good thing I don't brush my teeth

(would hate not to have had skin on them)

My flight to Amsterdam was at 10:35 am. I woke up at 7:50 with the goal of catching the 9:20 bus. Piece of cake. I left my house frantically at 9:13, took a velo'v, biked recklessly to the station with my suitcase balanced on the basket, and screeched to a stop next to the driver who was finishing his cigarette. Leaving my suitcase as a gesture of goodwill, I dashed to the bike stand and returned my bike. Since the stand is right next to the bus stop, I could see him close his door and start pulling away as I did this. Of course, the light was red, and there were lots of buses ahead of him, so he was just stopped. I waved at him, showed him my ticket, and pleaded. He refused to open the door. I should have flashed him as an inducement.

I hesitated for a bit there. I have taken a taxi to the airport in these circumstances. On the other hand, there was no reason for me to be in Amsterdam today. It was only because this flight was way cheaper that I had taken it. So I decided to force myself to relax, and take the 9:40 bus, scheduled to arrive at 10:15, right at "last call" for my flight. I did my best. On the bus, I did the full check, and emerged beltless, watchless, etc. I ran, recklessly again, to security, cut in front of a severely disabled person (no, really), asked my way ahead of several other (non-disabled) people, and spread my stuff out on the belt, cutting in front of someone I hadn't asked. I set off the machine because I'd forgotten my coins. Security was sanguine about me making it despite being so late. I was through at 10:25, ten minutes before my flight was to leave. I ran to gate 21E, which was completely deserted. No sign of anything. I was far too late. I slowed down, and saw a carte d'identité on the floor -- not the crappy carte de sejour that I have, but the real deal. I picked it up and walked to customer service. She also seemed surprised that I would have missed my flight, and looked it up. "La porte a changée," she said. "21G." I ran off again, and came to 21G, which seemed to be boarding for Paris. I asked, Amsterdam? He said, no. Amsterdam is another gate, further down. 21J, which in French is pronounced G, and which I never hear as J. I ran there as they were making last call, and handed them the id card. They thanked me and asked to see my own.

the UK needs me for one more year

-- unless the pound is weak. I have exactly 75 points, which is the minimum required to enter the UK as a "highly skilled worker" without any job lined up. I get 5 points for being 30. I'll still get 5 for being 31, but that's my last chance. However, I currently get 20 points for my income over the previous 12 months. If I earn more than £26,000 in a year (currently $41,344 or €27,870), then I can enter the UK whenever I like. Assuming they approve my application.

From the "notes" at math.berkeley.edu

Oct 2: Warning: Due to a known bug, the default Linux document viewer evince prints N*N copies of a PDF file when N copies requested. As a workaround, use Adobe Reader acroread for printing multiple copies of PDF documents, or use the fact that every natural number is a sum of at most four squares.

it all makes sense now

People will go to any lengths to hear Obama speak:

He said Oslo faced a major challenge to get ready for what will likely be among the largest civic events in Norwegian history: the award ceremony Dec. 10 at which Mr. Obama will be expected to deliver a speech.

way to look presidential

This picture looks like the evolution of man:

awful movie

When I first got to France and had watched a few of the movies my father gave me, with English subtitles, I asked him to rip some DVDs from Netflix that had French subtitles, since I thought it would make it easier to focus on the audio, while still giving me some help. As it turns out, the best way I've found to watch French movies is by using the English subtitles, but putting them on delay (pressing 'h' in VLC). With a delay of a second and a half, I get a chance to hear the French and try to understand it, but the subtitle comes up afterward in case I didn't. However, in addition to the many excellent films he gave me, I now still have a random assortment of French movies that were released in the U.S. with French subtitles available, and I watched one of them, "Crimson Rivers."

