For another instance,

... I  learned some interesting things about the late President Lee Teng-hui from this Twitter thread by Prof. James Lin of the University of Washington. I haven't been looking at Twitter for a while (trying to maintain my sanity), but had to "stop by" when I learned of Lee's death today (actually yesterday).

Anyway, LTH, RIP.

We gotta get out of this place...

Watching the news. Even though Taiwan is an island, I feel more trapped in the US than I ever felt when I lived there.

Probably not an original observation, but the US right now is the biggest island in the world, and it's floating away from all of the others...

For instance,

I found out about this webinar today about two hours after it ended, along with this "Advocacy Call to Challenge Institutionalized Xenophobia against International Students" (in response to the ICE rule about online classes that has already been rescinded) and this anonymous survey for international students (that will close at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow), all via the NEXTGEN Twitter feed, which I came to via Sharon Yam's Twitter feed, which I came to via this tweet by Bad China Takes, which had been retweeted by ... well, I lost the thread at this point.

This example points out two contradictory points:

1. I would need a Twitter account (or the aforementioned RSS thingy) to keep up with all of this info (and be able to sign petitions and join webinars on time).
2. I can manage to go down the Twitter rabbit hole just fine without a Twitter account, and this is really something I should avoid, anyway.

So I guess I'll stick with the status quo for now.

Plus the webinar was only open to CCCC members, and I let my membership lapse about 5 years ago. 

Twitter conundrum

I've had two Twitter accounts in the past that I used for a while and then deleted; I've had one account that I never finished setting up because I  wouldn't give them my phone number. I skim some people's Twitter feeds to keep up on some of the goings-on about Taiwan-related research and other things of interest, but I'm afraid to set up yet another account because I know how I get when I join a social network, and I just don't need that right now. But on the other hand, the number of Twitter feeds that I am interested in following keeps growing, and I don't know what else to do. I suppose I could bookmark all the feeds I'm interested in, but that doesn't seem very efficient.

I might look into figuring out how to set up RSS feeds for Twitter. Maybe I can add them to my Feedly app and see them that way.

(A little while later) Hmmm... Looks like you need to get Feedly Pro+ to be able to integrate Twitter. Have to decide if I want to pay $8.25 a month for that.

OK, I've decided that I don't.

There's also something called "FetchRSS" that will allow Twitter. But the free version deletes unused feeds after 7 days of  inactivity and updates feeds only once every 24 hours.

This article suggests a few options, but it seems most of them don't work anymore.

I suppose I can try the free version of FetchRSS if I can keep myself down to 5 feeds and 5 articles in a feed. Except that the whole reason for doing this was that I am interested in more and more feeds...

Oh how I miss Google Reader!!

[Update: I'm trying to use Blogger's "Blogs I'm following" function to see if that will work. It seems I can at least catalog the Twitter feeds I'm interested--sort of like bookmarking them. Which means I'm back to where I started....]

More webinars I'll be attending...

I'm not sure they'd appreciate this being called a webinar, though. My latest virtual learning opportunity will be via the 2020 Taiwan Studies Summer School at the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies. Here's some of the info and a link to the registration form, if you're interested:

2020 Taiwan Studies Summer School

Date: 6 July 2020Time: 9:00 AM

Finishes: 10 July 2020Time: 9:00 PM

Venue: Virtual Event

Type of Event: Summer School

13th SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School

SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies
倫敦大學亞非學院臺灣研究中心
6th-10th July 2020

The SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School is free to attend and open to all. To register for this year's Summer School please complete our short registration form.

There's a schedule of events that includes lectures, book events, film screenings and Q&A sessions, and student presentations. I think there's still time to register if you're interested. You can choose to attend the whole event or just individual days.

I'll try to report on my experience, though I'm teaching this summer session as well as doing other things.

Broken links

I wonder what bloggers do (or are supposed to do) when the links from old posts get broken. I mentioned a couple of posts from seven years ago and 14 years ago to a colleague and in the process noticed that most of the links didn't work anymore. A search on one of the sites that had hosted the linked-to pages didn't turn up the material I had linked to; I'm guessing that the material was considered time-sensitive or not worthy of archiving. Speaking of archiving, I guess I could try to use the Wayback Machine to find some of those pages; that would be worthwhile in some cases if not in all of them.

