2009 January « another blog: by kwok

Surrealistic events of the world

The single lesson on Friday was certainly surrealistic for me. I think there was complete lack of will and determination to either move the lesson proper on for the rest of the students left in class or cancel the lesson for fun and games instead. In the end the half-hearted attempt at both didn’t go down well with myself. And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only teacher who was in such a limbo. The Chinese New Year Concert was fair but I didn’t get out of the pits till the Chinese Orchestra played “Race Horse”. It was such a brilliant performance that I felt like I’d just struck 4D–which was paradoxically as surreal as the day had been since I don’t bet on 4D’s! The piece was rightly chosen and performed with panache. The neigh impressed everyone around me. Too bad the acoustics of the hall isn’t meant for orchestra pieces: injustice was done to the clarity of the instruments and everything sounded too ‘airy’. I’d want to hear the piece again without the tech!

If it were the USA (or China), for the most important day of their life, Sam would have played it again–and again–on the recorder:

Inauguration concert: Hitting a ‘false note’
The Straits Times Jan 24, 2009

WASHINGTON: It was not precisely lip-synching, but pretty close.

The sombre, elegiac tones before President Barack Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues.

But what the millions present at the National Mall and watching on television heard was, in fact, a recording made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

People sitting nearby could hear the musicians play Air And Simple Gifts, written for the inauguration by John Williams, but their instruments were not amplified.

The players and the inauguration organising committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the President’s swearing in.

‘Truly, weather just made it impossible,’ Ms Carole Florman, a spokesman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday.

‘No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,’ Ms Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because of lip-synching.

Ms Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand, but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

‘It’s not something we would announce, but it’s not something we would try to hide,’ Ms Florman said.

Mr Perlman said the recording, which was made on Sunday at the Marine Barracks in Washington, was used as a last resort.

‘It would have been a disaster if we had done it any other way,’ he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. ‘This occasion’s got to be perfect. You can’t have any slip-ups.’

In a similar quest for perfection, Chinese organisers superimposed the voice of a sweeter-singing little girl on that of a nine-year-old performer featured at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games held in Beijing last August. – NEW YORK TIMES, ASSOCIATED PRESS

That was how the day was for me, a pretty airy fairy sort of existence. But some others had it worse, I believe, if they chose to be engulfed in pessimism. And these are people who are more important to the world than I. And I am talking about the man who made history in the USA with all’s hopes that he will rise amidst the expectations, and his country the economic ruins of the world, making the star-spangled banner shine with pride and not charred by fear. The Chief Justice and the President of the USA can point to the wonders of the English Language to save the blushes during the schmooze-mangled oath, not that it is much of a schmooze to start, btu language purists are always around us:

Split verbs and the oaf of office
By Steven Pinker
The Straits Times Jan 24, 2009

IN 1969, Neil Armstrong appeared to have omitted an indefinite article as he stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled over the difference between ‘man’ and ‘mankind’. In 1980, former United States president Jimmy Carter, accepting his party’s nomination, paid homage to a former vice-president he called Hubert Horatio Hornblower. A year later, Lady Diana Spencer reversed the first two names of her betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince Charles Philip supposedly later joked, actually married his father.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Mr Barack Obama ‘solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States’, Chief Justice Roberts had him ‘solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully’. When Mr Obama paused after ‘execute’, the Chief Justice prompted him to continue with ‘faithfully the office of President of the United States’. (To ensure that the President was properly sworn in, the Chief Justice re-administered the oath on Wednesday evening.)

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the US Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Mr Obama’s vote against the Chief Justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’ habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against ‘split verbs’, in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like ‘to’ – or an auxiliary like ‘will’ – and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk in Star Trek made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the Starship Enterprise was ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’; it should have been ‘to go boldly’. Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that ‘I will always love you’ but ‘I always will love you’ or ‘I will love you always’.

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, ‘to say’.

But in English, infinitives like ‘to go’ and future-tense forms like ‘will go’ are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual On Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. Mr James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have ‘internalised the bogus rule so that they actually believe that a split verb should be avoided’, adding: ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer distinguish alien speech from native speech.’

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the ‘ain’t’ from singer Bob Dylan’s line, ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose’. On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts towards strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb ‘faithfully’ away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the Chief Justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions. – The writer is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the Chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

Yet another man made history. If Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps have dreams, so does he, and a faithful one at that:

The man with no vice
Sunday Times Jan 18, 2009

London – Alan Shearer was labelled ‘boring’ a decade ago because he had no flamboyant personality off the pitch, no documented vices, no funky look or haircut and never said anything controversial.

