This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
Every page now has Seesmic/Disqus video commenting. Scroll to the bottom to see or post video comments. To read a text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog on your iPhone or other mobile phone, click here. Or to see the graphics with less text, click here.
On an unusually hot day last week I wanted to eat something substantial but not heavy in a local restaurant. I ended up sharing a salad and ordering a huge glass of ice tea and a cup of chili, a food that I usually ignore. The chili was just right for the occasion, and I realized that chili is a dish worthy of more attention. This blogpost is the result of that attention. (I also cooked and just ate some homemade chili just before writing this last night.) Chili, of course, is the standard American English name for chili con carne, meaning a sauce made from a Southwestern capsicum pepper combined with meat. (The Spanish spelling is "chile con carne.") Chili, the dish, is a proletarian workhorse in the USA, eaten by the cup or bowl in diners and road-houses, with saltine crackers, spread on frankfurters (sausages) in a "hot dog" bun, even eaten on spaghetti (in Cincinatti, Ohio), and available as an instant meal in cans. There are several things I find especially fascinating about chili: the seemingly infinite variation in its recipes and preparation, and the quest for its origin. But first a personal story.
In eighth grade (late 1950's, small-town Pennsylvania) girls took courses in cooking and sewing ("home economics") while the boys learned woodworking. However, my school had a special crossover program where the boys learned how to cook simple dishes and sew a woodworker's apron, while the girls learned to make a jewelry box. The first recipe taught to us boys was a peanut butter sandwich. A week later came the next lesson: that's right, chili con carne. It was made with ground beef, and ingredients I now avoid in my chili: onions and canned tomatoes. Even so, it was delicious.
An organization called the Chili Appreciation Society International sponsors an annual chili "cookoff" in a Texas town called Terlingua, near the Mexican border. Contestants come from other chili cookoffs including the men-only Chilimpiad, also Texas-based.
And this leads to the question about the origin of chili. Is it Texan, Mexican, or from somewhere else? My opinion is that chili is quintessentially Texan, and this Mexican culinary website apparently agrees, calling the dish "estilo tejano." I will present my evidence for the Texas hypothesis, but first I think a more definitive description of the dish is in order.
As the name implies, chili con carne is basically chili with meat. Chili is New World genus of the nightshade family, whose name was derived from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, who called it xilli and cultivated it 5000 years ago, as found in pots from archaeological digs. The chili pod is now, of course enjoyed worldwide. In Thailand, for example, meat is combined with chili peppers, but the result is not chili con carne. What makes the Texas dish unique is the sauce, prepared from dried long red chilis that have been rehydrated, giving a distinctive flavor that is not merely the "hot" burning sensation of the capsaicin contained in the pepper. Adding tomatoes to the chili and meat, as my eighth-grade cooking teacher advised, merely extends the red color of the sauce without adding to the chili flavor. Chili powder, made of ground chilies with other ingredients, is a convenient way to add some chili flavor, but there are better ways, including starting with dried chilies (New Mexican dried red chilies may be the best), soaked, pureed, and cooked.
Then there is the question of additional ingredients. I consider myself a chili minimalist, but I cannot conceive of making chili without garlic. Perhaps that I because I am Jewish. Oregano and/or thyme can't hurt. In addition to herbal condiments, there is the bean question. I consider beans to be an optional ingredient, but a valuable one for texture and fiber content. The chili I made last evening contained ground beef, canned Las Palmas brand red chili puree (saving hours of prep time), and a can each of black beans and pinto beans, garlic, and a pinch of thyme (I couldn't find my oregano). I started it with sauteed chopped celery and I would have added chopped green bell pepper if I had any. Vegetarians, of course, could make chili with vegetables and beans without the meat.
OK, Texas. Wikipedia tells me that women sold chili on the public square in San Antonio in the 1880's, amd there was a "San Antonio Chili Stand" at the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. "Chili Parlors" have long thrived in Texas, including Dallas, and Wikipedia says that chili con carne is the official Texas state dish.
Captain Video and the Video Rangers. Remember them? If you do, you were a kid when I was, back in the 1950's. In those days there was an American company called Dumont, who manufactured a television set of the same name, and started a TV network. One of their shows, broadcast live in what would become the early prime-time slot, was a science fiction/adventure serial named after the good captain and his sidekick. A full hour of the program has been salvaged, and can be seen here on YouTube. But cowboys? Yes, there were cowboys in the show, because reruns of Westerns could be used for filler. Advertisements were frequent, long, venal, and aimed at children. The captain and his Ranger dressed in military-style uniforms and flew a spaceship resembling a propeller-driven World War Two aircraft. But that was not important; what was, besides the ads, was the video. The captain, most recordings of the show, Dumont televisions, and the Dumont network are long gone (they passed into oblivion in 1955), but their legacy is more prevalent than ever on today's Internet: the advertisements, of course, and the video.