Trouble is, I tried a Wayback Machine search on one of the "worthwhile" pages and nothing turned up. "This page is not available on the web because page does not exist," they tell me. But it must have existed at some point--I linked to it, after all. Anyway, I think there's no realistic solution to this problem, though I'd be happy to hear of some if anyone has any ideas.

More clues about Y. F. Yeh, aka Antenna

I found some more letters by Antenna on the 國史館 website. I'm just going to transcribe one letter from August 31, 1949, though, because it raises some interesting questions about Antenna even as it gives more information on him (typed exactly as written, including mistakes):

August 31, 1949

Dear Jack,

I hasten to take my pen and paper when I am informed that Dr. Huang (黃演燎), the vice-director of the Taiwan University Hospital, is going to America to attend to the X-ray course of Iowa University. How glad I am that I can write to you. I am very sorry that I have never written to you for these two years because there is no safe way for our correspondence after Mr. Catto left here.

How have you been getting along? Is it true that you are teaching at the University? And have you married or stayed single? I guess you might have a nice marriage and be a good daddy now.

Well, I have to tell you something about myself and this island. After your leaving Shanghai for America, I had spent a [1||2] miserable time in disappointment and uneasiness. Then I sailed for Japan on a small smuggling ship loaded up with sugar, but to our regrets, she was arrested by the Japanese coast-guards at Kōbe and we sneaked away with nothing but our own clothes. During those days of distress in Japan, I only expected I might find you out there because you had told me that you would go there by the end of that year. But nothing fell on me except poverty and bitter cold, so I came back again to my home land through a risky voyage last March. I lived a hundrum life last year and married at the beginning of this year. And now I am going to be a dad. Mr. Umbō Chō married also and has a baby, and has improved much in health. 

As to the situation of this island, [2||3] I can't keep from saying from more and more though you are quite well-informed enough to understand it. Through four odd years, the Chinese regime established in Formosa committed the worst vices that have ever appeared in human history -- speculation and embezzlment, extortion and black-mailing -- and have demonstrated their inability to rule and unwillingness to improve this island. Especially the terrible disaster led by the financil panic which the government intended to destroy the Chinese-Formosan's economical faculty, caused a large number of bankrupt and unemployment this May. This we call the Economical 2.28. accident. And during the past several months crowds of refugees with many Kuomingtan big-wigs, seeking shelter from the worsening civil war, have been [3||4] rushing into this island, therefore bring about a shortage of houses and foods and cause a terrible social confusion. However we never believe any improvement under such government, and desire sooner political change in this island. 

Nevertheless, there is a welcome news about the butcher Chen Yi, ---- that he was detained this March, then the Governor of Chekiang Province, because losing the confidence of Generalissimo Chiang and has been sent to Formosa after the fall of Shanghai, and is cynically leading a secluded life here. 

Please write me through Mr. Chō's sooner you get this letter. I hope I can see you again, and wish you every happiness now and in future with [4||5] all my heart,

 Ever yours sincerely,

Antenna Yeh

You may write me through:

Mr. Antenna Yeh 

Otorhinolaryngology of Taiwan University Hospital

Taipeh, Formosa

A few notes:

• I'm guessing that because he calls himself "Mr." Yeh, he isn't a doctor of otorhinolaryngology (*Whew! What a word for "ear, nose, and throat!"*). Also, as the letter mentioned in my previous post indicates, by the end of 1949, Yeh was working for Butterfield and Swire, a shipping company. Quite a switch of jobs, but he stayed with Butterfield and Swire at least until 1954.
• I searched through a book entitled 臺大醫學院, 1945-1950, but couldn't find anything that seemed like a reference to Antenna Yeh or Y. F. Yeh (not surprisingly if he wasn't there that long). Dr. Huang is in there, though, as an instructor of radiology (放射線學). 
• Umbō Chō ... is still a bit of a mystery. He's probably the Cho Un-bo mentioned in the 1954 letter in the previous post as being in Japan. [From Yukari's comment: "Cho Un-bo is, I believe. 張雲舫. He was a student of Kerr at Taihoku College; stayed in Japan after 228."]
• Mr. Catto is Robert Catto, the USIS officer in Taipei at the time of 228. 

