Battleship Curves and American Idol

Have a look at the picture above. It shows New England grave stone styles across a period running from 1720-1829. The horizontal bars indicate the numbers of tombstones found for any one period, and one can see that they form the shape of a battleship as they gain in popularity and then wane. If one were to find one of these tombstones, perhaps with the dates of the deceased unreadable, one would surmise that it probably belongs to the period when that particular style was the most popular. These curves, then, are used as dating systems, and they represent relative popularity of artifacts.

In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep's character berates the sweater her minion (Anne Hathaway's character) is wearing. Streep's character explains that a chic designer had introduced the colour a few years ago at a big exposition, it had caught on, mainstream culture had embraced it, it had gone out of fashion, at which point Hathaway's character had probably found it in the bargain bin at a large department store. The message was clear. Streep's character is scolding her underling for being a 'late adopter', rather than an early adopter or even originator. Wearing a sweater of such a passe colour was a slap in the face to the whole industry of haute couture which prides itself on being at the cutting edge.

This concept intrigues me. Where are we all on the battleship curve? If American Idol is a reliable indicator, then I am a really late adopter. This year, the show's ninth season, marks the first time that I have understood what everyone has found so compelling about it. I appreciate the extremely high production values of the show, judging, music, and raw talent of the performers. I like Crystal's outrageous musical talent, Siobhan's quirkiness, Michael's sincerity, and Casey's blues.

Most likely all of the early adopters of American Idol have long since jumped ship and found something else more compelling. However, here I am, embracing American Idol probabaly just as it has begun to wane. However, I can always look forward to enjoying the next craze just as the early adopters are abandoning it. Maybe in a few years I will even buy a Mac. Sigh.

Bodies as Palettes

Last week in Physical Anthropology we studied the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe, which ran from about 40,000 years ago to about 14,000 years ago. What strikes one immediately is that the people of this period filled their world with art.

The 200 or so caves in southern France and northern Spain with wondrously beautiful paintings on their walls suggest a people who wanted to beautify their living spaces. The graves of people do not have unequal amounts of grave goods in them, suggesting an egalitarian rather than class stratified society. However, these graves are filled with artifacts that these people wore on their bodies every day. They tatoo-ed their skin, and covered the rest with orange manganese dioxide and ochre. They wore rings in their noses, ears, and lips, and bracelets on their arms and ankles. They wore necklaces with large pendants. They wore clothes with thousands of colourful sea-shells stitched into them, and hats of hundreds of beads. These peoples' bodies were artistic palettes. Their utilitarian artifacts were covered in art, as were their weapons. These people were the first undoubted musicians, playing bone flutes. Compared to anything that had come along previously, these people of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe began and sustained a long artistic 'explosion'.

And this makes me wonder about my own body. I am losing my hair rapidly, and so doing anything like colouring, spiking, or crimping it would be absurd. I don't have tattoos, and now that my skin is losing its turgor it is probably a good thing for everyone. I have no piercings or body paint, and the wedding ring I wear is emblematic of my commitment to Denise rather than an artistic statement. The clothes I hang on my body are efficient and comfortable, and can in no way be construed as art. If anything, my body is a statement against art.

But when I look around, I see that I look the same as all of the men of my generation and socio-economic class. Sure, some might have an earing, a tattoo, or a cool haircut, but these are just embellishments to the same cookie cutter design. By comparison to the people of the Upper Paleolithic, we seem to conform to drabness.

I remember in the 1970's the pressure to wear my hair long. I remember feeling kind of trapped: every male of my generation then had long hair, and to have short hair meant something tragic had happened, like cancer, or joining the military. Short hair was deviant, and while we all may have thought we were doing something different, we were all just conforming as much as any other generation conforms. With New Wave in the early 1980's, I cut my hair short and have kept it that way ever since.

In some ways it is not the same with my kids' generation. While they too have to conform to today's fashion, it seems the scope of fashion is much wider than it has been for a while. Aidan, my 13 year old son, presently is wearing his hair longer, but it would be fine if he cut it short as well. Kira likes to wear bright clothes, will wear a dress or jeans, and has a pierced nose.

But it seems my kids are more conservative than most. A walk down Kira's High School hallways is a revelation. People have hair with every colour of the rainbow, and have piercings all over their faces, and in their tongues and navels. Young women wear brightly coloured and very revealing clothes, and the boys' pants show most of their bare butts. Often the exposed skin of both the boys and girls screams out with brightly coloured tattoos. It seems that my kids' generation has begun to treat their bodies as palettes. Good for them. This is a breath of fresh air.

Movies

In 1981 I took a 'Film Studies' course as part of my BA. We surveyed film from the beginning through to the present, each week reading about, watching, and discussing one 'classic' movie representing a genre or time period. The course took us through those crazy silent movies, including Sunset , Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies, through the talkies and musicals, slick dramas, adventures, mysteries, comedies, film noir, horror, through to The French Lieutenant's Woman and Body Heat, two of the really good movies of 1981. We learned that Citizen Kane was considered the best movie ever made, and that Hitchcock was the most economical and efficient director.

Nearly 30 years later, movies are better than ever. Last year we watched Kate Winslet in The Reader and Revolutionary Road. From every standpoint I can consider -directing, acting, script, lighting, sound and music, editing - these films are better than anything to date. They simply blow away Citizen Kane, or any of the old 'Classics' that we nostalgically set aside as 'the best ever'. We are living in a golden period of film, and it seems that the standards are simply getting better every year. These films challenge us to reconsider stereo-types, present a world as a series of grey-shades rather than black and whites, require us to follow complex story and plot lines, and appreciate the complexities, foibles, and whimsies of the human soul.