Oh, and he creosoted his garden fence on the day Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League in 1995.

Which may explain he was called ‘Mary Poppins’ during his time at Newcastle.

One may be tempted to say the same about Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, aka Kaka – who got that name because his younger brother Rodrigo could not pronounce Ricardo.

The 26-year-old does not drink or smoke, his haircut looks like something out of the 1970s and he is polite and courteous to a fault.

And he preserved his virginity until he married wife Caroline in December 2005. Which, for a footballer, is about as wacky as working in the garden rather than celebrating winning the title.

In 2007 Kaka told Vanity Fair: ‘The Bible teaches that true love waits until marriage. If our life today is so beautiful, I think it is because we waited.’

Shearer and Kaka may be dull from a celebrity perspective, but stick them on a football pitch and watch magic happen.

It is not sorcery born of flashy moves and baroque touches.

It is the most special – and useful – magic, skill distilled to its most essential elements. Nothing is wasted, everything has a purpose.

They are very different players in style and position, but the common thread is simplicity; making something difficult look easy in the most direct way possible.

That was Shearer. And that is Kaka – who, if Manchester City have their way, will become the world’s first £100 million man.

Kaka bristled when asked about the ‘boring’ tag two years ago, insisting he was quite the opposite.

‘I am a radical,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’m very radical. I have my life, I have my values. And, compared to much of society, especially football, that is radical.’

A devout evangelical Christian, he sticks to his faith in a secular world. And that, he says, is what makes him a radical, a non-conformist, a man who walks in his own religious bubble, respecting the choices of others but keeping them at arm’s length.

‘People still accept me,’ he said. ‘As for others, I respect them and their right to choose to do other things. I don’t judge them. If you can do that, it’s not hard to be a Christian in a less than Christian world.’

Muhammad Ali was probably the last global superstar who was so upfront and devout in matters of faith.

But Kaka’s belief is perhaps not that surprising when you consider what he endured.

He was born with severe myopia and a rare bone deficiency that stunted his growth.

At the age of 16, he cracked a vertebra at the top of his spine in a fall from a water-slide in his grandparents’ house.

The doctors told him that 99 per cent of such cases end in paralysis; but the vertebra healed perfectly (and mysteriously) on its own and, within two years, he was making his debut for Brazil.

Kaka says of the incident: ‘It changed me in the sense that, after the incident, I started doing things with more intensity, more commitment, more love, it changes your life in an instant.’

The lure of Manchester City’s £ 500,000-a-week salary could entice Kaka, but not out of greed, more out of a desire to help others with the money.

Unlike many Brazilian players, Kaka did not grow up in poverty. He comes from a comfortable, middle-class family. His father, Bosco Izecson Pereira Leite, was a civil engineer and his mother, Simone Cristina dos Santos Leite, worked as a teacher.

Yet, like many of his football-playing compatriots, he helps the poor.

He has explained that his desire to help fight hunger had its origins in his experiences as a player.

‘It has been tough when I have been with the national team and we have gone to play in some of the poorer areas in Brazil,’ he said.

‘You see people come and watch us train or play a match and then you know some of them are going home with no food on the plate.’

Kaka’s moral attitude means that you will never see him losing his temper, lashing out or swearing like so many players. He once said: ‘One needs to have tranquillity, calmness.

‘I will not brawl, because I am not a brawler. I am not supposed to be punching people on the field or swearing.

‘I seek to be a role model in the club. I seek to demonstrate what God has done for me and that He can do it in their lives as well.’

It is not difficult to imagine the AC Milan star excelling in the English Premier League, just as he has done elsewhere.

Technically, he is a rare blend of South America and Europe: the flair and creativity of the former, the directness and tactical nous of the latter.

That cocktail allowed him to integrate seamlessly into Milan from the moment he signed in 2003, avoiding the lengthy adaptation period that other South American stars, from Ronaldinho to Robinho, endured upon arriving in Europe.

‘I knew that I had to adapt to European football,’ he said. ‘I am just one man, I knew it wasn’t going to adapt to me.

‘At the same time, I knew that if they signed me it was because I could provide something different. And I knew I had to maintain that.’

