are filthy animals. According to him, they sleep and root in shit. “I don't wanna eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense to disregard its own feces,” he said.

“But sausages taste good,” I implored. “Bacon tastes good.”

“Sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I wouldn’t know, because I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.”

“How about dogs?” I pointed out that dogs eat their own feces.

“I don't eat dog either,” Shawn said.

“Yes, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?”

“I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but they're definitely dirty. But a dog's got personality. And personality goes a long way.”

“So by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he'd cease to be a filthy animal?”

“We'd have to be talkin' 'bout one motherfuckin' charmin' pig. It'd have to be the Cary Grant of pigs.”

Then we both laughed.

3. Sleep. This one kind of goes hand-in-hand with something Thai people don’t like: namely, work. I’ve had some disagreement on the exact extent of the phenomenon from some of my fellow ex-pats, but our basic impression of the hours of the Thai work day, based on unscientific random observational sampling (i.e., hanging out all over town instead of working ourselves), is that it starts around 10:00 and ends at 5:00, with a two-hour lunch from noon to 2:00. For those of us keeping track -- and I always keep track -- that’s five hours a day of work. I’m exaggerating a bit -- most office jobs here officially start at 9:00 and give one hour for lunch -- but here’s what I do know:

If you get on the sky train between 9:00 and 10:00, it’s packed. Prepare to know what five strangers just had for breakfast. On the few unpleasant occasions I’ve had to be somewhere by 9:00 a.m., however, the sky train has been nearly empty. I’ve also learned (the hard way, as these things are always learned) that if you get on the elevator in my building on the 28th floor (where I work) at noon, the elevator will stop approximately 26 times before getting to the bottom. (Each time it stops and the doors open, the people waiting inevitably just peer into the already-crammed elevator, giggle, and wait patiently for the next one.) If you wait just 15 or 20 minutes longer for lunch, until 12:15 or 12:20, it’s no problem. How everyone is already hungry after two hours of work, and three hours after breakfast, is beyond me. (Ostensibly it has something to do with something else the Thais fuckin’ love but which is not on this list: eating. They do it all the time, at all hours of the day and night.) And the lunch establishments are running full-tilt till 2:00 or 2:30. All of which leads me to conclude, based on my considerable powers of deduction (oh, what one learns as an SAT teacher...), that Thais work about five hours a day.

What do they do the rest of the time? Among other things (“other things” being eating and shopping), they sleep. Now, I like my sleep as much as the next guy -- okay, I like my sleep more than any guy -- but I generally limit mine to a nightly nine hours, plus two- to three-hour naps on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons. The Thais, though -- they make me look like an amateur: they don’t even need a bed. At any given time in the afternoon, it seems like half the construction workers on the street are asleep. And when I say “on the street,” I mean it literally. You walk around and you see carpenters and painters just sprawled out, dead to the world, in the middle of sidewalks (sidewalks that, ironically, are in dire need of repair). They lie there, still as two-by-fours, unburdened by fear of soi dog, cockroach, rat, or death by stabbing by three-inch heel. Apparently, after the two-hour lunch comes the two-hour siesta.

Ditto for cabbies. Walk by a parked taxi and look inside. Chances are, the driver is asleep at the wheel, his seat tilted back. Same with a good fraction of the city’s bus passengers. It’s like scanning the coach section of an airplane in the middle of the night on a transcontinental flight, and amusing in the same way: heads leaning on shoulders, faces pointed to the sky, mouths agape. Except that these nappers are achieving their somnambulant acrobatics in broad daylight, in filthy, un-air-conditioned buses that are idling in noisy traffic. I gaze at them, bemused and amused. Then I go home and take a nap.

2. Malls. They say that while the rest of Thailand worships the Buddha, Bangkok worships the baht. And the city’s numerous shopping centers are Exhibit A in that claim. From night bazaars and endless rows of vendors crowding sidewalks and hawking knockoffs, to the mind-blowing Chatuchak weekend market (which I once heard is the largest outdoor market in all of Asia), Bangkok epitomizes the breakneck consumerism of 21st century Asia.