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that 'nostalgia is masochism tempered by boredom'. As a general rule I am happy to dismiss nostalgia in favour of celebrating what we have presently, and with films it is easy, because they have never been this good.

In two minds about Religulous

I am in two minds about Bill Maher's film Religulous. On the one hand, much of it adheres to Michael Moore's style of slamming people rather than what they have to say, and it makes me squirm. It is simply not in good taste to attack a person instead of the person's argument, and Bill Maher does it relentlessly throughout the movie. I would have much preferred that he steered a more disinterested course, weighing the arguments for and against religion in a responsible way.

On the other hand, he interviews some really interesting people. The interview I liked the most was with a Vatican priest/astronomer/scientist, in which Maher directed the conversation to science and religion (in this case Christianity). The priest/astronomer said that we need to consider and keep separate two very different time periods. The first covers the period of the Old and New Testaments, perhaps something like 2000 BCE to 300 CE, or a 2300 year period. He called this the 'Age of Belief'. The second runs from the end of the 17th Century to the present, and he called this period 'The Age of Science'. He said that if we want answers to questions pertaining to how people should conduct themselves morally and ethically, we should look to the Age of Belief. However, if we want answers to questions of a scientific nature, we should look to the Age of Science. In other words, if we want to know how to behave once someone has stolen our sheep, we look to the Old and New Testament. However, if we want to know about evolution, we look to the Age of Science.

I think this is very insightful. I agree with him whole-heartedly with questions of a scientific nature. The Old and New Testaments are full of really bad science, and there is simply no point in finding answers to how the physical universe works within those works.

However, I would disagree with him in regards to finding the answers to questions of morality and ethics. Particularly with regard to the Old Testament and specifically Mosaic Law (the first five books), I think the cultural context of such laws was so profoundly different to our time and culture that these laws are of little use today. For example, an answer to the question of whether I should sell my daughter into slavery is highly unlikely to ever come up in my lifetime.

As a result, I do not look for answers to scientific questions in the Old and New Testaments, and I do not look for answers as to how to live a moral and ethical life from these books. Insofar as science and morality are concerned, the Old and New Testaments are to me, a child of the modern period, perfectly useless.

Nevertheless, I do think that the stories in the Old Testament are interesting, clever, and fun, and I do enjoy reading them as pieces of literature. Such literature has influenced western civilization throughout the millennia, and for those of us interested in western culture, one should know at least the general tenor of these two sets of books. I think Bill Maher has missed this point.

Good for you, Jean Chretien

Yesterday a friend of mine, Mike Homan, wrote in his blog about the seventh anniversary of the American Invasion of Iraq. Pink dresses notwithstanding, Mike is a well-informed and thoughtful American, and one can sense his utter frustration.










We made a whole lot of jokes about Jean Chretien when he was our Prime Minister. Nevertheless, to me, he is a hero. Despite enormous pressure at home, even from within his own party, and especially from the American Ambassador to Washington to join the 'Coalition of the Willing' and invade Iraq, he decided to keep Canada out of the invasion.

During the autumn of 2002, when I was in Jordan on an archaeological dig, Bush pushed through the UN Resolution 1441, giving the UN head weapons inspector Hans Blix new powers to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. By early 2003, we could all feel the winds of war. Hans Blix's team was unable to find anything, and this only seemed to feed the belligerent rhetoric from Bush and his neo-Cons. Bush held up a 'Wanted' poster with Saddam's face on it, and said "I've been out west...". Yikes.

Sometime in March of 2003, Jeff Lawrence, one of my colleagues at work, asked whether I would be willing to sit on a panel discussion in the College theatre to discuss the issues surrounding the imminent invasion. We were not sure at that point whether Canada was going to take part in an invasion, and so I felt it important to take the opportunity to speak my views publicly. In my presentation I questioned the legality of the invasion, given the fact that the Security Council had not given its sanction. Like so many at that time, I also predicted that the people of Iraq would do everything they could to undermine America's efforts, despite Rumsfeld's assurance that the people would embrace a 'Jeffersonian democracy on the banks of the Euphrates'. Other panelists tried to tease out the 'real' reasons for such an invasion. Although speculation ranged widely, there was general consensus that the invasion was misguided and a huge mistake.

Seven years of war later, Iraq is now a democracy. However, it is fragile, weak, and riven with stresses and cracks. The system of family relationships in Iraq and generally in the Middle East is based on 'segmentary lineages', and people will always vote for someone within their immediate or more distant family in such a system. Such arrangements run counter to the machinery of democracy. Iraq's democracy is ham-strung, ineffective, and virtually unviable.

My prediction in 2003 for the future of Iraq remains the same. Either under a strongman like Saddam Hussein, or the present fatally flawed democracy, the country is doomed to balkanize into three requisite ethnic groups. There will be a Kurdistan in the north, a Sunni middle, and a Shia south. The decision made at Versailles in 1918 to carve this part of the Ottoman Empire into an 'Iraq' was ill-conceived, and perhaps it will come apart before it meets its first century. At that point, all of the lives and treasure the Americans have squandered in this ill-fated mission will have been in vain.

Canada decided not to join America in its 'police action' in Vietnam in the 1960's and 1970's. In 2003, it would have been so easy for Chretien to bend to the will of so many and join in the 'Coalition of the Willing'. However, he did not. Hats off to you, Jean Chretien!

A day to remember

Sunday, February 28th was a good day. It involved Aidan's team playing two Island Cup games in Powell River, and the Mens' Gold Medal Hockey game between Canada and the US on the final day of the Olympics.

