Friday Action Figure: Silver Surfer

I saw "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" last weekend and as I expected, I was disappointed. This did not come as a surprise of course, it has practically become a tradition with Marvel comics to allow Hollywood to pervert and stupid-ize the story lines of their best heroes. Honestly though, the movie story line remained vastly more faithful to the original comic-book story than did the most recent Spiderman flick. The main thing I didn't like about the Silver Surfer movie was the ease with which the Fantastic Four came up with a way to negate the Silver Surfer's power. The Silver Surfer is a near-god-like being, and while his powers have been neutralized on occasion, it has always taken much more extreme effort. With such power, the conflicts that were usually faced by the Silver Surfer were almost never physical but usually moral or philosophical, which is what made the Silver Surfer series so fucking rad. Of course, Hollywood just knows that America is too stupid to appreciate the subtleties of a good morality play, so instead they screw around with the story line so that it fits the same-old vapid action movie formula. I would have really rather they focused the movie on the moral lessons learned by the noble yet amoral Silver Surfer character. Instead it was mostly a slap-stick superhero movie with awkward moments of seriousness shoe-horned in.

That said though, the movie was leagues better than the committee-written story sleazed on to us in the form of Spiderman 3. Ugh, what a piece of trash.

Next up: Transformers.

The newest twist...

...in the saga of my myriad diseases is that I'm not allowed to go to work. I hadn't mentioned it before because it was so minor, but the short fever I had developed from the Lyme disease as well as the minor sunburn from the antibiotic-induced photosensitivity resulted in my first-ever outbreak of shingles. For those who don't know, shingles are caused by the same virus that caused your outbreak of chickenpox when you were a kid (side note: chickenpox is not caused by a pox virus at all, but by a herpes virus called Herpes zoster, as opposed to Herpes simplex which causes genital herpes and facial cold sores). Chickenpox works essentially the same way as any herpes virus, that is, once you get it, it stays with you for the rest of your life, occasionally manifesting as outbreaks of pustules. With chickenpox, the outbreaks are called "shingles" and they usually only occur when your immune system is being challenged (like from an acute case of Lyme disease) or when it is being compromised (like from old age or chemotherapy). What many people don't realize though, is that you cannot catch shingles from someone else. You can only catch shingles from yourself, and even then, only if you had already had chickenpox (again, shingles is literally the re-emergence of the exact same virus that caused your childhood chickenpox - not just the same species of virus, but the exact same virus, laying dormant all those years, waiting for an opportunity). Having said that however, someone who has shingles can give a case of chickenpox to a chickenpox-naive person, but only if the chickenpox-naive person rubbed up against the skin sores of someone with shingles. Someone with shingles can't just cough on a chickenpox-naive person and give them chickenpox (in the way someone with chickenpox can). Is that all clear?

Anyway, my shingles sores are restricted to a 3x3 sq. inch section of my lower back. Despite my limited ability to infect people however, there is still that small risk that my lower back might be accidentally rubbed by the mucous membranes of some adult who has never had chickenpox or who has such a severely damaged immune system that they are vulnerable to chickenpox re-infection. With that in mind, my company apparently has a policy of not letting people with shingles come to work, so I was sent home yesterday (after I casually mentioned my spot of shingles to our HR director). I can't come back until I can produce a doctor's note saying that I am no longer contagious. I made a call to my doc yesterday and today, so hopefully this will all be resolved soon. Staying home is nice and all, but I've already taken most of the vacation time I need this year.

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Greece pictures are up!

So go take a look.

Abolish of the Fed?

So it seems that Ron Paul has introduced legislation to abolish the fed. I've heard only a few arguments about why this might be a good idea, so I did some more homework on it. I'm wondering what my economics-nerd and policy-wonk readers think of this?

Athens!