(Thanks to my wife for reminding me of how to create Google Docs by taking pictures of documents and saving them to the Google Drive app!)  

In Search of... Y. F. Yeh

Remember the old Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search of... shows? (The link will take you to one on astrology--just in time for the upcoming full moon!) This post doesn't really have anything to do with that show, but I am in search of something--or rather, someone.

My fellow Kerrologists and I are trying to figure out the identify of the writer of this letter to Kerr. A partial transcription of the letter by Kerr indicates that the author is the same person as the writer who sent letters to Kerr under the name "Antenna." As this letter indicates, the writer, Y. F. Yeh, had taken a job in 1949 working for the British shipping company Butterfield and Swire. As of the date of the letter (1954), he was working in the Keelung office.

Not surprisingly, it's kind of difficult to find out more about Y. F. Yeh of Butterfield and Swire based on what we have. I did find the archives of John Swire & Sons Ltd (at SOAS), which look interesting but I'm guessing wouldn't include anything on Yeh (in fact, there's no online finding aid).

After finding out through the first article in this journal (pdf) that the Chinese name of Butterfield and Swire is/was 太古輪船公司, I found some references to the company on Taiwan's 國史館 website. It looks, though, like most of the materials predate Mr. Yeh's time.

I've also tried the Taiwan Biographical Ontology database, though I'm not sure Yeh would count as an "elite." (And not knowing the characters for "Y. F." doesn't help...)

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

One thing that I've been thinking about recently, first with the COVID-19 pandemic and then with the demonstrations for racial equality that came in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, is the relations among minorities in the US--in particular Asian Americans and African Americans. My wife and I have talked about this a lot, and I've tried to do some reading, too, on the different ways Asian Americans are reacting to or are involved in this struggle for racial justice. Admittedly I'm a privileged outsider to both of these groups and their struggles, but that's why I'm trying to learn more. And as a colleague mentioned at a webinar on Juneteenth today, I shouldn't be trying to corner my friends and colleagues of color and expect them to teach me everything I need to do without me doing my homework first.

I bought Living for Change, the autobiography of Grace Lee Boggs. I had seen the PBS film about Boggs a few years ago and was impressed by this documentary of a Chinese American woman who was intimately involved with the struggles of African Americans for decades. I've read through the first four chapters so far. I'll probably post some thoughts on it (or quotes from it) once I'm done.

Driving in Postwar Japan

I started watching The Warped Ones on Turner Classic Movies tonight. I couldn't sit through the whole thing, but I did get curious about where it was filmed in Japan. A scene early on shows the two released criminals Akira and Masaru stealing a car, and I noticed that the steering wheel was on the left-hand side and they were driving on the right-hand side of the road (as was everyone else). Here's one scene of the guy (Masaru?) breaking into the car:

So my question is, I thought that in Japan, steering wheels were on the right-hand side and they drove on the left. I did a little Googling research and found that while Okinawa was still under US military rule, people there were required to drive on the right, but I didn't see anything about whether that was the case in the rest of Japan, especially around 1960 when the movie was made. Does anyone have any ideas about this? Does this movie take place in Okinawa?

[Update, 6/20/20: I forced myself to watch the rest of this, and there's a bit of dialogue where someone says, "The steering wheel's on the other side." The response to that: "It's a foreign car." So my question is sort of answered there. I also read somewhere that the movie was filmed in Tokyo. But I'm still confused by what I thought I saw was other people driving on the right-hand side fo the road... Maybe I was wrong about the whole thing--just saw people driving on the left-hand side. guess this blog post was much ado about nothing!]

Notes on the June 2 Webinar, "The Challenge of COVID-19: The Taiwan Experience"

Wow--how did it get to June 16 already?

I listened to that webinar on COVID-19 in Taiwan on June 2. I'm not sure if anyone was waiting with bated breath to get my impressions of the discussion, but I'll mention a few things.