The day began with a meeting at the Willow Point 7-11 parking lot, where we loaded up four vehicles with gear, players, coaches, and parents, and headed for the Little River ferry landing for Powell River. During the crossing, Lisa, our boys' Head Coach, gave a really good pep talk to the boys in the bow of the boat. I remember during the talk some soccer playing girls of about the boys' age had planted themselves just outside the windows and in clear view of all the boys. However, not one of the boys was distracted from the pep talk. Perhaps it was the gravity of the upcoming games that allowed the boys to focus on Lisa and what she had to say.

Upon landing, the coach of the Powell River team met us with a bus and took us to the field. The first game was against the dreaded Comox team that we had beaten the week before to represent the North Island in the Provincial cup playdowns (see previous post). Our boys came out really strong, and went into half time with the score 0-0. In the second half, our pressure brought results, so that we scored four goals, eventually winning 4-0. It was truly a remarkable win against a really good team.

Throughout the second half, people in Powell River would honk their horns after a Canada goal. Soon after the honking we would hear parents' cel phones ringing with the latest score, and the parents would then indicate the score to us by holding up fingers. In this way we were able to keep track of a game that saw a score of 1-0 after the first period, 2-1 after the second, and with 20 seconds left in the third, 2-2.











During the break between the third period and overtime of the hockey game, our boys warmed up for their second game against Powell River. While we were under the tent for the pre-game pep talk, we heard car horns go off around Powell River, at which point we all erupted in cheers and high fives.

The boys then played their game, scoring 7 goals to none in the first half. In the second half we put the boys in positions they were not used to, and the final score was 8-2.

We all then boarded the bus to the ferry, sailed across the strait, drove to 7-11, and made our way home. Perfect day.

As an illustration of how important the gold medal game was to Canadians generally, and Edmontonians in particular, have a look at the following graph showing when they visited the rest room.

Grass

This year we are getting 'Weed Man' to tend our lawn. This company will make several trips to our lawn this season, aerating, killing moss, fertilizing, and killing weeds. Because 'Weed Man' accommodates so many customers, the company buys its material in large quantities, and the costs are low. In fact, it does not cost that much more to have this company do these things than it would if we did them ourselves.

Why do we do this lawn thing? Our lawn not only gets fed regularly, but we have an underground automatic sprinkler system that came with the house that waters the lawn at regular intervals. I also mow it once a week whether it needs it or not. The lawn is pretty, but is uncompetitive, weak, and pathetic. Without human intervention, it has not a chance against dandelion or a host of other plants that would inundate and take over almost immediately.











About a kilometre from where we live the rainforest starts. Here on the eastern part of the island, the rainforest floor is mostly ferns, and the canopy consists of douglas fir, balsam, hemlock, cedar, and alder. Moving westwards, it begins to rise towards the spine of mountains that run north/south along our island, giving way at a certain altitude to meadow. The rainforest picks up again west of the mountains all the way down to the Pacific shores. Throughout, the rainforest is very dense: in terms of vegetation per square metre, it is the highest in the world. On the west coast of the island, the salal that covers the forest floor rises sometimes 3 metres, and without a machete it is in some places virtually impenetrable.

And so, the lame, weak, lawns of my subdivision are juxtaposed beside a rainforest that is the most prolific landform in the world. We subsidize a pathetic plant while nature not a kilometre away promotes tough, competitive winners.











It is as if we are living in China 150 years ago, when people bound the feet of young aristocratic women in such a way that it was impossible for them to walk as adults. The status of aristocratic women was measured by many things, one of which was their complete inability to walk. Perhaps in the same way we support grass. By doing so, we engage in a warped kind of 'conspicous consumption'. Because we are able to support grass, somehow it reflects our ability to consume.

Music lessons in 2010

Instead of waiting in the car for Aidan to emerge from his bass guitar lessons the other day, I went inside and watched the last 10 minutes of the lesson. Aidan was playing his bass at the time, and Grant McLellan, his teacher and an old friend of the family, was playing his six string guitar. Aidan was reading and playing a reggae bass line from sheet music, and Grant was playing a standard reggae rhythm guitar line over top. I spent only five minutes listening before Aidan's time was up and we had to go, but in those five minutes I was struck by how differently musical knowledge is transmitted to my son in 2010 than it was to me when I was a kid.

Beginning at five years old, my trumpet teacher would come to our house on Tuesday evenings, and between 6:30 and 7:00 I would have my lesson. My teacher would listen to what I had been practicing throughout the week, and then at the end of the lesson assign the week's material for the next lesson. I loathed the lessons. There always seemed something more fun to do during the week than to sit down and practice, and as I recall, I was never well prepared for the lesson. One minute into the lesson, and the teacher would realize that I had practiced very little or perhaps not at all during the previous week, he would become frustrated, question my work ethic, I would then feel guilty, completely liberated when he left, and the cycle would continue. Consequently, I hated playing music until I got to High School and played in a Stage Band.

However, for Aidan it is entirely different. First off, he can hardly wait to have his weekly lesson. After school on Mondays he jumps on a city bus and gets off near Grant's house. When I pick him up, he is always charged up and brimming over with enthusiasm. "Today we played 'Autumn Leaves', or "A Reggae bass line is good but really repetitive", or "Eric Clapton is more a Blues player than a Rock and Roller", or 'Jazz is the most fun to play'. His weekly lessons renew his deep love for music, whereas my weekly lessons seemed to do everything possible to kill the flicker of love I had for playing music as a kid. What is the difference?