It has to rank as one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life. Spoiler alert: I feel no compunction about recounting the "plot" because it's nonsense. The dialogue, situations, etc., are abominable (there's a random fight scene with video game sound affects "A new challenger enters!"; the two main cops, both of whom "play by their own rules" have habits of randomly attacking people for no reason), but the biggest issue is that the plot makes no sense whatsoever. A prestigious university in the French Alps, which also has a hospital, has been switching the babies of professors with those of people in the village, to avoid the inbreeding problems the professors have had. When a mother delivers identical twins, they take one of them, apparently believing themselves safe because the mother lives up the mountain somewhere. However, she later moves to the village of the university, and the identical faces of her child and the stolen twin, brought up as the child of professors, is a threat to the university. They hunt her, and she fakes the death of her daughter, cutting off the daughter's finger as evidence of her death (are all children in France fingerprinted?). Later, she starts gruesomely torturing and murdering various people who were involved in this baby-switching plan. The police are dumbfounded when they learn that the killer, whom they almost catch at the scene of a murder, has the same fingerprint as the "dead" girl's finger (which was preserved, with no decay, in a plastic bag for 15 years). They are especially puzzled because the lead cop saw clearly that the killer had 10 fingers. Of course, everything is resolved when they discover that the killers are identical twins, and it was the 10-fingered one that they saw. Except that identical twins don't have identical fingerprints. And how dumb are you to steal one identical twin in your master-race breeding plan?

I watched a documentary on the DVD afterward, since the plot made no sense and I was hoping for some explanation. I learned that the director cut out all exposition, one main actor had no idea what was going on, an Arab main character in the book was replaced by a white one, and the editor said not to "over-intellectualize" the movie. But the writer of the book the movie was based on gave the nice, clear explanation above, that still doesn't make any sense. Nevertheless, "Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse" was made and is available for your viewing enjoyment.

representation

I learned at some point that Andorra was jointly ruled by France and Spain. The truth is weirder. It's been a real democracy since 1993, but the titular heads (that's right, heads) are the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell in Spain. So it has co-princes, one of whom is an elected leader of another country, and the other a religious official.

censorship

I'm listening to Lily Allen's "Fuck You" on French radio right now. I don't know how I feel about this. Guess I'm really a conservative American at heart.

hotels

I'm staying in a very nice hotel in Wrocław. They've supplied me with soap, shampoo, shower gel, shower cap, sewing kit, and vanity kit. Why no toothpaste?? A shower cap is something you can easily bring on an airplane, as is a sewing kit (I brought many needles accidentally on a few flights this summer). Toothpaste, though, requires a little travel tube to get through airport security, which I never have when I'm about to travel. I'm not even sure what's in the vanity kit, but whatever it is, it's way less useful than toothpaste.

another in the line of french medical "horror" stories

Last night, I noticed, taking a break from working (shock!), that I had triple vision in my left eye. I couldn't decide if I'd had it for long, but I went to bed with a worried feeling -- I have a pending eye appointment, but the earliest I could get was September 24th, and I didn't want to wait a month with triple vision in one eye. This morning, it was gone, but against my natural laziness, I started calling ophthalmologists. The first was gone all of August, but the second, after learning that I was going to Poland tomorrow, agreed to see me today. The secretary warned me that it would cost at least 79 euro. I saw the doctor, who guessed that I probably had had a visual migraine (migraine without a headache). The bill was 23 euro. Now the confusing part. Their machine was broken, so I got a form which I'm supposed to give to my health agency. They will then reimburse me for part of the 23 euro. So (I guess) the full bill was 23 euro, which (a) sounds insane, and (b) means I don't understand something basic about the 79. The doctor was in no hurry -- chatted with me about mathematics research, and spoke pretty good English. In total, what we have is a same-day eye appointment for what will probably turn out to be around 10 euro if I ever turn in this form, and 23 if I don't. Score one for French health care over every other health plan I've ever had, in which vision was never included.

From a NY Times article on marijuana

The people who become chronic users don’t have the same lives and the same achievements as people who don’t use chronically.

Don't you mean "people who don't use chronic"?

common currency

You have to wonder why Canadians choose to make their coins just like the U.S. For example, their dimes are tiny, smaller than their nickels. I've gotten an American quarter mixed up in my change, and people don't seem to have any problem using American coins. And yet, Americans don't really appreciate Canadian coins. I would definitely complain if I got Canadian quarters in my change. On the other hand, I realize that I've started picking up pennies I see on the ground. I think it's because I secretly rejoice when I can pay for things with Canadian pennies -- these objects that have been worthless my entire life!

this is why I can't work in coffeeshops

Same place as the Robinson Crusoe conversation, all from a guy (20 yo?) whose companion replied "uh huh" a lot. He said that he was studying evolutionary biology:

"Spiny anteaters are the closest living relative, of all mammals, to dogs and cats." (He repeated this a few times.)