That ability to adapt, to adjust his arsenal of skills, distilling those elements that best suit his environment, is perhaps his single greatest asset. And, if he does land in the Premier League, it will be a priceless skill which will serve him well. – The Times, London

But David Beckham claimed Kaka is interested in a move to Real Madrid. Well, only time will tell if money is the real religion in sports:

Heart of Football: Stay or leave? Kaka has no say
Sunday Times Jan 18, 2009
By Rob Hughes
Money’s still the name of the game and nothing has changed except globalisation

Things turned ugly around the San Siro on Friday night. Milan’s favourite Brazilian, Kaka, seemed to be on the way out, whether or not he fancies the riches that come from being an object of desire for the Arabian owners of Manchester City.

Of all the great players in the world, Kaka is the most cerebral. He knew his place, his believes in his God, his family, his football.

‘As long as Milan want me,’ he said on Wednesday, ‘I want to stay here until I grow old.’

But as much as Milan’s owner and Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, presents this as a case of allowing the star player to decide his own destiny, all indications are that Berlusconi will take the money and sell the crown jewel.

Until it is signed, I wouldn’t put it past the populist PM to suddenly claim this week that the ‘boy’ Kaka doesn’t wish to go, so he, the Papa, will save him for Milan, and for Italian football.

Is that so surreal? What is reality any more?

Keyhole listeners at the door hear the Abu Dhabi sheik holders up the bidding. £100 million, Signor Berlusconi. £150 million? Sure, anything you want.

Kaka, how much? 10 million in the hand, 15 million per season, half a million a week? Pounds, Euros, dollars? Take it.

Money is not your god?

Then think of this, if Milan are prepared to trade, they cannot love you as we will love you.

We will build the best team on earth around you, and you will be their symbol.

So, with Berlusconi’s own son and daughter apparently telling their father that enough is enough, he has spent too much already of the family fortune on his blessed club and they want their legacy intact, you can bet Kaka’s sweet life that he now feels an outcast in his own idea of Heaven.

Is he worth the haggle?

No man is. Kaka is exceptional, he has vision, he has talent, he has a physique that might stand up to the English pace. And, for such an outstanding player, he has a sense of team.

But he is as susceptible to injury as the fittest of men.

He cannot carry a team alone, though Milan, with seven of their line-up well past 30 and with the cynical episode of putting a shirt on the back of David Beckham for a few, mercenary, months, have shown their preference for names over serious team building.

However, what does the deal that busts three-fold the world transfer record (the £46 million Real Madrid paid Juventus for Zinedine Zidane eight years ago) mean to club football?

It means there is only one spender in a league of its own. Move over Roman Abramovich, Sheikh Mansour wants his time in the sun.

Ludicrously, fatuously, the president of Juventus declares that his club would not sell Alessandro del Piero even for ¥120 million. Big deal. Del Piero is a totem player for Juve, but he turned 34 years of age last November.

People everywhere are writing this off as ‘obscene’ distortion of the transfer market. My assessment is that it is like the second coming of Chelski.

You cannot rationalise it, fight it, or ignore it. The money exists, the Arabs want to spend it, and no good intentions from Michel Platini or anybody else can outlaw it.

The statement by Arsenal’s manager Arsene Wenger that Britain is losing 3,000 jobs a day is irrelevant. The sheikh isn’t here to stop the ruin of the global economy.

His game is like that of rich men down the decades with their yachts, their paintings, their string of race horses that cost the GDP of some nations.

If it’s obscene, it’s the distribution of wealth into a few hands. It’s as old as time.

Football will survive. It took 74 years for the British transfer record to shoot from £1,000 (which Middlesbrough paid Sunderland for Alf Common in 1905) to £1 million (Trevor Francis from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest in 1979). Now the bidding has gone through the £100 million barrier in just 30 years.

When Francis moved – and incidentally headed the winning goal for Forest in the Champions League final – I wrote a book with him on the phenomenon of being the world’s first £1 million footballer.

I spoke at length to Brian Clough, who made the purchase on behalf of Forest.

Guess what? He was accused of destabilising the sport, the industry, the economy. He didn’t look like a sheikh, but in a sense nothing has changed except globalisation.

And that might be where we are inexorably heading – towards a global league that involves the top four teams of nations that can afford to stay in the game.