Grant approaches things completely differently. It is as if he recognizes that we all love music, and works very hard to nurture the love of playing it. For the first couple of years, Grant did not assign traditional homework throughout the week. Instead, he would ask Aidan to think about certain pieces of music that he would like to learn how to play. From very early on in the process, when Aidan would listen to music, he would also be thinking about playing it. During their lesson, Grant would download Aidan's musical choice with the tabs (a more graphical way of illustrating music than the standard treble and bass clef style), show Aidan how to read the tabs, and teach him how to play certain songs. Once Aidan had learned the piece, Grant would play his six string electric over Aidan's bass line.

The next stage in the process seemed to involve teaching Aidan enough about musical theory that he could improvise a bass line. Aidan learned chord structures, progressions, and musical keys, long before he knew how to read music. So cool. This information allowed him to step beyond simply mimicking the bass lines of famous bass players.

After all this initial preparation, the ground was set for this latest stage in Aidan's musical development. He is now reading music and counting out rhythms in the traditional way. However, he is approaching it already having had a really solid understanding about how music works. He is also enthusiastic, because he knows that by reading music he will enter a new realm of possibilities. The result is that he is putting the full force of his learning potential into this latest stage, and he will learn much.

We all begin learning language from our parents and siblings, and actively participate in speaking by the time we are 2 years old. Later on we learn how to read and begin to understand the rules that govern language. With my music teacher, he tried to teach me how to read before I could speak the language of music. However, with Aidan, he has learned how to 'speak' music before he could read it. In doing so, Aidan may one day converse in the language of music with the same creativity and clarity that he now speaks English. Many thanks, Grant!

Christmas

There have been times in the past when I have not much liked Christmas.

I don't have religion, and therefore don't share in the celebration of Christ's birthday at the heart of the religious festival.

Also, some of the trappings of Christmas drive me crazy. Our culture blows a gasket at this time of year. Media seems to scream at us to show how much we love people by buying them expensive gifts, Boxing Day sales now begin before Christmas, huge crowds of impatient and desperate people vie for that last Cabbage Patch doll or whatever 'it' happens to be that year. In addition to being unnecessarily wasteful, the Christmas lights that people put up on the outside of their houses are often gaudy and entirely tasteless. Not only that, people now put up their lights just after Hallowe'en, and take them down at the end of January.

However, this last Christmas I changed my mind. There are some things about Christmas that I really do like. And we should try, whenever possible, and as the song says, to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Christmas is no exception.

It is a time when all of us in our family take time off school and work to be together. We play games, watch movies, make and eat meals, and go for walks and bike rides. We try to get together with extended family, and sometimes this is the only time of year I get to see some relatives. Remember what Einstein told us: 'Whenever we are around relatives, time slows down', or something like that. It is a time to take stock, relax, have some laughs, and tell and listen to all the old family stories.

Christmas is celebrated just after the winter solstice, when we experience the least amount of daylight hours in our yearly cycle. Up here on the 50th degree of latitute, we get down to about 6 or 7 hours of daylight on the 21st of December. A return of daylight to a dark and cold world is a very fitting thing to celebrate. It is inded a time of hope.

I like getting Christmas trees and hanging ornaments on them. When the kids were little, we would head off into the forest and cut down our own tree. More recently we have bought our tree at a mall, and in the last two years we have used an artificial tree I bought at a garage sale for 10 bucks. On one holiday to California, we used a Superstore plastic box propped up in the corner of the hotel room as a tree, and it worked great. It does not seem to matter what the tree is made of. At Christmas, it seems to be enough that one part of the living room takes on a new focus, and that it is covered in ornaments that we have collected over the kids' lives. A tree represents one of the 'ritual' activities of this holiday, and I like it.

While I don't really appreciate the lyrics of Christmas songs perhaps as a Christian might, I really like the melodies of all those old songs, especially the jazz covers of them. Throughout the Christmas period, our stereo blasts out Christmas carols, and every year I look forward to hearing the Dave Brubeck quartet play 'Santa Claus is coming to town'.

I like the idea of giving gifts to people. It is something very different from a birthday present, the only other time most people give and accept gifts. We give people gifts, they put them under their tree, and the expectation and suspense builds until the actual act of everyone sitting around the tree and opening presents. While I loath the consumerism built around the edges, the actual ritual of giving gifts is a really great thing about Christmas.

What strikes me is that all of the things that I like about Christmas are not originally Christian. The holiday just after the winter solstice when we celebrate the return of light, that includes a tree covered in ornaments, the singing of songs, and giving gifts, all pre-date Christianity by perhaps millennia.

Glad not to have a dog

I understand why people enjoy having dogs for pets. Dogs love their masters, to the point that some would clearly lay down their lives to protect their master. It seems as though dogs experience love, and who cannot appreciate being loved? Dogs are descended from wolves who travel in packs, with one clear alpha male who calls all the shots. As long as the human master is understood by both parties that he or she is alpha, then the dog will idolize, love, and protect that human.

However, for the relationship to work, the alpha must also care for the dog. The dog must have an outlet for exercise, be stimulated mentally, fed, and cleaned.

In an urban context, a dog must be walked daily. The dog will go nuts if it is not allowed to blow off some steam. Often the dog will crap on these walks, and it is up to the human to ensure that the dog does it in a socially appropriate way. This might require bringing a plastic bag and collecting those happy offerings. It also means that the dog calls the shots: even if the human is not at all interested in going for a walk, unless the dog gets out, the mess to clean up could be far graver.

Dogs must be stimulated mentally. If the dog is bred as a retriever, it likes nothing more than to 'fetch', over and over, until it can't go on. For a human, this can be interesting for a little while, but at a certain point it gets to be like writing lines on a chalkboard.