I need to start this post by apologizing to Rhodes. I was really angry while I was writing about Rhodes and I just didn't give the place a fair shake. Between the Lyme disease and the crazy photosensitivity I have from the antibiotics, the sprained ankle, and somehow losing 200 euro, I just needed to be pissed off at something, and the best thing I could come up with was Rhodes (and Greece in general). This is of course irrational, as all of the above could or would have happened to me no matter where in the world I might have been. I really ought to have been thankful for certain things. For instance, I have now had first-hand experience with medical care in a country with nationalized medicine. When it was apparent to me that I had a Lyme disease, i had a choice to go to either a public clinic or a private one. I wasn't picky, and just went to the first one we could find which happened to be a private clinic with a orthopedist and a dermatologist. I was expecting that I would have to rack up about 500$ or so on my credit card for private care, but at that point I was desperate and didn't feel like inquiring about whether I would be treated at a public clinic (as a non-tax-paying foreigner). So, after the diagnosis was done and the prescription was written, I asked, "How much do I owe you and do you take Visa?" He replied, "The charge is 60 euro, and I can take Visa but I don't usually, it will take a moment." I dazedly responded to this by handing him 60 euro in cash and walked out of the clinic to go next door to the pharmacy, where I purchased my 10 day, prescribed supply of doxycyline antibiotic for, drum roll please, 6.35 euro. That's it. For 66.35 euro and about 20 minutes of my time, I had a diagnosis and prompt treatment for Lyme disease from a private clinic. Nationalized health care is obviously putting pricing pressure on the private clinics. I am supposing that the private clinics would provide free or nominally costly care for the trade-off of a potentially longer wait, and I also suppose that there is a certain income tax burden that must be shouldered by Greek citizens, but fuck it. I still think it is totally worth it. In this instance, I am quite happy to tolerate government price controls. Besides, if highly skilled, one-of-a-kind, so-called "specialist", super-doctors really want to make the crazy money, they can move their practice to the Cayman Islands and still see all their same patients. For routine, basic care though, I think this nationalization scheme is the way to go. I think capitalism works best for goods and services where demand may be elastic (like televisions and Internet access), but for inelasticly demanded things (like food and drugs) I really think that some kind of government regulation of prices or distribution is the best way to go. The reason I say so, is because people will pay any price for life, and I think it just creates to damn much potential for predatory trade practices. I think that is the right way to characterize the USA's current, mostly-capitalized system of providing health care - predatory. It has gotten to the point where it is starting to look like war profiteering, except in the "war on cancer". (Most of that above diatribe was for Tom and Spike's benefit, have at it boys.)

Anyway, back on the subject. I don't feel particularly compelled to talk much about Athens, since we already did all the Athens touristy-stuff at the beginning of this vacation, and because we just got off the plane, and because we intend to just spend our last few days here just shopping for knick-knacks and chilling out.

Instead I think I'll see if I can continue on and give Rhodes a better review. The only other really interesting archaeological destination (besides the city of Rhodes itself) is the Acropolis at Lindos. I know I mentioned it before, but it really is worth a visit. The hike up the plateau is a decent one if you are looking for a work-out, but if you aren't, they have donkey rides for 5 euro which are a ton of fun. I say so only with a slight sense guilt about it though, as my particular steed was clearly straining under the weight of my fat ass, particularly on the last switch-back. The view from the top of the acropolis is really sweet.

The old town of Rhodes (in Greek it is "Rhodos") is packed in behind some well-preserved walls, and being inside them among the various shops and restaurants felt a little bit like living in an alternate dimension, where architectural advances were frozen in the dark ages but electronics and chemistry had still advanced enough to produce cheap digital watches, tacky sequined T-shirts, and tons of plastic refrigerator magnets. In the center of the old town is the "Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes", but for some bullshit reason ("an administrative conference") it was closed on Monday when we went to visit it. However, there was also a clock-tower nearby and this was open, so we paid our fee and went to the top to survey the old-city and beyond. It was only from this vantage did I notice how many ancient (and I suspect mostly unused and purely historical) mosques are in Rhodes. I had read about how Rhodes was under the control of the Ottoman empire for some 400 years (until around 1912 when the Italians invaded), and so it was obvious to me that many remnants of Islamic culture should remain, but seeing it really made me connect to that fact a little more and now I have a slew of other questions regarding the history of this place (for instance, why do all the guidebooks I read here refer to the period between 1523 and 1912 as a time of "decline and darkness and oblivion" for Rhodes? surely something good must have come from Ottoman occupation?) On a less complex level, I also noticed that many (all of?) the mosques had not only crescent moon symbols but also stars decorating their characteristic towers. I understand the whole symbolism of the crescent moon in Islam, but I hadn't previously known about the stars, which were incidentally, the exact same shape as the stars of our own American flag. It had me wondering if there may be a connection between the star symbols of our flag and the star symbols of Islam, and if Muslims feel on some level like the "stars and stripes" and what it represents somehow co-opt the symbols of Islam? Readers? Any thoughts? Might it be anything like how fundamentalist Christians would act if the porn industry started using crosses instead of "XXX" as their identifying symbol? I'm not trying to imply that this overlapping symbol-use might be the root of all east-west tensions. I'm just wondering if Muslims have noted this overlap and if any even care about it.

