(Originally posted to Politics at EraBlog on Sun, 27 Jul 2003 02:22:19 GMT)

I found an interesting piece about what makes a political conservative.

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression

• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

• Uncertainty avoidance

• Need for cognitive closure

• Terror management

This was linked to from the Dean Blog's copy of Howard Dean's July 25th speech, The President Has Misled Us.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Fri, 25 Jul 2003 06:50:20 GMT)

As I mentioned in my Toastmasters' speech about naturalization, I decided on September 11th, 2002 to become a U.S. citizen.

This morning, I had my interview with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS, formerly known as the INS).

This afternoon, I was sworn in as a U.S. citizen at the Seattle INS Office. Eighty-three other new citizens were sworn in at the same time. Many were Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican, or Eastern European. Only three others, all Brits, were from Western Europe. We were gathered into a stuffy room with an overflow crowd of relatives and friends. It was not a deeply moving ceremony, but it was clear that most of us were sincerely glad to become Americans. If my interview had come a month sooner, I would have chosen to participate in the massive July 4th ceremony at the Seattle Center.

Woohoo! Now I get a vote for the first time since 1986. As my youngest brother Mark, who became a citizen last year, just told me, I now have an opportunity to get the Bush kleptocracy out of office.

(Originally posted to Iraq at EraBlog on Wed, 23 Jul 2003 06:25:56 GMT)

[Found in my email. Original author unknown.]

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ('AP', played by John Cleese) walks down the street carrying THE IRAQI INVASION (played by an empty parrot cage). He walks into THE WHITE HOUSE (played by a cheesy storefront) and addresses COLIN POWELL ('CP', played by Michael Palin).

AP: Excuse me... boy!

CP: (turns around and stands up) What d'you mean, 'boy?'

AP: I'm sorry; I have contact lenses. At any rate, I wish to register a complaint!

CP: Sorry, squire, I can't talk to you now. It's Code Orange! (he hastily starts to put up a sign)

AP: Never mind that now, my fine fellow. I wish to register a complain about this military action, which you sold me just a couple of months ago.

CP: Oh yes, the Iraqi invasion. Lovely little war, that was. What... uh, what seems to be wrong with it?

AP: I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's empty, that's what's wrong with it.

CP: Oh, no, no, no. It's not empty at all. It's served its purpose, it has. Freed the oppressed people of Iraq, fed the homeless, brought everlasting fame and glory to our bulging leader.

AP: But when I purchased this dreary little police action from you, you assured me that the whole and entire purpose was to disarm Saddam Hussein and take away, quote, his vast stockpiles of ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction, end quote.

CP: Oh, there's some mistake. We went in to liberate the poor oppressed people of...

AP: Listen, mate. I took the liberty of recording your voice when you sold me that thing, and here's what it says. (produces tape recorder)

Tape: (CP's voice): "We know just where they are. We know just what they've got. They're buried in these bunkers right here, which our surveillance satellites have photographed not more than twenty minutes ago. They could not possibly be used for any purpose other than the storage of hideous, slime-dripping nuclear anthrax chemical weapons of mass destruction. Say, are you recording me?"

AP: Right. And when we "liberated" those poor bastards, the bunker was found to contain little more than a twenty-year collection of Penthouse and Hustler magazines, plus a dozen lava lamps and a mini-bar.

CP: Well...

AP: Well?

CP: Well, of course they'd cleaned it out before they left. Sold it all to their chums in the Taliban, they did.

AP: I happen to know that their 'chums,' as you so colorfully put it, hate their guts and have referred to them repeatedly as "scabrous lackeys of the internationalist secular state," end quotation.

CP: Well, they have to say that, don't they? I mean, it's all part of the grand scheme. Lovely little war, wa'nit? Liberated all them poor...

AP: Stoppit! All you've done is make their lives worse than before. That's why they keep killing our soldiers.

CP: Oh no, squire. They're grateful. That's why they pulled down that statue.

AP: I've seen the footage of the event, and the only Iraqis in the picture appear to have had their feet nailed there.

CP: Well, of course they were nailed there. If we hadn't nailed them, they'd've been crushed by the falling statue, wouldn't they? It was for their own safety. That's why we liberated the...

AP: Shut up. Did you or did you not allege on several different occasions that we had found the weapons of mass destruction and that therefore the entire ill-advised escapade was a rousing success?

CP: What, them trailers? Well, of course they was weapons of mass destruction. They could've used them for germs, or chemicals, or...

AP: In fact, they were used for hydrogen, and precious little of that. They didn't even have walls, for pity's sake.