One has to make sure that the dog is properly fed. This can go horribly wrong. If the dog has been told a thousand times that it cannot eat food off the table, but goes unpunished even once, it will always remember the one time that it was permitted to do so. This is the same when dogs 'beg' for food. I am not sure there is anything more annoying than when a dog contantly begs for food while one is trying to eat. In order to stop the dog from begging in the short run, people will give the dog food. In the long run, the dog only remembers that the begging strategy has worked, and will continue to do so. Thousands of 'No's' are required to counter one 'yes'.

In nature, dogs in a pack will disguise their collective scent in order not to alert the intended prey. To do this, they will find something very stinky to roll in. It might be feces, a rotting corpse, a dead fish. Dogs love the idea of being as stinky as they can possibly be. Therefore, the alpha has to take measures to counter this annoying instinct by bathing the dog. However, once soap is introduced to the dog's fur, it loses some of its natural oils that help to keep out dirt and water, the dog compensates by producing too much oil, and the outcome is that the fur needs to be washed all the more. One step down the 'bathing' road and the dog will need to be bathed regularly for the rest of its life.

In total, a dog needs to be cared for in the same way a two-year old human needs to be cared for. We need to make sure that the child is physically and mentally stimulated, fed, and cleaned regularly. The only difference is that two-year old humans will one day be able to do all of these things by themselves, whereas a dog will be stuck at this stage for the rest of its life.

Throw away culture

In my on-going attempt to revive my recently broken right arm to its previous abilities and strength, I have been stretching my wrist several times a day, and doing simple weight training and squeezing exercises. The other day I was in a sports store getting new soccer boots for Aidan (sigh... three pairs in two years!), when I saw a set of Pilates plastic balls, each of which was filled with differently weighted substances. The '3-pound' ball was just the right weight for rotating my wrist effectively. When the ball was scanned at the check-out with the boots, something inside me reacted. "Wait!", I said. "Perhaps not the ball."









My first reaction was against buying a piece of plastic filled with, who knows, dirt, being sold for $17.95 before tax. And then I began to think more about it. I realized that I was surrounded by free stuff that would work just as well as the Pilates ball. Later that day, Denise and I went for a walk by the river, and I picked up a palm-sized rock along the shore. Not only were there thousands to choose from, the one I chose was the perfect weight, smooth like the Pilates ball, and free. Furthermore, when I am done with it I will simply put it back beside the river.

I'm glad I did not buy the Pilates ball. I was drawn initially to it because, well, if I am really committed to getting better, then I should not worry so much about spending money. However, even if the Pilates ball had been free, it would not have been free. The oil used to make the plastic would have required refinement at a factory, and whatever it was that gave the ball its weight probably had to be mined from somewhere. Once the raw materials had been collected and transported to a factory, people working in toxic conditions would have assembled the ball. And then it had to be packaged up, put in a container, then in a boat, and transported across the globe to a port, probably Vancouver. From there it would be transported to a warehouse, from where it was then put on trucks and transported to the sports store in Campbell River. But it does not stop there. When my arm is back to normal, I would no longer need the ball, and would have to discard it somehow. It might end up in a Thrift store, but such stores in Campbell River are getting very careful about what they accept, as they are inundated more and more with stuff that will sell, and have no room for the 'no-hopers'. It could be that I would not even be able to give it away, so that it would end up in our local land-fill. Our land-fill is, well, filling up, and soon we are going to have to truck our garbage to the nearest town's land-fill.

If there is one thing above all else that threatens the sustainability of our civilization, it is our collective and obsessive collection of stuff that we probably don't need and then use for just a little while before we discard it. If there are archaeologists in the future who pick through the detritus of our civilization, they are sure to wonder about things like the plastic weighted Pilates ball.

Neanderthals

This week in physical anthropology we are covering Neanderthal people, and much has been learned about them in just the last decade.

While it is true that there has been practically no evidence found of anything we might consider 'art' in Neanderthal contexts, nevetheless their tool and weapon technology suggests that these were not stupid people. Evidence also suggests that they organized large hunts, and killed their prey with sophisticated stone tools and hafted spears. They lived in rock shelters where they sometimes made partition walls, pebble flooring, and garbage pits. Endocasts of their skulls show that they had the mental capability to speak, as do the openings allowing nerves to the tongue, and hyoid bones in their throats. In total, it is likely that these people could speak. And so, in direct contrast to pop culture's view of Neanderthal as a bumbling, stupid, hairy, backward, oaf, a more accurate assessment is of a people who had a thriving, arctic culture with a spoken language.

For the past decade or so labs around the world have been 'cloning' viable Neanderthal tissue, so that we now know the general parameters of the Neanderthal genome. It turns out that genetically Neanderthal is not close enough to us to be our direct ancestor, and is rather an off-shoot of Homo erectus localized in Europe and Western Asia that died out about 30,000 years ago. Probably temperature changes in the Late Pleistocene eliminated the herds of herbivores central to Neanderthals' survival, and together with mammals like the wooly rhino, Neanderthals became extinct. What we do know for certain is that we are not descended from Neanderthals.

Such cloning technology may one day allow us to clone an entire Neanderthal from its DNA. Such a possibility poses for us the question as to whether or not this would be a good thing. Mary Shelley was in no two minds about it when she had Dr. Frankenstein track down his 'monster' all the way to the arctic wastes in order to dispatch it once and for all. Michael Creighton also posed a similar situation when the dinosaurs brought to life from their DNA took the upper hand and killed or chased away the humans from Jurassic Park.

