Catching Up with the News

La Republic bananier: Jean Sarkozy, the French President’s 23-year-old, undergraduate son is appointed to a powerful post as the head of the Epad, the public agency which runs La Défense, the big business district on the west side of Paris. (An internet petition is calling on Jean to get his degree before rising to high responsibility.) La Défense is the heart of Sarkoland, the President’s fiefdom. His son was elected to a seat on the notoriously sleaze-ridden departement council there last year. The president also orchestrated a public media trial of his bitter rival, former Prime Minister Dominic de Villepin for allegedly abetting an amateurish and ineffective scheme to smear Sarkozy Also, the fact remains that Sarkozy appointed (and stood by) a senior minister who had written about his exploits as a Bangkok sex tourist. Gay activists are also angry, because the minister in question, Mitterrand has tarnished homosexuality by at least appearing to associate it with paedophilia and prostitution.

IndeoChinese Cold War: Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese air incursions into India have dominated the news: China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory–around Tibet, and of semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled. To add to the drama, many yonger Tibetans, many born outside Tibet, are growing impatient with the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” approach—a willingness to accept Chinese sovereignty in return for true autonomy—and commitment to nonviolence. If these groups were to use India as a base for armed insurrection against China, as Tibetan exiles did throughout the 1960s, then two nuclear powers will be brought to the brink of war. (Beijing will at least seize important Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that lie in Indian territory close to the border).

Beijing has launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at undercutting Indian sovereignty over the areas China claims, particularly the northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh and one of its key cities, Tawang, birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. Tibet ceded Tawang and the area around it to British India in 1914. China has recently denied visas to the state’s residents; lodged a formal complaint after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in 2008; and tried to block a $2.9 billion Asian Development Bank loan to India because some of the money was earmarked for an irrigation project in the state. In India’s 1962 war with China, the latter launched a massive invasion along the length of the frontier, routing the Indians before unilaterally halting at what today remains the de facto border, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC). They are fearful of China’s expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean. Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review, predicted in a widely publicized essay this summer that China would attack India sometime before 2012.

Give Nukes a Nobel: The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age–the Nazi death machinery, and assembly line murders. The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I; by World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million, or 78 million — somewhere in there. Then came a world with nuclear weapons. As bad as they are, nukes have been instrumental in reversing the long, seemingly inexorable trend in modernity toward deadlier and deadlier conflicts. Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high., and thus began the age of globalization and global economy. If a world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about, the industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell–instead of fantasies about a nuke-free planet where formerly bloodthirsty humans live together in peace, what the world needs is a safer, more stable nuclear umbrella.

Haut-Karabagh Question: Azerbaijan is the only country criticiseing an agreement to normalize relations between Turkey and Armenia, saying it raises doubts about regional stability.The Azerbaijani foreign ministry said Turkey should not have normalised ties without a deal over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. During the war there in 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia out of solidarity with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s government wants Armenia to withdraw troops from Nagorno-Karabakh, the Aremenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and return land. (There was a chance that the Turkish-Armenian protocols might never be ratified by Turkey’s parliament). A timetable for normalising relations between Turkey and Armenia was agreed in April, after a century of hostility between the two neighbours.

News Roundup 18/09/09

Controversy over the Thames: ‘Furious’ London Mayor Boris Johnson has ordered the River Thames to be reinstated on the London Underground map after Transport for London decided to redesign it. Tfl’s decision to remove zone boundaries will also now be reviewed. The redesign caused so much outcry from politicians and passenger groups and fears that people could end up paying higher fares by accident. Tfl decided to remove the fare boundaries and river because it said some passengers had complained that the map, based on Harry Beck’s 1933 design classic, had become ‘too cluttered’. However, the Harry Beck map has been voted a British design icon alongside Concorde and Spitfire. ‘TfL treated it as an operational decision but clearly it’s much more significant than that,’ the City Hall announced. [Many people in London, this author being one, still use the Thames River to get their bearings]. One of the latest revisions also is that passengers entering Zone 1 – which covers much of central London – pay premium fares, while those who use circle line that circumvent the area gets a cheaper fare.

Berlin Wall, 20 years on, Divided They Stand: Twenty years on, there has been no grand new mission, no ambitious vision of remaking Germany — or Europe, or the world. As the continent’s largest economy, Germany could have taken a lead to ensure that the European Union came together to weather the worst economic downturn in 70 years; it did not. Germany has contributed 4,000 troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but there is deepening unease in Germany about the nation’s involvement in the war there. The strongest impulse in German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports this by producing consensus-driven coalition governments.  Ossis — Easterners earn less, produce less and have higher rates of unemployment than Wessis — Westerners . One in every 10 Ossis wishes he or she were still living in the G.D.R., something that will be reflected in the rise of Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists in the East. This division that Germans call “a wall in the head” is more evident outside Berlin, where the physical Wall has been all but expunged.

There’s also been a striking geographical reversal–the poorly paid, the unemployed, the migrated East Berliners were shunted into the high-rises of West Berlin while the rich West Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War. Today East Berlin is cooler than West. That’s where people with money want to live. After World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism–denial infused Germany’s student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. — its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime — expresses itself in ostalgie, the rose-tinted nostalgia for a G.D.R. that never was. Ostalgie inspired the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! and underpins the renaissance of iconic East German brands. [There used to be a blank space on maps of East Berlin where the Hohenschönhausen jail stood. Germany's secret police, the Stasi, employed one officer for every 180 G.D.R. citizens and had a network of 180,000 informers..]

If that why Thatcher opposed German Unification? A strong unified Germany looks where??? Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. She asked that her remarks should not be recorded,  and the part of the conversation is reproduced from memory. She assured Mr Gorbachev that President Bush also wanted to do nothing that would be seen by the Russians as a threat to their security. The same assurance was later spelt out in person to Mr Gorbachev at the Soviet- American summit off Malta. Back then, the French were also puzzled at Moscow’s refusal to intervene in East Germany and questioned whether “the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic.” An adviser to social President Mitterrand noted “France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable,” and that he would “fly off to live on Mars” if this happened. Gorbachev’s relaxed attitude to reunification later hardened. At his summit with Mr Bush,  he accused the West of trying to “impose” Western values on Eastern Europe, and launched a ferocious attack on Helmut Kohl,the German Chancellor, for hurrying the unification.

Still talking about healthcare?

I guess we are. I have totally zoned out of the topic, but people haven’t yet. At least the late night shows are on August recess and we are spared of some uncalled for jokes.

But you don’t been Jon Stewart to create soundbites. This weekend, one soundbite got prevalent that it even reached me. The soundbite, the Facebook status that could change the world (according to ever sensational TIME magazine), read as follow:

“No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, join us in posting this as your status for the rest of the day.”

Despite the fact that that message concerns only the Americans with their shithole healthcare, I now see it everywhere. Someone who wrote a little too extensively on the healthcare, I find such oneliners extremely disturbing to the real debate about the healthcare. This morning, I replied with my own soundbite, 139 letters, Twitter-style.

“No one should die because NHS won’t foot their medical bill. No one should go broke because the others get sick. If you agree, repost this.”

Sorry, that statement doesn’t make sense but the statement to which i am responding make little sense too. People die because they cannot afford healthcare, and they sometimes go broke because of their sicknesses, but the healthcare reform won’t change that–if the politicians are more sincere about the reform, what they should be talking about is the subsidies on the medical operators, so that an affordable healthcare can materialize.

A Temporary Transition

To follow me to Russia, go to cynicaltravels.wordpress.com. Caveat Emptor–it is not PC and extremely cynical.

The World We Ignored

The Top Foreign News We Missed:

Objectification of Women in Italy. Except: “Conservative ideas in Italy die hard because of  patriarchal culture and the Catholic Church, whose interference become even stronger since Mr. Berlusconi first became prime minister in 1994. The church, for example, has threatened to excommunicate doctors who prescribe the abortion pill as well as patients who use it. Italy ranks 67th out of 130 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index. Under half of Italy’s women have jobs, compared with the world average of nearly two out of three. Italian men have 80 more minutes of leisure time per day, the greatest difference in the 18 countries compared. Women had to devote extra time to unpaid work, like cleaning the house and are therefore unwilling to take on an additional burden of raising children. Italy has an extraordinarily low birthrate”.

Things We Need To Know: Why Elections and Bipartisanship are overrated, and other controversial answers, answered by Newsweek.

Belgian Justice. Except: “Most buildings are from the 19th century and not very functional in terms of security. There are 44 entrances to the huge Palace of Justice, many of them with little or no significant surveillance, almost no few metal detectors here. The minister of justice, Stefaan De Clerck, is now in the hot seat. Most of the escapees have been foreigners, given that roughly 57 percent of Belgium’s prison population is foreign-born. Almost all the recent escapees were serving time or facing trial for violent crimes.”

Where Ted Kennedy Mattered: He guided US policies in Vietnam, South Africa, Chile, Northern Ireland and Iraq, but let’s not forget his game-changer for East Pakistan.

Who are we robbing this week?

Something is wrong about (modern) pop-culture, and how it had been wrong for a millennium.

Every time I watch a superhero movie, I feel disgusted by this ‘end justifies the means’ attitude that these masked vigilantes hold. I know I sounded like someone denouncing the superheroes from the movie Watchman (Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?) but we usually hold high esteem for those who work on the fringes of the society, don’t we? Let’s us plunge into that cesspool of misfits:

It didn’t start with Robin Hood (there was probably some Cro-Magnon man who clubbed the better hunters and give their goods to poorer gatherers) but he helped romanticizing this phenomenon. From Scott’s Ivanhoe to Green Arrow, there were parodies and pastiches of the famed robber and his Merry Men. Libertarian Ayn Rand made fun of this with a character in Atlas Shrugged. A pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld, a Robin Hood-like character, considers himself the complete negative of the Medieval outlaw. (Rand viewed the idea to rob the rich and give to the poor highly pernicious). Ragnar, a libertarian like his creator, attacks on government property and never touch private property.

Literature was especially permitting to these lawless activities. Dumas’ Edmund Dantes (better known as the Count of Monte Cristo) has a moral compass that is misguided if not entirely broken. He was on a personal vendetta, which made things a little different, but among the swashbuckling gentleman-thieves (fashioned after Rt. Hon. Mr. Hood) that I read and misguidedly admired during my youth include: Hornung’s Raffles, LeBlanc’s Lupin, and Charteris’ The Saint. Even that Victorian staple of moral uprightness, one Sherlock Holmes, Esq., permitted the murder of a serial-blackmailer in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.

Some will say that Citizen Vigilantes like The Scarlet Pimpernel in fiction and gut-toting sheriffs of the American West in real life balanced (and reflected) the culture of the day, but what separate them from becoming monsters like Fantomas or various outlaws of the American West. They can justify their missions but saying those mail-wagons and rail-cars carried the bourgeois society’s riches but the bottomline is that they disturb the social order of the day. An unfair social order can be revolutionized through reforms and political awareness, not through assassinations and fermentations. I am looking at you, Captain America, Batman and the CIA assassination squads–which eventually served the same purpose.

Then, the worst of all–or the king of this misfit hill–is Dexter. Serial-television character and serial killer Dexter Morgan was the primary inspiration for this blog post. (real-life John Dillinger, who has been glamorized of lately is another inspiration; Dillinger stole from the rich and gave to the whores). In his show, whose opening sequence is a masterpiece, Dexter kills people who the justice system let go on technicalities with what wikipedia calls ‘a strict moral code’. It sounded like something from Michael Douglas’ Star Chamber. Well, no matter how hard we root for Hannibal Lector or those fighting against killer-on-the-loose Fred Krueger, even killing those who deserve is wrong. I feel funny saying that, being a proponent of death penalty, but no citizen should take law into his own hands. [A tangent clip about Michael Dukakis and death penalty here.]

Dexter is worse: he is a serial killer with a mission–to get rid of the bad guys. Who decides who is good and who is bad? In the real life, these mission-oriented killers exist, “ridding the world” of “undesirables” (read, homosexuals, prostitutes, minorities or Catholics). We should not be glorifying them; it is akin to glorifying Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”, who had a modus operandi too, in targeting universities and the airline industry.

I don’t usually agree with Parent Television Council, but here I will have them the last say: “The series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get discovered”. It is about Dexter, but substitute ‘thief’, ‘robber’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘murderer’ instead of ’serial killer’ and you will have accurate description of my sentiments about above fictional and non-fictional people. It is one thing rebelliously admiring their carefree lawless life (you hippies) but it is another idolizing them.

Whose lobotomy am I paying this week?

Probably those of Washington politicos and 24/7 cable news anchors. But debate over healthcare continues:

Government Care is at least efficient, right?

Umm, can’t tell unless we try it. The president’s misguided analogy with post-office said as much: “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems,” not the smartest thing he said, considering that U.S. post lost $4.7 billions last year, another indicator of inefficient government bureaucracy. On the other hand Medicare, medicaid and veteran’s health administration run quite efficiently.

Two reasons are behind this: (1) not as many people use medicare, medicaid or veteran’s health administration as private health care, and patient-doctor ratio is reasonable. (2) they don’t have to keep an eye on profits as private health providers have to. (Public health options don’t need to advertise, therefore they also gain a little unfair advantage when it comes to competition). However, during the enrollment increases in those programs (changes based on population growths, etc.), there were signs of fiscal stress on the system, showing that this combination is precarious at best.

As footnotes, there is efficacy through competition:  tragic-comically, insurance companies arrive on scene before FEMA during Katrina. There are back-and-forth arguments over whether the efficiency of medicare is just a myth: here, here. Also, medicare, medicaid or private insurance never cover 100% of the bill, making this efficiency a bare mirage.

What is the current government healthcare spending like?

Indecipherable. Let’s break down Obama’s healthcare spending. The expansion of Schip (state children’s health insurance program) which subsidizes insurance for 6 million low-income children (twice vetoed by President Bush) cost $5 billion-a-year. It will be funded by increased tobacco taxes ($35 billion for next five years).

Medicare Advantage, insurance for the elderly cost around $100 billion dollars to taxpayers a year. If the government provide the coverage directly, instead of private insurance companies, the taxpayers will save 12%-15%. Where does that $15 billion go? The president said insurance companies just took it as profits. Insurers say they take it as a buffer for government’s inadequate reimbursements, which shifts the costs to the privately insured. The insured blame the uninsured for this loss. Economists, however, blame everyone for allowing excessive treatments.

To put the government spending (and potential spendings) into perspective, the U.S. spends $2 trillion a year for health care.  President Obama’s proposed public option will cost around $1 trillion dollar over a decade to bring the 50 million uninsured into the tent, and $250 billion of such spending will be put on the federal deficit. However, in practice, the figure may not be as high because (1) it includes illegal immigrants, stubborn young adults who don’t think they need insurance and poor people who are eligible for Medicaid, (2) only those without affordable employer-provided insurance and those in small businesses not offering employer-provided insurance will qualify to Obama’s ‘public option’.