In the meantime I see that Evan Feigenbaum from the Carnegie Endowment interviewed some "senior health and epidemiology figures" from Taiwan, including Steve Kuo from National Yangming University (who also participated in the webinar). Feigenbaum comes to the same conclusion that Steven Goldstein came to at the webinar concerning the lessons the US can learn from the Taiwan experience. Goldstein even suggested that the Taiwan experience would be used as a negative example in the US, particularly in terms of the single-payer argument. He said that you can't even get some people to wear masks here, and any kind of single-payer system in which the government was able to compile the health information of Americans would be more of an argument against a single-payer system like Taiwan's for many of these Americans. (Which once again leads me to the conclusion that I wish I were in Taiwan right now...) Feigenbaum says the same thing about American views of the Taiwan model:

Mask-wearing? Fuhgeddaboudit. Large-scale integration of personal databases? No way. Centralization of messaging and coordinated efforts across levels of government? Whoa, hard. Political culture matters a lot. What worked there is easily ignored and trashed by many here.

Depressing...

Another interesting part of the discussion on June 2 centered on the question of whether Taiwan's exclusion from the WHO was an advantage or a disadvantage. Steven Kuo was pretty clear that it wasn't a disadvantage (though he didn't say it was an advantage). He felt that Taiwan could get information from other allies (even if the US withdrew from the WHO). My notes on what Kuo said (not exact quotes!):

For this outbreak, I won’t say being outside WHO has had any significant impact on our ability to respond. We’ve been trying to get into WHO as observers for a long time (20 years). SARS served as wake-up call, learned a lot, collaborated with other countries like US CDC, which improved disease control system. 2009, joined WHO as observer. Had some experience as observer. It would be wonderful if Taiwan could be part of WHO, but if we can’t “it’s not really a big deal.” We work double-hard. Some people think we’re lucky not to be in, but he doesn’t think so, though he doesn’t think it mattered in this case. Not an official gov’t point of view (he emphasized)!

In the end, he felt it was more a political issue than a health issue.

William Hsiao, on the other hand, who was one of the people who set up Taiwan's National Health Insurance program, felt that it was "an issue of respect" whether Taiwan was part of WHO or not. He admitted, though that Taiwan wouldn't gain much benefit from membership.

There are other things I could mention, but I have to get back to grading now...

I hope Richard Bush is making some royalties off of this...

If you are looking for a copy of Richard C. Bush's 2006 book, Untying the Knot: Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait, if you hurry you can pick it up at the low price listed below:

It looks like there are three copies available at these bargain-basement prices:

Glad I got my copy already. (But maybe I should put it up for sale...)

June 2: Webinar, "The Challenge of COVID-19: The Taiwan Experience"

I'm hoping to "attend" this webinar next Tuesday:

6/1/20: UPDATE FROM THE FAIRBANK CENTER:

AVAILABLE ON ZOOM. CLICK HERE TO ATTEND.

WEBINAR – THE CHALLENGE OF COVID-19: THE TAIWAN EXPERIENCE
JUNE 2 @ 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM 

Speakers:Jen-Hsiang Chuang, Deputy Director-General at Centers for Disease Control, Taiwan
Steve Kuo, President, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan 

Moderators:Winnie Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, China Health Partnership.
William Hsiao, K.T. Li Research Professor of Economics in Department of Health Policy and Management and Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 

Organizer: Steven Goldstein, Sophia Smith Professor of Government, Emeritus, Smith College; Fairbank Center Associate 

Webinar is available using Microsoft Teams or Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. No registration is required.
Click here to attend.

Will write up some notes about it afterwards (assuming I have time!).

Our second floor feels like a three-warms

My wife told me this afternoon that our upstairs felt like a 三溫暖 (sān wēnnuǎn; sauna), and that got me thinking about the origins of this term.

But to start with a digression: for some reason, when I typed 三溫暖 into Google Translate, it romanized it as "Sān wēng nuǎn" instead of "Sān wēn nuǎn." I'm not sure why. But I noticed that if I put spaces between the characters: 三 溫 暖, Google "fixed" the transliteration to ""Sān wēnnuǎn." If I leave a space between 三 and 溫暖, it's OK. But as soon as I put 三 and 溫 together, it becomes "Sān wēng nuǎn." Why is that? Here are some screen shots to prove it!

Getting back to the point of this post. I found several sources that say 三溫暖, like its synonym 桑拿 (sāngná) are transliterated loanwords from English. (To me, though, it's easier to hear "sauna" from sāngná than from sān wēnnuǎn.) 