At the same time, we have been domesticating and manipulating nature at least since the beginning of food production, 10,000 years ago. Might this simply be the next step? Is it more ethical to clone new strains of wheat and tomatoes for our consumption than it is to raise a Neanderthal baby to adulthood? If so, why? Perhaps a line in the sand might be that if something has the potential for a neo-cortex, and all that comes with it, such as feelings and conscious thoughts, we ought not to tamper with it. Generally, our culture is passive to the steady advances in genetically modified food, but is pro-active and angry when something like a dolphin is killed for food. Would our culture feel the same if, let's say, a chimpanzee was cloned for study? Even though we now know that Neanderthal is not in our direct line, is it still just a bit too close to clone?

The Sedins

The Vancouver Canucks have on their hockey team a set of ginger-haired twins: Daniel and Henrik Sedin. These two Swedes play on the first line, and any player lucky enough to play with them scores goals - lots of them. Henrik is the leading scorer in the NHL, and if Daniel had not broken his foot, he would be right there with him. The Sedins play a passing game, cycling the puck from player to player very quickly. Those without the puck dart into open spaces to receive a blind pass, and then deliver it just as quickly to someone else. Other sports like soccer and basketball will see this (I am thinking of Arsenal and the Suns, in particular), but no other sport does it at hockey's blinding speed. The level of communication between the twins is sometimes eery. How on earth did Henrik know Daniel was going to sprint just at that point in time and into that space? The Sedins' style of play makes hockey a fun sport to watch, and it comes closest to that brilliant Olympic style of play that we were all treated to just a couple of weeks ago.

The Sedins get into a groove that seems to go beyond, or perhaps 'under' conscious thought. It is as if the lightning quick decisions being made by these twins are made at the spinal cord level, rather than in the neo-cortex. As I have said in an earlier post, there is something intrinsically beautiful about sport, and it seems that sport is most beautiful when people are able to connect with each other on such a deep and primal level. It really seems like the Sedins have tapped into an extra sensory perception. Of course, some of this may have to do with the fact that they are identical twins.











I think I may have experienced something like it once in my life, when I played on a three person Ultimate frisbee team during a 3-month long archaeological field season in Jordan in 2002. The entire dig team was about 40 people or so, of which at least 16 people played ultimate frisbee nearly every day. We all got very good after a while. However, if not too many people were playing on any given day,and even though we tried generally to even out the teams, nevertheless sometimes Natalie Brodie, Matt Prince, and I would challenge everyone else there. There was something in the chemistry: it did not matter how many people we played against, we would always score. We three seemed to sense where the others were, and for some reason, we were able to elevate our game so that even in double or triple coverage, we would be the ones to come down with the frisbee. It was uncanny, and I cannot explain why or how it happened.

The field of neuro-science is on one of those vertical trajectories that we see from time to time in various disciplines (biology and physics are on them now as well). So much more is being learned every day about how the brain works, that it is conceivable that one day there might be an answer as to why and how the Sedins can communicate in the way that they do. Once we know how it is done, perhaps the next step might be in harnessing and nurturing such innate abilities. At that point, sport will go through a Rennaissance.

English pubs

While I was studying in England during the years 1986-1992, I learned to really like pubs. At first, Denise and I went to pubs simply to keep warm. We were living in a flat that had no insulation, and our two horribly inefficient electric space heaters were gluttons on very expensive electricity. We tried to use an odd type of coal called 'coke' for a while, but it was difficult to light, and once lit did not really produce much heat. It was cheaper for Denise and I to drink beer in a warm pub than to try to heat our own flat.

As I got settled into graduate work, I soon realized that the pub was as important to the university as the library. It was a place to take stock, integrate, make sense of, and articulate the day's tsunami of ideas, and listen to what other people had been thinking about. Those casual conversations with friends in the pub were the breeding grounds for some of the best ideas I had at university.

Our North American idea of an English pub is all wrong. Not once did I ever see a piano, and never did I hear anyone sing, apart from a Glaswegian football fan singing a Rangers song, and he was bounced very quickly from our sight. We have this strange idea that English beer is served at room temperature. However, lager is served cold, but just about everything else is served at cellar temperature.

Over the years, I developed criteria for what I thought made for a particularly good pub. The one that ruled over all else was the quality of beer. One can find the entire spectrum of beer in England: lager is the lightest, then pilsener, ale, bitter, and stout. However, and in my opinion, the best English beer is ale, and the best ale is not made for mass consumption. Rather, it is made in thousands of small independently owned breweries around the country in limited quantities, and we'll never see the likes of it here in North America: it does not travel so well, and there simply is not enough for even domestic consumption. We will only see the English beer made by the big corporations for mass export and it simply is not the same. The ale I am talking about has a glorious flavour, is not particularly fizzy, and the alcohol content is much less than in Canadian beer. While one trips over pubs that sell the mass produced beer in England, one has to seek out those pubs that sell really good ale. The picture above is of the Cooperage (a cooper is a barrel-maker) pub in Newcastle upon Tyne. It has very, very good beer.

The second most important thing was good music. The jukebox had to have music with a depth far beyond the Top Forty, and at the same time, not stuck in the 1950's and all that early rock and roll bubble gum stuff (Why must I be a teenager in love?). However, as the main purpose of going to a pub (beyond getting warm!) was to have a good conversation with friends, the music could not be too loud: no-one wants to have to shout.

Finally, the pub was particularly good if it had a pool table and a real fire to warm the bones.

My English friends tell me that those really special pubs that I am talking about are starting to die out as they simply cannot compete with the big beer company pubs. This is a real shame.

Cats as pets

Although opinion is generally divided on the issue of housecats, in our household, there really is no argument. We have two nine year old tortoise-shell sisters, and we like our cats.

