There’s low, and then there’s *low*

There are many, many questions regarding the police handling of the G20 summit that took place in Toronto recently, but this one takes the cake — a 57-year-old leg amputee had his artificial leg forcibly removed by Toronto police because “it could be used as a weapon”, and when he asked for it back he was told to hop. Since when is this in any way acceptable behavior for any human being? Also, when you consider that 700 people were arrested and released without charge, doesn’t that mean that there was little to no consideration of whether arrests were made with cause?

Go Oranje!

So much for my prediction of Germany winning the cup! Yesterday’s game was a bit of a disappointment, the Germans really got owned by Spain. Now let’s see what the Netherlands can do on Sunday…

Who could have known?

23-year old man attending a showing of the new Twilight movie dies suddenly during the film. The details are not yet in, but it does now seem plausible that perhaps he was bored to death.

A taste from the past

Yesterday before getting on my way home I stopped by the Buy-Rite in Jersey City to pick up a case of cider for home. Naturally I looked for a case of Strongbow but all they had was a case of Magners, which really brought me back to the old days when I played pool at a bar called The Quiet Woman in Hoboken. It’s a lovely brew, I can only hope that I can find more here. It’s different from Strongbow in that it’s sweeter and has less alcohol, I find it suits me.

Ramblings, July 3 2010

Today I had one of those days where I ended up with too much time to think. This is going to be a long one.

So last week I had a training session at my employer’s headquarters on Tuesday and Wednesday. Realizing that I also had Thursday off I decided to avail myself of a long weekend and move on to New York City for a couple of days. It was all very last minute; I had hoped that I could meet up with an old friend on the Friday, but she had plans for the weekend, so I decided to give a shot to the experience of New York as a tourist, as I had lived in the area for 5 and a half years until 2004. Every time I’d gone back before it was with certain other ideas in mind, about trying to reassume my “resident” persona, and just trying to make it happen again, be it for a few days. Each time I’d come back angry and depressed about the whole thing. And I think these experiences have probably led me to put some friendships into the background because they reminded me too much of what it was to have been there and called it home, and especially what it was to have lost that, indeed to have thrown it away as the cliche goes.

What cut me to the quick, and (in part) ruined a weekend I had planned with a friend, had been going back to Hoboken, where I lived (I also lived near Cliffside Park, but I haven’t been nearer to this than Edgewater since, it’s not even occurred to me). I tried to make arrangements with a friend to get a beer but it didn’t work out, the place where we were supposed to go had gone from pub to club (the sacrilege!), and even when I went for a (sober) walk by myself around the very small city the strange mix of familiarity and aloofness really got to me. The rest of the time I just felt like I wanted to crawl into a hole out of sheer sense of not belonging. The time before that on the drive in I went down Washington St. and ended up haunted with questions like “what are you doing here?” and “why did you have to come back?”

Oddly enough at the time I interpreted this as the voicing of the community — not in some mystical sense, but in the sense of my perception of the community, even though I wasn’t met with hostility by the locals. But I could tell that I didn’t belong. In reality, the crowds were the same people that were there when I lived there; but I was no longer the same. I’d been gone for five years by then, but the people in bars were still mostly the same age I remembered. Obviously, I wasn’t, neither in terms of age nor in terms of experience.

I really had not dealt properly with getting canned while I lived there, really, that lesson was very long in coming. Ultimately we all make our own beds, and there comes a time when one is pressed upon to lie in it. There is always an element of luck, and it is always random, unknowable and uncontrollable, but by and large it can only take you down if you screw up first. And sometimes it’s your job to concern yourself with the details. I’ve made my peace with that; it makes me hate myself so much sometimes that I can only wonder if it was truly worth it, although I know it is for my own betterment, for the long term. What can I say, it’s frustrating to know that you’re your own worst enemy, but then who could even be bothered to be my enemy? What have I got that someone would want so badly as to be a true enemy?

Hey, I called it “ramblings”. I meant that.