This led me to wonder if there was actually something in traditional Chinese referring to "three warms." Looking up "三溫暖是什麼意思" I found that a lot of people in China were evidently curious about this, too. One respondent on a forum on Baidu wrote, that 三溫暖 was what people in Taiwan call 桑拿: 

一个台湾朋友给了很权威的解释：Sauna，在台湾翻译成“三温暖”，其实是兼顾了音译和意译。“三温暖”除了跟英语的“Sauna”读音相近外，意思上也表达了这个蒸汽浴的传统。传统的芬兰桑拿房是全木结构，在桑拿房靠墙建有三阶木榻，每阶的温度各不一样，中下层的温度更低，方便老人家和小孩子，而上面那层温度最高，适合身体好的青壮年人享用，因为Sauna屋有三阶温度各异的木榻，所以称“三温暖”，意思也贴合。

To Googlify:

A Taiwanese friend gave a very authoritative explanation: Sauna, translated as "three warmth" in Taiwan, is actually a combination of transliteration and free translation. "Sanwennuan" is similar to the English pronunciation of "Sauna", which also expresses the steam bath tradition. The traditional Finnish sauna is made of all-wood structure. There are three steps of wooden couches built against the wall of the sauna. The temperature of each step is different. The temperature of the middle and lower levels is lower, which is convenient for the elderly and children. The upper level has the highest temperature and is suitable for young and middle-aged people who are in good health to enjoy. Because a sauna house has wooden beds with third-order temperatures, so it is called "three warmth", and the meaning also fits.

But then they add, interestingly, something about the meaning of 三溫暖 in Korea:

韩式“三温暖”：就是头一汤泡到摄氏36度的水池里十分钟，然后跳到冷水池里；第二汤泡到40度的水池里十分钟，接着再跳到冷水池里；最后是干、湿桑拿十分钟，再跳到冷水池里。这样，热水下皮肤伸张，排出身体中的污垢、头屑等排泄物；冷水下，皮肤收紧，防止脏物回流。如此“三热”、“三冷”，构成“三温暖”。按照韩国人的说法，三温暖可促进血液循环和新陈代谢，对肌肤美容和体形塑造有神奇效果。

To roughly (and Googly) translate:

Korean-style "three warmth": the first time is to soak in the pool at 36 degrees Celsius for ten minutes, and then jump into a cold pool; the second time is to soak in the pool at 40 degrees for ten minutes, and then jump into the cold pool. The last is a dry and wet sauna for ten minutes before jumping into the cold pool. In this way, the skin stretches under hot water to discharge dirt, dandruff and other excretions from the body; under cold water, the skin tightens to prevent the backflow of dirt. Such "three hots" and "three colds" constitute "three warms". According to Koreans, Sanwennuan can promote blood circulation and metabolism, and has a magical effect on skin beauty and body shape.

I'm not much of a saunaphile, so I can't say which of these interpretations best fits the Taiwanese idea of saunas. (I should add that my wife is also not a frequenter of saunas, but said she has heard the "Korean" description more than the "Finnish" one in Taiwan.) All I can say is that it was hot upstairs today!

Go Grandriders 不老騎士

I saw that ｢不老騎士：歐兜邁環台日記｣ Go Grandriders (2012) was on Kanopy and asked our school library to order it. I'm thinking of using it in my Travel Writing class in the fall as a look into another perspective on travel by looking at what motivates the elderly people in this documentary (averaging over 80 years old) to go on a motorcycle trip around Taiwan. The movie came out about a year after I left Taiwan, but evidently it was filmed in 2007, while I was still there. For some reason, though, I don't recall hearing about this trip while I was there (though I imagine it was in the news). And I only had a vague recollection of the film before I "discovered" it on Kanopy. Here's the trailer for the movie:

As you can see from the trailer, the film is somewhat sentimental. Reviews that I read of the movie ranged from Miriam Bale's snarky and dismissive hit piece to slightly more appreciative pieces, like Justin Chang's review that calls the movie "warmly ingratiating" while admitting that the movie is somewhat superficial and at times "unexciting."