As for me, I like them because they give insight into what wild cats might be like in the wild, without having to live with a lion or a tiger. In their natural habitat, cats are very specialized predators, and it is probably because of this specialization that housecats maintain many of their natural instincts, despite multiple generations of domestication. For example, our housecats have maintained the concept of the 'pride', and we, although very flawed cats, are very much part of that pride. Our cats like to eat, fall asleep, and wake up with one of their pride close by. Preferably, they like to fall asleep while being petted, and will track us down and arrange matters before they eat.

A wild cat is arguably the world's most complete predator, and our cats have many of those qualities: they are lithe, flexible, strong, quick, amazingly agile, and they can see in the dark. Our two females hunt together, or at least band together to scare away other feline intruders from our yard, and watching them one gets the sense that the savannah is genetically not that far away. One of the cats thinks my orange earplugs are prey, and will present one at my feet from time to time as if it were a gazelle or a warthog.

Wild cats are largely nocturnal hunters, and the pride relies on stealth while approaching its prey. To this end, wild cats bury their excrement and urine, clean themselves fastidiuosly, and do not make a lot of noise. Similarly, our cats use a litter box and carefully bury all evidence, and many of their waking hours are spent grooming and bathing themselves so that their fur is never dirty and never smells.

Furthermore, and beyond purring, our cats use their voices only to let us know what they want, such as opening a door or filling the food bowl, and they might growl softly if they see a bird outside. Beyond that, however, our cats are quiet animals.

In the wild, some cats will break away from the pride and return after a few days away. Similarly, as long as we make sure that the litter is fresh and the food and water bowls are full, we can leave our cats for long periods of time by themselves.

Housecats transform our households into a little bit of the savannah.

Napoleonic idolatry

Last year I looked for a book in the boxes stacked under our stairs. Although I didn't find the book I was looking for, I did find a box holding my old undergraduate essays. The box smelled musty, and the papers had begun to turn yellow. Many of the essays were hand-written, and others type-written and marred by blotches of 'white-out' that had begun to crack like old oil paintings. Some had scribbles in red pen by TA's, and sometimes by the professors themselves.

One caught my eye. It was dated 1981 (I was 19 at the time), and it had to do with Napoleon. I sat down on a box and had a read: the thesis was that we would live in a better world had Napoleon not been defeated at Waterloo in 1815.

I had made the argument that with the demise of England, her fleet, and therefore her overseas empire, France would have begun exporting the fruits of the French Revolution to the entire world. This included the hastening of a world-wide conversion to the metric system a hundred years before it was generally adopted. The Code de Napoleon, a legal code of laws, also would have been exported. I argued that this system was infinitely better than our horrible British legal system based on precedent and adversarial lawyers arguing for justice until they were blue in the face. I also argued that a unified Europe perhaps may have weathered the civil wars of the mid 19th Century, and prevented the petty rivalries, jealousies, and unabated nationalism that led directly to WWI: a Napoleonic Europe, then, would have prevented the horrors of 20th Century Europe.

After reading this essay, I sat on that box under the stairs and thought for a long time, and realized that I think about things very differently now than I did as a 19 year old. First, I tend not to idolize history’s leaders like Napoleon anymore. Napoleon was bent on attaining power and holding on to it, and nothing suggests that he was ever remorseful for the huge numbers of lives spent on his nearly constant warmongering. To Napoleon, other peoples’ lives were a necessary casualty of attaining and holding onto supreme power. As a father and husband, I guess I have much more to lose than I did at 19, and can’t imagine what it would have been like to have my son drafted into the army of a warmonger like Napoleon. If the price of bringing a new system of weights and measures and a law code to the world was even one human life, it would not have been worth it.

Further, from the Late Medieval period onwards, Europe had seen four major wars before the Napoleonic period, and there is nothing to suggest that a new empire throughout Europe would have quelled the frictions that had caused the previous wars. Perhaps it is just as likely that the conflagration that was WWI would have come much sooner than it did after a prolonged Napoleonic Europe. Presently, and apart from the Balkan war of the 1990’s, Europeans have been at peace since 1945. Such an enduring peace in a land of incessant warfare has not been brought about through the governance of an over-arching empire: rather, those ancient rivalries have been tempered by such things as a democratically governed European Union.

Finally, I suspect that at 19 I was rebelling somehow against a secondary education that had been very pro-British. Napoleon had been cast as a demon and threat to all that was good and wonderful about England and her empire. However, I had recently learned in university that Wellington was a jerk, publicly calling his troops 'the scum of the earth', and that he represented and fought for a severely class stratified society, with a tiny elite (of which he was one) who ran everything at home and across an empire of subjects and slaves. It could be that I idolized Napoleon simply because he was not British.

In my now older skin I realize two things that I did not at 19. First, our admiration ought not to be directed at history's power hungry robber barons who use peoples' lives to attain their goals. We might better learn from them how not to treat other human beings. Those far more worthy of admiration are leaders like Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., who refused to engage in violence to get what they wanted. Second, history is very complex, and the game we play of predicting 'what might have happened had something been different' is, in the end, fruitless.

Ode to Ultimate Frisbee

It has been 3 months since I broke my right arm, and I am now able to throw a frisbee for the first time. I now go with my son to the field up the street, and throw him 'long ones'. Perhaps you know the ones I am talking about. The frisbee sits on the air, seemingly in defiance of all sorts of laws of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry. Time stands still. I have always gotten a thrill when a frisbee finds that sweet spot on the air, hovering seemingly forever. It seems to stop, and yet sometimes it is flying through the air very quickly. It is a difficult thing to describe, and perhaps a Zen Buddhist or Taoist might do a better job. Yes, it is as if the frisbee sits on the Tao, the 'path of the universe'. After a session of throwing frisbees, I often feel as though I have been meditating.