Does financial crisis have any bearing on the healthcare reform?

Definitely. On one hand, it makes current healthcare companies less willing to take risky customers and yielding way for a government-run system. A lot of people lost their jobs and employer-paid health-insurance. As many as 14,000 people are losing their health insurance every day because of job cuts, according to left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund. On the other hand, it will further strain the national debt already stretched by the bailouts. A better lesson will be about risk.

In both financial and medical sector, insurance companies insure against risk. By taking on those risky health care coverage, the government (or insurance companies) are forced to take on risk and thus needs to diversify the potential damage. They do so by raising everyone else’s health care coverage. That was how the housing babble began and AIG/Lehman Brothers/Merrill-Lynch all ended by with risky asserts that turned into defaults. Dieu merci.

So health insurance companies are naturally lobbying against Obamacare?

No. They are against a government agency providing ‘healthcare’; that is why there is so much hot air against Britain’s NHS which employs hospitals and doctors. However, in the U.S., the reform will greatly benefit health insurance companies. They will gain tens of millions of new customers because Americans would be required by law to carry health insurance. Pharmaceutical companies would sell more prescription drugs because more people would have coverage for drugs. Hospitals and doctors wouldn’t have to provide as much free care as they do now.

Their profit margins would go down a little, but unlike with the Clinton care, the healthcare lobby is currently for the reform. However, so much political backlash (in town-hall meetings, ha) currently comes from small-businesses with low-income workers, which will now have to provide some insurance. [In Obamacare, small business is defined as an establishment whose annual payroll is over $250,000 annually, so most small businesses will be directly effected].

What is wrong with legalizing euthanasia?

Nothing really, but must be heavily regulated? It depends on how you frame legalizing part: assisted suicide is one way to interpret it, while mercy-killing (a noble concept pioneered in those benighted Crusader days and still used on dying horses) sounds a sunny idea. However, regulating this euthanasia will be a logistical, theological, and political nightmare. Suppose we impose a minimal age before which one cannot seek state-sponsored euthanasia. What will happen to those with incurable diseases under that age?

Tragically termed ‘easy way out’, legalized euthanasia can easily mark the beginning of this slippery slope. However, on the other hand are precipitous laws banning suicide. The assisted suicides of terminal patients are legal in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands; Oregon requires two doctors to confirm that the patient has less than six months to live to conduct euthanasia. A Swiss group Dignitas is currently in the news for ending the life of an ailing (but not dying) British composer in a suicide pact with his dying wife. Everywhere in the world, the debate rages more violently than ever: in France, Je Vous Demande le Droit de Mourir, a 2005 book by Vincent Humbert, who a car crash left “unable to ‘walk, see, speak, smell or taste”, became a bible for people supporting euthanasia; in the Netherlands, a Dutch doctor is underfire for assisting the death of a Catholic nun, who he assumed refused euthanasia for religious reasons. No case is black and white when it comes to euthanasia.

Whose rhinoplasty am I funding this week?

The above title is misleading. I am not an American and have no wish to fund anyone’s rhinoplasty this week, but seeing everyone’s anger and angst compelled me to write about this debate, which is not as black and white as partisan politics made it out to be:

National Heathcare leads to long lines.

True and false. There are stories (anecdotes, fear mongering) about long waits for health-care services. Currently, 25% of Americans wait 6 or more days for an appointment with their primary-care physician, as opposed to 15% of Britons, 13% of Germans, 10% of Australians and just 3% of New Zealanders. Still a sweeping generalization cannot be made about these countries with strong public-health care: 2/3 of Canadians had to wait longer than six days, and they too have a national health care system.

Only 26 percent of Americans and Canadians reported being able see their doctor on the day they called, compared with 60 percent in the Netherlands and 48 percent in Britain according to the Commonwealth Fund. However, specialized care is a different story: 8 percent of Americans have to wait four months or more for specialized procedure, and 62 percent wait less than a month. In Britain, 41 percent of patients have to wait four months or more. All these stats are not reflections of private or public healthcare system, but of the disparity in earnings between physicians and specialists in North America. In the U.S., there is already a shortage of primary-care doctors, which means this Obamacare can put another strain on primary-care.

Massachusetts healthcare system works, so can we apply it to the entire nation?

No. It does work, but lamely. The Bay State’s system is a brainchild of Senator Ted Kennedy and his 20-year campaign for healthcare. It is based on the Swiss model, perhaps the most integrated private-public healthcare co-pay systems in the entire world. The government uses regulations and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered: everyone is mandated to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies. However, the system is very costly.

Current prevailing health insurance in America (employer-assisted coverage) is already like Massachusetts model (actually, it was vice versa). Middle-income families are not being covered, and people who lost their jobs during the recession lost their insurance too.

Will socialism ever work?

Not in America. Healthcare-socialism connections (or connection) stop at the fact that the government will take over the entire healthcare system. Obamacare will not lead to this, but in Scandinavian countries, at least, the public healthcare systems make up the major portion of the healthcare coverage. There, even the hospitals are publicly owned institutions. It is one of the milestones of a social welfare state to provide a government-run healthcare system to its citizens.  The system worked in those Scandinavian countries because of a selection entry-and-exit model. America with its freedom to move within states and bad immigration problem will never embrace socialism.

Yes, in Scandinavia, it work thanks to the citizens who pay 50%-60% income and property taxes–another aspect of a welfare state. The state makes everything in life (from milk to education services) subsidized and therefore makes it impossible to immigrate from or emigrate to the said country. Emigration laws were tight and a person has so much to lose by leaving his society. That was the premise of socialism (and some futuristically-imagined self-sustaining societies); people hail this as a novel, revolutionary and even reactionary idea. No, it isn’t. Socialism is the bastard son of feudalism, where manor lord oversees every aspects of his peasants’ lives (birth, education, employment, marriage, health, infirmity, death); it is hard to leave because he owns you. In modern socialism, instead of literal droit de seigneur, the state figuratively rapes you.

Will this lead to dead panels?

No, but maybe in the future. Somewhere, William F. Buckley Jnr. is smiling. In 2007 novel on babyboomers, Boomsday, Bill’s son, Christopher wrote about a bunch of politicos spinning euthanasia as ‘voluntary transitioning’, and providing incentives (tax breaks for golf carts and segways) so that these 65 and older take government’s ‘voluntary transition’ pill. No. Obamacare won’t lead to this, but if Obamacare were to be successful, the dependence of the system can eventually lead to so-called dead-panels.

In England, a treatment is only approved if it adds the value of one additional year (which was valued around 30,000 pounds). If you are a penniless 80-year old depending on government-subsidized pills, what will happen if the government (or a new doctor) deems it should not be giving out pills to you anymore. It is not an unreasonable fear, but considering that if you are a penniless 80-year old under the current system, you will die anyway so why not trust the government for once. The worst it can lead to is … bad teeth.

Or certain bad body parts for that matter. The classic stereotype, the British bad teeth, comes from the expensive and inaccessible dental care under their NHS system. This combined with indifference (of 60 million Britons, only 14 million are entitled to dental care, and only 7% of the eligible people actually apply for the care), lead to the horrific dental appearance. The same goes for every body part (eyes, ears, etc.) not entirely covered by the public health care.

Everyone can use and abuse health-care statistics.

True, for all kinds of statistics. Don’t trust me; go on and read here. Read here about NHS in Britain.

(To be continued…)

Farewell Summer 2009.

From a totalitarian continent to a totalitarian summer camp, my summers seem to be getting worse.

Last summer, I embarked on an adventure. This summer, I said to myself, I should devote more time to my college life before I embark on another adventurous tour through Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia starting late August. I lost an internship opportunity with the House of Commons because of a scheduling conflict. Among the job offers for the summer was a mentorship position with a Summer College program for highschool kids. Nothing prestigious, nothing lucrative, but it fit the grand scheme of things and I took the job.

Wow. What an adventure it had been. I was confronted with problems within and without the program, the problems so overblown that they reached such a feral state that I didn’t witness last summer in the depths of Africa. Silver lining? I am now perfectly ready to be the headmaster of a sufficiently small school.

Firstly, there was this Facebook thing; my superiors ask all mentors not to add highschoolers. Not that we were actively adding them, but we were just responding to their friend requests. (Oh, I think I need to preface it by saying I am 20, and most mentors are only two years older than our wards, most of whom are under eighteen.) I don’t care much about facebook but when we ignore them on facebook, we created this entirely necessary ‘us vs. them’ barrier. Mentors didn’t know what is happening inside our wards’ community. They might as well be organizing beer pong parties or massive Satanic rituals via facebook, but we didn’t know. We were trapped behind this information Iron Curtain of our own doing.

Not to mention, it sent a wrong signal. It is as if their friendships were not worthy. It is better to be feared than loved, said Machiavelli. In reality, it is better to be trusted than either feared or loved, and this facebook episode showed that my superiors at the college didn’t trust us, the mentors, nor the students nor our relations with one another. Okay, facebook, I can deal with, but after a few weeks, the entire dynamic of the Summer College Program changed.

As someone who went to prep/boarding school, and tackled his smoking habit by taping the pack and the lighter to the bottom of the drawers (take note: teachers were not thorough searchers), I was fully prepared to tackle any problem they (students + program) threw at me, but the program sadly wasn’t. There were allegations about students stealing, drinking, smoking pot, etc.–allegations that were entwined with rumors–a situation not unfamiliar to the highschool cafeteria atmosphere. The program reacted strongly; we (shamefully I have to add my own name to this list of perpetrators) ignored the fact that the burden of proof was upon us and that we have to presume them innocence until proven guilty.

Edmund Burke, who did have a way with his words that I don’t, said ‘it is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph’. I finally filed a strongly worded email protesting this ignorance of burden of proof and innocence until proven guilty process. I was also flared up by the curfew check policy; the university treated these highschoolers as college students but the program didn’t. [College students are exempt from curfew checks by the 1961 Supreme Court Ruling, Dixon v. Alabama.] Students’ key cards which they used to access the building were catalogued so that the program could track who was re-entering the dorm and when. For mentors, they used card access and dining halls access to guestimate how many hours we spend at the camp. For a fierce critic of Bush administration’s wiretapping policies, it was just a slap squarely on my face.

Mentors are here to protect the students from themselves or one another, but this summer, I find myself protecting–or trying and failing to protect–them from the programs (authorities) or from the other mentors. I received significant support behind the administrators’ back for my righteous standings (I couldn’t believe I am typing this to describe myself but such was the reality here) but the silent majority didn’t utter a word when the vocal minority (of administrators and other mentors) decided that curfew breakers must help the program with chores (rearranging tables, etc.). You might never guess it from this blog but taciturnity was my policy so I said just four words, “It is not legal.” The program decided to go ahead anyway, but they acknowledged my fiery two cent by calling these chores ‘community service’. Then it is legal? After all, didn’t Pol Pot renamed his killing fields ‘reeducation camps’?

I began with an African anecdote, so I will end here with another, so that the story can come full circle. I once quarreled with my girlfriend in Africa. She said in her not-so-perfect English, “You hurt my feelings”. I replied, “You know what, I have feelings, too.” How often do we forget that? How often do we forget that the other party (in this case, 300+ students in Summer College) have feelings too. Why are we treating them as sub-standard human beings (paraphrasing a mentor who called them that)? They have feelings too. We just have to stand back and listen to them. How easy was that? Why make it so hard?

 

 

 

Confessions of a Lover

I took this post down for a reason earlier this summer. In retrospect, it was probably untruthful for me to do so, so here it is.

Relationships are composed of nothing but fleeting visions and brief encounters—when we started reaching for them, they ran away … and then, we fall. For me, the fall began on one fine November afternoon last year.

I first met Kirsten inside a locker room in the Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Yes, it is a chance encounter in front of an electric locker that started all. Likewise, our acquaintance itself is one of the most chancy and singular episodes in my life. I was lining for a locker directly behind her, and she was having trouble with the malfunction locker. I tried to help her, but we ended up queuing for another locker. We started talking and I insisted upon sitting beside her in the ride (which happened to be The Mummy so it is not exactly romantic stuff).

This is the point where those writers usually say smugly, the rest is history. No, it isn’t. Both of us independently decided to go on a studio tour. However, seeing a long line wait, we gave up and settled on a cup of mocha in a nearby café. We talked for nearly two hours—until the last studio tour beckoned us.

That is over the Thanksgiving. By Christmas, we were talking on phone and via chats. Before Easter, she has extended me an invitation to spend a week at her house in Denmark, and we have arranged (actually she arranged, and I concurred lackadaisically) a humanitarian volunteering in Africa. My friends said it is damn chancy to spend a summer with someone whom you have met for only a couple of hours, but it was a chance I was willing to take.

On my arrival in Copenhagen, I was pleasantly astounded. I knew that she belonged to landed gentry and that her father was a junior minister in the Danish Cabinet (who also was instrumental in arranging my travelling plans), I didn’t know that they also owned a billion-dollar fishing boat empire. At the airport, there were just her and her chauffeur waiting for my arrival, but back at her home (which is an understated term for a four-star hotel), the staff outnumbered the family.

Today, we widely frown upon the elitism practiced by the aristocracy, but Kirsten is a prime example that the aristocratic education has their own pluses. She is fluent in five languages, is knowledgeable in Latin and Ancient Greek, and is currently learning her eighth (Arabic). She rides, fences, dances and hunts better than I do. Her musical talents in viola and piano are only surpassed by her athletic acumen in hockey, polo, swimming, tennis and billiards. Never before in my life had I seen a person, let alone a woman, as well-rounded as she is.

Her education and upbringing do define her world, but they don’t—and can’t—limit it. Kirsten is a person whose CV won’t do her justice; you just have to meet her, and you will see how inspirational she can be. Self-conscious and introverted, a good orator she was not, but she knew how to express her views and justify them. Her world is built around a single word, “others”. Despite belonging in the topmost echelons of her social hierarchy, her compassion and altruism for those less fortunate than her are astounding. At the age of twenty-one (the age at which most of us are still hectically updating our facebook profiles and playing on our Wiis), she had already been in Serbia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Timor and now with me in Central African Republic.

I may not be exaggerating if I say that this last summer totally changed my views. In the middle of Africa, between fights and cleansing in Chad, Sudan and CAR itself, I found my own solace in her comforting eyes. Both of us gazed unwittingly into the very whites of the Evil’s eyes when we volunteered for the African mission; I admit I volunteered for my own reasons to embellish my resume, and to be together with her. She, however, had a nobler reason—to offer.

Offer and dedicate, she did. In the process, we had our private moments. During our stay together, I came to understand the human nature that lay hidden under her otherwise cool and logical veneer. She slowly recounted her trials and tribulations one by one—her private personal tragedies, which are no less or lenient than the tragedies of the African continent and her people. In those moments, her discernable frailty and fragility was so markedly different from the aplomb and self-assurance which radiates from her during day. Like the African Sun under which we toiled, she is a symbol of light and warm for many, but at night, her life is as empty and cold as an uninhabited cave.

