In which God shits all over my weekend plans and I discover that my ancestors hate smiling

I was all set to visit some friends in Columbia, when I got the news that my grandparents' home had been torn up by a tornado. It wasn't as bad as it could have been; there was a substantial piece of their roof missing and all the windows had been blown out. Lots of water damage in the house and debris in the yard. Their garden shed was facing the wrong way and the wind had blown the corrugated metal structure up in to the trees. An awesome sight. The craziest thing was that the second day I was there helping to clean up, my grandparents got a phone call from someone from a town about a 45 minute drive away from their home, saying that they found a picture of them in their yard. After the storm tore off their roof, it picked up one of their old family photos and carried it 30 miles away.

My grandparents were lucky compared to some others. Just two houses down, there was a giant pile of rubble where once there was a house. The people who had lived there only survived because they had retreated to a storm shelter. Walking around the neighborhood I saw an I-beam that had been bent at a 30-degree angle and thrown to the side of the street from a house that used to stand some 50 feet back. The town's only school (this is super rural Oklahoma) was ripped in half by the storm. There was a pecan orchard that had around 85% of its trees destroyed. Nut trees generally take 30 years or more to start fruiting, so the lady who owned it has had a large part of her income irrevocably ended.

Quite sad, but compared to the 15 or so people who died in a town just 5 miles up the road, even these people were better off than some.

My mom and I stayed at the house of a relative who was described as my cousin, twice removed. It took me a while to realize that this meant she was my grandmother's cousin. This lady is big in to genealogy and tracked that side of my family back to Germany by way of New Orleans. In her house she kept our family's pictures up in a hall of portraits. I learned that my grandmother was a smoking hottie back in her day and that my grandfather was a snappy dresser, though his ears make him look like a big galoot. I took pictures of the oldest pictures.


The first thing I noticed was that my ancestors were not big in to smiling. I realize that pictures took a while to take in those days and that maintaining a smile would be hard (I myself can't hold one for the five seconds it might take even now), but generally these people can't even hold a neutral face. This is Elizabetha Margareta Radmacher, who bears in my mind a striking resemblance to the woman in Grant Wood's American Gothic. Here is a face that says "We do not tolerate laughing in this house. Now finish chopping wood so your father can finish your daily beating before it's time for church."

Here is Louis Stahler and Margarete Elizabeth Offenstein. It's a bit hard to tell from the picture I took, but only Margarete is actually photographed. Louis appears to be penciled in afterwards. I can only guess that he died before they took the picture of his wife and they had to draw a portrait of his ghost. Margarete looks like she doesn't believe the picture will work.

This character is Samuel Sanders Jr. It'd be understandable to think that he was involved with the lovely Elizabetha Radmacher, but in fact he wasn't. It'd be easy to see them together, though. The frown on his face looks like it's been chiseled there since he was 4 years old. This is the face of a man who would tell you to shoot Old Yeller and then burn all of your favorite toys after you catch a cold.


This happy couple is Peter Oliver Sanders and Elizabeth Margaret Stahler. I particularly like the pose they've taken for this picture. It was on quite a few of the old portraits in the hall. I think it was supposed to suggest a supportive and loving wife in an era/area when body contact beyond a handshake would be pornographic, but to me this calls to mind a young jedi and his evil master standing behind him with hand on shoulder.

Lucinda Harrolle and William George Washington Sanders. Lucinda had it together and looked straight at the camera, but William got mixed up and stared fixedly at a tree in the background.

Samuel Sanders III and Elizabeth Gillespie. I have no idea why there should be so many Elizabeths in my family. It continues even through my generation with my older sister Sarah Elizabeth. According to babynames.com it means "God is my Oath," which seems not just a lot to squeeze in to a name but also a pretty somber message to saddle some poor baby girl with.

That's all the pictures I took. Now that I've been accepted in to a graduate program and I don't feel so paranoid about my online life damaging my future prospects I can go ahead and post up some pictures from a book of 1800's Japanese porn that I found in a used bookstore in Osaka.