CP: Well, hydrogen's pretty dangerous, isn't it, Squire? It could power tanks or jets or... and what about that Hindenberry thing? Let's see you stand in a room full of liquid hydrogen with nothing but a ripe boysenberry to defend yourself with, and you'll soon see mass destructive. Wouldn't want to be in your shoes then! And anyway, we liberated the...

AP: Liberation don't enter into it, mate. It was a bleeding sham.

CP: No, it was liberation!

AP: Sham, sham, sham! And you didn't find any weapons of mass destruction!

CP: Well, of course we didn't, Squire. They was... they was looted.

AP: Looted? LOOTED?

CP: Yeah. When our boys was busy not looking at the museum, they looted all them weapons out from under their noses. And anyway, we liberated...

AP: You're saying that starving peasants with no resources of their own simply looted vast stores of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons? With What??

CP: They carried them off on their bicycles.

AP: But a missile weighs several tons, and a bicycle can only carry, at most, a couple of hundred pounds.

CP: They used two bicycles, with a bungee cord between 'em. They're a nasty lot, Squire. Not like the ones that sang songs to us when we liberated...

AP: Will you shut up? Since when is it liberation to leave a people destitute, without food, water, electricity, or law enforcement?

CP: Those things was all shackles on them. We freed 'em, I tell you! They're grateful to us. They're singin' songs...

AP: Those aren't songs, you parsimonious prevaricator, they're protesting in the streets, and shooting at our soldiers.

CP: They're just exuberant. Like to fire off their guns a lot, now they're free and all. They don't mean nuffin' by it. They're just so happy to be liberated, with Hussein gone. You mark my words; he was the real weapon of mass destruction his own self, why, he...

AP: That's another thing. You didn't even get him, did you?

CP: Well...

AP: You don't even know where he is, do you?

CP: We got a tip...

AP: You've been blowing up caravans and bombing cities and striking about blindly, because your yahoo cowboy boss refused to listen to any intelligence that contradicted his beliefs. Which, when you come down to it, precluded the use of any intelligence whatsoever.

CP: I see. Quite. (pause) Well, then, we'd better replace it, hadn't we?

AP: With what?

CP: Well, them Iranis are gettin' pretty swaggery, ain't they?

AP: I thought you were encouraging them to rise up against their religious leaders, now that they aren't accepting any more cakes from your lot.

CP: Fair enough. How about something in a nice little Afghanistan?

AP: You've already done that one. Worse than Iraq, if I recall.

CP: How about... coming up to my place and re-electing my boss?

AP: Why in the world would I want to do that? Why wouldn't I just vote for the Democrats and chase you idiots out of office, once for all?

AP: Oh, no, Squire! No, no, no, no! You wouldn't want to do that, trust me on this one.

AP: And why not, if I may be so brash as to query?

CP: Well, they're a bunch of psychopathic liars, they are, always Whitewaterin', 'aving sex in the Oval Office, taking' expensive haircuts on Air Force One, trashing the White House, murderin' poor ol' Vince Foster, and claiming they invented the Internet.

AP: Point taken! Well, then, I'll have a North Korea to go, please.

CP: You won't regret it, Squire! I'll just wrap it up. (tears an American flag off of a roll and clumsily wraps up the same cage the AP carried in.) Come again!

(Originally posted to Humor at EraBlog on Thu, 10 Jul 2003 05:12:39 GMT)

Nippon TV made a very funny Matrix-style parody of two people playing table tennis.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Mon, 07 Jul 2003 15:34:22 GMT)

I gave the following speech to Toastmasters on June 25th, 2003, as Speech #4, "Show What You Mean". Clearly, I've reused some material from my earlier post about Bloomsday. I'm also finding that I take longer to deliver a speech to an audience than I do when rehearsing, so I cut some of the material on the day to fit the seven-minute limit.

I've uploaded some photos of the reading to one of my other websites.

BLOOMSDAY

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather..."

So begins James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the most famous, and famously difficult, novels of the Twentieth Century. The book is by turns funny, obscure, insightful, and irritating.

The whole book takes place in Dublin on June 16th, 1904 and tells of the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Irish Jew, and of Stephen Dedalus, a young writer who is Joyce's alter ego.

Nowadays, there is a thriving Joycean industry in Ireland, that re-enacts portions of the book on Bloomsday, June 16th, the anniversary of Ulysses.

Next year is the centenary and you can be sure that the Joycean industry will make the most of the occasion. Ireland loves Joyce now: he helps bring in the tourist dollars.

This wasn't always true. Ulysses was banned in Ireland until the 1960s. It was considered obscene, pornographic, and profane. It's true that Joyce was an apostate Catholic who mocked the Church and that he was unusually frank about lust, sex, and excretion, but the novel is undoubtedly a work of literature, not mere base titillation.