This is a very long prologue! To come back to the main point, however, I really sought to distance myself from these past experiments this time around. No secondary motives. No looking to see if I fit in. No unreasonable expectations that reality couldn’t live up to (through my own fault, anyway). And I actually enjoyed myself, but it’s also become clear as crystal that unless I want to do a hard-core photography weekend — and I mean, do nothing else than take pictures — I really shouldn’t go to New York anymore. It comes down to this — living there is one reality, visiting it is quite another. I actually found myself shopping, for Christ’s sake. (and no, this is not a complicated “coming out” note, I’m not anywhere to come out of). I went to Times Square and Rockefeller Plaza. I visited the MOMA gift shop and seriously considered buying a couple of things.

It’s a new experience, but it doesn’t even come close to that of actually living there. Those are the things I notice — the rumbling of the pavement when a subway train goes under it. The stifling humidity and very distinctive smell of the air in the PATH stations. The air conditioning that’s always far too cold in all subway cars, and just chills you in your sweaty clothes. The stifling heat of 2 o’clock summer sunshine in the concrete jungle. The beggars not even flustering you anymore. Knowing where you are in Manhattan in a second, including the name of neighborhood. Thinking, “oh yeah, that’s got to be on the East Side near the projects” when you see an address. Knowing that the candy-striped chimney in the middle of the street is to contain a leak in the ConEdison steam service. Not even flinching when you see a hobo wipe his own ass in a side street, just politely looking away and exhaling through your nostrils to make sure you don’t get a whiff of what just happened, same as you (and everyone else in the carriage) did when you were going home from Brooklyn one Sunday morning and a bum sprawled across 3 seats decided it was a good time to have a wank. Recognizing that smell of rotting wet garbage and urine, usually around disgusting puddles in the cracks in the pavement of an alley, as being the city’s vintage. Almost as the city’s way of saying “Fuck you, you think you’re so special? You’re not the first and you won’t be the last.” And the city has a point. It’s not directed at you, not specifically, it’s the general “you”. “You” know who “you” are, so to speak. “You” are there because of that. “You” want it. “You” can’t even imagine leaving “your” stamp on the city, but “you” can always tell yourself that the city leaves its stamp on “you”. It’s in knowing these things that “you” find it.

And yet the tourist experience is so removed from all that. You find yourself looking at other tourists with their gaudy clothes and thinking “is this what I’ve become?”. Living somewhere robs you of the opportunity of being a proper tourist there, really. Particularly when you didn’t really leave the place on good terms. You really can’t enjoy things the same way as tourists do. In a way you hate them for being there (the local’s instinct) and then realize that you’re deliberately chosen to be one of them.

Perhaps it’s because I’m taking an unnecessarily angry view of things. It’s true that in the past week I’ve been far more angry at things than I should be. I don’t mean angry at anyone in particular, just looking at things in a very negative light by default. On the whole drive up I was continuously angry at every other driver on the road. There are very few with which I couldn’t find fault. It’s true that Americans are pretty appalling drivers by and large, but I don’t even know how I could keep up that anger for almost the whole drive. It’s practically remarkable.

And then, the 90 minutes spent waiting at the border, to cover what couldn’t have been more than 1km… my mind kept looking for ever more painful and frankly medieval punishments for those responsible. Obviously this is out of proportion, but in my defense the guy handling the line seemed to chat with each car for at least 10-20 minutes, the other lines were moving several times as fast, and indeed he decided to send me, along with, well, almost everyone, for inspection. After which inspection the customs agents decided that I had indeed been honest in my declaration, be it said.

I kept wishing for worse and worse as time went by; eventually I wanted to see these people drawn and quartered, their lands plundered, and I wanted to hear the lamentations of their women. It makes me laugh to think on it now, but at one point I mock-wondered if perhaps it wasn’t my destiny to die in that very line, and by that point I was starting to feel a little bit nauseous (I was also gradually aching for a pee, which I didn’t think wasn’t an option, although now that I think of it I did have empty water bottles around). It’s practically embarrassing to think about, but where did this much anger come from? What do I have to be so angry about in the first place?