Until next time

A book suggestion

"The man behind the wheel weighed, at a rough guess, twenty-two stone and appeared to be wearing a vehicle several sizes too small. Massive hairy arms protruded from a dirty singlet like legs of mutton through a slit in a wetsuit. The enormous gut landslided between the driver's legs like a ten-kilo bag of sagging wet shit and conveniently eclipsed any view Dean had of the wheel. The steering wheel in question nestled firmly between the driver's ample thighs, happy as a Frisbee in a waterbed and gripped by Bratwurst fingers. It resembled a bread and butter plate being stress-tested by a Sumo wrestler."

from "And Even the Rats Clapped" by David Argue. Excerpt describing a taxi driver

Things in my head

Million dollar idea: Scamp Camp! From Goofus to Gallant in six weeks. We take your little rapscallions and work some discipline into them. Activities include 4:00 reveille, breaking large rocks in to smaller ones, being put in small boxes, and crafts.

I am a superhero. My powers include correctly identifying cats as boy or girl based on their face, walking on ice without slipping, and forming regular-sized pieces of soap from small fragments.

Hand jobs, nose jobs

I watched a program on the National Geographic channel about the Hubble telescope, on which they mentioned that the supernova that led to the Crab Nebula was recorded by Chinese astronomers at around 1000 AD. The only other recorded one I'm aware of (with not even the minimal Google searching to find exceptions) is the one that occurred around 0 AD making the Star of Bethlehem. They sound pretty awesome, and going by this every-1000-years estimation it seems not unlikely that I'll get to see one in my lifetime. I sure hope so.

Item 2: On Health Care.
Everybody knows that preventative health care is cheaper and more effective than treatment of disorders allowed to come to the point of crisis. Everyone also knows that the USA's health care system needs some major revamping if it's not going to drag the country in to bankruptcy. There has to be some method of health care that improves the rate of regular checkups for preventative care, especially among the aging baby boomers. In "Predictably Irrational," the author devotes a section to procrastination, mentioning an experiment he performed that gave three groups of students due dates for four papers over the course of a semester that were either outwardly dictated (by the professor) to be evenly spaced over the course of the semester, outwardly dictated to be all due at the end of the semester, or freely decided but binding and enforced by grade penalties for each day late. The students who decided their own dates did fine, the ones who could turn in at any day up until the last day of the semester did worse, and the ones with the due dates dictated to be evenly spaced did the best. In other words, those who were given the freedom to procrastinate on all their papers ended up doing so and were eventually graded worse than those with due dates decided by their benevolent dictator.

You can apply this message to preventative health care. Checkups are a hassle, but perhaps if they were mandatory then people would take care of them with more regularity than if we were given the freedom to put them off indefinitely. Therefore, I propose a national health plan that one can opt in or out of, but imposes regular checkups on its members with a monetary penalty for failure to make them on time.

Supporting this, but requiring too much typing for me to summarize here to my satisfaction, is the work of this guy, who finds that people are indeed happier by means of a "psychological immune system" when terrible things happen to us beyond our control. Granted, in his book he finds that we are more unhappy about small irritations, which checkups might turn out to be, than world-shaking tragedies, but I think the line I'm thinking in is clear. Just as business and the financial markets need some regulation, people's habits might need some too.

Somewhere in my legions of readers there'll probably be someone of influence in the house of Obama to get this thing moving.

Election, self-reflection

I was reading a transcript of the Larry King interview with John McCain, and something occurred to me when McCain made the comment that the last president to win the election while still losing Ohio was John Kennedy. He was saying it in a way that was justifying his heavy campaigning there, but I kind of wonder if he is misunderstanding the role that the swing states play. It occurred to me that there might not really be a connection between how much time and money is spent in a particular state and how many popular votes one receives, that instead it might be that the reason that you can't win an election without winning Ohio is because Ohio reflects the national mood. Obama is apparently wiping the floor with McCain right now, and even Texas is not guaranteed to go Republican now. If I'm right then Obama will win Ohio just as he's winning all those other states, whether or not he's spent a lot of time there. I say this while knowing that the candidate with the most money almost always wins the election, and since Obama has enough money to make a Scrooge McDuck style silo of gold coins to swim in the fact that he's winning might be merely a reflection of the money he's got to spend. But I think that all the money he's getting is another reflection of the national mood, that so many people want him to win that lots of people are giving him a lot.

We forget almost everything that we experience, and commuicate or record even less than what we remember, so I think everything is a lot more mixed up than we like to admit. It makes me really bad at arguments since I have a hard time convincing myself that I'm absolutely right and spend most of my time trying to convince the other guy that they aren't as right as they think they are. Considering that, and that I freely admit that I don't follow election statistics as closely as those who are paid to do so, I will freely admit and actually suspect that I am probably missing something very obvious here. But at the same time as I say that, I can't help but think that while I might be completely wrong, the people running the election might be going about their job in the wrong way.