Ulysses was also banned in the United States when it was first published in 1922 because it was considered pornographic. That ban was overturned in 1933.

Bloomsday is celebrated outside Ireland too. In many cities around the world, you will find groups of Joyce fans celebrating on June 16th. In Seattle, the Wild Geese Players have been staging readings of Ulysses for the last few years. This year, I joined them.

We staged readings from Chapters 8 and 9 at the Brechemin Auditorium in the School of Music at the University of Washington. We had a cast of about fifteen readers who read aloud from scripts, acting the parts of various characters. We were watched by about forty people, only half of whom were related to the cast.

Ulysses is very loosely modeled on Homer's Odyssey, the classic Greek epic, which tells of the wanderings of Odysseus, who took ten years to return home from the siege of Troy. (Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus.) Each chapter of Ulysses roughly corresponds to a book of the Odyssey. Each chapter is written in a very different style. Leopold Bloom represents Odysseus the wanderer, while Stephen Dedalus represents Telemachus, Odysseus's son, and Molly Bloom represents Penelope, Odysseus's wife.

Chapter 8 of Ulysses is The Lestrygonians. In the Odyssey, the Lestrygonians are foul cannibals who threaten Odysseus's crew. In Ulysses, Bloom wanders southwards through the center of Dublin, encountering sights, smells, food, and drink as he goes. He enters one pub in search of lunch, but is repulsed by the gorging and gluttony of the customers. He moves to Davy Byrne's pub, where he eats a calm lunch. Bloom's interior monologue takes up most of the chapter, as he observes people and places on his walk. There are a number of encounters along the way.

This chapter was difficult to stage. Bloom moves from one encounter to another. We had perhaps twenty scenes in ninety minutes. I myself played four minor characters.

I came on first as Denis Breen, the half-mad husband of Mrs. Breen, whom Bloom has spent the last five minutes talking to in the street. I shuffle unseeing across the stage, muttering to myself, clutching an enormous tome to my chest. A real stretch!

A few minutes later, when Bloom is recalling a pro-Boer student riot at Trinity College Dublin, I return, playing the part of one of those students. Wrapped in my old Trinity scarf, I stride onto the stage bellowing such slogans as "Up the Boers!" and "We'll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree!" It wakes the audience up nicely.

For my third part, I play the barman in the first pub that Bloom enters, the one that soon repels him. I get to utter in my best working-class Dublin accent such memorable lines as "Roast beef and cabbage", "One stew", and "Pint of stout", while serving some of the customers.

My final role in this chapter was slightly meatier. I played Tom Rochford, one of a trio who enter Davy Byrne's pub as Bloom is eating his lunch. We stand around, ordering drinks and arguing about horse racing.

Chapter 9 of Ulysses is Scylla and Charybdis. In the Odyssey, Scylla is a six-headed monster, while Charybdis is a whirlpool. In Ulysses, these dangers are metaphorical, as the journey becomes becalmed in the literary debate between Stephen Dedalus and other writers of the day, We are subjected to torrents of language, in lyric, in dramatic, in verse, and in prose form, as well as Stephen's interior monologue. The debate wanders through the life of Shakespeare, especially his relationship with Ann Hathaway; Shakespeare's work, particularly Hamlet; and the nature of father/son relationships.

This chapter was much easier to stage, if harder to follow. Almost the whole chapter takes place around some tables in the National Library. We sat mostly, although we did stand for the Hamletesque play within the play, and Buck Mulligan wanders around poking into things.

I read the smallest of the main roles in this chapter, that of Mr Best, an inoffensive young man in the mold of Bertie Wooster, who can't quite hold his own in the debate that rages between Stephen and the other writers.

He says such things as "But Hamlet is so personal, isn't it? I mean a kind of private paper, don't you know, of [Shakespeare's] private life. I mean I don't care a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty..."

I enjoyed myself that night. I hope I have conveyed something of the flavor of the evening, if not much of the book itself. That's difficult to do without reading aloud passages from the book, and this speech format doesn't lend itself to that.

Cut due to lack of time

Several times in the last 20 years, I have attempted to read Ulysses. Always before, I gave up in the first half of the book. Some of it is very difficult, especially when Joyce is playing with language.

I'm rereading the book once again. I've not yet finished it but I've gotten further than I ever did before. I've learned two tricks. The first is not to give up if a section doesn't make sense. Just keep going. It'll get more enjoyable. I don't think it all makes sense to anyone on the first reading. The second trick is that sounds are very important. Joyce was a poet. Subvocalize or speak aloud the odder bits and the music will come through.

It is said that Ulysses is the most difficult of the entertaining books and the most entertaining of the difficult books.