My friends told me that I don’t care much about my girlfriends. Sometimes, it is true, but Kirsten, she is a different story. I didn’t spend entire days (let alone the entire summer) with my other girlfriends, nor meet their parents and families. During our stay in Africa (in which we alternately pretended to be a honeymooning or affianced couple), I came to know her in a different light—she is more personal, more humane, more compassionate, more … vivid.

When I am writing this, one of the best relationships I had ever—and will ever—had has come to an end. It didn’t ended with a loud and acrimonious quarrel that plagued my many another relationship; disquietly, it ended with a long and heartbreaking silence that seemed like an eternity. The hardest thing with the relationships is not how to start one, but how to live on after conclusion of one. In the term of angling, it is all about catch and release. You must know when to release your other half so that he or she can fly freer, see further and soar higher.

So it ended, with each of us deciding to let the other to freely fly. It was a classic parting of the ways moment—both of us reflected upon our futures, our careers and our respective chosen paths. With smiles, we admitted the relationship is not ideal or feasible under such conditions; gracefully, we embraced each other as friends. It is a moment I anticipated ever since the beginning of the summer. It is also the moment I have been dreading.

As the Bard would say, All’s well that ends well. However, memories live on—memories that l will cherish forever. Weeks before, a friend compared my tale with the one in Out of Africa, where a Danish noblewoman apparently has a doomed love affair. I replied, it is not the outcome, but the experience and memories that mark, define and immortalize a love. I am just glad that I live up to my words.

The Purple Menace: Barney the Communist Dinosaur

Communism will never destroy America. But as Generation Barney matures, we look back at the dangerous legacy of communism’s top entertainer.

Throughout the 20^th century, popular entertainment was never just that. Thanks to the Legion of Decency, a kiss was never just a kiss, and a knowing smile had deeper meanings in the early part of the century. Later, better messengers proved to be the forms entertainment directed towards the youth.  Superman and Captain America battled every single public enemy and moral outrage of the age; the most enduring ads (Disney’s I like Ike, Duck and Cover) were conveyed through animation.

However, no other children’s television program in America was as iniquitous and reprehensible as Barney and Friends. The PBS Kids’ TV show about an anthropomorphic purple dinosaur doubles as a pinko commie propaganda machine promoting communism and socialism and exposing young and malleable minds of millions of American children to these dangerous and subversive ideas.

Before we started pointing fingers, let’s see what Barney brings to ‘preschool’ children, its targeted audience group. There were accusations that Barney promotes denial and ill-prepare the children for the existence of unpleasant realities. Many scholars and psychologists detest and denounce the show for it. However, children don’t go to these TV shows to learn about real life, so we need to bring the conversation about Barney to what it is within instead of what it is without.

Firstly, there is unhealthy eating. Barney consumes only peanut butter jelly sandwiches, while his girlfriend Baby Bop eats macaroni and cheese and pizza—the staples of American diet. The promoting a diet of peanut butter jelly sandwiches to preschoolers is unacceptable but mac and cheese and pizza—that is just downright wrong. The young minds are easily impressionable; in the age when we should be promoting healthy eating and well-balanced diet, the show was a slap in the face to many a nutrition expert.

Then came his theme song: “Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination”. The show was first aired in 1992, right after the fall of the Soviet Union. Choosing an extinct animal and reviving it may not directly suggest communist revival but Barney was originally meant to be red. Yes, red—like communism whose fossilized remains it came to symbolize. The production team claimed that red as a primary color would attract young childern’s attention, and only after a child psychologist warned that a bright red dinosaur could be perceived as threatening, color purple was chosen.

Thus like the Soviet Union, a purple Tyrannosaurus Rex remained an unnatural entity. Two additional lines from his theme song added to his unnatural, dishonest nature: “Barney shows us lots of things/Like how to play pretend” and “Barney can be your friend too/If you just make-believe him!” I don’t know what the producers (or the children who ‘imagined’ Barney to life) were smoking/drinking.

Children who grew up with Barney will remember a slew of his most famous songs. Apart from ‘I Love You/You Love Me’ with its hippy, free love message (another fossil from the 70s), all of his other songs and episodes promote communism towards young and defenseless children.  [‘I Love You/You Love Me’ song was not so innocuous either. Entirely devoid of musical value, it was used by the U.S. military in interrogating terrorists. It is probably a thousand times worse than waterboarding.]

Barney asks children to clean up after themselves. Although it might probably have been a great idea for parents to implant in their children, his actual lyrics are terrifying. “Clean up, clean up everybody everywhere. Clean up clean up everybody do your share,” sounds like a quote copied from Big Brother. It had been the propelling idea behind Stalin’s collective farms and Pol Pot’s killing fields. A world where everyone do the same ‘share’ instead of maximizing utilities and profits by outsourcing is not an idea espoused by anyone since Adam Smith. It is downright socialist.

The next message cements Barney’s stance as the premier agent provocateur of communism. “Sharing is caring” had been his message. In addition to becoming the tag-line of online piracy, the quote shed light into the minds of Barney’s creators (and its masters in Kremlin). Sharing is a communist idea; it leads to a society whose very norms inhibits the personal growth and motivation. How can a person be motivated if his society promotes sharing instead of gaining the benefits through his own exceptional work? It was the flaw with Peter Singer’s model world. In addition to that cheery, idealist society where everyone receives the same wage and the benefits, sharing leads to a brave new world where state-sanctioned theft was promoted. That is Barney’s world. That is Marx’s world.

The best example of this line of thought was epitomized in the song “Peanut Butter and Jelly”. “First you take the peanuts/And you crunch ‘em,/Then you take the grapes/And you squish ‘em,/Then you take the bread/And you spread it” were the lines directly taken from the song. Peanuts symbolize farmers and landowners. Grapes symbolize not only bourgeois class but also religion. (Grapes have been an enduring symbol of faith, fertility). Barney is promoting a society where we oppress  farmers, landowners, bourgeois and even religion. To do what? To take the bread and spread it. Ambiguously pronoun there brings back uneasy memories of breadlines behind the Iron Curtain.

“Communism will never destroy America,” proclaimed many politicians. But now as Generation Barney matures as and many who were directly related to Barney show becomes the icons of showbiz, we see America’s sudden turn to the left—nationalizing banks, healthcare, increasing taxation, etc. Those communist, socialist and nihilist ideas ingrained when these kids were little were definitely showing. Are we headed towards a Kleptocractic world where the rule of the jungle (viz., Sherwood Forest) is not only allowed but also sanctioned? It is time to expose this communist conspiracy. It is time to condemn Barney.

OMG, Omegle…!

In the age of ‘Net, moral degradation can come from anonymity and privacy. I report from that last frontier.

Last week, a friend sent me a link about www.omegle.com, an online chat website which pick ‘another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each’ anonymously, according to their website.

Omegle has an entry in wikipedia (so it might be a pretty big deal, right?), and was mentioned in a New York Times article. So, against common sense and my better judgment, I started using it. It went lackadaisically uneventful for me after a few minutes, but my friends—they are less fortunate. They were assailed by raunchy messages in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Dutch—which says something about the general social ineptitude of people in those countries, and also about what people do when anonymity is handed out to them.

Out there, it is like the chatrooms in the fledgling day of the Internet minus collective monitoring. Now, it is one-on-one and proposals for cyber-sex apparently galore in multitude of languages. It is like Babel mixed together with Sodom and Gomorrah.

We fear a day when governments will track our IP addresses and take away the last semblance of online privacy and anonymity. With websites like facebook and twitter, we are moving towards less private world in which everyone can see and judge us for what we are. Through Omegle, anonymous blog posts and comments (and perhaps even Second Life) we veer towards another extreme—an underground anarchistic world where cowards, perverts and hackers hide behind their monitors.

As we navigate the happy medium between these two extremes, we must also be aware that our online personae live in an ever-evolving world. In an age when etiquette, decency and accountability are fast evaporating, privacy and anonymity can be the last things we can hold on to. Yet, this too shall pass. In the future, when we—the facebook generation—become the employers of the next generation, how could we look down upon our employees who had put up incriminating pictures/stories on their websites?

Maybe we could, but let us not be hypocritical but be be public, frank and accountable.

A Few Thoughts on Elitism

That famous socialite Leonore Annenberg had to resign her post as the White House protocol chief after curtsying to visiting Prince Charles. Michelle Obama was praised for breaching the protocol and touching Her Majesty, while her husband was demonized for bowing to the Saudi King. For a country that gained its independence by deposing a king (and crowning many more since: king of rock, of late night shows, poultry production; czar of drugs, intelligence, etc.), small gestures like these spoke shrilly.

I am not titled (no thanks to a morganatic marriage made a century before I was even conceived) and I am entitled…. and that’s probably how most of my friends view me–a naive, harmless simpleton who hid his second-rate intellect and closed mind behind a first-rate fortune. The latter, combined with my parents’ occupation, was enough to send me through an English boarding school and a prestigious American university, two bastions of elitism.

I don’t own a Ferrari, a Bond Street wardrobe or a villa overlooking Lake Como (all, perhaps, telltale signs of extravagance, rather than elitism) but I know people who do. I dined with royalty, presidents, dictators and ambassadors. My family and I were overnight guests of American actors, Greek shipping magnates, and British lords. The Conde Nest executives came to grouse hunts with us, I rode with the professors from Oxbridge, and every year, without fail, comes that coveted invitation to Royal Enclosure at Ascot. It is good to be an elite.

Why am I expounding on this? U.S. Presidential Election. On this side of Atlantic, the political system doesn’t look favorably upon the E-word. During this election season, the word ‘elite’ and ‘elitism’ was so excoriated that it paved the way for the rise of a ditzy, gun-toting, grammar-disrespecting governor. Inside my university–an institution that frequently produced presidents, senators, supreme court justices and other ‘elites’–the word was frowned upon, citing, “All Men are created Equal”. The framers of those lines ironically belonged to those ‘elites’.

‘Elitism’ is the closest the United States has ever come to aristocracy. Those East Coast WASPs who liberalism entails evading taxes and donating to charity organizations. They are elites, but elites also include those like the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the DuPonts, the Vanderbilts, a veritable who’s who of American greats, who asked what they can give to their country. Yet, it is a closed community too. An Ascot invitation had to be endorsed by someone who had been going there for years. A nouveau riche, unlike most French words, is only used with disdain.

But just became someone shops at Whole Foods, or gets a Prius means they are elitist. Sometimes, we have to be proud of our elitism. Sometimes, we have to be grateful that our lineage prevented Europe from the barbarians, fought for morality and decency in the heart of darkness, and produced great philanthropists. Sometimes, we have to be entitled that we went to Eton, Harrow, Oxbridge, the Ivies. Sometimes, we have to acknowledge that we eat healthier, live cozier. We have to be thankful for this (hence adding an ‘P’ to WASP and sending our kids to strict Catholic schools) but we can be thankful for giving back to.

By running for elected office or through charities, there are many ways that we can affect change. We have wherewithal and publicity to do it. Why waste it on some holiday home in Aspen or a $2,000 Max Mara? Be the change.

Meanwhile, the line “All Men are created Equal” remains a cheap punchline to a motivational poster. Perhaps because men are not created by some ethereal being, as much as our elitist prep-school education would like us to believe.

Coal Day In Hell

Coal is not good. Coal has no future. Yet, its Frankensteinian corpse is being revitalized by lawmakers and  the future of the coal industry is not as grim as it should be. So we dig for coal, and in process, we dig our own graves.

Coal is not good. Its difficulty to mine, transport and noxious burning severely limited coal’s widespread use when it was first discovered in pre-Industrial times. However, since then, our economies has dramatically shifted and now coal is the power behind many a developing nation. However, coal costs only 4 cents per kW-hour, which is the cheapest among all the alternative fuels if you exclude hydroelectricity (which is not really abundant). In comparison, natural gas and nuclear power costs 5 cents/kWh and wind costs 7 cents/kWh while solar energy costs whooping 50 cents/kWh. Coal’s relative cheapness becomes more apparent if one takes its energy density into account-energy from coal is roughly one-tenth the cost per unit mass as oil or natural gas (see Robert Zubrin’s Energy Victory, 2007).

In 2004, the New York Times ran an article, “Fuel of the Future? Some Say Coal,” which discusses the possibilities of lucrative investments in newly resurgent coal sector. Although policy uncertainty poses big risks for such investments in the coal industry, the investors are banking on the fact that the U.S. government would be unwilling/unable to take punitive actions against the coal industry.

Currently, America is driven by its own energy thirst. Although America’s own dependence on coal is not as serious as those of growing, developing Asian countries, the U.S’s own national security is at the stake with coal. As the possessor of the world’s largest hard coal reserves, the United States would not–and could not–let the industry die. After the September 11 attacks, the coal industry gained support from the American government which aimed to reduce its dependence on the Middle East Oil. 

Bureaucracy kept coal alive. Current Energy Secretary Stephan Chu once said, ‘Coal is My Worst Nightmare’. On the campaign trail, Obama was under criticism for saying that new coal plants will face bankruptcy unless they account for the future. However, now Washington, both of them have changed their tunes and seem to have espoused Bush’s Clean Coal Doctrine.  

Coal being such an important political, economical and social issue, it is not very surprising that there are attempts to make coal producing and coal consuming more palatable. At the forefront is the ambitiously titled “Clean Coal” initiative, supported by President George W. Bush and quickly endorsed by both Senators McCain and Obama during the election season last year. However, as the Sierra Club’s director Dan Becker pointed out, ‘clean coal’ is an ‘oxymoron’. The industry use the term to loosely refer to the number of technologies being developed to reduce the negative externalities of the coal usage. Burning coal produces chemical impurities (carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, etc) which intoxicate the environment by poisoning water supplies, polluting air and creating acid rains. Chemically washing minerals from the coal, capturing noxious emissions and storing them, and dewatering coal are a few methods proposed for clean coal but they are merely cures but not preventions.

The most vocal clean coal technology (and lobby, one is tempted to add) concerns removing of ash, soot and other particulates from the exhaust of the coal-fired generators, and desulfurization. However, after carbon capture and storage or IGCC installations, the cost of coal power will be raised by 40-90 percent (Sierra Club statistics). If this is the case, natural gas and nuclear power seem better alternatives. Even if American aid goes to clean emerging Asian coal plants, retrofitting old plants is a costly, efficiency-reducing and long-term process. In addition, ‘clean coal’ initiative blithely ignores other devastations caused by coal mining and transportation not to mention toxic ground water caused by the chemicals used in mining and bitumen.

In addition, coal advocates predicts the future as if the coal reserves of the world are limitless. This is not the case–if coal is produced at the current rates, the U.S. reserves would last only sixty four years. 

There are no real solutions to the coal dilemma–increasing the efficiency of the coal power plants fall under the umbrella of the clean coal, but a better alternative is to create internal market for carbon sequestration through cap-and-trade system. Carbon tax is an effective blanket tax on all emissions, but the political feasibility of such a tax is near zero. However, coal usage could be gradually phased out in the United States; first old coal power plants where there is extremely high cost for limited benefit can be effortlessly shut down. New coal plants should go through a thorough federal scrutiny and should be forced to use cleaner and more efficient method so the production will be economically unprofitable. However, in the other countries (especially China), such a control would be impossible. 

