To make said 7AM bus (from Chinatown to Boston) required me getting up around 5, having a very hurried breakfast, trying to finish stuffing all my stuff into a smallish backpack without waking my roommate, and going to 6th Ave. to pick up the first C-train of the morning. A near-mishap on the ice between Grand Ave. and the bus later, and I was sitting in a mostly empty bus, with about 15 other folk. The bus route took us over the Brooklyn bridge, up the Bruckner Expressway through Brooklyn and Queens, over the Triborough bridge to the Bronx, and finally onto I-95. What would normally have been drab scenery became much more interesting with the addition of a few inches of snow.

The ride itself wasn’t too exciting. Aside from a few folks chattering on cell-phones, everybody was either asleep or quasi comatose. We stopped briefly at a Roy Rogers somewhere in Connecticut for people to grab coffee and use the bathroom (too late for me, alas, I had to use the horrid one on the bus). Two chapters of Markets of Dispossession (from Anthropology) and three albums of The Clash later, we were coming up on Boston’s suburbs. Slightly after 11AM, the bus deposited us in South Station.

Pausing to admire the ‘no photographs in the terminal’ sign, I wound up at the Boston subway (T), which proved both much cleaner, and much smaller than the New York one. Getting off in Cambridge, and triangulating via cell-phone with my friend Z- with whom I would be staying, I managed to stay upright on the icy sidewalks long enough to arrive at her place. She had unfortunately not been as lucky, having slipped and sprained her ankle the night before.

The afternoon was one of introductions. To Z-‘s enormous apartment. To the 14 chinchillas, 2 guinea pigs and 1 other human (hi F-!) therein residing. To some very silly British TV comedy. To an astonishing collection of movie posters (which were in some cases more memorable than the movies themselves had been). A nice relaxed afternoon, out of the wind and cold, finished with Indian takeout and a ridiculous movie making fun of uptight born-again Christians (and Jews, and just about everybody else featured in it).

Yesterday’s snow was mostly still here, although the roads are mostly passable now. Arabic class proceeded apace, including a diversion into the intersection of marital practices and language (or rather, why ‘became engaged to’ is only conjugated in the third person feminine form in our text). Grandma is recovering from a cold, so our Thursday lunch programme required some revision.
Instead, I spent my afternoon dealing with two disparate topics: hard drives and Wahhabism. Having read Hamid Algar’s polemic against Wahhabism earlier in the week, I had the pleasure of examining Natana DeLong Bas’s apologia on the same topic. I’m very much not certain I know more about the essence of Wahhabism than when I began, but I have a rather clearer idea of the sorts of arguments partisans on either side make.

My hard drive experiment was more about trying to create a fast, effective backup system. I benchmarked the time required to transfer a 1GB file, both from internal to external drive, and duplicating to the same drive. Results were less than impressive: 8MB/s duplicating, about 14MB/s internal to external (and vice versa), and 22MB/s when using 2 drives as a striped RAID array. I’d say USB 2.0 isn’t my favorite interface for data transfer. Despite the fact that booting from an external drive is subjectively much slower than from the internal one, my tests didn’t see much of a difference there. Odd that.

The final portion of the evening (starting after dinner, at 11PM) was packing for tomorrow. Perhaps taking the 7AM bus wasn’t the wisest idea.

So it is officially winter in New York. Double officially. NYU sent out a nice message last night warning us that although the university would not close, some operations might be impacted. When I got up this morning, the snow was coming down lightly. Going to class was rather exciting, what with the half-blocked streets, partially buried cars and whatnot. Walking in the snow was actually much better than walking on the sidewalks that were cleared, as the latter were quite slippery and gave no traction whatsoever.

I returned to my nice warm apartment for lunch (particularly warm because we’ve been keeping the window closed, and haven’t figured out how to turn down the heat). Evening class was cancelled, not on account of the snow, but because the professor was sick, so that left me plenty of time to ponder and read. It finally stopped snowing right around sundown. In the grand scheme of things, 3-4 inches of snow seem hardly an adequate explanation for the muted, nearly tranquil atmosphere around Washington Square, but there it is.

Among the more pleasant diversions of the afternoon was an article by Matt Taibbi on alternet: “Time’s Joe Klein: A Supreme Suck-Up.” The thing about Taibbi is that he has a complete lack of respect for the Washington establishment and its consensus. Moreover, while the topic was a bit pedestrian (a three year old could eviscerate Joe Klein given half an hour on Google), Taibbi’s polemic has such poise and style that you’d read it even if it was talking about monkeyfishing.

One of the things I find supremely irritating about blogs, particularly since Billmon and Michael Berube quit, is the writing quality. Most of the time, it sucks. It’s formulaic. It’s boring. And it’s repetitive as all hell. The politico-blogosphere basically feels like an echo-chamber of third rate hacks (with a few notable exceptions). If you want to know what the libloggers are up to, read Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein and maybe DailyKos and you’re good. If you want to know what the wingnuts are thinking, have a peek (if you dare) at Glenn Reynolds. There, done.