Today is a good time to celebrate the memory of Captain Video because a new use for video has just emerged over the past few days, and today Jonathan's Coffeeblog will add the feature: video commenting. On blogs. Commenting itself has been a bone of contention, because it is vulnerable to spamming, trolling, and ranting. Some bloggers resist a comments feature. Others open commenting to registered readers, then close registration to new commenters. Most blogs that do accept comments have a system built in to moderate comments, filtering out unwanted communications. Now that video commenting has become available, someone will still have to moderate the comments, but instead of mere text, tone of voice, facial expressions, sounds, motion, and visual props can now be part of the commenting process.
In the days of Captain Video, the closest imaginable thing to video commenting would have been a letter to the local newspaper editor. Now video commenting is available, and, I predict, will soon be widely used throughout the Internet.
Video commenting is now possible due to a collaboration between two Internet start-ups. One is the web commenting service, Disqus, founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan. The other is Seesmic, the brainchild of Loïc Le Meur, a powerhouse entrepreneur who helped pioneer blogging and political podcasting in France, after a start in advertising and web hosting. Seesmic, which one might call a video version of Twitter, the social microblogging hub, makes it easy to record short videos as a means of conversation. Now a Seesmic video, using the Disqus commenting apparatus, can be attached as a comment to a weblog item.
The science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, featured a realistic-appearing conversation between a space station officer and his child. Since then that kind of two-way videophone talk has been available for a while over Apple's iChat, the Skype Internet phone service, and other systems. (I just talked with my mother this morning over Skype.) She and I agree, being able to see someone's face makes a big difference.
What is special about the new Seesmic/Disqus collaboration is that two-way video, blogging, and mainstream media online magazines and "blogs" are getting closer to being fully integrated. Now, instead of writing a letter to the editor of one the dwindling number of local newspapers, you can make a few mouse clicks and give the guy the raspberry.
Poor Hormel. That's the meat-packing company that invented the canned luncheon meat in the late 1930's whose brand name has become iconic: Spam. I googled Spam and found out all kinds of cool stuff. For example, there is a kind of spam sushi, called spam musubi, popular in Hawaii. Then there is Spam Spread, which is reportedlyhalal, which means kosher for Muslims. Who knew? Spam, of course, is the internet nickname for unsolicited, unwanted, and deservedly deprecated email concerning strategies for enlarging the membrum virilis, keeping said membra viriles in a state of precoital readiness, and, for those who are unconcerned about the state of their membrum virilis, or have no such membrum, mortgages. Oh, yes, and get-rich-quick schemes out of Nigeria. But I digress. Why? Because I am not intending to write about Spam here. I am writing about bacn.
Bacn? Yup. The omitted "o" distinguishes it from the salty and delicious pork product that goes famously with eggs. Pancetta, they call it in Italy. And Canadians produce "Canadian bacon," although it's not the same thing. (Do Canadians just call Canadian bacon "bacon" and refer to the Anglo-American kind as "Anglo-American bacon?" An interesting question, but yet another digression, because the subject here is not bacon but bacn.)
The bacn concept emerged in October, 2007 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at a geek meet called PodCamp Pittsburgh 08. Bacn was defined concisely: email you want -- but not right now.
Wow. There's all that bacn on my computer , and I never even knew what it is called. I just checked my inbox and I have 295 unread messages. Bacn. I have already read the messages I wanted to read. Will I ever read the bacn? Will I ever delete it or transfer it to another folder? I don't know. But I could use Mac Mail's smart mailbox feature to store bacn in a bacn folder. If I wanted to. Do I? I don't know.
Bacn, of course, is merely a subset of a topic that's very hot on the Internet right now: information overload. The very fact that bacn is wanted, but its reading is to be deferred, puts it solidly in the overload category. I've written about information overload, as have many others. Furthermore (that's a grammatically correct way of beginning a sentence with the conjuction "and") I am increasing the information overload by the very act of writing this blogpost. One must never forget, however, that one man's noise is another man's signal. Or, as one might say, one man's spam is another man's bacn.
