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Are there tv shows that are doing insightful commentary like this these days? I need something worth hulu-ing.

Today was a totally mundanely awesome day of humans. I met Camellia and her brand new son Asa for Tartine breakfast at 9 and we had a nice walk around dolores park. I went down to Stanford on the caltrain to study at Green and hang out with Pat and Davie before Pat is off to Boston. On the train platform, I ran into Scott Klemmer and chatted a brief bit. Then Kenneth spotted me and came to join me in the bike car and I got to catch up. (Previous two times I saw Kenneth were at Coffee Bar and Ritual. Neighborhoodiness seems to be our new m.o.) I then hit green library with my UC reciprocal lending library card and had a really productive 4 hours of journaling, lit reviewing, and thinking about the india design methods research. (Well, I was supposed to be reading stuff for this weekend's STS workshop so nothing is ever perfect in prodcutivityland for me.) Green Library was quiet, ridiculously posh with those desks that have built in power and good chairs (omg private school I didn't realize the poshness until public school), and a tree and blue sky were just out the window. Pat and I then walked to Fraiche and I took in the numerous anti-skateboarder traffic management "improvements" that had happened since I graduated. Davie joined us as we had frozen yogurt. Pat told me that Old Union now serves chicken fingers. This made me greatly excited and I looked forward to eating those as I'd had breakfast at 9 and was starving by 4, obviously. I ended up thwarted as Old Union was closed so Davie and I went to Zao for dinner. Afterwards, we ended up meeting a very very talkative man who insisted on telling us about the wireless mice we were investigating at the Apple Store. He wouldn't stop, sort of in that not-picking-up-on-cues-like-"I really want a wired mouse" way. Then, Davie and I went to the cowboy fry's which is ALWAYS epic even if nothing happens. There, Davie was looking for a laser pointer. The employee who showed us the laser pointer responded to a crack I made about finding a pointer that would put people's eyes out by telling me that pepper spray would be more effective and that he'd bought his girlfriend pepper spray because her previous boyfriend had raped her. (WHAT?!?!!? Yes, he said that.) Davie commented that my anthropological ways seem to attract a lot of randomass conversations. Today, SOMETHING was attracting random convos. Maybe women wandering circuits always attracts comment. Eventually, I made it back to the Caltrain for an uneventful ride of reading those STS workshop PDFs. At the end of the ride, I stood in the northernmost car staring at the tracks speeding under the train lit by train lights when one of the conductors came and had a chat, opening with the observation that my black ballet flats were not typical cycling shoes. (I was looking beauty queen with my helmet on.) I was weirded out thinking he was hitting on me but it turns out he grew up in Long Beach where I'm moving next year and he'd been into anthro as an undergrad. We had a nice chat and didn't exchange names.

Things I didn't get to do tonight: Flashdance in honor of MJ, Ambidextrous launch party, seeing Shawn S

In Sex Work: In Bed With the Religious Right, author Dagmar Herzog talks to an interviewer about how the sexual politics of the evangelical right are both repressive and graphic at the same time. He had previously researched Holocaust-era germany and noticed a parallel in how Nazis were quite condoning of sex for their own kind but portrayed jewish sex as dirty and vulgar. Herzog noticed a parallel, pointing out:
"So many saw only the puritanical and homophobic side of the religious right coin; they didn’t see the Christian vibrator Web sites or the detailed evangelical sex advice manuals."

The following also resonated deeply with me, pointing out the futility of cataloging evangelical hypocrisies. Time to lay off Bristol Palin?

Another big misconception is that the best way to resist conservatism is to expose conservative hypocrisy. One of the most important things I learned in researching evangelical sex advice and therapy culture (which is a multibillion dollar industry) is how crucial exhibitionist, preemptive confessionalism has become. Evangelical advice-givers like to brag about the wild promiscuity of their youth, and their many adulterous misdeeds, or to confess in anguish the abortions they forced on girlfriends or the porn they once so frequently indulged in, before moving on to advise others how to get onto the straight and narrow. It’s titillating. But it also preempts in advance any traditional liberal strategy of muckraking exposé of conservative incoherence. There’s nothing to expose; the sins have all been luxuriously confessed.

most interesting internet thing I've read in a while

Bidoun Magazine is "Art & Culture from the Middle East" but actually written in New York. This piece captured a lot of dimensions of things i've been thinking and seeing, but with more vivid language and authority than my speculations. If you think about "doing good" "innovatively" for the "world's poor" and "putting your skills to work," DEFINITELY read this.