OK that's enough for now. I'm glad to back back in a happy mood again.

Opa!

Update June 22, 2007: Wikipedia and a couple of other sources have some good info regarding the star and crescent musings.

Rhodes!

Uck. Rhodes has some nice beaches, a ton of exactly identical restaurants, and a cool acropolis about an hour's drive away from the main town. It also has a cool medieval castle in the center of a well-preserved old city. Unfortunately, I don't really feel like talking about all that right now. Instead I feel like bitching. This vacation has been a real fucking bitch for me and I want to come home now. We weren't more than two hours in Rhodes before I slipped on a sidewalk and sprained my ankle, hard. It hurt so bad I actually saw starts and retched. I've never hurt so bad it made me almost-puke. I managed to find an orthopedic store which sold the kind of hard-core ankle braces I have at home and that is getting me through. Of course, the whole photo-sensitivity thing seems to be getting worse, to the point where even a brief flash of direct sunlight on my forearms feels like hot acid. Despite all these setbacks though, I was determined to soldier on and try to enjoy this vacation as much as possible. So we went to the acropolis at Lindos, where we rented ponies to do the hiking for us. It was a fun visit and afterwards we decided to hit the beach for some snorkeling at a small, beautiful cove just below the acropolis. Somewhere between paying for our ponies on the way down and getting back to our hotel after snorkeling and the drive back, I lost about 200 euros in cash from the front pocket of my shorts. Either they fell out in a bundle when were moving clothes around and to and from the car to the beach to the car to the hotel, or one of us accidentally left a door unlocked and someone broke into our car in the beach parking lot. Can't be sure which but either way I was (and still am a little) pissed. To top it all off Chris tells me that she got a call from our house/dog sitter saying that the heavy rains last week leaked into our basement and got our downstairs rug wet. Also, one of neighbors left an anonymous note at our door telling us to mow our lawn because a house was going up for sale next week, with references to "trailer trash" etc. With all the other crap I needed to get done before I left for vacation I didn't get a chance to mow my lawn (and it needed it) so I can imagine it does look shitty, but there is no need to be mean about it.

Anyone in the mood to do me the favor of mowing just my front lawn today or tomorrow? 20 minutes work and I'll pay you 30$.

Sigh.

Santorini!

OK. Back on track. Chris and I arrived in Santorini yesterday, an island that is really the ridge of a caldera, the largest neighbor of some other islands forming other parts of the caldera, all surrounding one more island, which is of course the tip of the massive volcano itself. When I say massive I really mean it too. Pictures aren't going to do justice to the sheer scale of this place. Imagine cliffs as tall and steep as those of the Grand Canyon, but dropping to an ocean. Now imagine a crater as large as Baltimore, and then fill it with seawater. Think about that, imagine being able to drive out to the mountain cliffs of Fells point, and from there being able to see across the sea to the mountain cliffs of Pimlico Park. Oh and the sunsets here are famous for a reason. Our hotel is built right into the side of the caldera cliffs like some modern version of an ancient Hopi village. Apparently the current residents kept the architectural traditions of the ancient Minoans going. It made me wonder if the Hopi had not been mostly wiped out by the whiteys if they too would be carving 5-star hotels into the sides of the Grand Canyon for visiting Seminole tourists.