The pyramid beneath that will have to cut its cloth according to its means. Clubs would be reckless in the extreme to try to compete with the sheikhs, the oligarchs, maybe even the odd drug baron and exiled head of state who, for a brief time, blow them all out of the water.

A still, small voice, belonging to Gianfranco Zola who had a marvellous time at Chelsea in the pre-Abramovich era, was heard this weekend.
‘It is a difficult thing for Kaka,’ said Zola. ‘I would not want to be in his place. He loves Milan, I think he will stay there.’

The choice may not be his.

Ethics could be the new dodo bird. When money is a concern, what’s stopping us from flouting the rules of our belief–as long as we are not found out:

Japanese cities ‘mine’ ashes of the dead
The Straits Times Jan 16, 2009

TOKYO: Cash-strapped city governments in Japan are searching through the ashes of cremated residents to extract precious metals, and pocketing the proceeds from the recycled gold and silver.

The city of Nagoya alone had collected, in 2007, 12kg of gold, silver, platinum and palladium worth more than 10 million yen (S$168,000) from teeth and bones, reported the London-based Telegraph, citing Japanese media reports.

The practice has been uncovered by Japan’s influential newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which claimed that relatives of the dead were unaware of their loved ones’ remains being ‘mined’ for reusable materials, reported the Telegraph.

‘What happens to the bodies after cremation varies from place to place, but in general, it is left up to the crematorium,’ said Mr Fumio Nakajima, a spokesman for the Tokyo metropolitan government.

‘The ashes and most of the bones are placed in the urn and given to the family, although some bones are too big and it is then up to the crematorium to dispose of them,’ he said. ‘It’s the same with teeth.

‘The metal is no longer considered to be a part of the person and we are just reusing and recycling the material,’ he added.

Tokyo collected some 700g of gold, 500g of palladium and 1.9kg of silver from cremated bodies in 2007, adding 3.2 million yen to the city’s bank account. The city also banked around 90,000 yen in coins left as offering inside the coffins, said the British daily.

The practice has apparently been going on for the past 20 years, but some cities have halted it after relatives of the dead found out and complained that it was disrespectful to profit from the deceased, said the report.

‘Very few families know what happens and what happens in the crematoriums is kept very quiet,’ said a Buddhist priest from Kanagawa prefecture who often oversees traditional funerals.

‘The crematorium will usually return the ashes of the whole body but they assume the families can’t use the gold and hence they’re not doing anything wrong,’ he said.

Nearly 2,000 tonnes of bones and ashes are collected across Japan at crematoriums every year, with many municipalities considering ashes and bone fragments not placed in urns and taken away by the family to have been abandoned, reported the Telegraph.

I’m not sure if I’m reading too much into the intention of this essay, but I think Andy Ho might be offering a solution to the poor Japanese officials:

Rising from the ashes
The Straits Times Jan 24, 2009

UNKNOWN to bereaved families, several city governments in Japan have, for the last two decades, been going through the cremated remains of their loved ones to extract precious metals.

Reporting this grisly fact recently, the Asahi Shimbun noted that when these remains – called cremains – are large (such as bony pieces and teeth), crematoria dispose of them as they deem fit.

Some readers were aghast to learn this, having assumed that everything was consumed in the fires. Most people don’t know what the pyrotechnology employed at crematoria actually entails. People assume that the bones are charred first and then burnt to an ash. This is understandable since you can’t see what goes on once the casket rolls away behind that curtain after the final goodbyes are said.

Here is what happens: First, the heavy furnace door opens and the casket is ‘charged’ in quickly, so as not to lose too much of the heat that had been built up by firing up the furnace beforehand. The door is then quickly shut. Next, flames as hot as 1,000 deg C are shot down at the casket from above.

There are small amounts of real ash from the wood of the casket that are caught by filters in the first 10 minutes or so. Then, since we are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and minerals (in our bones especially), the extreme heat turns flesh and organs into water vapour and carbon dioxide. There is no ash from these tissues at all.

The whole process takes about two hours, with the heat removing carbon even from the bones. But 70 per cent of bones are a white mineral called hydroxyapatite, found also in teeth. While all the carbon can be burnt off, the hydroxyapatite cannot be vaporised. It is left behind as bone, cracked into little pieces.

About 2kg to 4 kg of recognisable pieces of skull, vertebrae, long bones and teeth may be recovered. They are swept into a tray, left to cool down and then poured into a device called a cremulator. This mechanically pulverises them into a grey, uniform sand-like consistency – the ‘ashes’ next of kin receive in an urn.