I had the thought the other day that the game of Ultimate frisbee seems to be patterned after the 'frisbee-Tao' described above. Certainly, the game is like no other. In every game I've played the teams are 'evened out': if one side is stronger than the other, players are exchanged. This has the effect of decreasing that hard and sharp edge of competition, and increasing an overall sense of 'goodwill'. Further, the play rarely stops. It flows backwards and forwards, with people going from offense to defense readily, easily and frequently. Finally, play continues until everyone is too tired to keep going, and then 'the next point wins'. In most games I've played no-one even bothers to keep score, and there are no time limits, beyond those of human endurance and interest.

I can hardly wait to get back playing. Any one up for a little Ultimate frisbee? I'll throw you a long one.

Sultans of Swing

Sometime in 1978, when I was in grade 10, Dire Straits released Sultans of Swing. I remember distinctly being in a pool hall and seeing it listed on the juke box. It was nearly lost in the avalanche of the latest disco tunes, like 'Disco Duck', 'Copacabana', 'Macho Man', 'Rasputin', and 'Blame it on the Boogie'. For me, the Disco era was fun at first, but by 1978, I had had enough. In fact, I had been reacting to the disco craze by delving more and more into the songs and the bands that pre-dated disco, like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Stones, the Allman Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

I placed my quarter into the juke box, and an entirely new sound cut through the air. I listened first to the rhythm and melody, which was oh so different from anything a disco filled juke box had played in quite some time. It may as well have been from another planet. The second quarter allowed me to listen to the lyrics: the song was about someone who crosses the river into south London, and hears a band in the distance. The band was called the Sultans of Swing, and joyously played 'Big Band' music. The lyrics presented for us a band playing a different sound from a different time, and the lyrics themselves were embedded in a song with a new and completely different sound. It was not R&B, folk, soul, rock, country, blues, and it was certainly not disco. This juke-box epiphany changed me.

At first, I think it made me more open to the new music emanating from England. I did not much like the first wave of punk that came over like the Sex Pistols, but I eventually learned to really like the Clash. New Wave, including the Police, and then all those fun bands like Devo and Joan Jett and Blondie represent for me a really cool time for music. I would go to clubs at the university with my friends and jump up and down doing the 'pogo' for hours on end to songs like 'Whip it good'. I remember distinctly that it was the first time in my life that people no longer danced in 'couples', but just jumped up and down wherever they wanted, bumping into other people, laughing the whole time. Such fun.

Later, while finishing my BA and looking around for graduate schools, I was drawn ever more to things English. While I may not have articulated it as such back then, I think Dire Straits had a lot to do with my choosing to study in Newcastle, Dire Straits' home town. It could be that because so many of their songs have to do with Newcastle, subliminally I had a soft spot for the place. Later, Denise and I would walk down to the quayside on the River Tyne, noticing the various places mentioned in their song 'Down to the Waterline'. Later I was able to see them live in concert at Gateshead Stadium when they were still writing and performing.

All these years later, sometimes I still get that same thrill when I hear the opening bars of Sultans of Swing cutting through the air.

An Uneasy feeling about James Cameron's Avatar

Over Christmas, I and the family visited LA and saw James Cameron's Avatar in 3-D at an Omnimax. We sat in full reclining seats with a perfect view from our knees to the ceiling of a huge screen in the clearest possible resolution. The 3-D worked really well, and sometimes I found myself holding out my hands to feel the foliage of the rainforest floor. I remember looking over at my family and seeing them in a long row of people, every one of whom was wearing those funny glasses.

Amidst the splendour of the audio/visual experience, I remember feeling at unease about where Cameron was taking the story. The plot featured a people of another planet perfectly in tune with their environment, threatened by an American corporation with American military support bent on extracting the precious 'Unobtainium' from beneath the rainforest floor. I became uneasy when the people began to fight back successfully, actually kill American soldiers, and succeed at the expense of American business and warcraft.

I am not sure that Cameron intended to draw a parallel between the American business interest and military on a strange planet and the American business interests and military war in Iraq. However, it seems to work well: with regard to business, 'Unobtanium' equates well with 'oil'; as for the military, one of Cameron's soldiers actually uses the term 'shock and awe', the code name for the invasion of Iraq.

I think I felt uneasy because America is still involved in a war in Iraq, has lost many men and treasure prosecuting this war, and we, a family of foreigners, were sitting in a closed in place surrounded by Americans who may not have liked what they were hearing.

I felt uneasy also because Cameron seemed to be re-writing American history. The main character meets the daughter of the chief of the native people, and it is through her intercession that the main character is not killed. This is eerily similar to John Smith and Pocahontas. The difference is that John Smith's descendants would eventually thrive, kill or capture the natives and put them on reservations, and create a nation state. In Avatar, we see the proxy Pocahontas and her people repel the invaders and require that they leave the planet. In a stroke, Cameron has allowed the Native Americans to keep their 'New World' for themselves.


In the end, we were not crushed by our fellow theatre goers as they stormed the stage with pitch-forks and torches. Rather, the audience seemed to really like the film. In fact, it is now the all-time biggest movie in terms of revenue. While not all of this revenue has been garnered in the US, I understand that most of it has.

This tells me one of at least three things.
1. People agreed with the equation of the planet/Iraq and native people/Pocahontas and liked it.
2. The above equation is wrong, Cameron meant something else, and people understood what he meant and liked it.
3. People did not see any symbolism at all, and liked it instead because there was a romance, lots of colour, destruction of public property, and some really interesting ways that people died.