Finally, it’d be really nice if everybody stopped calling liberals leftists. They’re not, and it’s an insult to real leftists, not to mention political speech.

Happy Valentine’s day. Snowstorm made my day. Hope something made yours.

I’m not really sold on the value of theory. Particularly when it comes to the social sciences, I find it often impenetrable, frequently impossibly abstract, and generally inapplicable to meaningful situations. These objections aside, today’s anthropology discussion was actually reasonably captivating. Our theoretical drift was motivated by the question of development: why do efforts at development (meaning in this case that of the third world) consistently fail (by the standards of their own supporters)?

Now one possibility is sheer incompetence. But considering the considerable expertise going into many of these efforts, this is less than satisfactory as an explanation. Another is ill intent. But given the variety of the actors, and the motivations of many of them, this too seems absurd.

A third position is that the fault lies not at the level of implementation, or even really planning, but at the formulation and examination of the problem itself. Development is a process shaped not merely by individual free agents, but by its own internal dynamics: the discourse that contains it, and the epistemology that governs its conception. To take one example, the problem is not merely that bad statistics lead to poor project-planning, but that the way in which we think about knowledge cause us to collect those bad statistics in the first place. Knowledge (Egypt is overcrowded) is socially constructed (our assumptions about valid population distribution as drawn from our experiences and surroundings), as is our knowledge of that knowledge (how we can go about ‘measuring’ overcrowding).

This does lead one to a rather pessimistic view. Since the morning was full of Arabic which I wasn’t wholly on top on, and the evening led to snow as I read a text on Wahabbism, that seems entirely appropriate.

In the meantime, we have an unfolding internet drama pitting our homegrown theocrats against some of the best and brightest of the leftish bloggers. Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan have resigned from the Edwards campaign. The two were attacked by the Catholic League (a Christianist outfit run by William Donohue) and its deranged and abusive followers for having the gall to mock and criticize the misogynistic and patriarchal practices of the Catholic church. This their (Marcotte’s and McEwan’s) opponents called ‘hate speech’, before proceeding to threaten them with violence, rape and the like. Edwards refused to stand fully behind them, keeping them as employees, but disavowing their comments as ‘offensive’ and doing nothing to force a halt to the vicious campaign against them. Thus both have resigned.

Once again, we have a clear example that in American public life, you can be a homophobe or a racist, but being critical of Christian religion is a no-go. Until that changes, McEwan and Marcotte are quite justified in their strident criticism of the Catholic Church, an organization with an assuredly mixed record up to the present. ßGo Pandagon and Shakes’ Sis!

I hate writing. Scratch that. I find writing to be the most aggravating activity in the world (with the possible exception listening to fools, which clocks in pretty high on that roster too).

The problem is actually pretty simple. I have an idea, or an observation (often regarding an assignment). It seems decent. I want to put it down on paper (or as is the case these days, on computer). So, I try to write it out. But it doesn’t quite come it right. It gets convoluted or it doesn’t sound as clever as I thought it was, or I somehow wind up on a tangent writing about something I had no intention of discussing or…

At some point in the process, I realize I’m writing garbage. So I try again. Usually at first, I’ll just start near the end. Hoping to turn things around you see. That’ll fail. So I wind up rewriting the whole darn thing. Again. And again. And so on.

At some point, I give up. Sometimes, it’s because I’m marginally satisfied. More often, it’s because I’m sick of the whole thing, or don’t have any more time to blow on it. The result is that most of the time, I can’t stand to read what I’ve just written. I know it’s garbage, but I haven’t got the will or the means to do a damn thing about it.

Today, I wasted a good hour trying to expand on an op-ed I saw in the NY Times (Gar Alperovitz, “California Split”, Feb. 10). Good op-ed on the virtues of decentralizing the US. All I wanted to do was to elaborate on the benefits such a plan would have for the left, while simultaneously allowing us to coopt much of the right in its execution. Yet somehow, my thoughts just wouldn’t come out right.

I also had the privilege of writing something short for a class. The advantage there was that I could let my conscience rest on the issue of quality: deadlines are deadlines, after all.

Reading is fun (lots of that today). Thinking is okay. But writing? Maybe academia isn’t such a hot destination after all.

The hard thing about Sunday is that it’s followed by Monday, but preceded by Saturday. So you have a precedent going in (staying up late, being somewhat lazy) and a need for results. A rather ugly combination.

Still, things must be done, so I did… things.

Among the things done (though not necessarily planned on) was to watch the rather curious John Cusack comedy, “Grosse Point Blank.” Premise: A hit man goes home to complete a job and attend his ten-year high school reunion. The whole conception is perfect for a black comedy. Which the film would be, except they have to throw in a love interest who softens the film to the point that the blackness is basically submerged and even SNL’s Dan Aykroyd can’t quite rescue it. All that said, something about Cusack makes him just perfect for the role of hitman, particularly when he has to deadpan lines like: “Oh, I kill people for a living.” Plus, it’s 1997 and he’s using a PowerBook. “Solidarity, baby” (Aykroyd to Cusack in the final shootout).