For my money, though (as it were), it’s the beautiful new malls, not the bazaars and street peddlers (which have, after all, been around for centuries), that most embody the “new Asia” you’ve heard so much about on NPR and CNN. If I had to take a visitor -- you, let’s say (to my all friends reading this: hint! hint!) -- to the one place that best captures Bangkok, I wouldn’t take you to the Grand Palace or the wats on the river; I’d take you to the Emporium. There you would see thousands of Bangkokians, content as clams, milling about, chowing down in the food courts, cell-phoning, SMSing, and spending, spending, spending -- for hours at a time and at all hours of the day. Try saying the same thing about your local mall (not counting December, which, incidentally, it might as well be in Bangkok the rest of the year -- picture your city’s biggest mall the day after Thanksgiving and you’ll have some sense of what the malls here are like every day of the year). Siam Paragon, a monstrous conglomeration of high-end name-brand shops, complete with the largest aquarium in Asia (they billed it, in the marketing blitz running up to the opening, as “The Glorious Phenomenon”), opened in December, after several years of construction. For point of comparison, it often takes that long to get a small street paved. Adjacent to Siam Paragon are two nearly identical -- and nearly identically named -- indoor malls, Siam Center and Siam Discovery Center; across from it, the much-needed outdoor mall, Siam Square.

As offensive as such egregious consumerism may be to traditionalist senses, the Thais’ love of their malls is completely understandable, and, to anyone who’s visited Bangkok, not really surprising. The easy lighting, the modern architecture, the cleanliness, the spaciousness, the air-conditioning -- the malls are just flat-out, all-around undeniably pleasant places to be, egregious consumerism be damned. They basically serve as Bangkok’s version of city parks: effectively public spaces where the locals can escape the noise, pollution, and weather (heat, humidity, rain, or all of the above) that pervade most other parts of the city. When my parents visited in February, to break up a long day of sight-seeing we took refuge from the 90-degree heat in a lovely mall food court. Several months ago, when a Thai man asked out a female co-worker of mine -- a 26-year-old female co-worker of mine -- he suggested the mall as the venue for their first date. (In response, she suggested someplace with fewer teenagers.)

To say I don’t like to shop would be a gross understatement, but I’ve enjoyed my mall time here. I probably hit up the local malls two to three times a week, usually just to people watch or grab a bite to eat; still, I’ve spent more time shopping (window and real) in my eight months here than in my entire life before this combined. Call it what you will¾the height of superficiality; the encroachment of Western values on ancient Eastern cultures; an anti-social and unproductive use of time. I call it living as the Thais do. When in Rome, head straight to the Gap.

And the number one thing Thais fuckin’ love...

1. The King. How much do Thais love their king? It’s difficult to overstate this one. Probably more than their malls, sleep, pork, and shitty Thai pop combined. Certainly more than any other country loves any single one of its countrymen or -women. Indeed, I could probably prove, using some sort of citizenry calculus, that the Thai king is in fact the most beloved human being on earth. A bold statement, to be sure, but one that can be supported by indisputable mathematical corroboration. To wit:

If you were to calculate an individual’s “belovedness” rating by taking the number of people who love that individual times the average amount of love harbored by said lovers, and subtract from that product the square of the total hate engendered by the individual (the square of the hate the better to penalize those who have done something hate-worthy) -- i.e.,

Belovedness Quotient = {(# of people who love Person X) x [(sum of individual “love quotients”) / (# of people who love Person X)]} – {(# of people who hate Person X) x [(sum of individual “hate quotients”) / (# of people who hate Person X)]}

-- then the king of Thailand would have to be the most loved man in the world, hands-down. There are 60 – 70 million people in Thailand, virtually all of whom adore the man and none of whom have even a single negative word to say about him. That’s a pretty high Belovedness Quotient right there. Try saying the same thing about [insert name of any country’s political leader or figurehead here]. See what I mean? Even Oprah or Tiger Woods don’t come close. Maybe Jesus. But He’s dead.