But I wonder how the film plays to different audiences. It seems to have been well-received in Taiwan, as well as in Hong Kong and South Korea (Chinese Wikipedia). It touches on some aspects of Taiwanese modern history, particularly the Japanese colonial period when some of the riders had been police or on opposing sides of the war between Japan and China. It might be that a reaction like Bale's is due at least in part to not understanding the whole context of the film. Bale claims (she doesn't support the statement, so I can't call it an argument) that what she calls "mystery" in the film comes "mostly from omission in the sometimes inept storytelling." But my guess is that anyone familiar with Taiwan's history--the primary audience of the film--would not find much mysterious about it. When one of the riders, a former Nationalist Chinese soldier, says that another rider, a Taiwanese lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese army, used to be enemies but that "a smile between brothers can melt enmity"(兄弟一笑泯恩仇), this seems no mystery to me (the question then being whether it's the director's responsibility to spoonfeed Taiwanese history to an American viewer like Bale).

It might be, too, that the style of the movie is also more suitable for some East Asian audiences than for American audiences. That's certainly a possibility, given the fact that the film was a winner at the Asian American International Film Festival and was nominated at the 17th Busan International Film Festival and the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival. However, it's also interesting to observe that the most positive review I saw published was by Frank Scheck, in which he concludes,

The filmmaker documents the proceedings in refreshingly matter-of fact-fashion, thankfully avoiding the temptation to overly sentimentalize or mine cheap humor and contrived suspense from the proceedings. It somehow seems doubtful that an American director would have shown such restraint.

I don't know much about Scheck besides the fact that he's described as an "American film critic," but he has a more understanding perspective on the film than Bale.

At any rate, I'll be interested to see how students in my Travel Writing online class respond to the movie. I'm putting together some questions for them to think about regarding the role of place vs. the role of the journey in the film. I'll have to think more about the questions, which will probably involve watching it again. Pass the Kleenex, please!

Finished reading Before the Storm

So I decided that instead of feeding my rage over what's going on currently, I'd give myself a chance to rage about the past. I just finished Rick Perlstein's 2001 history of '60s conservatism, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.

Like the other two Perlstein books that I've read (Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge), this book was packed with historical details of famous, infamous, and little-known events and people, seemingly culled (by Perlstein or his research assistants) from newspapers of every size across the US. In with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the candidacy of Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith (the first woman to run for president as part of a major party), and the murder of Kitty Genovese are such details as the number of African American journeymen in the Brooklyn plumbers' local ("three ... out of several thousand members" [236]), the rise of businesses and products catering to fears of nuclear war (like "'Foam-Ettes--the Toothpaste Tablet You Can Use ANYTIME, ANYWHERE--WHEREVER YOU ARE, even in a family fallout shelter' [143]"), and the origins of the boysenberry and its relationship to the growth of conservatism.

Unfortunately, some of Before the Storm is as hard to read as that previous sentence probably was. Like a lot of readers (at least judging from the book's reviews on Amazon), I came to this book last, after having read Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge. Reading the books out of order like this, I can see how Perlstein's style has (fortunately) developed. Like the later books, this one sometimes takes detours in the narrative to bring readers up to date about a figure, trend, or other historical development that is important to the overall story. At times, however, the detours were not accompanied with proper signage and I found myself lost when I was back on the main road. At times I'd be reading along and suddenly come along a sentence like, "By July, ..." and wonder, "July of what year?"

Overall, though, I learned a lot from this book. It even clued me in on a 1953 executive order signed by Eisenhower "demanding homosexuals be fired not just from all federal jobs bur from all companies with federal contractors--one-fifth of the U.S. workforce" (490). This order, Executive Order 10450, was interesting to me as it seems to have formed part of the context in which George Kerr was forced to resign from his work at Stanford with the International Cooperation Administration. (See my brief bio of Kerr in the Camphor Press edition of Formosa Betrayed.)

I see that Perlstein has a new volume coming out in August: Reaganland. I'm looking forward to it, but considering that the Amazon website says it's 1040 pages long, it'll be a while before I get to it...