The above paragraphs are a fine example of writing that I wish to stop. When I write naturally I throw in a lot of "I"s and "me"s. I'm not sure if it's because so much of my writing lately is for cover letters and purpose statements for jobs and graduate school applications, respectively, or updating people on my life through emails, or writing things out to smooth out my internal monologue from a nebulous cloud of vaguely connected ideas to something more solid. I'd like to think that it's a reflection of the constant knowledge that what I experience is a tiny slice of reality and therefore subject to misjudgement and an inexact memory. As I mentioned above, I'm aware that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, and I think that my nonvariance from the first person is a result of the knowledge that everything I think I know is eventually subjective. Even if something is laid out in a boring black-and-white line graph, the source of the data, the organization's intent in collecting it, and the methods of data collection all have to be considered along with it. A truly comprehensive collection and consideration of all the variables involved in any set of data or opinion can never be assembled, and knowing this I feel compelled to throw in lots of qualifiers to any statement I make.

It's kind of a positive spin, and viewed in this light I think it makes my writing more solid than others', but I am also aware that it makes me seem self-interested and self-doubting. I can't help but wonder if it discourages people from reading anything I write to completion. If I read something I want it to be something relating to me, after all, and someone reading my writing gets constant reminders that it's not about them. I'm not sure how to fix it without ignoring the little voice that tells me that I shouldn't make unqualified statements of fact when nobody knows the unqualified truth. If anybody knows the unqualified truth, then do let me know.

Science and shit

Teaching English to preschoolers and hanging around with non-native speakers has taught me to examine my own language use. I’ve realized that I have two really bad habits. I slur my words together so that the final sound in one word tends to sneak into the beginning of a word that begins with vowel, for example “I’m going out” turns in to “I’m goin gout.” If there’s a hard sound, I tend to drop it. I want to be more precise, but actively thinking about what I’m saying makes me 1) sound unnatural and English Teachery, and 2) probably more restrained in what I say since it slows me down and forces me to think about what I’m about to say. I can’t figure out why exactly speaking more clearly and thinking about what I’m going to say is a a bad thing, but for some reason it turns me off.

The second habit is that I use far more profanity than is usually called for. I’m sure there are more words that I can use for emphasis than “very” and “fucking,” and I intend to find out what they are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I speak because I suspect it will be a big factor in my upcoming interview for a teaching job with Nova, the once-giant, then fallen, and now rising up again English teaching giant of Japan. It’s a job that is mostly to help me stay with my fiancee until finally her American visa is approved and we can live happily ever after in suburbian USA, but while I’ve been looking for jobs in Japan for the meantime I’ve also been firing apps all over the globe for something that lets me use my science background but outside of the lab. I discovered that lab work is tedious and shitty and boring, and after years of experience I can’t help but think that the only reason undergraduates are allowed to work in them is because the robots to do the work are too expensive or haven’t been made yet. Anyway, I don’t want to work in a lab anymore, and between actually applying for jobs and continuing my Japanese studies, I have been quietly imagining what it might be like to actually be interviewed for one of the jobs that I actually want.

That leads me to more science. I am an extremely lazy person, so if I was someone hiring for the positions that I want, I would probably ask a couple of throwaway/character analysis questions like “what do you see as the future of medicine,” or something like that. Judging by my progress thusfar, I don’t have much of a chance of getting these jobs, so I am going to share my secret answers with you.

Just so you know, I’m applying mostly in the world of information retrieval for big databases and stuff that make papers accessible for smarter people than me.

It’s going to go very, very fast. Education inflation (a painful subject for me, I kind of resent that I can’t get a job with a supermajor like biochemistry and wish that someone had told me early on that I really need to add an -engineering suffix to my major to be in demand) means that people are going in to the job force with a lot of knowledge. Lots of these people are crossover computer-whatever people who are going to harness increasingly intelligent, untiring, and independent computers to do the “grunt thinking” (like taking raw data and churning it through some of the easier but time-intensive calculations for the most obvious conclusions) for them.