If you walk into any African market, you see chaos. Things tend not to cross over from the formal side of an African city to the informal side. The two speak very different languages. Often, the formal side, out of its good nature or its panicked guilt, out of a feeling that the giant world of the urban poor is too pathetic to tolerate, pins its hopes and dreams on some revolutionary product. Biogas. A windup radio. A magic laptop. These pure products are meant to solve everything.

They almost always fail, but they satisfy the giver. To the recipients, the things have no context, no relationship to their ideas of themselves or their possibilities. A great salesman can spark a dialogue with you; in a matter of minutes, you come to make your own sense of his product, fitting it into your imagination, your life. You lead, the salesman follows. Whereas a pure product presents itself as a complete solution; a product built to serve the needs of the needy assumes the needy have measured themselves exactly as the product has measured them.

...

There are few useful "development models" for genuinely selfstarting people. I am sure the One Laptop per Child initiative will bring glory to its architects. The IMF will smile. Mr Negroponte will win a prize or two or ten. There will be key successes in Rwanda; in a village in Cambodia; in a small, groundbreaking initiative in Palestine, where Israeli children and Palestinian children will come together to play minesweeper. There will be many laptops in small, perfect, NGO-funded schools for AIDS orphans in Nairobi, and many earnest expatriates working in Sudan will swear by them.

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Friends not in india also feel free to comment.

So many indian stereotype jokes with the "Jai Ho" playing while colbert dances faux-bhangra as "jai did it" flashes in fake devnagri along the bottom of the screen. Monkey gods sort of a cheap shot too. But I think the ironic call center character at the end is brilliant.

Study finds that turmeric inhibits the build up of fat tissue in mice
This, and a couple of days of gastroenteritis, are the only explanations for why I didn't gain a ton of weight in India since my exercise went down to nothing (rickshaw and cars everywhere, hard to walk) and the food was plentiful.

While I was in India, the elections were very much part of daily life -- the news covered it constantly, tv networks showed PSAs asking the (middle class, newswatching, and somewhat electorally disenfranchised*) populace to vote, and in villages and smaller towns, trucks with flowers and loudspeakers rolled around broadcasting party messages. Elections shaped decisions about travel since police often stopped cars traveling to smaller towns and villages to check for bribe money (I was in a car one day that was stopped 5 times). Election day is supposed to be a work holiday (though the firm I was at worked). And alcohol doesn't get sold the day before the election because the authorities want to prevent alcohol-facilitated electoral disruptions and violence. After all the build up I witnessed, I was anxious to know what happened.

I turned on NPR this morning on my way to Long Beach for a meeting with my advisor. I'd seen someone reading an NY times that had a picture of Sonia Gandhi and something about "landslide" election results in the bottom corner.

The election coverage was reduced to just a few minutes that didn't even name the party that won -- I'm assuming it was Congress, the Gandhi/Nehru party. The winning party was described only as the one supporting "economic reform" which is code for trade liberalization and loosening of regulations on global finance. The analyst quoted said that India is often criticized for being too slow to "reform" and that with "capital comes in knowledge" -- we're left to make the inference that this will all lead to goodness and apple pie (or rice for everyone ESPECIALLY the middle and upper classes, as the hope here might be).

I was shocked. Economic "reform" and liberalization certainly isn't what I experienced the election being battled on, at least overtly. Religious "communal" conflict was the most overt issue that charged the battle between Congress and the BJP, the two major parties. To grossly oversimplify, the people I was hanging around was seen as a Hindu nationalist party that worked to stoke the difficulties of the poor into electoral passion through veiled anti-Muslim speeches (BJP's Varun Gandhi said "we'll cut the throats of the muslims" during a village speech, getting himself thrown in jail). Modi, a wildly popular BJP candidate, was suspected by many to have turned a blind eye during the 2002 post-Godhra riots in which thousands of Muslims were killed. And the Congress jettisoned a several-term MP candidate Tytler because of ongoing insinuations (though he'd been officially cleared) that he'd helped lead anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination 20 years ago. Even among the globally laboring middle class, where I was situated during my 7 weeks there, secularism and government corruption were the things I heard worries about -- not more economic liberalization.