So the next time someone say we must find the new alternative energies to break oil addition, please be aware that we must break coal addiction too. Coal is not a substitute for oil, and coal addiction is not the substitute for oil addiction.

The Greatest Story Ever Sold

On Easter Sunday, one of the most mystifying of all the Christian holidays, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ–a semi-legendary man who may or may not have lived in Judaea two thousand years ago. To what extent is the story of Jesus original and true? To what extent is the story embellished or contrived? 

A lot of pre-Christian customs were adopted by Christianity, because eradicating them will only alienate the people whom they are trying to sermonize. It is not coincidence that one of the earliest writers of Christianity, St. Jerome was a pagan scholar and theologian. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible–amalgamation of truth and fiction, pagan and Christian is to this day the authoritative Bible of the Catholic Church. Jerome and other founders of the Church outlined one important part of Christian belief: that there is some good in everything, and that in general things can be redeemed instead of being destroyed.

So old customs remained. Easter Bunny–the pagan symbol of vernal fertility–being just one example. The Easter Bunny joins other esteemed figures like God himself in the pantheon of pagan symbols.

Six thousand years of Bibical narrative looks down upon the visitors in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. The most striking figure is of God himself, lushly illustrated by Michelangelo, as the wizened, muscular old man. The Bible said nothing about God being an anthropomorphic being. Judaism and Islam both rejected this representation of God. Christianity drew its inspiration of God from the ancient Hebrew god which appears to have originally been a local, tribal storm god and some polytheistic tradition. Muscular, bearded Zeus, the pinnacle of Greek god hierarchy served as a model for Christian God. Like Zeus, Christian God attempted to remove humanity from the face of the Earth by sending a flood.

And Christianity’s most famous symbol, the Cross? It is not original either. One of the most enduring human symbol, the cross quadrants the world into four elements and four cardinal points. The union of vertical divinity and horizontal secularism is frequently the symbol of Egyptian deities (compare Ankh) and Norse gods alike. The cross represented (and represents) the tree of life, and its usual portrayal inside the sun in Prehistoric Europe suggests its comparability to the yin-yang symbol of the Orient.

The arrival of baby Jesus (as the King of the Jews) was announced to the King of Judea Herod the Great by the Magi. To prevent his throne being challenged, Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, creating an event now known as the Massacre of the Innocents. This episode, not recorded by any contemporary historian, is pure hagiography, which gave Christianity its first martyrs. The story drew its inspiration from the another earlier Biblical tale in the Exodus about the killing of the Hebrew firstborn by Pharaoh prior to the birth of Moses. This extremely suspicious description linking Christianity and Islam–the Moses stroy was recounted in the Quran too–was a trite literary trope. A similar story on Mordred’s birth appeared in the Arthurian legends but the source is thought to be the 7th century BC biography of Sargon of Akkad, who lived in the 24th century BC.

As predicted or annunciated (the birth of a religious leader of some importance, be it Buddha or Mohammed is usually uncannily foretold), Jesus did arrived through virgin birth. An oxymoron which laid the foundation for the Catholicism is by no means unique to Christianity. It is a long standing tradition burrowed from earlier polytheistic traditions where badly-behaving gods go about in assumed forms to impregnate women. Zeus was notorious for it; Hinduism is full of it and the practice is even observed with the Aztecs. The Zoroastrians furthered copied the concept from the Christians to elevate their prophet who lived in the 6th Century BC to divinity.

The New Testament doesn’t not give a date for the birth of Jesus. The first authority to date Jesus’s birth was the 3rd century scholar Sextus Julius Africanus, who conviniently placed the Annunciation on the spring equinox (March 25 on the Roman Calendar) and the birth on Sol Invintus, the feast-day of the unconquered Sun and of several gods associated with Winter Solstice in many pagan traditions. [Sol Invintus is a Syrian god later adopted as the chief god of the Roman Empire under Emperor Aurelian.]

If there was one single person primarily responsible for the fundamental feast days of Christianity, it was Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, who in 321AD introduced Christmas as an immovable feast on 25 December. He introduced movable feasts (Easter) and also designated Sunday as a holy day in a new 7-day week. Sunday, the typical day for the sun worship, was chosen for obscure reasons but the Bible itself vacillated between Friday, Saturday and Sunday in its descriptions of the Holy Day. (Some contend that Sunday was chosen because it was on a Sunday that the Resurrection occurred; the crucifixion indeed occurred on a Friday and the Resurrection indeed is recorded on the third day, but it being a Sunday depends on how you count).

Christianity drew inspiration from other pagan religions and sometimes try to show its superiority over the earlier polytheistic beliefs by uniting their selling points. Christian notions of eating and drinking the “flesh” and “blood” of Jesus were influenced by the cult of Dionysus–a mystery religious cult very important in Asia Minor and Greece. Dionysus, the God of Wine and Bacchanalia, is also thought to be the inspiration behind Jesus’ Marriage at Cana, which was only once reported in the Gospels despite its apparent importance. At the festival of Dionysus, three water pots are placed in a sealed room and the following day be found to miraculously be filled with wine. Dionysus’ feast day is on January 6th, and the Marriage at Cana took place on the same day.

Ever story needs a villain and Judas provided color to Jesus’s hagiography. Judas is the 13th person to sit at the Last Supper–bringing misfortune to the number. Twelve-Thirteen Dilemma Effected many an early religion and still have its discernible impact today. Loki in the Norse mythology is also the 13th god–and in order to be 12th, he engineered the murder of Baldr, and was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. Twelve, the dozen, is universally regarded as a perfect number–there were twelve Olympians for instance. By outcasting Judas, the Christianity incorporates the magic of the numbers into its religious diktats.

The Greatest Story Ever Told ends with a cinematic climax–the Resurrection of Jesus. Human beings’ fascination with death and afterlife ensured that this too is neither original nor revolutionary. The resurrection is expected on the humanity–like one enormous zombie uprising–on the Judgement Day, by both Judaism and Christianity. However, the idea of gods leaving their bodies behind or resurrecting comes down from ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis (who receives this divinity through tyet–a comparable symbol to crucifixion cross). Isis also resurrected her husband Osiris (who has been killed in an episode mirroring Cane and Abel) who like Jesus died again soon afterwards. As late as 6th century AD, the believers equally venerated Osiris and Jesus in Egypt.

Jesus’ face itself is based on one of history’s most depraved. Since the Middle Ages, art was considered as religious expression, and the Borgia family was notorious for painting themselves into the Biblical milieux. Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI became a Cardinal at 17, a commander in the Papal Army, a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and many other artists. Many of his contemporaries have left varying descriptions on Cesare’s appearance, but the celebrated portrait by Altobello Melone which depicts pondering and placid man belies Cesare’s bloodthirsty and depraved nature inside. However, when Altobello Melone painted his Christ figure in 1520, he drew inspiration from his earlier Cesare Borgia portrait, inadvertently blurring the distinctions between the visages and the ethnicities of one of history’s one holiest figures and one of its most depraved.

Jesus is succeeded by Peter, and other shepherds of the Church. No matter whether Jesus himself existed or not, his successors embellished his story (and history) to an extent that if Jesus were to return today, he will be flabbergasted–for instance, pagan or not, Christmas is now belongs to another latecomer with dubious background, Santa Claus. The fact is that we have been sheep for more than two millennia. Like sheep, we are being herded and chased into following someone, going somewhere, and giving something. May be it is time to rebel against that dogma most famously outlined in Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd.” I alone should be my own shepherd.

Little Things That Changed History

From Roman Chariots to Modern Railroad

The distance between the rails on a railroad (also called a gauge) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. This awkward distance comes from the length wide enough to accommodate the back-end of two horses. Yes, the first military vehicle to be mass-produced was the Imperial Roman Chariot, and they were specifically made to be just wide enough to accommodate two horses’ asses. When Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe for their legions, they built in ruts into the road. Rome may be long gone, but the rut remained and every man and every wagon maker since has been using the Roman rut distance for their wheels and axles. From wagon, the practice was transferred into trams and then into the modern railroads. Such was the power of tradition and human reluctance to change/adapt.

1st Century AD: Lead pipes fell the Roman Empire

A lot of causes has been cited at the source of the decline and the fall of the Roman Empire–decadence, incompetency of the latter empires, and internal strife. However, it seems that lead, the noxious metal the Romans used in water pipes and bath linings, was behind the fall of one of history’s greatest empires. Musonius, a Roman writing in the first century A.D., observed that masters were weaker, less healthy and less able to endure labor than the servant class. What Musonius didn’t guess was that the mysterious maladies were coming from the lead in food, water and wine. To boil crushed grapes, vintners insisted on using lead pots or lead-lined copper kettles for the best quality. Lead’s sweetness complemented food as well–the metal was used in one-fifth of the 450 recipes in a Roman Cookbook, complied by the gourmet Apicius. It was also used in the cosmetics. However, its toxicity and abilities to cause mental instability and impotency overlooked, lead would go on to play a major role well into the middle ages–its crowning achievement being the moveable type.

1347: Bubonic Plague kills Latin

There were many epidemics that plagued the Middle Ages, but not many epidemics were as devastating as the Black Death that occurred in the 14th century. Carried by the Mongols, who had been invading Eastern Europe for the past century, the first outbreak was recorded among the Tatar army ranks besieging the Genoese city of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347. Over the next three years, the Bubonic Plague will sweep nearly every corner of Europe, killing a third of the population. The plague also set in motion one of the greatest linguistic transformation in history. Among the people who suffered the worst were the clergyman, who lived in close quarters in monasteries and attended their dying parishioners. Half of the Latin-speaking clergy died. Semi-literate laymen replaced these clergy, which hastened the fading of Latin and the rise of vernacular English, French, Spanish as languages of learning. Germany received the worst of the plague and it stunted the development of the German language. In addition, after the plague, the dwindling population demanded higher wages, consolidated wealth and broke free from the old feudal system. The new middle class and its vernacular language slwoly gained economic and social importance.

1415: Rain wins the Battle of Agincourt

Much has been written about the Battle of Agincourt–the stunning English victory over a larger French army in the Hundred Year’s War–starting with Shakespeare’s Henry V. Centuries of politicians and military strategists extolled this as a victory of both leadership and technology (longbow). However, it was another factor that played a bigger role in that fateful October day, 1415. Indeed, the odds were against the English – the troops were exhausted, hungry, and dysentery-ridden. Also the night before battle, heavy downpour left the English soaking wet. However, the rain was a blessing in disguise. It turned the battlefield into a quagmire. Having no cavalry of his own, Henry V was unperturbed, but the French cavalry, weighed down with heavy armour, were bogged down. The horses lost their footing in the mud and fell or ran into each other. They became an easy prey to Henry’s longbows, and within a few hours, a victory was secured. Above, central panel of ”The Battle of Agincourt” the triptych by Donato Giancola (2007).

1519: The Plague that Gave Us Bread and Butter

In 1519, Polish forces were besieged in the fortified town of Allenstein, a Polish town on the Prussian border. During the siege, the town was struck by a plague–a plague that comes from a contamination in bread supply. Sanitary conditions in the town were very bad, and the coarse black loaves were usually dropped in the dirty streets. However, luckily for the town, the noted scientist Nicolaus Copernicus [above] was in the vicinity. A man named Gerhard Glickselig suggested to Copernicus that the bread loaves be colored with a thin layer of light-colored spread, which would make it obvious if the bread was dropped or if debris fell on it. Copernicus ordered it be done, and the plague soon ended. For the first time in history, bread and butter were combined and the custom slowly spread in Europe during the following century.

1520: Jesus got his image from Cessre Borgia

Since the Middle Ages, art was considered as religious expression, and the Borgia family was notorious for painting themselves into the Biblical milieux. Some pictures of Jesus Christ produced in their time were based on Cesare Borgia, and that this in turn has influenced images of Jesus produced since that time. Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI became a Cardinal at 17, a commander in the Papal Army, a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and many other artists. Many of his contemporaries have left varying descriptions on Cesare’s appearance, but the celebrated portrait by Altobello Melone which depicts pondering and placid man belies Cesare’s bloodthirsty and depraved nature inside. However, when Altobello Melone painted his Christ figure in 1520, he drew inspiration from his earlier Cesare Borgia portrait, inadvertently blurring the distinctions between the visages and the ethnicities of one of history’s one holiest figures and one of its most depraved. [Above, Christ is the leftmost figure in Melone's Walk to Emmaus. Cesare is painted by Melone on right.]

1648: Dwaves to Democracy

One of history’s most dramatic entourages was maintained by Ferdinando I and Francesco II, brothers and dukes of Mantua in the early 17th century. Their penchant was for dwarves. In the process of collecting them, they managed to bankrupt the Mantuan state. Their family, the Gonzagas, had amassed what was at the time probably the greatest private art collection ever assembled. To pay for their dwaves, they had to sell the art. The buyer was Charles I of England. He wasn’t on very good terms with Parliament, and the purchase of the Gonzaga art collection helped put him over the line into the red, triggering the English Civil War. So constitutional government in the Sceptered Isle rests, in a way, on a pair of Italian princes’ insatiable need for dwarves.

1715: Nature Gives Us Stradivarii

Scientists for decades have been trying to explain superb sound quality behind violins of Antonio Stradivari. A group of American scientists claim that a drop in temperatures between 1645 and 1715 (because of a reduction in sunspots and solar inactivity known as the Maunder Minimum) enhanced the quality of wood from which the instruments were crafted. These factors slowed tree growth, thereby creating the ideal building material for violins later manufactured according to the tree ring science journal Dendrochronologia. This also explains why history’s most famous violinmakers—Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari—all hail from the 17th and early 18th centuries. Other contending theories however state that Stradivari and his contemporaries used a special varnish (the secret of which has been lost today), or that the wood was chemically treated, soaked in water, specially dried, or stored for long periods of time.