Anyway, Chris and I decided that today was going to be a day of fun in the sun at the beach, just lazing around. I spent most of that time under the umbrella of course, but for a while I did lay out into the sun and attempted to get a light burn. I managed to accomplish my goal (a light pink which quickly faded to off-white, as opposed to my normal freckled alabaster), but it seems I am among the 10% of those who experience the doxycycline side effect of photosensitivity. It was a remarkable feeling actually, everywhere the sun touched my body felt like someone had just rubbed fresh Ben-Gay on my skin, like fire but less dramatic. It wasn't so much uncomfortable or painful as it was just intensely, distractingly, odd. Speaking of Lyme disease, I think I am going to live. My angry rash seems in rapid retreat and the antibiotic isn't too bad on my system.

Other random bits I haven't mentioned in previous posts:

The SCUBA diving in Mykonos was a disappointment honestly. The water is cold enough to require a wetsuit (which isn't a downside really). The water is clear as crystal and 100-150 foot visibility was the norm for the day. However, I expect that all this great visibility is due in large part to a severe lack of nutrients in the water, which of course prevents things from growing, which in turn obviates the existence of any large, diverse, or interesting aquatic animals. All I saw were some big schools of minnows, a handful of some weird spiny worms, and a little bit of an octopus. The octopus would have been the highlight except for the fact that he was doing a very good job of hiding himself, so I only saw a flash of tentacle and beak. What a tease. Judging by the size of his tentacle and suckers, I'm guessing his head was about half the size of mine.

All the most popular beaches in Mykonos have adjoining clubs. Literally. It just goes straight from sand to dance floor to bar. At around 5 pm, the DJ starts up and if you happened to have been sleeping on the beach, too damn bad, its time to dance fucker. I actually really thought this was cool as hell. Unfortunately, they play mostly shitty diva house, but some of it was tolerable enough for me to want to go on a Friday or Saturday night when the shit is really hopping so I might get to see how all those topless sunbathing chicks dance at night. *note to my wife: you are the hottest dancing chick I have seen topless and you know it*

Athens is a very cosmopolitan kind of city. Like New York or LA, everyone is beautiful and young, or selling something to them. The room we had stayed in was postage stamp sized and yet was considered "top shelf" and expensive. For the same amount of money we are living like kings in the islands, although our bed in our room here in Santorini is hard as a rock and in Mykonos, the bed was actually two singles pushed together. The same was true with our room in Athens and at one point we started to think this was some strange Greek-Orthodox cultural thing. Alas no, it is just a Greece thing I think.

Lessee, what else? I can say I have finally settled into my vacation stride. I know when I start to forget I even have a job.

Opa!

Lyme Disease!

..wait, what? Yes you heard right, today's post is not about a new Greek island, but instead it is about Lyme disease! It turns out, I have it! About two weeks ago, Chris and I were tromping around Liberty reservoir. About two days later we both noticed each of us had a tiny tick on our bodies. Chris is fine, but now two weeks later, I've got a really angry rash, of the typical sort for Lyme disease, and the center of it correlates exactly with where that tick had bitten me. So I managed to find a local private clinic dermatologist and got a prescription for doxycylcline, which I am now taking, enthusiastically. So, needless to say I am totally freaked out, having met more than a few people now who have been diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease. I've caught it early, so I hope to hell I will be among "most cases of Lyme disease [in which] symptoms can be eliminated with antibiotics". Wish me luck.

Opa?

Mykonos!

Chris and I left Athens two days ago for the island of Mykonos. Today has been our first real day out in the island exploring. We arrived here about 3 pm yesterday and ended up just taking a nap until about 7, after which we got dinner. Somehow dinner transformed into the two of us indulging in a late-night bender, courtesy of the Skandanavian bar. After dragging ourselves out of bed at the crack of noon today, we rented a Smart Car, and immediately took it out to some of the island's southern beaches, just to see what the place looks like. Driving around in this car was fucking hilarious. There's basically nothing to it, so it feels alot like a clown car, like to you could reasonably pick it up and store it in your closet at home. We have some good pics featuring the Smart car which we'll share. Anyway, I found a shop at which to book a SCUBA dive tomorrow, so while I'm doing that, Chris will probably be sunning herself at Paradise beach, which has a really awesome open-air adjoining club. I expect we'll end up there tomorrow night. Tonight we'll try to get to bed early so we can be more sporting at an early hour tomorrow.