"I'm so a part of this technological revolution. I'm so into blogs and stuff, like Twitter."

[about his ex] "She's a really next-level individual. She's a really different order of being from most people."

"I can direct my mind's eye to some point in the past, and get a good idea of what things look like."

right-to-left script rendering

I happen to be sharing an office with an Iranian. His English is pretty bad, but he says the election was definitely stolen, and he thinks there's no hope that things will be righted. He also says, which I have not heard elsewhere, that polling stations were "captured," or at the very least there were fake votes, as opposed to just centralized fraud. But it's possible there was a language barrier. Of course, a math researcher currently in Canada is certainly part of the educated elite. I guess the explanation for how poor the fraud is is just that Mousavi was on his way to winning outright, which they weren't at all prepared for, and so they then did a frantic, clumsy fraud. But it's startling how poor a fraud it was -- almost unbelievably bad as a fraud. It almost makes you agree with the Douglas Adams quote

"I refuse to prove that I exist", says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But", says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? it could not have evolved by chance. it proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear", says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

overheard at the airport

"A Frenchman tried to get mommy to break up with daddy on the plane just now," said a girl in her 20's seated next to her mother. "He said, '22 years of marriage is too long.'" Four comments.

1. Good job upholding the stereotype of a nation, Frenchie. Were you also wearing a horizontally-striped shirt and beret, on strike in an invisible glass box while you chain-smoked with one hand and held a tiny dog with the other, your nose sniffing a fine bordeaux and your mouth full of baguette, cheese, and words of surrender?
2. The daughter had clearly witnessed this first-hand. I choose to envision it with her in the middle seat.
3. The mother and daughter in question were continuing on to Minneapolis, the waiting area of which flight is where I overheard them. The Frenchman, unless he was skulking about, was not. Unless he was proposing entry into the 10-kilometer-high club to a married woman with her daughter sitting next to her, it's pretty stupid to hit on someone who lives in a different city than you're going to on a continent you don't live on.
4. In his defense, the general consensus in France, at least as reflected in my language partners, is in fact "22 years of marriage is too long." As soon as the kids are old enough, man finds a new girlfriend and woman gets a job as a therapist.

welcome home

My first night back in New York, I did my best to adjust to the time change, by getting back home around 2:10 am. Letting myself in, I was only mildly surprised when my key didn't work in the lower lock -- it's persnickety. 2 am is pretty early for my family most nights, so I knocked softly, waiting for my father to let me in. I progressed through various stages, starting with not wanting my mother to be unnecessarily woken up, and eventually reaching the point where I was continuously ringing the doorbell and calling the home phone, occasionally leaving a message like "Hi, this is your son Janak. I'm locked out, and I'm standing outside the door." Around 2:30 am, I gave up. I was pretty sure I could go bother my friend Jomy, with whom I'd been hanging out before, but he lives in Chinatown, and I'd already splurged on a taxi one-way. So I decided to sleep in the hallway. I figured that either I would be unable to sleep, and then would continue ringing, which would have to eventually work, since no force on earth can keep my mother from using the bathroom 5 times a night, or I would be able to sleep, in which case, no problem. Remember, it was 8:30 am after an all-nighter by Lyon standards. I woke up half an hour later with no feeling in my right arm, and rolled over onto my left. After another 20 minutes, I had two numb arms and sat up to sleep on my knees. Around 5 am, the elevator door opening woke me up, and I started to my feet, fumbling for my keys as if I had just arrived. The woman coming out of the elevator knew me, but she was puzzled by the situation. Fortunately, another burst of ringing and calling roused my father, and I was finally admitted to the house. My mother told me later, "whenever Shantha is out late, I can't sleep very well because I worry about her. Not with you." Given that anyone who knows us would have infinitely more confidence in Shantha handling herself in any difficult situation, this can only speak to my mother loving Shantha more. So it goes.

my grandmother

Paatti: can you set the time on this watch for me?
(I set the time)
Computer technician: He's a good boy.
Paatti: No, he's my grandson.