1862: Close but No Cigar

The bloodiest one-day battle in American history came on September 17, 1862 when some 24,000 soldiers died in the clash between Union and Confederate troops at Antietam Creek. The battle’s outcome was decided by McClellan’s ability to predict the Confederate Army’s movements–however, McClellan got his help from three cigars. Yes, the outcome of the battle and of the Civil War was decided by three lost cigars being discovered in a field. A Union solider discovered Special Order 191 wrapped around three cigars; the order noted Lee’s army’s movements. Although McClellan waited long enough to lose the opportunity to defeat Lee decisively, Antietam became the first battle in which Lee’s army had been denied its main objective. Lincoln decided to release the Emancipation Proclamation only after the Union victory at Antietam. [Prior, a string of disastrous Union defeats had prevented Lincoln from issuing the proclamation for fear of appearing desperate]. In the proclamation’s wake, the war not only gained a higher moral purpose, but also record numbers of now-emancipated slaves joined the Union Army, thereby increasing its military strength. A carelessly lost parcel containing three cigars extended the American Civil War for four years, tipped the scales to the Union side, and altered forever the United States’ future. And as , in great part, it came down to that carelessly lost, cigar-encasing battle plan. [Above, Lincoln at Antietam]

1873: Jamming leads to an iconic keyboard

The QWERTY keyboard, so-called for the top row of letters on its left-hand side, came into existence because of a terrible structural flaw when the typewriters were first invented. In the first practical typewriter, designed by an American Christopher Sholes in the late 1860s, the keys were arranged in a sort of circular basket under the carriage. The first typewriter was extremely prone to frequent jamming at fast typing speeds. To solve the jamming problem, Sholes and Co., who had originally arranged the keyboard in alphabetical order, decided to put the most commonly used letters as far apart as possible in the next model. The next year, 1873, when they came up with the new invention which would set the standard of the keyboards. A faster, more convenient keyboard ‘the Dvorak’ was patented in 1932, but the cost of changing into a new system perpetuates the Qwerty.

1940: A Geological Map aids the Miracle of Dunkirk

The Miracle of Dunkirk was portrayed as a “divine” injuncture where the British Expeditionary Force incredibly were saved from the marching armies of Hitler. However, the ‘miracle’ wouldn’t have happened without an inadvertent help from Hitler himself. Hitler’s specific orders to halt the advance of German Troops for 3 days (which gave the British enough time to escape) was one of the last unsolved mysteries of the World War II. Some historians contend that Hitler was thrown into panic by a geological map, which convinced him that his tanks would be trapped in waterlogged, low-lying fields near Dunkirk if he let them advance. Hitler was haunted by his own experience as a solider in the notorious Flanders mud, but the land was dry and safe for tanks during this period and Hitler’s frontline panzer commanders sent a message to Berlin. Immediately Hitler rescinded the command, but the rain began to fall, which made the fields genuinely impassable, allowing the evacuation to be completed despite Luftwaffe attacks. It was the pause that lost Hitler the Second World War.

Most Beautiful Charts In History

Smoot-Hawley Spiral

The flawed protectionist measure enacted in 1930, known as Smoot-Hawley Act led to decreased international trade and furthered the Great Depression. The full disastrous effects of the act are usually portrayed in economic text books with an ugly spiderweb chart, which serves as a silent testament to the perils of protectionism.

Salyut Cyclogram

Very similar to Minard’s famed charts (see below), this chart is handmade by a Russian cosmonaut, Georgi Grechko. The ‘cyclogram’ shows a 96-day flight of Salyut 6. Some 22 parallel time-series show 1500 sunrises and 1500 sunsets during the flight, a schedule for space walks and baths, and visits of resupply ships bringing equipment, fresh fruit, and gingerbread.

Harry Beck’s London Underground

Before Harry Beck, the underground lines are superimposed on road maps. However, it was Harry Beck who came up with the idea of creating a full system map in color, doing away with the geographical accuracy. Predicting that passengers riding the trains were not too bothered by those accuracies, Beck drew his famous diagram, a cross between a electrical schematic and a map, on which all the stations were more or less equally spaced. Initially scoffed by the authorities, the map gained popularity with the commuters and has since been copied by many underground services around the world.

Orbis Terrae Maps

Describing the world as noted by St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century, Orbis Terrae (or T and O map) represented the top-half of the spherical Earth–a convenient projection which included only the northern temperate (and inhabited) half of the globe. The T is the Mediterranean, dividing the three continents, Asia, Europe and Africa, and the O is the encircling Ocean. Jerusalem was generally represented in the center of the map. Asia was typically the size of the other two continents combined. Because the sun rose in the east, Paradise (the Garden of Eden) was generally depicted as being in Asia, which was posited at the top portion of the map. The most famous specimen of this T-O map are Mappa Mundi–the maps made during the middle ages.

Nightingale’s Coxcomb

At a dinner party in 1856 that Florence Nightingale met William Farr, the Compiler of Abstracts in the General Registry Office. Together, they complied a mortality table, listing causes of death in the general population–a novel concept popularized by Farr. Nightingale compared Farr’s numbers with her own and created a chart which noted that even in peacetime a soldier faced twice the risk of dying in a given year as a civilian due to bad conditions in barracks. The 1858 graph (now known as “Nightingale’s Rose” or “Nightingale’s Coxcomb”) was a stunning visual graphic that revealed that it wasn’t wounds killing the highest number of soldiers – it was infections.

Playfair Wheat Chart

William Playfair pioneered the first “pie chart” in 1801. It showed that, compared to other countries, the British paid more tax. Altogether, Playfair invented four types of diagrams now taken for granted in statistics: line graph, bar chart, pie chart, and circle graph. One of the first people to use data not just to educate but also to persuade and convince, Playfair compared the “weekly wages of a good mechanic” and the “price of a quarter of wheat” over time in 1821 to cast a light on the straining wheat prices. His overwhelming success in statastics didn’t prevent him from being profiled as “an engineer, political economist and scoundrel”, by Victorian biographers who remembered him mainly for his speculative get-rich-quick schemes.

Napoleon’s Russian Campaign

“The best statistical graphic ever drawn“ noted the statistician Edward Tufte. Indeed, Charles Jospeh Minard (1781-1870) created more than fifty memorable “cartes figurative” but this one ["Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Français dans la campagne de Russe 1812-1813"] depicting the advance into and retreat from Russia by Napoleon’s Grande Armée “defies the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence.” (Marey, 1878) The map unites six different sets of data: geography, the army’s path, its direction, the number of soliders, temperature (in the republican measurement of degrees of réaumur) and time. [Napoleon entered Russia with 442,000 men, took Moscow with only 100,000 men, only to escape the Russian winter with barely 10,000 soldiers, which included 6.000 returning soldiers from the north.]

It is not easy being green

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (or to less religious people like me, Leprechaun Day or Ireland Day), I listed a few culturally significant things that come into mind where thinking about the color green. The word ‘green’ originally comes from the Old English verb growan (“to grow”)–an etymology shared by German and Scandinavian languages. 

Kelly Green and Leprechauns

The shade of green typically associated with St. Patrick’s day is called Kelly Green. The name derives from the fact that the surname Kelly, as well as the color green, are both popular in Ireland. However, association of leprechauns with green originated in the United States in early 20th century. Before this, it was generally agreed that the leprechaun wore red and not green. Yeats wrote as late as 1888, that a leprechaun is “something of a dandy, and dresses in a red coat with seven rows of buttons.” 

Greenbacks

In October 2003, $20 (the most counterfeited U.S. money) became the first American dollar bill since the American Civil War that wasn’t just black and green. When the federal government issued currency during the Civil War, it was backed by the Spanish dollars. To prevent counterfeiting, it was decided the back of the bills would be printed in a color other than black. The color green was chosen because it represented ’stability’, thus coining the term “greenbacks”. Since then, green not only carries a connotation of capitalism but also of money itself. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum described the Emerald City, where everyone wears tinted glasses which make everything look green as a social commentary. [Baum supported the Gold Standard.]

Soylent Green

In 1973 Dystopian movie, Soylent Green, the human race ridden by global warming and overpopulation lives on a depleted Earth beset with unemployment and poverty. Real fruit, vegetables, and meat are rare, commodities are expensive, and much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green” wafers. The film describes the efforts of a NY Police Detective Robert Thorn (played by Charlton Heston) who try to investigate a murder. At the end of the movie, Thorn sees how the corpses are processed into “soylent green” wafers, thus causing him to proclaim the movie’s most memorable last line, “Soylent Green is People.”

Evil Green 

In Othello and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare talked about envy being “green-eyed monster.” The moniker was just a Bardic interpretation of the centuries-old superstition associating green with evil. Green signified witchcraft, and base, natural desires of man, and was associated with faeries and spirits in English folklore. It is an unlucky color, and green cars, wedding dresses, and costumes are all the objects of superstition–a superstition which found its way to modern cinema. Green is the color of death [see The Shining for instance] and evil [The Grinch; Bela Lugosi who wore green makeup for black-and-white Dracula, the Wicked Witch of the West]. 

Go Green 

The first traffic lights were installed outside the Houses of Parliament in London in 1868. Green and red gas lamps used for the lights were taken from a railway station, but the tradition dates back to early seafaring times: port is identified by red and starboard by green in maritime right of way, where the vessel on the left must stop for the one crossing on the right. However, using green-red lights in New York in the 1920s nearly backfired: residents of Irish descent had objected to the fact that the “British” red was placed above the “Irish” green. Mao Zedong’s attempt to reform traffic lights was more disastrous; noting that Red, symbolizing Revolution must also come to symbolize ‘go’, Mao ordered the cars to go on red and stop on green. Many traffic accidents ensued and Mao had to recant his plans. 

Absinthe

In the historical literature, it is “la fée verte” (the Green Fairy). It is said that one sees green fairies everywhere under the influence of this strong (and some contend, dangerous) anise and herbal drink. Originated in the canto of Neuchatel in Switzerland, absinthe gained green popularity in the 1840s, when it was given to the French troops as a malaria treatment. The Bohemians (luminaries like Baudelaire, van Gogh, Oscar Wilde include) quickly embraced the drink, which ironically required almost dandy-esque preparation (Absinthiana). It is preparing by pouring ice water over a sugar cube placed atop of a specially designed slotted spoon patched on a glass of absinthe. [Above absinthe, below 'green' tea]

Islam Green

Prophet Muhammad once noted that,  “water, greenery, and a beautiful face” were three universally good things. Thus, the Islamic green, symbolizing religion, harmony and nature was born. In the Qur’an, people in Paradise wear fine green silk. Al-Khidur (“The Green One”), is a figure who met and traveled with Moses. The tribe of the prophet Muhammad had a green banner. Many Islamic nations and sects (Saudi Arabia, Hamas) have green flags, which culminate with Libya’s ascetically plain monocolored green flag.

Most Beautiful Libraries In the World

The Library of Congress

The de facto national library of the United States, the Library of Congress is also the largest library in the world (by shelf-length). Although it is open to anyone, only the Supreme Court Justices, the U.S. Senators, and the President can check out books from the Library. [Among his other duties, the Librarian of Congress appoints the Poet Laureate]. 

The Westminster Libraries

The two library complexes of the House of Commons (top) and House of Lords (bottom) were built together with the Palaces of Westminster. Originally they served as map rooms, and committee rooms. The Derby Room in the House of Lords (pictured) is one of the most beautiful rooms in the building. 

J.P.Morgan Library

In an unassuming residence of J.P.Morgan exists his library, one of the hidden treasures of New York. The original private collection was preserved and expended by Morgan’s own personal librarian. The above picture is the newly renovated facade of the building.  

The New York Public Library

Featured in many movies and books, NYPL is an institution in itself. Also famous are two famous stone lions guarding the entrance–Leo Astor and Leo Lenox (named after the library’s founders, John Jacob Astor and John Lenox). The lions are also nicknamed “Patience” and “Fortitude”.

Boston Athenaeum

An art gallery and museum as well as a library, Boston Athenaeum in Boston, Massachusetts was founded in 1807. The library contains extensive Confederate war documents and papers from George Washington’s home. 

Duchess Anna Amelia Library

It burnt down in 2004–an ironic twist for a building that survived two World Wars–but its collection was saved. [In the rabble was discovered an unknown Bach aria]. Founded by Duchess Anna Amelia in Weimer, Germany, the library contains the largest collection of Faust-related manuscripts in the world.

Abbey Library of St. Gall

Considered one of the richest medieval libraries in the world, the abbey library at St. Gall contains 2,100 manuscripts from the 8th to 15th centuries, 1,650 incunabula (those printed before 1500) in addition to 160,000 volumes. The manuscript B of the Nibelngenlied is kept under this Swiss library’s magnificently decorated ceiling. 

Senate Library, Palais du Luxembourg

The French Senate is housed in the Palais du Luxembourg in the 6th Arrondissement of Paris. Behind the wonderful Jardin du Luxembourg lies the library of the senate, decorated by various masters (including Eugene Delacroix).   

Klementinum, Prague

Currently the National Library of the Czech Republic, the Clementinum is housed in the historical complex of buildings that date back to the 11th century.  Amidst its twisted wood columns and under its trompe-l’oeil frescoed ceiling, the Baroque library contains a collection of Mozartiana and works of Tycho Brahe. The Czech Government is building a new modernistic library (above) designed by Jan Kaplický.

My Twitter Adventure, first few minutes…

Reader, I joined Twitter. I don’t know exactly why but I joined–jumping into that tech-bandwagon late. (Hey, better late than never.) However, my first hour at Twitter is marred with “wtf?” moments.

Firstly, I learnt that none of my loser friends on my primary email carrier has Twitter accounts. To add insult to injury, my secondary (and vastly expanded) email carrier is not listed, and there is no way (at least not easy or easily accessible ones) to add your facebook friends–just great, just apt, just right.

Then, Twitter offered me its menu–its a la carte choices for me to follow. I don’t know how they randomize the choices or how they recommend different Tweets to different demographics but their recommendations to me include Tweets of once popular (but perennially obnoxious) Britney Spears (along with those of two not-at-all-famous singers, both female–I think I see a trend there), a Dell computer repairshop (because only thing Dell users need are repairshops), JetBlue airways (because its channel is more useful to Twitter than that of Chesley Sullenberger), an unknown writer, someone from Slate (the only one I care to follow in Slate may be Elliot Spitzer, but that has nothing to do with his writing abilities) and last but not least, BBC Click. Yes, not the news website BBC but the small, marginally informational IT-show on it.

I gave up, and tried to add Tweets to follow. I added No.10 Downing Street Tweet, because I thought their Tweets will be more informational than those from three female singers whose combined IQ score is probably less than what I paid for my last pair of shoes. However, I may be in the minority in that line of thought.

A grim happenstance dawned upon me as soon as I clicked on “Follow” to No.10 Downing Street Tweet. I received an instant email saying, you have one follower! And guess what, that follower is No.10 Downing Street. What sort of government follows its citizens? I don’t know but this No.10 Downing Street Tweet, which claims to be the official twitter channel for HM’s First Minister apparently follows 182,247 citizens. Somewhere, George Orwell is smiling smugly.

The Greatest Predictors of the Future, Part I

Although I am not a believer in this spiritual hocus-pocus, these ten people no doubt left their mark on history: 

The Oracle at Delphi

The most important oracle in the classical Greek world, the Oracle at Delphi is the major shrine for Apollo, who he slew Python (God of the Naval of the Earth) on that side.  The priestess of the oracle at Delphi was known as the Pythia and Apollo spoke through this oracle. The sibyl sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth, fumes from which allegedly entranced her and caused her to predict in riddles. The Oracle survived under the Macedonians, Barbarians, and Romans before Emperor Theodosius I ordered to close it in 395AD.  

Robert Nixon (?)