Come to think of it, the Jesus comparison is a pretty apt one. His Majesty the King is ubiquitous here. (Or at least his picture is. The king himself holes up most of the year in his various palaces scattered throughout the country.) Taxi drivers keep his portrait on their dashboards, just as the cabbies in Ethiopia (the most dominantly Christian place I’ve ever been) keep drawings of the Madonna and/or Jesus on their dashes. Most restaurants and small shops have the king’s portrait hanging on their walls. His likeness adorns school house walls and flags on major roads. One prominent office building sports the king on one side -- mural? billboard poster sheeting? frescoe? -- his 50-foot bespectacled phiz gazing benevolently down on Sukhumvit Road. (In most of these renderings, the king is decked out in royal or pseudo-military garb; in none of them is he smiling.)

Loving your king is even a fashion statement. Seemingly half the population sports bright yellow rubber bracelets that say, in both Thai and English, “LONG LIVE THE KING.” I now wear one too. Last week, for the 60th anniversary celebration of the king’s coronation -- this king, known as Rama IX, is the longest sitting monarch in the world -- almost everyone in the city wore yellow t-shirts for all four days of the long weekend, in honor of the “king’s color.” You haven’t witnessed loyalty until you’ve seen eight million Asians hurrying around town in various shades of yellow. Yet the strangest, most uniquely Thai demonstration of support for the king has to be what occurs before movies. After the trailers and before the feature presentation, everyone in the theater rises as one to “pay respect to His Majesty,” as the words on the screen instruct. An elaborately produced montage then commences, complete with (crappy) special effects and background orchestration (the king’s anthem, I’m told): there’s King Bhumipol in the 1960s, aiding impoverished Thai villagers; and here he is saving the environment; and that’s him shaking the hand of a sick child whose life he just saved. It’s one of those surreal “only in Thailand” peculiarities you can’t read about in Lonely Planet, and which infuses travel abroad with the charm and surprise it too often lacks.

Much of the love is a just a function of a genuine and unquestioned respect for the monarchy as a whole. (Take note, Britain.) It’s a federal crime, for instance, to badmouth the royal family. (What happens to anonymous bloggers who use the word “fuckin’” in a sentence that mentions the king can only be imagined. A century in Thai purgatory, perhaps?) And when I asked a Thai friend whether the movie theater thing would happen regardless of who was on the throne, he guessed that it probably would. (There’s no way to be sure, of course, since this king has reigned since well before any of my friends here were born. Probably since before there were movie theaters in Thailand, in fact.)

At the same time, there is undeniably a special affection and reverence for this king in particular. Despite his official position as a mere figurehead -- the most important member of what is essentially a symbolic monarchy -- he has apparently put his symbolic capital to good use over the years. Forgive my ignorance of the details -- I’ve read more about bar girls than contemporary Thai history -- but I believe the king stepped in during several occasions of political unrest, even quashing one bloody coup in the 1970s. I think he has also been quite active about bringing ecological awareness and education to Thailand. His deeds have earned him esteem in all circles; Bangkok’s urbane intellectuals and the uneducated villagers in the provinces alike -- no matter how much they know about him, all Thais admire him equally. During last week’s celebration, the following banner headlines ran across the front pages, in bold type and all caps: THE WORKING MONARCH, THE BELOVED KING, SIX AMAZING DECADES, KING BY EXAMPLE. And that was just one paper in two days. Editorializing? You bet. But is it compromising journalism if every single person reading the paper already believes it? (Do you agree or disagree? Write an essay of no less than 2,000 words explaining why. Be sure to draw on First Amendment Supreme Court decisions and allude to the rise of yellow journalism in the second half of the 20th century…)

In some respects, the deification of the king goes too far for my egalitarian tastes. The road closes and all traffic comes to a halt if the king’s third-cousin, twice-removed comes within a mile of a major road. They could probably increase the country’s GDP several percentage points just by letting the royal family sit in traffic like everyone else. A few weeks ago, as I walking home from work, I was pushed to the side of the sidewalk by a police officer and told to stand still. Confused, I looked around. The road was clear; the other pedestrians had stopped as well. A minute or two later, a small motorcade zipped by. Everyone continued on as if nothing had happened. Me, I was a tad miffed that my day had to come to a complete (if brief) halt so that someone else -- someone in less of a hurry than I was, I’m sure -- could enjoy one more privilege of the privileged life. Royal people are, after all, just people -- a fact the Thais seem to have either forgotten or cheerfully ignore.