---

Father: (In living room) Did you understand what I said?
Paatti: (In kitchen) I didn't hear it at all.
Father: Why didn't you tell me that you didn't hear?
Paatti: I'm shy.

patriotism

I was expecting it, but it was still strange to be in a French supermarket and hear the opening strains of the "Marseillaise" dissolve into the Beatles singing "love." I wonder how the French feel about it.

Manifest destiny

I went to my first French demonstration a few weeks ago. The universities are having weekly "manifestations" against the proposed reforms of the government, which would do various things, among them increasing teaching loads, making graduate students more fireable (?), and making it more difficult for high school teachers to complete training.  It's pretty impressive that they can get 1000+ every week to march Thursday at 2 pm for two hours, and also impressive that Lyon lets them shut down the center of the city to do it.  Some slogans (that I caught) from the march:

Mar, Mar, Mar

Marcel Proust

La recherche n'est pas de temps perdu

Lyon 1, Lyon 2, Lyon 3, Sarko-zero

[when asked for an explanation, one guy I was with said that 3-0 is a very important score in France, since France won its only World Cup in 1998 against Brazil 3-0.  The better explanation is that there are 3 main universities in Lyon, named Lyon 1, Lyon 2, Lyon 3.]

Sarko, cedez

Sinon, on viendra

avec des bazookas

[Sarko, give up, if not, we'll come with bazookas]

A sign with an arrow pointing down at the holder, saying

"Future chercheur . . . du travail!"

[Future (re-)searcher . . . of work!  That guy was in the math department.  He's right.]

At one point, the march started to disintegrate, with large portions of it cutting across a square, seemingly to take a more direct route.  I, as well as my companions, were confused.  Eventually, I discovered the facts: a bus/van was set up by the UMP (Sarkozy's party -- a crucial fact I took a while to learn) to campaign for the European elections.  The demonstration, being basically anti-Sarkozy, devolved into a protest against the two or three people in the van, who were surrounded by a ring of police.  Video is available, and the story says that three eggs were thrown at the vehicle, though unfortunately neither the video nor I captured that.

The march never fully recovered, since the marchers were torn between the symbolism of the march and the action of attacking the van.

Obviously, I would fail the French Turino Test

Turino Test: a test of machine (or human) translation, where a native speaker has a text-only conversation a person who is either a native speaker, or with a person who has no knowledge of the language, but has a translator. If the native speaker cannot tell that the conversation is being translated, the translator passes the Turino Test.

This seems just as hard as the Turing Test. Probably harder.

more accurate

Violence: the universal language.

Photos from around Lyon

Cover of a used book, part of what looked like a standard collection of different authors, like Victor Hugo, etc.:

Two from a health clinic:
Yes, that's a condom.
And that's a butterfly having sex butterfly-style with what appears to be a very ill ant. "The summer favors new encounters. Protect yourself."

travel plans

I will be in the following places at some point during the summer:
NYC, South Bend, Minneapolis, Toronto, Lyon, Geneva, Barcelona, London, Paris, San Francisco. If you'll be in any of those places, and I don't already know that (i.e., you don't live there), then let me know.

so civilised

Check out this article about FOTC ending. Two things: :( , and read the comments. Have you ever read such literate/polite web comments anywhere in your life? New Zealand is fucked up.

overheard in Toronto

College-age girl in coffee shop: Have you heard of 'Robinson Crusoe'?
College-age guy sitting with her, studying: No.
Girl: Oh, it's this really famous book. The author's name is exactly like the main character, Robinson Crusoe, like, it's 'Daniel Crusoe.' It was written in like the 17th century, and it's about this guy, Robinson Crusoe, who's like a world traveler. And he goes to all these places, and he goes to a place where everyone's really little, and another place where everyone's really big. And he gets this little slave.
Me: [WTF]
Guy: Huh.
Girl: And it's all about, like, Victorian ideas of colonialism and of how people of that time thought about exploration, and control over the native population.