According to National Environment Agency rules, these ‘ashes’ may be stored at home, in a columbarium, or scattered at a designated site out at sea, about 1.5 nautical miles south of Pulau Semakau.

Death intrudes upon the continuity of our social world rudely. Not only must the corpse be processed but also the idea of death itself. Thus all societies have developed rituals to revalidate the social order that has been disturbed by death. If such rituals have to be changed, the social order suffers perturbations.

Traditionally, the Chinese have preferred to bury, not cremate, their dead. While the omega-shaped Chinese grave had a platform for worship to facilitate and re-emphasise ancestor veneration rites, the columbarium does not.

In a study published 10 years ago, National University of Singapore (NUS) geographer Brenda Yeoh found that Singaporeans had generally accepted cremation as a choice for the post-mortem repose of their loved ones. With the intermediation of the funerary industry, Chinese religious beliefs, including fengshui, and traditional rites of memorialisation have been woven into the new rite and ensconced within the columbarium landscape as well.

That transition was perhaps made a little easier because the ashes were said to come from the bones. In pre-modern Chinese culture, flesh was seen to come from the mother (yin) and bone from the father (yang). Being able to preserve the bones, thus, would keep the patrilineage of males – and thus the family – intact down the passage of time, regardless of death, since the world of the living was yang in essence. (The world of the dead is said to be yin.) Perhaps, such beliefs helped make cremation become acceptable to the Chinese here.

More universally, cremation itself may serve to transform meaning as well. Julia Kristeva, writing in her 1982 masterpiece, Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection, argued that the corpse is an ‘abject’. That is, it is no longer the subject the deceased was when still alive but not yet the object of our longing that he would be when he is really gone for good. In that liminal, transitional period between death and burial or cremation, we can still see and touch him.

Embraced by the flames, the ‘abject’ is transformed from being liminally present to absent. And then, when the ashes are collected in an urn, the absent is made liminally present again.

In most cultures, people build monuments less to commemorate loss and more to reinstate the presence of something or someone who was lost. The ashes we imagine are inside the urn stress a past that has passed, yet is nevertheless present once again. The bereaved can touch once again – if once removed – the bone of my bones.

Looking at another domain of life, debates like the death sentence or abortion are evergreen. Organ harvesting could be a new one:

Death-row organ transplants problematic
The Straits Times Forum page Jan 17, 2009

I REFER to Dr Andy Ho’s article on Thursday, ‘Chance for capital felons to pay back’.

A working group from Columbia University noted in a 1997 report that in the light of the acute shortage of organs, it is not difficult to trot out arguments to justify using executed prisoners as donors: ‘Since the execution and death will occur anyway, why ‘waste’ the kidneys and heart? Since the state has the legal right to execute the prisoner, surely it may remove organs for so socially constructive a purpose. Moreover, donations can provide recompense for past misdeeds. The criminal has the opportunity to redeem himself through this act.’

Here are a few points to consider:
• The legitimacy of capital punishment is already questioned. I am strongly against it and I think Dr Ho makes light of a grim situation.
• Securing organs from executed prisoners entails a process that is subject to abuse. Individuals on death row face the inevitability of execution. In that frame of mind, it is easier to compel them to donate an organ. This is abuse – even more so if people are ready to pay for organs.
• Trying to solve the shortage by taking organs from those put to death is shocking. As a human who knows he will die one day, I prefer to pledge my organs for donation and encourage others to do so.
• Using executed prisoners as donors also subverts the ethical integrity of the medical profession. Are doctors not supposed to save lives?
Is it not enough that we kill people? Do we still want to make them pay after death? Need we go one step further by harvesting their organs? – Francois Bretault

Of course, like most Forum letters, the arguments put forth in support of one’s stand seem almost easily thwarted. I must admit that there is one point raised that can be seen as valid, but that is not saying the authorities will not be able to come up with a solution to address that concern and I am sure we can. For the record, I did not opt out of this organ donation scheme when I reached 21 years of age (not so long ago!) Anyway, my guess is that the organ-harvesting debate will soon be less important an issue than rice-harvesting.

Boundaries blurred by excuses of capitalism or globalisation or science and technology make the real surreal. May the year of the ox ground everything in earthly sincerity!

January 26, 2009 Posted by Mr K | literary expression, Reflect | Leave a comment