Mostly, though, the Thais’ adulation for the king is refreshing. How many countries have someone whom they’re so proud of, much less a leader? Several months ago, when the prime minister of Thailand found himself entangled in a corruption scandal, the populace responded with a vengeance, demonstrating for weeks until he resigned. The king, meanwhile, remained where he’s always been: on the throne, a rock, more beloved than ever before. No other nation can say the same about its leader, symbolic, political, or otherwise. The British royal family has degenerated into a tabloid joke. Other countries’ symbolic monarchies are anonymous at best, scandalous at worst. In America, we’re left with our celebrities and sports stars to worship, and they inevitably let us down. Who can live up to such hype? No mortal, surely. But His Majesty the King Bhumipol Adulyadej, Rama IX, of the Kingdom of Thailand is no mere mortal, if his subjects’ feelings about him are any indication. For 60 years he’s been living up to the hype, serving his 60 million admirers with grace, stability, and altruism. Being someone the Thais fuckin’ -- really fuckin’ -- love.

The Big Easy

2006-05-13T03:34:00.003-04:00

[Note: Most of this was written on Wed., March 1, 2006.]

I’m writing this first entry from the distilled comfort of a plush Starbucks chais, in the well air-conditioned, brightly lit Ploenchit shopping center on Soi 2 off Sukhumvit Road, in Bangkok, at 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. I don’t have work today. I woke up at noon (11:59, actually, which, in the same way that $9.99 sounds like a better deal than $10.00, seems less pathetic than 12:00), not because I stayed up late or needed to catch up on my sleep but because I could. I returned on Monday from four days of relaxation on Ko Samui. Tomorrow I work from 10:00 – 12:00, then have three days to recover before leaving for another island, Ko Pha Ngan, on Monday morning. I will spend five days there, two at a swish resort (at about $50 a night) and three amongst partying backpackers, topless Swedish girls, and beachside bungalows, before returning on Friday night so that I can teach a class on Saturday.

So goes life as an ex-pat in Thailand. For the last two months, this is how it’s been: four hours a week of work (and getting paid for the “minimum” 50 hours per month anyway); drinking on Tuesday nights; awaking whenever; four-day excursions to the beach, to Cambodia; afternoon naps and all-day international film festival movie binges. You can see why I haven’t had time to get around to this blog until now.

In Thai, Bangkok translates loosely as the “City of Angels.” After four months here, however, I can make a pretty strong case for assigning Bangkok the nickname of a different American city: It is, more than New Orleans ever was, the “Big Easy.” On first glance, or even first visit, Bangkok appears to operate with the same organic frenzy of many of the world’s major megalopolises. It’s a “crush of humanity” and “assault on the senses” (as the countless tourist guides and travelogues might describe it), with honking horns and clicking high heels, stifling fumes and charcoal-hot food stalls blocking the sidewalks, buildings (and building) for miles in all directions, and people everywhere, everywhere -- chattering, smoking, cell phoning, laughing, hawking -- all day and night long, every day of the year. The legendary traffic -- along with the heat and the hookers, one of the only features of the city I heard much about before arriving (“Awful traffic,” my grandmother and parents’ friends would tell me, shaking their heads as if discussing a friend’s nephew who is in rehab) -- is, alone, enough to grant Bangkok “chaotic urban” status. (On their tour here a few weeks ago, my parents were informed that Bangkok has the third-worst traffic in the world, which, for anyone who has spent even one day here, is a surprising piece of trivia only because of the word third. First and second on the list, in case you were wondering -- and of course you were -- are Mexico City and Cairo.)