Opa!

Greece!

Well here I am in Greece, so now I can say that my wife finally let me do her "Greek style". We've taken a ton of pictures (of Athens, not of us doing it) but won't be able to upload and post any until we get back of course. Sights seen: the Parthenon and the Erechthieon at the Acropolis and the Haephaisteion and the Stoa of Attalos at the Agora. We haven't figured out what we're doing tomorrow, but after we get some dinner (right after this post), we'll start thinking maybe about a nightclub to go to (if there is any place decent to go on a Thursday night).

Opa!

One last post

...and then I'm off to BWI. Tom recently introduced me to the concept of "Pareto Efficiency" which I do not yet understand but I gather has something to do with economic equlibria. Anyway it has made me wonder to myself if some clever mathematicians can link the math of Pareto Efficiancy to the math I normally use when considering equilibria, namely, the Michaelis-Menten equation. I expect there is little or no relationship at all, but still I'd like ot understand the Pareto end well enough to compare it and say why or why not. A little porject for when I get back maybe.

Where does culture come from?

I just finished writing a long comment in defense of a poorly-thought out throw-away line I had written in another comment on Jackie's blog. I don't want to revisit that too much but it got me thinking. Where do you think culture comes from most directly? It is a tough question because "culture" itself will need to be defined in any answer. I suggested that cut lure is a natural, extrinsic property of our biology, along the lines of what the evolutionary psychologists have been speculating. It is a purely hypothetical topic because I don't think any hypothesis or opinion on it is falsifiable (there never can be a control group for humanity). I have a few weak pieces of evidence that seem to suggest to me that culture (especially as it relates to issues of gender relations) is directly sourced in biology. I feel similarly about tool use and other basic behaviors. However I could easily be swayed by arguments that suggest culture is an ever evolving creation of humanity (like a house or a city or a non-profit organization) made with conceptual tools, and that participating in and influencing culture itself is not akin to using tools to build the house, city, or NPO.

Of course this gets a little bit into the meaning of "natural" too. Another word I've always had trouble with. Love and Rockets once sang a song with the following lyric, "You cannot go against nature, because when you do go against nature, it is a part of nature too". Calling something "natural" is to imply that it has not been interfered with by humans. This word and its use, by definition presumes that man is somehow an entity entirely divorced from nature, which is obviously absurd. The word "natural" has an absurdist meaning. Man is as much a part of nature as anything else, and every so-called "unnatural" action we may perform is in fact, just another part of the cycle of nature. Humans naturally build tools and use our big brains to do all kinds of things never seen before in nature. Army ants use their awesome powers of consumption to do things never before seen in nature before too (in their own way). It is the most wild act of anthropocentrism in my mind to suggest that the impact of achievements of humanity (subjectively good or bad) are somehow more or less significant than the changes wrought by any other creature on their particular environment. Everything needs to make changes to it's environment to survive, and all of it is natural.

Now I understand that this is mostly a philosophical point, but I just wanted to express it to perhaps better inform you on the root of my opinion that the origin of culture is biological. But maybe it isn't? For some reason I can't quite connect, but suspect is relevant is an observation I once heard was made by Carl Sagan. The observation was that there are essentially only three physical information storage media that exist in the world. The first is DNA, the second is the mind, and the third is a computer hard disk. The first information storage device encoded the creation if the second, and the second encoded the creation of the third. What kind of unimaginable information storage device will be encoded into existence by the computer? It makes me wonder if the Internet itself could be considered a new kind of mind? A very lonely mind. Wow, that was poetic and all but boy was it tangential. Sorry about that.

Unfortunately, since I won't be around to write any rebuttals to any comments I may get, feel free to assume I have answered in a certain way, just to keep the conversation going. ;)

Bedtime for me now.

Going Away Soon

Chris and I leave for Greece for two weeks starting this coming Tuesday. I imagine that posting will be light during that time, but hopefullly I'll make it to a net cafe once or twice to share some missives.