A legendary figure, Robert Nixon is known more famously as Cheshire Prophet. In one legend, he served under Edward IV and Richard III, while another  conflicting story notes he lived during the reign of James I two centuries later. However, in the early 18th century, he is the claimed source of various prophecies widely circulated in the leaflet form. In those, he apparently predicted the rise and banishment of Napoleon, the invention of cigars, the Jacobite rebellions and the abdication of Edward VIII.  The story surrounding Nixon’s death was equally intriguing: summoned to the court of Richard III (because he foretold the Battle of the Bosworth Field), he predicted that he would be starved to death there. The puzzled king ordered him to be kept in the kitchen but, because he was always picking at food he was locked in the cupboard. The cook was called away and Nixon did starve to death.

Ursula Southiel (Mother Shipton)

There is no really trustworthy evidence as to her ever having existed, but Ursula Southiel (allegedly 1488-1561) apparently descended from a long line of witches. Ursula from her infancy was regarded as ”the Devil’s child,” because of her sinister appearance. She got her gift of ability to foretell the future when she turned 24. Her predictions, typical of those of the time, were presented in riddles, often in verse, and dealt mainly and accurately with the the predictions of deaths of famous people, including Cardinal Wolsey. In the 1862 version of her life by Charles Hindley, Mother Shipton predicts the end of the world in 1881. In 1881 there was some panic in Britain as the prophecy had become accepted as true even though in 1873, Charles Hindley confessed that he had made up this prophecy.

William Lilly (1602-1681)

The famed English occultist William Lilly was a popular astrologer under King Charles I. Particularly adept at interpreting the astrological charts, he published his comprehensive Christian Astrology anthology, which has never gone out-of-print since, and which is now considered the textbook for the study of traditional astrology. After the Restoration, he quickly fell into disrepute because of his previous sympathetic predictions for the Parliamentarians. Lilly was at the centre of controversy in 1666 for predicting the Great Fire of London some 14 years before it happened. Many people believed that he started the fire,  and Lily was tried for the offence in Parliament but was found to be innocent. 

David Goodman Croly (1829–1889)

Although he is now remembered only for his anonymous pamphlet Miscegenation, which tried to discredit the Abolitionist movement, David Goodman Croly also left behind a legacy of predictions. He wrote a column of business, political, and social predictions for the New York Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide. He made his reputation by predicting the Panic of 1873 two years in advance, even specifying the first bank (Jay Cooke & co.) and first railroad (Northern Pacific, above) to fail. He also made fifty-three concrete predictions “to be read now and judged in the year 2000,” of which forty are proved to be correct:  World War I; the Russian Revolution; women’s rights, aerial reconnaissance, etc. However, his other predictions include the United States drafting a new constitution and conquering North and Central Americas. 

Anton Johansson (1858 – 1909)

Known affectionately as the Christian Seer of Finnmark, Anton Johansson of Sweden is famous for the prediction of the sinking of Titanic. He also predicted the First World War in Central Europe, the Russian Revolution, the defeat of Germany in the First and the Second Wars. As an old man, Johansson was highly obsessed by what he termed a Third World War. He stated it would break out at ”the end of July, beginning of August, I do not know the year”, but went on to detail a Russian invasion of Europe and Middle East. 

Evangeline Adams (1868-1932)

The best known astrologer of her day, Evangeline Adams was said to have “raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science,” by the end of her life. However, this did not prevent her from being arrested twice in New York for fortune telling. [Once, she was acquitted after recounting to the judge the details about the death of his son.] She predicted the Windsor Hotel fire, the stock market crash of ‘29, World War II, the deaths of King Edward VII, Enrico Caruso, and even herself. Her books, now all out of print, are eagerly sought after by students, and even stolen from library shelves. 

Cheiro (1866-1936)

Self-described clairvoyant, and self-titled Count Leigh de Hamong, Cheiro (born WIlliam John Warner) took his name from the word cheiromancy, meaning palmistry. He read the hands of celebrities ranging from William Gladstone to Mata Hari. The skeptical Mark Twain wrote in Cheiro’s visitor’s book: “Cheiro has exposed my character to me with humiliating accuracy. I ought not to confess this accuracy, still I am moved to do so.” Cheiro predicted the date of Queen Victoria’s death, the year and month when King Edward VII would pass away, the grim destiny that awaited the late Czar of Russia, the assassination of King Humbert of Italy, the attempt on the Shah’s life in Paris, 

Homer Lea (1876-1912)

A hunchback, American mercenary Homer Lea served as the military advisor to Sun Yet-Sen in China. He wrote two seminal works on geopolitics:  The Valor of Ignorance which predicted the rise of Japanese militarist aggression and a Japanese Empire in the Pacific, while The Day of the Saxon, predicted the rise of a greater German Reich based on national supremacy and ethnic purity. His unfinished third book, The Swarming of the Slav predicted a Russian move to dominate Europe. In The Valor of Ignorance, he predicted a possible Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor, and on the US mainland (using balloon bombs).  

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945)

An American psychic Edgar Cayce demonstrated abilities to answer questions while in a self-induced trance. Although many critics say Cayce exploited the contemporaneous newspaper articles, affidavits, anecdotes, and testimonials to gather information, many of his recorded predictions are proved to be accurate. He foresaw the Stock Market Crash and Great Depression, the existence of a ninth Planet, WWII, the independent India and the birth of Israel and noted that Hitler would remain in power until it will “come as an overthrow or an outside war.” His most famous prediction is on the existence of Atlantis, which he noted, populated ancient Egypt and pre Columbian America. During the height of World War II, he saw the possibility of a united world assembly but died before he had chance to see its fruition.   

(To be continued, with Nostradamus & co. in Part II)

Top 10 Astronomers

Sic itur ad astra: To commemorate the Kepler mission, NASA’s first mission to search for worlds that could potentially host life, here is a post about the greatest astronomers in history, chronologically: 

 

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) 

An alchemist and an astronomer, Tycho Brahe known more for the sheer volume of his observations than for his discoveries. Being a Danish nobleman, he had his own observatory/castle built by his king, from which he observed all known celestial objects. Although it has been down previously before, Brahe measured the Earth’s axial tilt more accurately than ever before. Brahe was not a Copernican, however; he proposed a stem in which the Sun orbited the Earth while the other planets orbited the Sun, while denouncing Coperinicus’ transparent rotating spheres. He observed a supernova now known as “Tycho’s supernova” and made the most precise observations of stellar and planetary positions. His death itself was surrounded in mystery, but his records of planetary motions enabled his protege (and alleged killer) Kepler to discover the laws of planetary motion and dispel the heliocentric theory for once and for all. Above, the monument to Brahe and Kepler in Prague, Czech Republic. 

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

A true Renaissance man, Galileo published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger). In the last portion of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo reported his discovery of four objects that appeared to form a straight line of stars near Jupiter–four first Jovian Moons. Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede were originally named after the members of the Medici family (Galileo’s patrons) but later renamed as Galilean satellites. By proving Venus exhibited a full set of phases similar to that of the Moon, Galileo refuted Ptolemaic pure geocentric model. Galileo also observed the planet Saturn but mistook its rings for planets, thinking it was a three-bodied system. Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, lunar mountains and craters and also stated that Milky Way was made up of stars, instead of nebulous as previously thought. He even observed the planet Neptune but marked it down as a dim star, thus delaying the discovery for more than three centuries.  Above: the Inquistion confronts Galileo on his beliefs. 

Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712)

An astrologer as well as an astronomer, Giovanni Cassini served as the Count Astronomer/Astronomer to King Louis XIV of France. During his time at the Court of the Sun King, he accurately measured the size of France for the first time, which turned out to be considerably smaller than expected. The amused king noted that Cassini had taken more of his kingdom from him than he had won in all his wars. Along with Robert Hooke, Cassini was credited with the discovery of the Great Red Spot in Jupiter. He was also the first to observe four of Saturn’s moons. Those moons he once named Sidera Lodoicea (Louisean Stars after the Latinized name of King Louis), are now known as Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione. Above: Cassini (arrowed) arrived at the Sun King’s court. 

Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) 

Like many scientists of his days, Christopher Huygens is known for the discovery of many breakthroughs. In his annus mirabilis of 1655, he designed a refracting telescope, discovered the first of Saturn’s moons (Titan), formulated that Saturn is surrounded by a solid ecliptic ring, and discovered and sketched the Orion Nebula. He also observed planet Mercury’s solar transit in 1661, and wrote two monumental books Systema Saturnium and Cosmotheoros. In the latter, he speculated about life on the other planets, and imagined a universe brimming with life. A fellow of the Royal Society and of the French Academy of Sciences, he worked together with Giovanni Cassini at the newly completed Paris Observatory (opened in 1671) under the patronage of Louis XIV.  Above: King Louis and Minister Colbert visits Director Cassini and Huygens at the newly completed Paris Observatory in 1671. 

Charles Messier (1730-1817) 

Although many listings in his eponymous catalogue were discovered by his assistant Pierre Mechain, and many are not organized scientifically (by type, or location), Charles Messier left behind a lasting standard for astronomy. In 1774, he published first of his astronomical catalogues, which contained the observational data for 45 celestial objects. By the time the final version of the catalogue was published in 1781, the list of Messier objects had grown to 103. A comet hunter, Messier complied his ”Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d’Étoiles” (“Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters”) in frustration from his list of non-comet objects that frustrated his hunt for the comets. 

William Herschel (1738-1822)

A Hanoverian émigré to England, William Herschel was obsessed with music and telescopes since young. Working as a lowly music teacher in Bath, he discovered the planet Uranus in 17981 using a small homemade telescope. He named the new planet Georgium Sidus (Georgian Star) after his king, George III, but the French vocally protested it, and the planet was known as ‘Herschel’ until the name ‘Uranus’ was universally adopted. Handsomely rewarded in England and knighted, Herschel became the King’s Astronomer, and retired to become a telescope maker–his primary hobby. He, however, coached his sister Caroline (above) to become one of the greatest astronomers of her day. Caroline Herschel became the first woman to discover a comet. William himself went to measure the Sun’s motion, and to become discoverer of the  sunspots and the infrared range of sunlight. 

Thomas James Henderson (1798-1844) 

The first Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Thomas Henderson was the first person to measure the distance to a star (Alpha Centauri, the nearest stellar system to Earth). Working at the British Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, he made a number of stellar observations for which he is mainly remembered today. The 1830s version of the “space race” was to be the first person to measure the distance to a star using parallax, a task which is easier the closer the star. Doubts about the accuracy of his instruments kept him from publishing, but after he was beaten to the punch by Frederic Wilhelm Bessel (who measured 10.4 light years to Sirius) in 1838, Henderson published his results, thus claiming his rightful spot in history.  

William Lassell (1799-1880) 

Although he is today remembered as the pioneer of the age of “Grand Amateurs” in astronomy, WIlliam Lassell appeared as if he is least suited for this avocation–he is a career beer brewer from Liverpool. When “Le Verrier’s Planet” (later to be named Neptune) was first observed in Berlin, Lassell used the new planet’s co-ordinates, published in The Times, to discover its satellite (Triton) and its ring. Within a month of Neptune’s discovery (and before the planet was even named), Lassell announced his discoveries to The Times. Two years later in 1848, he independently discovered Hyperion (a moon of Saturn) and in 1851, he discovered Ariel and Umbriel, two moons of Uranus. Lassell also pioneered the use of an equatorial mount and built a 48-inch (1,200 mm) telescope on Malta. 

 

Urbain Le Verrier (1811-1877)

Best remembered for his discovery of planet Neptune, le Verrier was a mathematician first. From the illustrious Director chair at the Paris Observatory (its first director was Cassini, no less), Le Verrier predicted the existence of a then unknown Transuranian planet using only mathematics and astronomical observations of the known planet Uranus. Unknown to Le Verrier, similar calculations were made by an Englishman John Couch Adams, but le Verrier announced his prediction two days before Adams’s final solution. Encouraged greatly by his success, le Verrier went on to predict an unknown planet closer to the Sun than Mercury, which he tentatively named Vulcan. This prediction became his long-lasting, and controversial legacy, triggering a wave of false detections, which lasted until 1915, when Einstein explained Mercury’s anomalous motion with his theory of general relativity.  

 

Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997)

On the New Horizon spacecraft, launched for a flyby of Pluto in 2014, is a container inscribed: “Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone’. Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997).” Best known for discovering the planet/dwarf planet Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh was working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona while he was given the job to search for the Planet X (the trans-Neptunian planet), which had been predicted by the observatory’s founder Percival Lowell and William Pickering. Using the photographers taken by the observatory’s 13-inch astrograph, he found Planet X on Tuesday, February 18, 1930, using images taken in January of the same year. The name “Pluto” was suggested by an English schoolgirl, which was chosen because it was after the Roman god of the Underworld (who was able to render himself invisible) and because Percival Lowell’s initials PL formed the first 2 letters. 

United We Fell

Knotted Gun by Fredrik Reuterswärd in front the UNHQ is ironically metaphorical towards the state of affairs that happen inside the building.

In a trouble-beset century, the greatest challenges for the United Nation ironically comes from the inside.  – by Archibald S. Hone. 

“The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” said John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Although I usually find myself vehemently disagreeing with Mr. Bolton’s agenda and political views, his quote directly reflects the painful truth and the frustrating bureaucracy that lie at the very foundations of the United Nations.

Now the United Nations is a 64 year old whose 401(k) has shrank to nothingness. It is a leviathan that has outlived its usefulness and has no bright future. It is a badly managed classroom–a hierarchy with an unruly, undemocratic Security Council presided by a wavering Secretary General at the top. Yet, it is not a relic of the Cold War, it is the last species of an era even more distant. It is the modern pale imitation of the age of the Great Statesman—the age where the fate of the world is decided in the cigar-smoke filled antechambers in the Chancelleries of Europe. When the United Nations (and its crippled predecessor, the League of Nation) was founded, that world still existed. In 1945, two colonial powers (the Great Britain and France) still controlled a third of the world, and the Soviet hegemon collectively and coercively spoke for ‘the united socialist workers of the world’.

Within a few years, that world is descended into history books. Empires fell; China embraced—or to be precise, was forced to embrace—Communism. The Russians boycotted the Security Council after the latter refused to sit the Communist government of China. Meanwhile, the United Nations sat forlornly as countries after countries plunged into civil wars and genocides. Hungarian Uprising, Vietnam War and Prague Spring are just three examples of this collective failure.

However, the institution’s honor was upheld by the events that started unilaterally and that are out of its control. The UN intervention in Korea was made possible by the Russian boycott in the UNSC (see above). The Suez Crisis was solved because of the American pressure. The UN’s role in South American development only followed the US and CIA’s efforts to stage coup d’etats. Even its intervention in Rwanda came only after the French threatened to deploy its military forces. It would also take an affronted world to mandate the UN actions in Kuwait, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.  

Yet, there are high points too—the humanitarian missions that build a social infrastructure would be impossible without an organization as universal as the United Nations. However, the high point of those missions came only in the 1990s (refer to the UN charts) when the Soviet Union isn’t on the UNSC anymore to effectively block interventions.