Upon closer inspection, however -- inspection, it should be repeated, that is being carried out by someone who works half as much as he did back home and still earns more per hour than many doctors here -- Bangkok offers, more than anything else, a cush respite from the stresses of life in the West. The farang flock here in droves, from every Western corner of the world -- America, Britain, Germany, Australia -- lured and then kept here by the warm weather, cheap goods, amazing food, and girls who are easy in every sense of the word -- easy on the eyes, easy with a smile, easy to amuse, easy to impress, and, well, just plain easy. (Why be coy? The girls themselves certainly aren’t.) A friend of mine here told me that there are about a million ex-pats in Thailand. Three-quarters of them must be in Bangkok. 750,000 ex-patriots in a city of about 7-8 million -- that’s one of every ten people. On Sukhumvit Road, where I live, it’s probably one in five.

It’s easy to see why. The Thais are friendly, welcoming, open-minded, and quick with smiles as warm as the beaches in the South. The food deserves its reputation -- it’s fragrant, fresh, healthy, spiced to perfection with an array of local herbs. As for the climate, yes, it’s too hot here, but constant sweating is still preferable to most (albeit not me) than winter in Berlin or Glasgow or New York. (I haven’t donned a sweatshirt since I got off the plane, five months ago.) But any discussion of the easiness of ex-pat existence here must begin, surely, with the lifestyle a Western salary in a developing country affords us. For all the talk of the inflation that has occurred here over the last 15-20 years, most things are still absurdly and irresistibly cheap. You can get a delicious, nutritious meal on the street for 25-30 baht -- that’s about 75 cents -- and a beer in a bar for a little more than a dollar. A perfectly good t-shirt or pair of boxers will run you about two dollars at a market, depending on your bargaining skills. Pirated CDs and DVDs go for $2.50 apiece; a movie in a lovely Cineplex theater, $2.00. It’s the one thing in Bangkok that never gets old. And while it’s true that many ex-pats aren’t incommensurately wealthy, even my farang friends who earn Thai salaries seem to coast by rather comfortably. Just go to any Starbucks or hotel bakery, where prices are comparable to what they are in the States: most of the clientele is white. Generally speaking, the only people in Bangkok who can routinely afford Venti lattes, rock concerts, and Italian dinners are tourists and ex-pats.

And then, of course, there are the women. Famous and infamous both, Thai women mostly deserve the reputation that now fully precedes them. They’re not all gorgeous. That’s a myth. (One that, in retrospect, I’m not sure why I believed before I came. I had this image of a land of genetically perfect beauty queens, which, of course, doesn’t exist anywhere. Except Sweden.) But they are all thin, which by itself separates them from half of all American women (who are also, it’s worth (chauvinistically) adding, automatically eliminated from beauty-queen-status contention by this fact alone). Thai girls also all have soft flowing hair, beautiful complexions, trendy tight-fitting clothes, and light-up-your-hour smiles made even more winning by flawless teeth. (Perfect genetics or great dental plans? I haven’t asked.) Most relevantly, Thai girls are more approachable and then more easily charmed than their fuller-of-themselves and fuller-bodied Western counterparts.

All of which accounts for the very noticeable prevalence of white-guy-Thai-girl couples in Bangkok. Walking down Sukhumvit Road and its sois, it seems as if every other farang male is accompanied by a devoted (and generally much younger) Thai female holding his hand. The men are invariably overweight, bald, and sporting European soccer club jerseys. The women are skinny and fresh-faced, if not outright beautiful. Most of these couples are the ephemeral sort -- sex tourists or single-minded ex-pats (a.k.a. “sexpats”) and the bar girls they picked up the night or the week or the month before. I, for one, find the phenomenon endlessly fascinating. You watch the scene and the questions inevitably flood in. She barely speaks a word of English. Apart from the intermittent romps in room 2802, could he possibly be enjoying this? Or, That is one of the ugliest men I’ve ever seen outside Arkansas. Could she possibly be enjoying this? (Incidentally, the answers to these two questions are, respectively: intermittent beats the hell out of never; and: does a McDonald’s counter girl like serving fries?) (Actually, in all seriousness, it appears -- emphasis on appears -- that the women really don’t mind. They flirt, giggle, and sound out complete English sentences with egalitarian élan and charm -- that is to say, regardless of the age, infirmity, or unattractiveness of their men of the moment.)