A break from COVID and CANVAS

I was going to post a thoughtful note on George H. Kerr's perspective on the April 24, 1970 assassination attempt on Chiang Ching-kuo, but I'm burned out on COVID-19 news and transferring my Blackboard materials to Canvas for my first summer class that begins May 4. So I'm going to relax with this video, which I just encountered. Apologies if you've seen it before:

Ragesurfing

This is the term I came up with this morning to describe how I lurch from one anger-inducing news story to another about the intersection of politics and COVID-19 (and, sometimes, bad reporting).* I imagine I'm not the only person who does this. I've seen the term "doomsurfing," but that describes something a bit different--as Kevin Roose defines it, doomsurfing consists of "falling into deep, morbid rabbit holes filled with coronavirus content, agitating [one]self to the point of physical discomfort, erasing any hope of a good night’s sleep." Ragesurfing, perhaps a subspecies of doomsurfing, is characterized by the active pursuit of news articles that you know will make you angry and a descent into the rabbit hole of reading the comments on stories or social media posts with an emphasis on the ones that you strongly disagree with or that are dismissive or insulting to your perspective. "I knew there would be some idiots who would agree (or disagree, as the case may be) with this posting!" you say, vindicated in your belief that not everyone on the internet is as enlightened as you (OK, this is about me), at the same time growing more and more angry and despairing at how stupid and/or evil "they" are.

I'm not sure what motivates ragesurfing; Roose, in another article, argues that what he calls "machine drift" happens when our thoughts and emotions are influenced by our online experiences through "a combination of humans and sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence." He quotes the adage that "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." His objective is to explore how our tools shape us, which, if you believe that ragesurfing is a result of being manipulated by our tools, seems an important consideration. Maybe his podcasts will shed some light on this phenomenon (though he'll probably end up giving it another name that will stick better than "ragesurfing," which will probably make me even madder).

Note that ragesurfing doesn't imply engaging those other points of view, though I guess it doesn't preclude engagement. Personally, I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account, so my consumption of social media is strictly from the sidelines. This might enhance the feelings of impotent rage--Roose suggests that "using social media actively makes us feel better than consuming it passively," but I have no intention of diving into the volcano just because I'm burning my feet by dancing around the edge.

I suppose that ragesurfing, unlike doomsurfing as it's currently being used, does not have to be concerned only with coronavirus-related content. However, it makes sense that it would surface now, when I'm stuck at home, sitting in front of the computer or staring at my phone way too much.

I need to get back to grading right now, so I'm just going to post this as a "half-formed thought." I'll try to stay away from my usual grazing locations. Like a cow that eats too much lush green grass in the spring, I'm liable to start staggering around and fall over. (That simile probably proves I'm a suburbanite.)

*Update: I found the hashtag "#RageSurfing used once in a late 2018 tweet:

Doesn't seem to be exactly what I mean by the term, though... "Ragesurf" also comes up, as in this tweet:

Still doesn't seem to mean the same thing.

I'm supposed to be grading...

My son's first book

My son has gotten into writing books now. His writing looks like a flock of birds, and he glues the pages together so they form sort of a long wallpaper-like thing. Maybe a scroll, except that he doesn’t roll it up.

It’s all about Thomas and Friends, of course. The trains look like alien heads with big eyes on top of long footless legs (which are actually wheels). Then he draws the tracks and writes the text (see the left-hand side.) He could write some real letters if he wanted to, but I’m not going to rush him. He finished one book last night and got to work on another one today. I wish I had his energy. He calls them “Awdry books,” so I guess they’re based on the books the Rev. W. Awdry wrote back in the day.

Clearing out yesterday's fallen branches

Yesterday a big storm came through, with heavy rain and strong winds that tossed branches around the yard and even cut out our power for about 45 minutes.  (We were lucky on both counts--other people in the state had trees fall on their houses or lost power for much longer times.) Today was a reasonably nice day, so this afternoon my five-year-old and I went out to clean up the fallen branches that were scattered all over the yard.

My son alternated between picking up branches to put in my wheelbarrow and playing with his wooden Thomas trains; sometimes his trains helped carry the branches over. Henry, the big green tender engine, was especially helpful. While we worked on collecting the branches, we discussed Henry--his helpful but sometimes "arrogant and vain" personality (as my son described it), his fear of rain, of wind, and of heights. Every once in a while it amazes me not just that he's talking so much, but that we have things to talk about (though our most content-rich conversations seem to circulate around Thomas and his friends, which I know more about now than I ever wanted to).

Of course, now that we have all of these branches, I have to figure out how to get them to the dump on Saturday...