It will take a Messiah to save the UN.

Now with Russia and China back as the global hegemons, it is time to once again say our goodbyes to that unipolar world into which we grew up. The UN Resolutions from Zimbabwe to North Korea, from Venezuela to Iran are being thwarted by the vetoes of that two resurgent powers, while any attempts of reform the undemocratic vetoing powers in the UNSC are not favorably looked upon by any veto-carrying members.

Last year, during the presidential campaign, Sen. McCain put forward an idea called “League of Democracies”. It is not perfect nor 100% altruistic, but the plan is to create a expansion of NATO that will curb the Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus and to take ‘War on Terror’ to a new level. The plan’s genius is that we will be able to unite the nations that are divided by geography but are united by the ideology—a democratic ideology, that is.

America totally disregarded the UN with Iraq; Russia did in Georgia. In Middle East, nations have been disregarding the UN for years. So why are we still relying on the United Nations while simultenously outsourcing the important agenda to NATO, EU, Six-Party Talks, Davos, etc. The problem is that the UN has become its own Detroit: it is just too big to fail. It is a bad PR for any member nation to admit that nothing is being done at that 38-storied behemoth. So when we are talking about the reforms to the United Nation, we should probably look beyond a top-down approach to embrace bottom-up approach to create a new international organization, whose membership should be as exclusive as that to the EU. Through highly exclusive, highly selective cartel of the international states, we can relocate governments that are not representative of their people into the dustbin of history, i.e, the General Assembly and the Security Council. The bottomline is now more than ever, we need responsible international governance. It is time either to revamp the UN or just trade it in for a newer model. 

Although he quoted two Republicans, Archibald S. Hone is not a conservative, but just a cynic. This is his first article for the new column, “Pillory”, where he will try to crucify pretty much everything, from French wine growers to Jane Austen. 

12 Evil Fictional Characters

This is inspired by this list: 50 Greatest Villains in Literature. Since I don’t agree with some of their choices, this list was born. Here are the twelve notable flagrant omission on the Telegraph’s list:

1. Uriah Heep

One of the more vivid and polarizing characters in Dickens’ David Copperfield, obsequious, greedy and insincere Uriah Heep was physically modeled upon Hans Christian Anderson. Cloyingly humane and humble, Mr. Heep works as Wickfield’s law clerk, teaches himself law at night, and by blackmailing Mr. Wickfield, gains control over his business eventually. However, his biggest ambition is to marry Agnes, Wickfield’s daughter, and to obtain her fortune. Like most of Dicken’s villians, greed is his main motivation. Eventually unmasked by Mr. Micawber, he ends up in a prison, where he tries to put forward himself as a model prisoner. [Above: Roland Young as Uriah Heep and Freddie Bartholomew as the child David Copperfield in the 1937 film]

2. Injun Joe

In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the villain of the piece was Injun Joe, someone with whom the reader cannot identify or sympathize at all. The saddest part of Injun Joe’s depiction in the novel is that he was cast as a relic of a bygone era, an era when vengeful American Indians still roam the prairies. His evil nature was depicted as natural among the Indians, while he displays the culture of violence attributed to the Native Americans: ”When you get revenge on a woman you don’t kill her–bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils–you notch her ears, like a sow’s!” When Judge Thatcher closes the mouth of the cave to fatally asphyxiate Injun Joe, it is as if he metaphorically ended a chapter of American history. 

3. Fu Manchu

Envisioned during the Yellow Peril era, Dr. Fu Manchu (created by Sax Rohmer) encompasses all signs of an evil genius: height, gauntness, feline-agility, a Satanic face, high intellect and even mind-reading abilities. However, his signature mustache, only for which he is now known, didn’t appeared in any of the novels–it was a creation of the movie industry. He uses arcane methods (he disdains guns or explosives) ranging from dacoits and Thuggees to exotic animals, plants and chemicals for world-domination, and the restoration of the Imperial China. Although he was virtually un-defeatable because of his strength and life-extending elixir, his plans are thwarted and the society is saved by the diligent efforts of Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, the Holmes and Watson of the series. [Above, he is played by Christopher Lee]

4. Dr. Nikola

A master of disguise and a mesmerist like Dr. Fu Manchu, Dr. Antonio Nikola (created by Guy Boothby) is another of those evil geniuses who populated Victorian, Gothic and Pulp fiction. Handsome yet puritanical, Nikola is always accompanied by a cat. His goal in life has also been the hunt for immortality, which, he believed, could be obtained from a mysterious sect of Tibetan monks. To aid him in this quest, he used many people whose loved ones they had a hold over (through blackmail or kidnapping) and various mutants he created through his own mad research. Nikola was hunted by Hatteras, a Mongolian assassin missing half of one ear before he finally  a fatal victim of his final experiment. 

5. Napoleon the Pig

Based on Stalin, Orwell’s hero pig in Animal Farm is also an allegorical figure of all dictators who have ever walked on this world. A common farm pig, Napoleon fights to free the Manor Farm from human control, but eventually becomes the tyrant of Animal Farm. Although his villainous activities (drinking milk the animals had gathered, taking others’ puppies for himself, teaching animals to use firearms, taking advantage of his comrade Snowball, historical revisionism) may seen trivial when compared to those of others on the list, Napoleon stands as a humiliating testament to human gullibility and shortcomings even outside the confines of the book. 

6. Cardinal Richelieu and Milady de Winter

In Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu attempts to undermine Queen Anne (mother of Louis XIV) who was having an affair with an Englishman. However, Richelieu is action out of his own lust for power. The cardinal employed Milady de Winter–a woman with an evil (albeit tragic) past–as his chief secret agent to discredit the Queen and the English. The Cardinal and Milady plot to kill the English general (and the Queen’s lover) Buckingham. Although she was arrested, she seduces her jailer and asks him to assassinate Buckingham. Although both battled the musketeers, Richelieu and Milady de Winter both respected them, especially d’Artagnan. Yet, it didn’t stop Milday from murdering d’Artagnan’s lover, Constance. In the emotional last scenes of the novel, she was beheaded, but the ghost of Milady came back to haunt the musketeers in the sequel Twenty Years After with her son, Mordaunt. 

7. Lady Macbeth 

A mother. An antimother. A witch. A femme fatale. Lady Macbeth is one of the most marginalized and discussed figures in the literature. Starting from the point when she receives a letter from her husband saying three witches have prophecized his future as King, she plotted a regicide to the last detail. A real mastermind behind Macbeth (who is merely an instrument), she convinces to him that he first broached the matter and belittles his courage and manhood to coerce him into killing King Duncan. In her last appearance, she sleepwalks in a powerful and profound scene where she is tormented by horrific recollections of her past. She dies off-stage, with suicide being suggested as its cause. [Above, Lady Macbeth, by George Cattermole]

8. Elmer Gantry 

In Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 satire, Elmer Gantry, the eponymous hero is “a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who, upon realizing the power, prestige, and easy money that being a Christian fundamentalist evangelist can bring, pursues his “religious” ambitions with relish, contributing to the downfall, even death, of key people around him as the years pass. Gantry continues to womanize, is often exposed as a fraud, and frequently faces a complete downfall, yet he is never fully discredited and always manages to emerge triumphant and reaching ever greater heights of social standing”, wikipedia quote succinctly. Although denounced by various religious groups, Elmer Gantry and Lewis were proven to be correct by a bizarre life-imitating-art events in the 70s and the 80s, when an array of Christian evangelists becomes entrapped in sex scandals.  [Burt Lancester played Elmer Gantry above]

9. The Queen of Hearts

“The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said,” wrote Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland. Foul-mouthed, foul-tempered, blind fury, the Queen of Hearts is the ruler and tyrant of all the lands in the story. Although she is not the villain of the storybook, all creatures in Wonderland fear the Queen, and her tyrannical tendencies (sentence before verdict!) makes her a proud entrant of this list. [Above, two Queens of Hearts: Carroll's characterization changed the loveliest card in the playing deck into a menacing threat by the time Mrs. Iselin arrives in The Manchurian Candidate.] 

10. Sunday

In G.K.Chesterton’s surreal novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, a poet Gabriel Syme is recruited by the Scotland Yard to be part of a secret anti-anarchist taskforce. Syme is later elected as the local representative to the worldwide Central Council of Anarchists, which consists of seven men, each using the name of a day of the week as a code name. Syme becomes ‘Thursday’, but he also discovers that five of the other six members are also undercover detectives. They are fighting each other and not real anarchists, in a cleverly concocted plan by the colossal evil genius Sunday. In a dizzying and surreal chase scene (which involves a cab, an elephant and a hot-air ballon), the six chases disturbing, whimsical and almost inhumanely big Sunday, the man who calls himself “The Peace of God”. The Council of Days may not just be a dream–but it sure is a surreal nightmare.

11. Madam Sara 

Madam Sara in The Sorceress of the Strand (1903) created by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace is on this list because she defies the most basic rule of detective fiction: good triumphs over evil, and the detective always captures the criminal. Madame Sara is a versatile and cunning criminal whose machinations thwart the attempts of sleuths Dixon Druce and Eric Vandeleur to bring her to justice for “blackmail, murder, and other crimes presumably too fiendish for the texts to explicate fully”. Female and foreign (she is half-Indian and half-Italian), she may not be a PC arch-villain, but as Ellery Queen put it, she “made [traditional] rogues like Colonel Clay and Raffles look like sissies.” 

12. Big Brother

It was not even a match let alone an even match. The nemesis in George Orwell’s 1984 is this enigmatic entity, the invisible dictator of Oceania, but it wasn’t even clear whether he exists or he is merely a propaganda tool created by the ruling elite of the Party. In Orwellian society, everyone under complete surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens, a fact that is constantly being reminded by the phrase “Big Brother is watching you”. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith finally succumbed to the “love” (the most awful euphemism if there is one) to Big Brother, who apparently demands sacrifices as if he were an Aztec god. Unlike many villains in other novels, Big Brother wasn’t defeated in the book. People like Alan Moore in V for Vendatta tried to show the collapse of such an Orwellian society, but in fact, it took a society to overcome this omniscient, omnipresent entity. 

 

Dishonorable Mention:

Javert

Inspector Javert who hunts down the protagonist of the novel, Les Misérables (written by Victor Hugo), Jean Valjean, is frequently voted as a villain although he isn’t one in the book. A devotee of the Law, he closely pursues Valjean, but when he finally sees Valjean’s brave and kind acts, he has an epiphany: Javert can be justified neither in letting Valjean go nor in arresting him. Faced with a choice between the Law and his morals–a conundrum that imploded his sanity–Javert drowns himself in the river Seine.

Literature’s Most Touching Love Triangles

My Tribute to Valentine Day

Rhett Butler & Scarlett O’ Hara & Ashley Wilkes

It was the greatest love story that never was. In 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell tells the story of young and adventurous Scarlett O’Hara during and after the Civil War. Scarlett believes she loves Ashley Wilkes, her aristocratic neighbour. She disdained the disreputable war profiteer Captain Rhett Butler although they had much in common. When Wilkes married another girl, Scarlett married one Charles Hamilton out of spite. Someone who repeatedly challenges gender roles of her time, Scarlett also embodies the general lifestyle of the Civil War South in her mixed feelings for the Southern gentleman Ashley and her attraction to the sardonic, opportunistic Rhett Butler. After much misfortune, Scarlett finally realizes she really loved Rhett, who by then had grown tired of waiting for her affection. The novel ends on an ambiguous note, with Scarlett vowing to find away to win Rhett back. 

Fitzwilliam Darcy-Elizabeth Bennet-George Wickham

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the readers see the unfolding plot through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet, the intelligent, lively and attractive daughter of the Bennet family. At her village ball, she met Fitzwilliam Darcy, who is apparently bored with the ball, and who snubs her at a public dance. Her gullibility and her tendency to judge on first impressions separated her and Mr. Darcy at first. She instead favored George Wickham who made up a story defaming Darcy. Elizabeth’s initial refusal of his proposal for marriage and Darcy’s subsequent letter that defends his wounded honour and denounces Wickham defined and changed the novel’s course. When Elizabeth finally realizes that her feelings for Darcy have come full circle, she accepts Darcy’s second proposal. Thus ended the novel, and began a thousand sequels.

Jane Eyre-Edward Rochester-St. John Rivers

“Reader, I married him.” opens the last chapter of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The novel goes through five distinct stages: her orphaned childhood, her education, her time as the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her employer, Edward Rochester, her time with the Rivers family, and her reunion with Rochester. After her first meeting with Rochester, she nearly married him, an ugly, moody yet Byronic gentleman before a lawyer announced that Rochester is still married to a madwoman whom he keeps imprisoned in the attic. Jane left Rochester, only to reunite with him after the mad wife set fire to Thornfield Manor (killing herself, and causing Rochester to lose a hand and eyesight). Rochester fears that she will refuse to marry a blind cripple, but Jane accepts him without hesitation. 

The Karenins and Alyosha Vronsky

A married woman, Anna Karenina come to Moscow to salvage the marriage of her brother, Stiva. Upon her arrival in Moscow, a railway worker accidentally falls in front of a train and is killed. Anna interprets this as an “evil omen.” Count Alyosha Vronsky soon falls in love with Anna after he meets her at the station and later dances the mazurka with her at a ball. Although Anna initially tries to reject him, she eventually succumbs to his courting, and confesses to her husband. The difficulties in her getting a divorce from her husband, a potentially bitter custody battle and Anna’s childbirth distanced two lovers eventually. In a jealous rage, Anna threw herself under a train like the railway worker in the first part of the novel. Vronsky finally realizes his guilt at Anna’s death and faces a life made more tragic than death by his own shortcomings

Le Chevalier Des Grieux, Manon Lescaut and Synnelet 

In the short novel Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost, ennobled and rich le Chevalier Des Grieux forfeits his hereditary wealth and incurs the disappointment of his father by running away with Manon. In Paris, the young lovers enjoy a blissful cohabitation, while Des Grieux struggles to satisfy Manon’s taste for luxury. Manon usually leaves him for a richer man but the two younger lovers were always reunited by their mutual affection. They finally settle down in New Orleans, where the Governor’s nephew, Synnelet sets his sights on Manon. In the duel that ensued, Des Grieux knocks the nephew unconscious, and thinking he had killed the man, the couple flee New Orleans. In the wilderness of Louisiana, Manon dies of exposure and exhaustion. Des Grieux returns to France to become a cleric after burying his beloved. 

Jay Gatsby and the Buchanans

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Gatz fell in love with Daisy Fay before the war, but he lost Daisy due to their different social standings. After the war, Gatz became a millionaire after being involved with the bootleggers. He reinvents himself changing his name to Jay Gatsby, get a mansion near where Daisy (now Mrs. Buchanan) lives, and hosts parties in the hope that she will visit. With the help of the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, two rekindles their love. However, a hit-and-run incident in Gatsby’s car (driven by Daisy at that moment) complicates the matters. The victim’s husband finds Gatsby floating in his pool and kills him before committing suicide nearby, thus ending Gatsby’s American Dream and Fitzgerald’s ambitious novel. 