The phenomenon isn’t limited just to bar girls and their concupiscent clients. I’ve lost count of the number of perfectly respectable middle-aged men I’ve met -- in short, guys who wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be described as sex-pats -- who visited Thailand, fell in love, and ended up staying. I’ve also met guys who aren’t so much falling in love with limitedly intelligible young maidens as they are actively seeking it. I even met one who admitted it. His name was Danny. We were in the same TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) training course together. Half the class was there, ostensibly, because they had landed in Bangkok, run out of money, and now needed a way to earn some back. I think they had been pulled straight off Khao San Road by the company running the course. (“Hey you! Yeah, you with the tattoos and bead necklaces. You look English-speaking and shoeless. Wanna teach English to hot, young, impressionable, plaid-skirted Thai girls? The hiring criterion is that you speak English. …”) One Thai woman who ultimately got her certificate barely spoke English herself. I was there for the certification, the only way I could obtain my work permit. Danny, he told me, was there to meet chicks. More precisely, he was there to get his certificate so that he could teach English and meet chicks that way. But not the kind found on Cowboy or Soi Zero. He said he wanted to meet the respectable kind, and I completely believed him.

Danny was a software engineer from the Northwest who spent half the year as a private tech consultant and the other half in Thailand, as an aspiring ESL teacher and wife-hunter. He was in his early forties, moderately overweight, mildly intelligent, and personable in that slightly awkward way that makes you wish he wasn’t as outgoing as he was. He also had an awful sense of humor -- cheesy and unapologetic in its sheer dorkiness. Awful. During breaks, I would sit in the lobby and read. Danny would wander from classmate to classmate, looking for a victim more patient than the last to chat up or crack a joke to. Usually, towards the end of his wanderings he would amble up to me and ask things like, “So, you like to read?” Yes, I would answer. “I love to read too,” he would continue. “I read everything I can get my hands on.” Uh-huh, I would respond, nodding politely, and wonder, but not really, why such an avid reader spent all his free time in a constant quest for insipid small talk.

But I’m just being a dick. Basically Danny was one of those perfectly nice, generally harmless, transparently happy people you hope to God never sits next to you on an airplane. During one lunch, I found myself in the same cafeteria as Danny. He asked if he could join me, and I said yes because I couldn’t say no. We exchanged the standard one-step-beyond-introductory questions -- What do you think of the course so far? What was your life like back home? -- before inevitably arriving at the subject of how we each ended up on the other side of the world. I asked Danny why, if he had a good job back home and few prospects here, he chose to spend half of every year in Thailand. “Well, to be honest,” he responded, “I’m sort of looking for a wife.”
I said something like “I see,” or “Oh yeah?” or maybe I just raised an eyebrow and kept chewing.

“I don’t know. I don’t really like American women,” he continued. “I’m a little bit shy and they don’t seem to like me. They’re not very nice to me. I find Asian women more approachable, less snobby.”

More like less choosy, is what I was thinking. But in fact I found Danny’s childlike candor charming. His goal, along with the supporting rationale, was the same as that of so many other guys who also preferred Asian girls (or even Asian-American girls, back home). The only difference was that Danny was willing, or ingenuous enough, to admit it.