Given this, and the fact that India is 70% rural voter turnouts in cities are often lower, I was shocked to hear NPR basically summarize the election as a mandate for economic liberalization -- free trade, low taxes, open doors for global companies.

I was even more shocked to hear them summarize liberalization as foreign capital brings foreign knowledge brings goodness since liberalization and open capital borders in Africa during the 90s have been a spectacular failure, supporting the growth of corrupt governments who let oil and mineral companies set extractive shops that let them use foreign workers and technology to take the natural resources and run. (The most stable, democratic governments in Africa are the ones that did *not* open their doors to trade reform. Source: Gupta and Ferguson, "Global Shadows"))

And giving the whole thing a poetic conclusion was that during the newsbreak, I heard over the speaker "NPR is sponsored by Monsanto..." -- Monsanto being one of the companies whose nonrenewable seeds is partly causing the debt traps a rash of Indian farmers were escaping by suicide.

*the middle class seems somewhat disenfranchised as far as I can tell because I heard lots of people talking about how they felt that there were no good choices to vote for, that the politicians basically diverted resources to the poorer constituencies just before elections resulting in frequent power outages in more middle class areas, and by the fact that voter registration requirements made it seem very difficult for people who move their residences every few years to get registered. (Of those who had recently finished college, graduate school, or just changed jobs and cities, only the most diligent among them seemed to have managed to get registered to vote.)

Or at least I thought I would. I mean, ovens start at 140, right?

I got into bed and thought just now, it's cold. Let me use a blanket. I didn't use a blanket or even a sheet to sleep in Delhi except when trying to protect myself from mosquitos. Then seeing the weather forecast drove home that I'm not in Delhi anymore.

I <3 gay west point grad former army arabic translators. (This guy isn't the only one I know.)

The video below is an update about "don't ask don't tell" today. According to another formy army arabic translator (and I've read this elsewhere as well), more than 58 arabic linguists have been booted out of the army since "don't ask, don't tell." Arabic? Gee, who needs to communicate with Arabs in the government?

Jet lagged and should be sleeping or reading at my parents' house.

As I do exactly the wrong thing and indulge my jet lagged wakefulness at 5am by catching up on Andy Samberg's Lonely Island, I just realized that one of the things that consistently delights me about them is that a lot of their stuff pokes fun at and deliberately fucks with masculine stereotypes: premature ejaculation in "Jizz in my Pants," junior Donald Trump wannabes getting inarticulately excited in "I'm on a Boat!", wooing Ahmadinejad (though there are no gays in Iran) in the piano-ballad "Iran so far," and making Natalie Portman into a PCP-addled genderbending nightmare in her SNL rap.

From Natalie's epic rap:
Chris Parnell: "Damn, Natalie. You one crazy chick."
Natalie: "Shut the fuck up and suck my dick!"

Even "Dick in the Box" with the ridiculousness of the "my dick is a present to you," even though that very idea comes up over and over again in viagra ads and stories like "semen makes women happy" (BBC).

Just props to Andy, the self-declared feminist:

They're pissed that carrie prejean posed "partially nude" when she was 17 I will admit that my first feeling was one of incredible schadenfreude. Of course the girl standing up for het-only marriage -- the same movement that talks about the risks to our children's innocent ears should gay marriage be legalized -- be herself a kid sexually exposing herself. Oh, the delicious new manifestation of the always present irony to these moral majority people. (Saving yourself for marriage by keeping to oral sex and anal another example of this.)

But another irony of all this is that the pageant requires people to actually pose partially nude -- isn't that what a bikini is? So why are some instances of it REQUIRED when others are prohibited?

These people probably don't know the bird.

The ball drops and you can draw lines that it bounces off of. It is almost like an improvisational rube goldberg machine. The sounds it makes are pretty too so if you can get a structure set up, you can just listen to it for a bit -- especially if you like blips like I do.

BallDroppings found on the Processing website