The amazing thing to me about this conversation is how in the end, the girl managed to put out a semi-coherent point, although her getting nearly every fact wrong about the book somewhat detracts from said point. But you can make these points without actually knowing any real facts. I would like to blame post-modernism for this, as for everything else, but I'm going to go with dumbness instead.

cultural heritage

On a flyer I got:
TEX MEX
Tout nos Tex Mex sont servis avec potatoes ou frites+sauce barbecue
8 pièces nuggets
10 pièces nuggets
8 chicken wings
20 chicken wings

People in California tend to slag on Tex-Mex, but even they don't think it consists of nuggets or wings and french fries. I don't really get how the "Mex" got in there at all.

divorcées

All four women I've done a language exchange with who have been married are now divorced or in the process of being divorced. I'm pretty sure this shows the immorality of the French.

pronounciation

I find it surprisingly hard to pronounce my name correctly when I'm speaking French. This is true even when I'm just trying to record the greeting on my answering machine.

Resemblance

On St. Patrick's Day, I struck up a conversation with some girls at a bar who had remarked upon my resemblance to Marshall in "How I Met Your Mother," who it appears is played by Jason Segel. It's not a very flattering comparison, in my view, but that's possibly because in the first 5 minutes that I saw of Jason Segel, he got pretty naked.

memory

At some point, Jon Stewart has got to remember to remind each of his guests not to get up until the commercial break has started. The other possibility is that the impulse, upon shaking hands, to get up and walk away is so strong that, despite the reminder, luminaries like Sandra Day O'Connor and Bill Gates just couldn't stop themselves. O'Connor didn't even do the initial walk on, presumably because she's not in such good shape (punishment for Bush v. Gore, one hopes), so to see her scurry away from Jon Stewart with the cameras rolling was even stranger.

virtue

I was watching a guest on the Colbert Report talk about conscious eating, and feeling all smug because my diet is more plant-based than the average American's, and thus less carbon-emitting. But then I realized that bringing my 20 pound sack of rice and 30 jars of peanut butter by plane from New York to France probably nullifies any carbon benefits I accrue not eating steak.

race by the printer

Question posed by a friendly older guy waiting for his print job: "Are you Spanish?" Me: "No, American." Him: "Latin American? South American?" Me: "No. My father is Indian, but I was born in the United States." Perhaps I have a Spanish accent in French. Or he's mixing me up with my Colómbian officemate. But I don't think so.

didn't see this coming

My plan to walk half an hour each way tonight to the Fields Institute to print out my boarding pass and return my key became a very bad plan when I sprained my ankle. To be fair, it was never really a good plan.

but only $40 CAD

My mp3 player has a "playlist" button but no playlists. You'd think the software would be cheaper to implement than the hardware.

wish the chair lift had legrests

Skiing on a sprained ankle turns out to be precisely as bad an idea as it sounds -- no more, no less.

still swollen

I sprained my ankle running down stairs to get to a math talk, which I was late to because I was doing math. It's the most righteous injury I've ever had.

can you spell that for me?

Banff: the extra 'f' is for 'fun.'

typical II

I lost my mp3 player today. I looked all over my room, and was resigned to having packed it in my suitcase, when I found it in my jacket, which I was wearing at the time.

typical

I lost my mp3 player the day before yesterday. I looked all over my room, and was resigned to having lost it, when I found it in my hoodie pocket, which I was wearing at the time.

Anachronism

When are airplanes going to be made without No Smoking signs above every seat, or at least without ones that can theoretically turn off? Are airlines hedging against the contingency that one day, smoking on a plane will be legal again, and it would be too much trouble to paint over permanent signs?

New Year's in Lyon

I have a terror of a bad new year's, probably caused by years of having nothing to do in NY, which is pretty pathetic. This year, I had dinner with Javier, Mónica, and Mónica's visiting sister, Ingrid. We then went out to see the town. We had a list of a few places that were free, and we figured that we'd check them out, along with the usual bars. We did not anticipate how crazy the French are. I mean, really fucking crazy. In certain things, like this, France resembles less a Western country, and more India. The year I spent in India, my whole family came for the holidays, including New Year's. Shantha and I talked of going out for New Year's, but were informed that it wasn't advisable -- you had to go to very upscale clubs and spend tons of money to get in, and there were gangs of young men marauding. Instead, we watched Enemy of the State, possibly for the second time. Last night was better than that, but there were definite echoes.