To me Danny epitomizes the Bangkok ex-pat ethos, if not the Bangkok ex-pat himself; it’s a subnation of men and women (mostly men) who stay here because -- quite simply, and to discard with euphemism -- they can’t hack it anywhere else. Can’t afford that downtown high-rise apartment you’ve always wanted? Move to Bangkok. Only wanna work twenty hours a week? Try Bangkok. American women don’t like you? Come to Thailand! And if you can’t earn your way into the upper decile or find a beautiful girl who likes you in Thailand, I’m here to tell you, buddy: it ain’t happening anywhere else either. It’d be wise to take heed the inverse of Sinatra’s famous apothegm about New York: if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. It’s a phenomenon my friends and I have dubbed the “Bangkok Trap,” and the result is a city with the biggest ex-pat population in Asia, many of whom never plan to return home. In the end, Bangkok ruins you not as New York does, with its unwinnable rat race, but rather with its accommodating languor and tantalizing combination of first-world amenities at third-world prices. It chews you up this way and then spits you out, returning you home spoiled and lazy and unfit for Western life.

Two of my fellow teachers, one of whom is approaching middle age and the other of whom is already there, are perfectly content to spin the proverbial hamster wheel as long as that wheel is here. When they arrived, they had planned to stay a few months. It’s five years later now, and here they still are, teaching test prep, chasing Thai girls, smoking weed and hitting the bars on weeknights, living the dream. Call it the Un-American Dream. Another colleague of mine, a young woman earning a salary that would barely keep her afloat in any major American city but which made her rich here, could hardly bring herself to leave despite a job that had gone sour and a group of friends that had turned on her. (That’s a story for another day’s blog.) She told me that she still considered the States her true home, but that it was hard to give up the lifestyle her salary allowed her here. She finally returned home to Chicago four months ago. Rumor has it she now plans to return. The Bangkok Trap strikes again.

If I sound a tad judgmental in my assessment of the easy life, that’s because I am. I can’t help it. It’s the neurotic Jew and Protestant work ethic in me, combining individualistic forces and rearing their collective ugly head. More to the point, it’s the American in me that I can’t seem to (or perhaps don’t want to?) shake -- that entrenched and constant desire to always be both on the move and moving forward. Ultimately it will be my ability to reconcile these two competing ideologies -- not so much East vs. West or Zen vs. Judeo-Christian as Type-A-striver vs. Type-B-backpacker-slash-beach-bum -- that will largely determine how happy I am here and how well I adjust when I get home. Should I sign on for extra hours at work, some curriculum development, which would bolster my resume, or should I spend those hours napping and reading my book out by the pool? Should I go to the beach, or should I take a more “cultural” trip, one that will fascinate and edify and make me a more interesting person, a more dangerous writer? How many more structureless days before the torpor that has overrun me like a virus becomes a character trait rather than a temporary side effect of my environment? Will I bring it home with me? Will I be spoiled, lazy, and unfit for American life, to be judged unfairly by others like me? Would I be content casting aside my Type-A-striver values, buying up some property on Ko Samui, and living out the remainder of my days in a breezy beachside bungalow, as that Vietnam vet we met last month did?

No. No was the simple conclusion I reached during my third consecutive day of Type-B doing-nothingness on the beach in January. I was enjoying my book and the thrice-a-day naps, but I needed more. More action, more conflict, more direction. More “on the move” and forward movement. The American in me craves goals and achievement -- concrete, striven-for destinations to go along with the journey. For better or worse, I need to have something to show for my time. Witness this essay, composed at the expense of time that could have been spent exploring Bangkok’s canals or talking to locals.

In December, a friend and I were lounging out by the pool at our gym. It was a sunny, breezy day -- clear-skied, about 85 degrees. And it was 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. We were both done with work for the day, and neither of us had to go back in until the following evening. I was reading The New Yorker; he was about to take a nap. “This is the life, isn’t it?” he said.

“Definitely,” I agreed. But now, as I’ve said, I’m not so sure. Yes, I worry about the consequences of so many lazy Tuesdays. On the other hand, they certainly have their appeal, don’t they? I wouldn’t mind falling into the trap for a while, as long as I had a way out.

It may not be the life, but it’s certainly an easy one.