There are two technologies to watch over the next 10-15 years, long enough to make a real difference but far enough that the business-educated folks can’t touch them just yet. There’s Dr. Craig Ventner, a guy who has a kind of weird place in my respectometer for kind of stealing half of the data from the government-financed Human Genome Project and setting up his own company to start working on sequencing lots and lots of different creatures’ genomes. He’s since then done a lot of amazing things, the biggest and most exciting one being that of making significant steps on making customized life. Still in its early phases, it will before too long result in cells that people can build with their own experiments in mind. People doing proteomics or genomics or toxicology or the laaaaarge majority of life science will be able to reduce all of the nasty side-effecting stuff out of their cells and work one piece at a time to give them more predictable and stable systems. Not Real Live Cells, but though you can’t quite call it in vivo I think it will merit a new Latin phrase’s introduction into the common academic lexicon. In synthetica I guess. I don’t know Latin, but that feels right. His work also will lead to easy-to-control bioremediators with off switches. Good for the environment for several reasons.

There’s also some other guys, whose names I don’t know and the source for which I don’t care to google right now, who have just gotten diabetic mice to switch some of their cells to insulin-producing ones. This will, eventually, spread out to incredible tools for non-infectious diseases (diabetes for example) that will, I guarantee you, freak out the pharmacy industry like nothing else has. This means that the pharma guys are going to have to watch reeeeeally carefully what happens to the group of scientists who have done this and those who are influenced by them, and either buy them up really fast or work superdoubletime to catch up. It also means they are going to have to find a way to make the currently less-profitable but more prevalent diseases profitable.

And that brings me to the less-profitable but more prevalent diseases. I saw on one of the TED talks a speech by a guy who was promoting fairly traditional control measures against malaria. Malaria is spread by mosquitos, and in its more virulent form leaves you sick and bedridden for quite a while before it finishes you off. Thinking from the eye of the disease, he realized that the form it takes hijacks the bedridden state by making the victims vulnerable to mosquitos biting the immobile patient, then the mosquitos spread it around more. The disease LOVES people when they’re sick. But if you can keep mosquitos from biting people in bed, by putting some nets around the places where people sleep, the strains that keep people in bed won’t be as successful in reproducing. Put some nets around, and the strains that don’t make you so nasty, that let you move around freely without severe symptoms, are more successful. By keeping the poor saps that are super sick from being bitten, they promote the less deadly strains of the virus. Disease not cured, but god damn if that isn’t an improvement. He did something similar with diarrhea in South America.

So there you have it. Anybody want to hire me?

My crappy computer crapped out on me

Which means I lost alllll my old papers, all my music, all my software, and my computer back home crapped out at the same time and my backup CDs for the software are all in America. I got my lappy fixed (in one day - here's a well-earned shout out to Shinsaibashi's Apple store) but it is a hollow shell of the amazing machine it once was. I'm in the process of trying to get back what I once had, but the heartbreak was great and I don't think I will ever love a computer again.

What I've been doing since the tragedy -

Using my fiancee's computer. I was just getting used to all the weird key placements and now I have to re-train my muscle memory so I don't have to look at the keyboard for the punctuation keys.

Looking for jobs! I really want to find something that calls for a scientific background without being a lab tech. I'd really like something in writing, and I've seen some very juicy-looking ones that call for translating academic language into something more accessible. However all these writing jobs need sample writing, and though I was a "science correspondant" for a student newspaper, I've lost all of my articles that I wrote for them with the hard drive failure of my old computer in America. Bad luck for sure.

Working at the preschool. I wrangle kids and try to keep them from fighting each other while hoping that they pick up English when I speak it at them. Frequently when I ask them a question, they just stare back up at me with the biggest, cutest eyes in the world with a face that tells me they either didn't understand a word or are too scared of me to answer. One of the kids' dads is the Japanese sales representative for Independent Fabrications and he said he'd let me on one of the demo bikes, which is exciting.

Today, though, I've been doing none of those things. Everything has taken a side seat to figuring out who left me this mystery message on my phone last night. What a mystery! I have no idea whose number it is, though it's a Japanese cell phone number, and don't recognize the voice at all. Japanese phones have a nifty infra-red thing that makes exchanging information effortless so I am almost certain that everyone I've given my number to has given me theirs in turn. The caller addresses me by my first name, and then tells me to answer the phone in a slightly disappointed, slightly aggrieved tone, as if we had agreed to get in touch at that time (about 1:00 am here) and I failed to be there for him. It's a guy, it's an American, and he knows me and my phone number. Who is it!?! I called the number back after listening to the message a few more times, but it was 5:30 in the morning at that time (living with Keiko means I keep kind pretty much the same hours as her) and I got no answer.

Mystery man, if you're reading this, reveal yourself! Also, sorry for calling you at 5:30 in the morning. You were probably sleeping, and if you're like me you turned off the ringer and went back to sleep without waking up.