I've added a new category to the Coffeeblog: Nations and Empires. Originally I had thought of adding a "history" category. Then I realized that everything I post to the Coffeeblog is some kind of history: the history of Bettie Page and the Kefauver Commission, or the history of Andres Serrano and his "Piss Christ" image with the resulting kerfuffle. Even a movie review is a history of sorts. Thinking it over, I realized that the kind of history that has begun to interest me lately is the history of empires and the nations, peoples, tribes, ethnic groups, language groups, and other societal entities engulfed, absorbed, or instrumental in the development of such empires. I would have never predicted such an interest as a college freshman who felt overwhelmed by the huge reading assignments of my required basic history course. But back then there was no hypertext, Internet, or Wikipedia. Why such a powerful interest now, so late in life? It has to do with the world events swirling around us about which the dead tree media and the idiot box generally keep us in abysmal ignorance. Why do Shia and Sunni Muslims attack each other in Mesopotamia (the dead tree pundits call it Iraq)? There are reasons for it. "Civil war" the treekillers call it. Sort of like Antietam or the Battle of Bull Run? Please. And then there's Central Asia, the route of the Silk Road, where the focus is not silk any more but petroleum., land of many fallen empires. To paraphrase George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to write for CNN."
Like most Coffeeblog topics, "Nations and Empires" turned out to be much more complex and hard to pin down than I expected. I found that the best starting point was the idea of empire itself. It comes from the Romans and their Latin word imperare, which simply means "to command." It's a military term. Commanding officer and all that. From imperare came imperium, which the was the legal concept of the power to command, vested not only in officers but in magistrates. The Romans, unlike the founding fathers of the USA, did not advocate separation of powers. Roman politicians served simulatenously as magistrates (judges), Senators, and military commanders. They had the imperium. The Romans used the same word to describe their empire: Imperium Romanum. The power derived, in principle, from the Senate and the people: Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR). In the 1960's, I saw manhole covers in Rome with SPQR on them.
Because Roman law codified the principles of empire, the Roman empire (east as well as west) is a good example to study, and that includes Roman imperium during the years of the republic before the first Emperor, Augustus Caesar. But Rome was by no means the first. Rome inherited (hijacked might be a more accurate term) the empires of Carthage and Alexander the Great, who in turn took over that of the Persians, who had taken over the kingdoms of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The Persian Empire (actually a series of empires) might be the best prototype of an empire to study, but for the fact that languages in which its history have been recorded are less accessible in Western translation than the Greek and Roman histories, if they were written at all. Along the Silk Road and to the north and south have been empires that are forgotten (Khitans, anyone?) and others which some want to forget (the Huns and Mongols).
OK. So what? A point I want to make is that we are still coming off the nineteenth-century political pipe-dream high of nationalism and nation-states. In their purest forms, nation-states are not multicultural, and by definition, not multinational. Empires are both. That's the difference. Nation-states sometimes engage in ethnic cleansing to stay pure. A nasty habit. But what is a nation? The question has always been easier to ask than to answer. The word nation also comes from Latin, and it means a birth. The birth of a nation, perhaps? (That was a 1915 movie honoring the Ku Klux Klan, by the way.) Presumably a nation consist of people born sharing a common heritage, meaning language and culture. Nations, however, are almost never homogeneous, like homogenized milk, and they are never static. They change. The idea of a nation is better understood by using the word for nation in Greek: ethnos. Yup. An ethnic group. And there is a Hebrew word for nation, goi, often used Biblically in the plural, goyim, "the nations." When the Bible was translated into Greek, goyim was translated as the plural of ethnos. As many know now, goyim in Yiddish means people who are not Jewish, in other words, the "other nations," and I have read that ta ethne, the Greek plural, has been used to mean non-Greeks, the barbarians, and among Christians, the opponents of Jesus.
So, my friends, perhaps nations are not all good and empires are not all bad. As Rodney King asked, "Can we all get along?" Excellent question. And I would add to it, "Can we all get along without empires? And if not, which empires?"
Recently when the Olympic Torch passed through San Francisco, city officials engaged in well-intended skulduggery when they extinguished the original torch and successfully routed a second torch in another part of town. On the announced route, fans, onlookers, and angry demonstrators on both sides of the "Free Tibet" issue had gathered to show their enthusiasm and outrage. It turned out that the rerouting subterfuge prevented violence, but I was struck by the era-defining implications of this event, and other demonstrations which had begin on March 10 in China's Tibet Autonomous Region and soon after had become internationalized. I decided to write something about this in the Coffeeblog, and this is it. The more I learn about Tibet, however, the more complex the issue appears. Read on.