Falling down the depth of character

Its funny. One simple foray away from the usual shallow and vapid posts and I start drumming up comments and responses. Maybe I'll go in a different direction with this blog. Admittedly, as a corporate man, I'm a little afraid to be too open about things, particularly when I'm just testing ideas. It is the sort of concern that makes tenure track jobs more attractive despite the shitty pay.

Feminism and equality v identity

I've been posting comments over at my friend Jackie's blog in an attempt to get her to answer some questions I have about feminism, particularly in how it values gender roles in modern western society. I think she is more qualified to answer the question than anyone else I know, I only hope she doesn't charge me tuition. Every once in a while I get locked into a subject I want to know more about, particularly in the face of insufficient Google-ability.

While I don't know where our conversation may be headed (other than to a end in short time), I do know that for me, it is part of a larger internal dialog. I've been thinking of subjects and themes I might be able to use in some fictional story I'd like to write. In particular, every good story has to have a defining conflict and certain archetypal characters (a la Campbell's studies of Hero Myths, of which I have recently become aware - thanks Gregg). The characters, set, and setting I think will be the easiest parts of my story. I'm having the most trouble with the deeper conflict itself. The surface conflicts are always man v man, man v self, or man v nature, etc. No, I'm talking about the thematic aspect of the conflict, like free will v determinism (Brave New World, 1984, etc.) or truth v beauty (Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet, etc.). I've been trying to think of other "great" philosophical conflicts that might exist. I had been thinking that "freedom v security" might fit until I started to realize that that is really the same as free will v determinism. The latest one I've been trying to reduce to its elemental bits is what I've so far been calling "equality v identity".

If you've followed me so far, lucky you, because I expect I might be getting abstract to the point of incomprehensible, but if not, try and bear with me. The conflict of equality v identity is most easily represented in my mind in the western systems of government and economy. The most fundamental underlying principle of our government is that "all men are created equal" and this manifests in our system of "one vote per person" (sorta, if you ignore the electoral college). Our economy is based on an exactly contrary fundamental notion that people should be free to make the most of themselves, "the cream shall rise to the top", etc. Capitalism itself is based on inequality. I think people feel happiest when these two opposing concepts are balanced and in perpetual battle with each. A country that becomes too capitalist has no middle class, and is essentially fascist. A country that becomes too equal has only one class, the perfect communist dystopian paradise, where no one is allowed to achieve any more than anyone else. So, it seems the best results are obtained in the balance between equality and identity. This is similar again to the balanced conflict between free will and determinism, that is, fully determined lives are suicidally boring, and fully undetermined, ie: "100% free" lives are too unpredictable to be sustainable (if you can't at least predict the sun will rise in the morning, it will be hard to live etc.). But back to equality v identity, the debate I'm having now is if "identity" is really the right word to describe the concept I'm after to describe this conflict. I feel like "achievement" isn't fundamental enough, because it goes deeper than that, achievement is tied to ego, and ego to identity. I'm open to sugestion if you're grokking all this.

Anyway, the tie in to feminism is the notion that culturally-defined gender roles (or cultural gender identities) are intrinsically bad. I don't know if that is true or not, but if so, it makes me wonder what ways of identifying oneself are ever good? I've heard arguments against nationalism, religiosity, provincialism, race-pride, etc. But don't most people agree that we should celebrate our differences too? And if so, how specifically? Are such differences only appropriately celebrated on the individual level? Is it always bad once these differences are celebrated on the group level? How can we ignore the most obvious differences between us (like gender)? It makes me wonder if pretending such differences don't exist might be as evil and extreme as pretending that they are the only things that matter, thus my "new" philosophical conflict - equality v identity. Would an uber-feminist that considers any gender-identity to be a bad thing be a convincing fictional villain? (probably not). Such a villain could be good in the sense that, like all villains, it would be easy to see how her motivations were pure, but how the execution of her principles could be evil. A redneck racist would make a more convincing but equivalent villain, but also boring and not new. I think I'm headed in the right direction anyway.

I haven't re-read this post, so I apologize if it is full of grammar issues. I'll proof it tonight after work.