And now, how about some Egyptian political economy, with a dash of Arabian Islamism?

So on top of some general reshuffling, cleanup, memorizing odd Arabic words and writing overdue letters, my odyssey with the printer ended in success. A few weeks back, I’d tried to print out some photos from my shiny new laptop. The prints were alas far from shiny and new-looking: they were disturbingly grainy and blurred. Playing with innumerable printer configuration settings accomplished nothing. Today I had the inspired idea to downgrade from Photoshop CS 3 beta to CS 2. And lo and behold, my prints no longer stink (or rather, they look as good/bad as they did before the new computer. Guess I shouldn’t be using beta software to print out stuff I care about?

Rather than spell out in painful detail (and after the fact) the happenings of the week, let me just mention a few highlights.

Monday 2/5: Cold and gloomy. That’s me, not the weather.

Tuesday 2/6: Nominally introduced the Anthropology discussion, but in practice, received a rather convoluted education into the construction (and potential deconstruction) of human rights.

Wednesday 2/7: Tackled 19th century Iran in the history class. Interesting to compare to the Ottoman Empire.

Thursday 2/8: Went out to lunch with Uncle H- and grandparents before his return to LA. For once, Indian food without indigestion.

Friday 2/9: Catch up. On course readings. On Arabic. On sleep. On this neglected blog. Lots of catch up.

Sunday was the sort of day that just sort of happened. It all centered around a rather haphazard lunch that several members of the party rather vociferously objected to. Nothing could be done, however, and so there was a giant trip to the grocery store for enormous quantities of food that didn’t get eaten, followed by a lunch gather mixing relatives and neighbors. As Cousin H- was intent upon affixing balloons to everybody throughout, I was rather distracted.

The remainder of the afternoon was pretty quiet, until it was suggested that perhaps we should go see a movie. One mad rush later, we were in a theater in Elmsford, tickets in hand for Babel. I wasn’t really all that impressed, although the bits of Arabic were of some interest. It was the sort of movie that would have been affecting, had it not been so heavy-handed.

Regardless, the reality of morning classes meant that as soon as we returned and Grandpa attended to his presents, I left for the train station. A quick ride to White Plains got me to an express train. Entertainment riding back alone was limited. I also made the mistake of taking the express subway line at Grand Central. Walking to my apartment from 14th St. shouldn’t have been a big deal, but the mid-teens temperature and roaring wind going down Broadway left me feeling just about as cold as I can remember. After a can of soup to warm up, I checked the web: temperature of 14 degrees, or -3 with wind chill. Brr…

Today’s narrative begins with me, groggy and with a slight headache, getting up at 7AM. This allowed me almost two hours to do a number of errands. Send off, via post, one of the last eBayed Kanga parts (an extra ethernet board and a 64MB RAM module, no less). Return a book to the library that I’d now bought. Eat a light breakfast. Try and dress warmly.

At a quarter past 9 came the buzz by the doorman to indicate Dad had arrived. Considering his overnight flight, and lack of sleep, I suppose the 20 degree weather in which he had walked from Penn Station down to my place was in a sense useful. We took a quick jaunt around Washington Square before deciding to give the outdoors a miss and stop at yuppieish restaurant/bakery called Le Pain Quotidien. There we not only drank tea and had a light breakfast, but managed to meet Cousin K- who I had not seen in almost 3 months (despite his being at NYU for much of that time), and watched a very large SUV get towed from a red-zone.

We took a tour of the library (to my surprise, they let Dad in without complaint) before encountering prolonged blasts of icy air on the way to the quay by the Hudson. This exceedingly clear view of Manhattan, New Jersey, and a good deal more (lady liberty herself was a sizable smudge on the horizon) was marred considerably by gusts that reduced us to almost complete numbness. After leaving K-, who had work to do, Dad and I took the subway down to the former site of the World Trade Center. Or rather, we overshot it, as the trade-center’s collapse had closed the relevant station. The site itself was the scene of a great deal of construction equipment and workers, though it is as yet only a big hole.

Next to the WTC site is the WFC, the World Financial Center which seems to be part of a general revitalization project for lower Manhattan. This huge, heated, and oddly open building offered lunch opportunities and the vocals of a goodly number of Gospel choirs, vying in some sort of competition. Returning from the WFC to the subway brought us past a building billowing smoke that seemed to have attracted most of the FDNY. Perhaps Saturday afternoon is a slow period?

In quick succession, we picked up card, present and luggage and grabbed the subway up to Grand Central, whence we took the train in to Hartsdale. Waiting at the other end, having also just arrived from California, were Uncle J-, Aunt I- and Cousin H-. We thus arrived at the grandparents house, unannounced and unexpected. Both Grandma and Grandpa were suitably surprised.

The actual birthday part of the evening (well, this whole thing was for Grandpa’s 90th birthday, you see) was almost anti-climactic by comparison. We reveled briefly in togetherness, had a light dinner (Chinese take-out) and once jet lag finally kicked in, everybody went to bed. And I do mean everyone.