It’s not really an effort to place the blame for all sorts of things on anyone but myself. I’ve become very proficient at self-criticism. However there’s definitely a desire for self-identification as “not X”, and then finding lots of X’s to not be. It really brings to mind some lyrics from the Franz Ferdinand song “Dark of the Matinee”:

I time every journey to bump into you, accidentally
I charm you and tell you of the boys I hate
All the girls I hate
All the words I hate
All the clothes I hate
How I’ll never be anything I hate
You smile, mention something that you like
oh How you’d have a happy life if you did the things you like

It struck me when I listened to the song a couple of years ago. Double negatives work in grammar, but that’s a very restrictive binary world. Reality as a whole is more nuanced, to say the least. I know it’s true, that’s self evident on an intellectual level. Why don’t I seem to fully comprehend it, and let it guide my thoughts and decisions?

The magic number is ‘vier’

Germany sends Maradona and Argentina packing with a stunning 4-0 victory at Green Point Stadium. And a well-deserved victory it was — the Germans came out as a disciplined eleven playing as a team, while Argentina generally lacked discipline. If anything, the Germans were a little loose on offense, while the Argentines were loose on defense, and you just can’t have poor goal-zone defense in a World Cup quarter-finals match. With three four-goal games so far the Germans are emerging as definite favorites for the Cup. Herzlichen Glückwunsch!

It’s kind of depressing to think that these people have a large number of nuclear weapons.

According to CNN, Americans didn’t understand a speech delivered yesterday by President Obama because he was using language that was too advanced for them to comprehend. The speech is generally accepted as having been written to a 10th grade level. On the other hand it’s now a hell of a lot easier for us foreigners to understand how George W. Bush managed to win two Presidential elections.

Nothing is ever as it seems with North Korea

The DPRK made it to the world cup and beating expectations, but their fans are a little odd — but then they would be, as they’re not actually North Koreans, but rather Chinese volunteers paid by Pyongyang to attend the games and cheer loudly.

Making football enjoyable again

Like the World Cup but can’t stand the vuvuzela, that plastic horn that just fills the air with an indistinct drone for literally every second of the game? Lifehacker has you covered by showing you ways to get rid of that dread scourge while still enjoying some good football.

Is Reddit on the path to decline?

For a long time I’ve been a member of reddit.com, which is a fairly popular blog of sorts, but recently I’ve started to wonder if it hasn’t jumped the shark and entered its natural period of decline.

I’m not usually a big fan of the whole “is this what this site has become” whines, and this isn’t going to be a note about how the content used to be so much better than it is now (although one may say that such naysayers have a point, what with imgur.com now practically being the most prominent source of links). The site has grown tremendously and recruited users from outside its traditional scientist/engineer base to become more of a general content site, although it does have its overall tendencies, viz. atheism and political liberalism.

That being said, over the past few months it seems that the site is succumbing to its own success. Site performance is generally marginal, and during busy times you’re disturbingly likely to get a 502 error page instead of the comments page you wanted. The search functionality, which was never one of the site’s strengths, is now basically unusable; when doing a search you’re most likely to get the message that reddit is “under heavy load”. Likewise when you attempt to check your unread messages, you often end up with the picture of the reddit alien sweating while carrying a big object on his back (get it? “under heavy load”? harharhar). And of course there has recently been a bit of outright downtime.

The problem is that this just isn’t supposed to happen, not for a site which prides itself on its tech-heavy roots, and especially not for a site which has been acquired by a large corporation. Availability issues are understandable for sites such as this one, which do not have a server farm available to accommodate an excess of requests; but in reddit’s case it’s owned by Condé-Nast, a company with a lot of resources at its disposal. The site has had a few upgrade-related outages in the not-too-distant past. It would appear that the upgrades did not really resolve the underlying issues. It would seem that reddit doesn’t scale as well as its owners think it does.

At the same time it’s not like demand for sites such as reddit is showing signs of abating. The site’s pageviews have grown 1200% since January 2009 (acc. to Alexa) and over 10% in the past three months. So reddit’s capacity problems, it seems, are only going to get worse with time, especially given that they can’t really cope now. Which is really odd for a site whose membership could once be relied on to say that they knew 20 programming languages and “only” used 5 or 6 on a regular basis…