As an old-timer, I remember the days when the People's Republic of China was generally viewed as a international bad guy or villain in most of the American press and the general American consciousness. Then, in 1972, President Nixon visited China and met with Mao Zedong, the legendary Communist leader. Since then, with some notable exceptions, China's reputation has become generally favorable in the USA, as a manufacturing titan and "most favored nation" on a voyage, no matter how slow the boat, to freedom, democracy, and rights for the individual. Now, it appears, with the convergence of the Tibet issue and the Beijing Olympics, once again China's Communist leadership is being seen here as an international malefactor.
Why, when some of the regime's other warts and blemishes (like mass murder and the attempted extinction of individual rights and groups like Falun Gong) tend to generally pass unnoticed in the international press, has the "Free Tibet" campaign gained some traction? Has it reached the point of international humiliation of the folks in the once-Forbidden City before, during, and after the Olympics? A good starting place to answer such questions is Tibetan Buddhism itself, of which the Dalai Lama is the acknowledged spiritual leader outside of China. The Wikipedia asserts:
"In the wake of the Tibetan diaspora, Tibetan Buddhism has gained adherents in the West and throughout the world; there are estimated to be tens of thousands of practitioners in Europe and the Americas. Celebrity Tibetan Buddhism practitioners include [movie actor] Richard Gere, [Beastie Boy] Adam Yauch, [martial artist] Jet Li, [the late beat poet] Allen Ginsberg; [composer] Philip Glass, and [movie actor] Steven Seagal (who has been proclaimed a [reincarnate lama himself])."
And, yes,the near-legendary Italian-American director Martin Scorsese had made a 1997 film called Kundun about the life and exile of the Dalai Lama.
Add to that the events in the Tibet Autonomous Region beginning March 10 of this year, when rumors of beatings and killings of monks by Chinese government authorities reportedly triggered violent retaliation. The Dalai Lama stated, "we remain committed to taking the Middle Way approach and pursuing a process of dialogue in order to find a mutually beneficial solution to the Tibetan issue," after being accused by high China officials of having masterminded the the violent conflict stemming from the high-visibility "Free Tibet" campaign
In my view, another international generation, heirs of the 1960's counterculture, and sympathetic to Buddhist ideals and peaceful solutions to problems, has now reached maturity as a huge critic of the methods used by the Chinese Communist gerontocracy.
But, as the Dalai Lama also said, "The problem of Tibet is very complicated." Yup. It is. Let's roll back the time machine. The recent Tibetan uprising included violent attacks on otherwise innocent members of the ethnic groups moving into the Tibet area in increasing numbers, presumably with the approval and encourangement of Beijing officials. These not only include Han Chinese (members of the majority nationality in China, and known worldwide simply as "Chinese.") Many of the migrants to Tibet include Chinese citizens of a nationality know as Hui.
Hui? Who are Hui? Several sources tell met that Hui are predominantly Chinese-speaking Han Chinese individuals with one important distinction: they are Muslims, descended from Muslim traders, Islamic Mongol and Turkic warriors and settlers, and even from far-eastern Nestorian Christians.
OK. So? Aren't they just Han Chinese like the rest of those moving into geographical Tibet? Well, yes and no. The no part is that their religion, Islam, appears to be not only tolerated, but approved by the Beijing communists, whose Marxist view is reportedly promotion of atheism. This pro-atheist, anti-religious view could be cited as a reason for exiling the Dalai Lama and his "lamaist" followers from Tibet.
Do Chinese communists promote atheism in the same way it was promoted by Stalin in the Soviet Union? A good question. Marx had called religion the opiate of the people. But a multiculturalist perspective might consider a religion to be a colorful folk custom of an ethnic group. Is that the Chinese view, before and after Mao Zedong?
Is there a double standard in Beijing? Do Chinese communists view religion as OK among Hui Muslims, but not among Tibetan Buddhists? Is Han chauvinist piggery a factor? Or are there history-based political reasons for Beijing's perceived, and probably accurately perceived desire to crush Tibetan lamaism and even the Tibetan ethnic group itself.
Supposedly, the Dalai Lamas have been backed by the Mongols, who had taken over the Beijing empire during the Yuan Dynasty, before being ousted by the Han-led Ming Dynasty in 1368, 604 years before Nixon visited China. A Mongol khan, Altan, reportedly bestowed the title of Dalai Lama on the third one in 1578 when the Mings still ruled. Is Beijing still steamed about the Mongol-Dalai Lama alliance? Are the lamas still steamed about the way the Hans treated them and their allies?