When we went out, Javier and I contented ourselves by badmouthing the French and the relative emptiness of the streets -- fewer people out at 10:30 than you'd find on an average Friday night. Our first stop was a bar that was listed as free, with a "surprise theme." The "surprise theme" turned out to be "costume party," and they were going to open at 11. So we continued on, to Vieux Lyon. It was there that I realized that our jokes were no laughing matter. Our two reliable bars were both closed. Closed for New Year's Eve. One other place that was listed as free seemed to have a 10 euro cover, and so we headed back to the "costume party." On our way, we hit the second disagreeable aspect of French New Year's. Two guys, late teens to my eyes, were going up to women and walking with them, putting their arms around them, going for kisses, etc. Really ugly. At one point they bumped a guy, but their main object was women. Javier and I weren't sure what to do. In this, as in many other things, not speaking French makes things tricky, we agreed.

Arriving at the costume party, we found it not very crowded at all, and with nobody in costume but for the waiters. Which you might expect -- costume party is not really an appropriate "surprise theme," since it requires a modicum of preparation. Our current theory is that they were planning to close for New Year's Eve, like all the other bars, and then, since they are part of a chain of clubs, the other members of which were open for New Year's Eve, had to throw something together in a hurry. But we were grateful -- don't get me wrong. We settled in and debated why French mojitos are so awful. I got nervous, though, as midnight approached and there seemed to be no signs of any kind of unified action. Javier's worst instincts were justified -- at midnight, there was a kind of delayed, half-hearted cheer, sans preparatory countdown or any other such ritual. Truly pathetic.

We finished our drinks and headed out of the bar, to find more exciting places to go, but of course now everything was full. There were also guys out in force harassing women. We finally got a measure of satisfaction when we saw three woman who were surrounded by these guys who would just not let them alone. After watching for a bit, Mónica marched over and grabbed the girls, dragging them away, and we surrounded them, keeping the guys out. Interestingly, what we noticed is that these guys have no interest in fighting with other guys -- just in harassing groups of girls by themselves. In that, they seem to be a bit different from drunk American men, who seem to be as interested in fighting as "loving." An unfortunate racial note is that most of these men seemed, to my untrained eye, to be of Arab descent. I could very easily be wrong about this, though, since it seems to me like there's a racial continuum in France -- I see people who look clearly French European (to me), and people who look clearly Arab, and people at all points in between. Since there can't have been so much intermarriage, I guess this means I'm incompetent.

We ended up on a boat, which was nice enough, dancing in an incredibly packed space to Senegalese musicians. La Passagere came through again.

unpleasant topic

Because of this article about MySpace's handing over 90,000 registered sex offenders' names to the states, I started to wonder how many cases of sexual abuse of children had actually started on the internet. Nobody seems to know. This report on "Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation" has lots of scary passages. It has figures on the percentage of children who say that "they have been invited to a face-to-face meeting with a stranger," but no numbers on the number of children abused by people they met online. So I wonder. My parents told me what to do if a stranger tried to talk to me (take the candy -- never turn down free food) on the street, and they worried about it, but that wasn't a reason for me not to go outside by myself after the age of 10 or so (getting hit by cars was the reason). So why should the risk of being talked to by strangers be so bad, unless people actually end up meeting them? But there are no numbers. Is this going to be like the day care scandals of the 80's and 90's?

complete protein

Sometimes, when I have Asian food, I consume it with large quantities of rice over a period of days. During that time, my ratio of dish-to-rice will vary dramatically, sometimes getting to the point where I'm just eating rice in a bowl that once held the main dish, and kind of enjoying it. Anyone else have that happen? Anyone?

no wonder detroit is going downhill

From the ads on bus shelters, it appears that Canada thinks that Michigan is literally just a big dump. Which is apparently not so far off the mark in terms of garbage exports, but still, it's not cool to have a picture of an old armchair with the caption, "Don't let it end up in Michigan."

my home and native land

I watched the Super Bowl on Canadian TV, despite the lack of ads. When I wanted to watch the amazing interception return again, I found that the feed it was taken from was CTV, so I get to be consistent. I wonder if Canadian channels aren't as big on piracy prevention.