Hey, don't ask me. I'm just a guy in a cafe with a laptop and a cappuccino. I doubt that Nixon knew back in 1972. I have a pretty good hunch, however, that the Dalai Lama knows something about this. And, assuming that his karma is as good as it's cracked up to be, perhaps even Steven Seagal knows too.
Lately the course of events I have been following on the Internet has demonstrated that the technological tail has been wagging the dog, the dog being content. In other words, what is written and shown is becoming increasingly influenced by the high-tech ways of showing it. One of the best illustrations of this increasing influence is this cartoon by blogger Hugh MacLeod, who announced that he was leaving the social networking site Twitter because it was "too easy," and because it was distracting him from the content ("art! ideas! poetry!…") that he sought back in 2005. Twitter, about which I wrote previously, is a child of the mashup phenomenon. What's that? Keep reading.
I'm assuming that there are Coffeeblog readers, perhaps the majority, who are unfamiliar with the technology behind mashups, and that it is worth explaining because it is having such a powerful influence on communiation in the 21st century. So what is a mashup? Wiktionary defines it:
(computing slang) A derivative work consisting of two pieces of (generally digital) media conjoined together in some interesting way, such as a video clip with a different soundtrack applied for humorous effect
I think that definition is already obsolete because nowadays mashups consist of many more than a mere two pieces of media. It can be hundreds or thousands. Also, the example of the humorous video clip is misleading because most mashups now have the purpose of pulling data together, with humor being a random phenomenon. The data that tend to be pulled together are mostly personal opinions, news items, and weblog entries (blogposts) which are combinations of just about anything. And that's exactly what Twitter does: pulling together thousands of short clips (140 characters maximum) from Twitter members and sources all over the Internet, many with links to click on for greater depth for those who are interested.
So now for the technological part. (Mom, are you still reading this? Hey, the Coffeeblog is a nobitic blog.) I'll start with newsfeeds. Any website, particularly a blog, can have its content machine-processed into a coded file called an XML file which can be read by other machines and reprocessed into a different format with the same content, that is, text, images, video, sound files, and sometimes more. There are websites (I use one called Feedburner) which will do this free for members. Once the XML file is available on the Internet, other websites can pick it up, dice it, and slice it. Often only shreds of the XML files are reprocessed into "new" websites, which actually are mashups. Once the machine programming has been completed by humans, the whole process becomes automatic.
Now for some examples. The moment that I put this Coffeeblog item on the Internet, its XML newsfeed is picked up by a website called Twitterfeed which translates it into XML that Twitter can understand. Twitter then picks up that feed and automatically puts a little blogpost under my Twitter name which contains a clickable link to this Coffeeblog item. Any of my Twitter friends who see this can go right to the Coffeeblog if they want, knowing that there's something new, interesting, enlightening, and delightfully entertaining for them to read. No emails (like the one I send to you, Mom) or checking every few hours or minutes to see if there's something new on the Coffeeblog. (That last sentence was the random humor to which I referred two paragraphs ago.)
But wait, there's more. (The preceding sentence was a mashup of actual communication and late-night television infomercial cliches, inserted for the sake of random humor.) Yes, there's more. You see, my Twitter generates another XML newsfeed which is picked up by yet another website called Friendfeed, which lists all kinds of stuff from me and my Friendfeed feed friends. If I send a photo or video to Flickr, that goes on Friendfeed. If I share an interesting newsfeed that I discover on Google Reader, that goes onto Friendfeed. If I buy an interesting new book and add it to a website called Library Thing, that goes on Friendfeed.
So where will this all end? The human brain can only handle a relatively puny amount of information, and sorting out the mish-mosh is beyond daunting and overwhelming. Merely trying to keep up with the latest tech changes is challenging enough. Friendfeed just went online a few months ago, and video on Flickr is almost brand-new. I just wrote about the idea purveyed in the New York Times that blogging is already killing the bloggers with stress. No, we don't know where this will all end. Setting priorities, of course, is a huge challenge, as Hugh MacLeod's cartoon suggests.
But wait. There's, dare I say it… more. Does anyone out there remember Marshall McLuhan? Us old-timers remember his 1964 dictum "The medium is the message." Since then, McLuhan has reportedly been named the patron saint of Wired Magazine. Taken literally, McLuhan's dictum implies that the mashup is its own content . MacLeod suggests the same thing in the last panel of his cartoon, where his entire content is "Twitter! Twitter! Twitter! Twitter!"
Fortunately, it's still a free Internet, except where it isn't, and I can post any Coffeeblog content I want. So. Back to the art, ideas, and poetry. (Well, I haven't done poetry yet, but I like to think the word "fershlugginer" is poetic in itself.)