Werther, Lotte and Albert

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe is written as an epistolary novel from the point of a young artist Werther, who retreat to a small village of Wahlheim to flee from an unwanted romantic entanglement. Thus, it was especially ironic when he meets and falls in love with Charlotte (or Lotte), a beautiful young girl who is taking care of her siblings. She is engaged to a man 11 years her senior named Albert. Werther cultivates a close friendship with both of them to be near to Lotte, but his letters become more and more incoherent after Charlotte and Albert marries. Out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, Lotte convinces Werther not to visit her. After his last visit, and memorable and torrid recitation of “Ossian”, Werther shoots himself in the head. He doesn’t expire until 12 hours later. 

Humbert Humbert, Dolores Haze and Clare Quilty 

Recounted by the narrator who chose to be called by his pseudonym Humbert Humbert, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most marginalized novels of our time. Humbert lodges with a widow Charlotte Haze and later marries her just to be near to her daughter, Dolores (Lolita). When Charlotte discovers it, she is horrified; she bolts from the house but is struck and killed by a passing motorist. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp and intends to use sleeping pills on Lolita, but instead, she seduces Humbert. Driving Lolita around the country, Humbert falls genuinely in love with her. Their strange situation is further complicated by the presence of Clare Quilty, himself a pedophile and pornographer, with whom Lolita finally absconds. Humbert finally learnt that Lolita married an old, deaf war vetern after being abandoned by Quilty. Humbert confronts and murders Quilty and is arrested for murder. Lolita herslef dies during childbirth. 

Tess Durbeyfield, Alex D’Urberville and Angel Clare

In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the impoverish Durbeyfields send their daughter Tess to work with the aristocratic D’Urbervilles after learning that they are closely related. There, Tess is seduced and raped by Alec d’Urberville. In her next job as a milkmaid, she falls in love with a travelling farmer’s apprentice, Angel Clare. She tries to tell Angel her indiscretions, but the letter she sent gets lost under a rug. When Angel learns the truth, Angel leaves her to go to Brazil. Meanwhile, Tess started living with Alec D’Urberville again. However, when Angel returns, Tess confronts Alec and stabs Alec through the heart with a carving knife, killing him. Tess flees with Angel but their sojourn ends with a romantic night at Stonehenge, when the police arrest Tess and she was executed. 

Lord and Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellor

D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” is about Lady Constance Chatterly’s unhappy marriage to wealthy mine owner Sir Clifford Chatterly. His war wounds made him paralyzed and impotent and she begins to explore her sexual feelings else where–namely with Sir Clifford’s game keeper, Oliver Mellor’s. Although Mellors initially shuns her due to the class distance between them, they meet by chance at a hut in the forest and have sex. Many torrid meetings later, she becomes pregnant, and she seeks a divorce from Sir Clifford. He refuses to give her a divorce and this leaves Lady Chatterly and Oliver waiting only in the hope that Sir Clifford may die. When Connie returns from her vacation in Venice, she finds Mellors’ old wife has returned, causing a scandal. The novel ends the couple waiting for their respective divorces, with the hope that, in the end, they will be together.

The 10 Most Exclusive College Societies

The Seven Society, University of Virginia

The Seven Society, founded in 1905, is the most secretive of all university collegiate societies. Members’ names are only revealed after their death, when a wreath of black magnolias in the shape of a “7″ is placed at the gravesite, and the bell tower of the University Chapel chimes seven times at seven-second intervals on the seventh dissonant chord when it is seven past the hour. Nothing much is known about the society, and legends note that of eight men who planned to meet for a card game, only seven showed up,[4] and they formed the society. How the members are chosen are of an equal mystery. The only known method to contact the Seven Society is to place a letter at the Thomas Jefferson statue inside the University’s historic Rotunda, but one visible sign of society–the number 7 logo surrounded by the signs for alpha, omega, and infinity and several stars—adorn many buildings on the grounds of the University.

The Flat Hat Club, William & Mary

The oldest student club founded in the United States is the Flat Hat Club, founded in 1750 at the College of William and Mary, which proudly counted Thomas Jefferson as one of its members. The initials of the F.H.C. Society doesn’t stand for Flat Hat Club, but for Latin, “Fraternitas, Humanitas, et Cognitio” (“brotherhood, humaneness, and knowledge”). The founding fathers of the modern fraternity traditions, the “brothers” of the F.H.C. devised and employed a secret handshake, wore a silver membership medal, issued certificates of membership, and met regularly for discussion and fellowship. The society ceased to exist during the American Revolution and WWII, and fully revived only in 1972. [The Flat Hat refers to a graduation cap.]

The Corps Hannovera Göttingen, Georg August University

One of the oldest German Student Corps (Studentenverbindung), the Corps Hannovera Göttingen was founded in 1809 at the Georg August University of Göttingen. The name was chosen because the founders called the Kingdom of Hanover their home. It is a founder member of the Kösener Senioren-Convents-Verband (KSCV), the oldest governing body of student associations in Germany and Austria. A fencing society, Hannovera is a stringent follower of the blue principle—the promotion of gentlemanly conduct and social behaviour, as well as the common principles of tolerance and democracy. Its members wear cap and tricoloured sash, and its motto is Nunquam retrorsum, fortes adiuvat fortuna! (Never backward, fortune favours the bold). Corps Hannovera’s parties in their club house (Corpshaus) are the best parties in the town.

The Philomathean Society, University of Pennsylvania

The oldest continuously-existing literary society in the United States, the Philomathean Society took its name from the Greek word for “a lover of learning.”The Society emphasizes the arts of rhetoric, oratory, and writing and its three-step membership process reflects this. Governed by a Cabinet of eight officers (Moderator, First Censor, Second Censor, Scriba, Recorder, Treasurer, Librarian, Archivist), the society meets eight times per semester on the top floor of College Hall, and has regular afternoon teas with professors and sponsors. The Society publishes several books and anthologies every year, and was the publisher of the first complete English translation of the Rosetta Stone—a translation done by three undergraduates. The motto is sic itur ad astra (“thus we proceed to the stars”).

Final Clubs of Harvard

Increasingly stigmatized by their elitism, sexism and racism are the final clubs of Harvard. There are eight all-male clubs, whose reputations are marred by the frequent charges of sexual assaults and five all-female clubs, and most clubs have historical traditions that make them more of a reflection of Harvard’s predominantly white, trust-fund wealthy, Protestant past. The societies differ greatly in their exclusivity, wikipedia notes, “the clubs have an undergraduate membership of around sixty a piece, amounting to nearly 20% of the eligible male undergraduates and 5% of eligible female undergraduates. Some final clubs often hold parties and open their doors to women and male guests of members. Others, like the A.D., have only in recent history opened their doors to female guests of members and still do not allow male guests. Porcellian never allows non-members past “the bicycle room” in the building’s foyer, while the Delphic permits its guests access only to its basement by a separate entrance.

St. A’s. Columbia

Although the chapters of the Society of Saint Anthony (or commonly St. Anthony Hall) now exists all over the United States, the society still retains its secrecy, exclusivity and gravitas. The national chapters are known variously as social fraternities, clubs, secret societies, or literary clubs, but Columbia’s original society is known for its members’ extraordinary wealth. Founded in 1847, St. A’s at Columbia is usually at the center of controversy because of the alleged discrimination practiced by the young men and women of the society. Although Baird’s Manual referred it in 1897 as “the most secret of all the college societies,” and many novelists, some as prestigious as F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote slantingly about it, the society’s mystic as a secret society slowly withered as it expended its chapters.

Quills and Daggers, Cornell

First of the Ivy League Honors societies to open its membership to women, Quill and Dagger society, founded in 1893, recognizes exemplary undergraduates at Cornell University. Many professors, deans, trustees and administrators themselves are the alumnae of the prestigious society, and so are many famous American businessmen and CEOs. The society also has been responsible for starting numerous campus traditions. The meetings and proceedings of Quill and Dagger are closed, and the society’s activities on campus are typically concealed. The public is not admitted to the society’s sanctuary on the top floor of Lyon Tower.

Skull and Bones, Yale

The most secretive of all societies on this page is Yale’s Skull and Bones, which was formed in 1832. Alternately referred to as The Brotherhood of Death or Eulogia, the society’s macabre emblem is a skull with crossed bones, over a mysterious number “322″. The Skull & Bones Hall is known as “Tomb”, and members meet in the “tomb” on Thursday and Sunday evenings of each week over the course of their senior year. Some accuse Bonesmen of involving in Satanic practices in the tomb or conspiracy theories. Every year, fifteen seniors on the society “tap” fifteen new junior members to replace them. Although this is the highest honor a Yale undergraduate can receive, historically many members has been drawn from the same great American families. Members are assigned nicknames, chosen from literature. The society also owns an island retreat in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York named Deer Island. Another equally secretive group, Scroll and Key exists on the Yale campus.

Cambridge Apostles, Cambridge

Many don’t fail to notice that many energetic people who participated in Cambridge Union (the university’s debating society) ends up in the British Parliament. However, even more exclusive than the Union is the other debating society, the Cambridge Conversazione Society, known commonly as the Cambridge Apostles. Founded in 1820, the society takes its name from the idea that its members are the 12 cleverest students at Cambridge. The members were traditionally chosen from King’s and Trinity Colleges [Great court of Trinity College, above] (though this is no longer the case). Once a week, on Saturday evenings, a debate and discussion is held while the members eat sardines on toast, called “whales”. The Apostles retain a leather diary of their membership stretching back to its founder (George Tomlinson, who went on to become the Bishop of Gibraltar), which includes handwritten notes about the topics each member has spoken on. Former members are called “angels” and undergraduates being considered for membership are called “embryos.” Becoming an Apostle involves taking an oath of secrecy and listening to the reading of a curse, originally written by Apostle Fenton Hort, the theologian in 1851. The Apostles became known outside Cambridge because of the infamous Cambridge spy ring, in which two “angels” were found to have passed information to the KGB.

Bullington Club, Oxford

Satirized again and again inside the British High Society and inside the House of Lords and Commons for its excessive rowdiness and destructive binges, the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University is a club that England loves to hate. The New York Times informed, it is “the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the ‘young bloods’ of the university”. Founded around 1780 as a hunting and cricket club, the club slowly evolved into a dining club at towards the end of the 19th century. Extreme drunkenness and destruction of private property (usually windows, glasses) usually couple the club meets, which led to the club being banned for long periods of time from the University. The membership is only by invitation, and membership elections are held twice a year, when successful new members are visited in their rooms, which are then ‘trashed’ as a symbol of their election. [In above photo, current opposition leader David Cameron is in the back row on the left.]

….Things that Never Were

A Tudor who Never Was

In 1931, Anthony Hall (1898-1947), a former Shropshire police inspector wrote a letter to Britain’s King George V., saying he had a better claim to the throne than King George V., since, he wrote, he claimed his ancestry back to Thomas Hall, a “bastard son” of Henry VIII. Tall, polite and always impeccably dressed, Anthony Hall charmed the working class. His populist ideas, such as plans to scrap taxes, pay off the national debt, build thousands of police stations and set up a Ministry of Pleasure to “revive the ancient merry times” drew up to 800 people, united under a banner: “A New King, A New Country”. His other (more ridiculous) promises include plans to rebuild Tudor style homes and to popularize portrait painting. Buckingham Palace unsuccessfully tried to declare him insane. Later, he was shortly arrested for using “quarrelsome and scandalous language”. Hall died in 1947 leaving no male heirs, thus effectively ending the ‘Tudor dynasty’.

 

An Emperor who Never Was

Hall tried to claim the English throne, but an English Jew named Joshua Abraham Norton went a step further and claimed the non-existent throne of the United States. Unhinged by financial ruin, Joshua Norton turned up in California with an ill-fitting naval uniform with tarnished gold braid and a sabre. Storming into the California Legislature, he proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States, and later, Protector of Mexico. ‘The Emperor’ made a point of appearing at all public functions, where he was received with honor. The best restaurants dined him and his dogs for free. He attended in a front row seat all sessions of the Legislature at Sacramento. Banks cashed his modest, worthless checks and people took his imperial banknotes bearing 7% interest, which he promised to redeem in 1880. That year Norton I died. Ten thousand San Franciscans attended his funeral. In 1934, he was reburied under a tombstone that vaunted: NORTON I, EMPEROR OF THE UNITED STATES AND PROTECTOR OF MEXICO

 

The Land that Never Was

In 1817, a Scottish man Gregor MacGregor, captured Amelia Island, Florida from the Spanish and began his crusade against Spain in the Caribbeans. Returning to London as a hero, MacGregor published a guidebook supposedly written by one Captain Thomas Strangeways. In the book was a description of the Territory of Poyais, a tiny nation on the Bay of Honduras, fertile with untapped resources of gold and silver. In 1822, MacGregor raised a loan with the total of £200,000 in behalf of the Poyais government and also started selling land rights. When wanna-be settlers arrived in South America, they only found an untouched jungle. Under the harsh conditions, 180 of the 250 settlers perished. However, survivors refused to believe that noble-looking MacGregor (now self-styled Sir Gregor) was the main culprit. They blamed Sir Gregor’s advisers and publicists for spreading the false information, and the ‘colonists’ at Poyais for abandoning the colony. Meanwhile, MacGregor had absconded for Paris where he published a new constitution of Poyais declaring himself as the head of state. The French were less gullible and they publicly denounced him. A lonely broken man, “Poyais humbug” failed to reclaim his earlier successes and died unlamented in Venezuela in 1845.

 

The Man who Never Was

At 4:30 in the morning of April 30th 1943, the corpse of ‘Major Martin’ began his only battle. Secretly buried at sea from the British submarine Seraph, Martin was the strangest hero of W.W. II—a principle actor in a plan named Operation Mincemeat to convince the Germans that the Allied attack on Europe would take place on Sardinia, not Sicily. Major Martin never existed–British Intelligence officials, faced with the problem of finding a suitable corpse, selected a soldier who had died from pneumonia, for an autopsy would reveal water in the lungs and seem to prove that the victim had drowned. On his body were a bank overdraft of pound 80, a photograph of his supposed fiancee, a £53 bill for an engagement ring, and torn tickets for a London show. Because the corpse looked “too hopelessly dead,” another “double” was photographed for the identity card. Most importantly of all, Martin carried a letter personally signed by Lord Mountbatten which ended with a simple pun designed to trick the Germans into believing the Allied assault would be on Sardinia: “Let me have him [Martin] back, please, as soon as the assault is over. He might bring some sardines with him–they are on points here!” The Germans discovered the body and sent the letter to Hitler himself. Days later British Intelligence learned that the Germans had begun sending large reinforcements to Sardinia. When the Allies invaded Sicily, Field Marshal Rommel said that the failure of the German defenses was “a result of a diplomatic courier’s body being washed up off Spain.”

 

The Donation that Never Was

A ninth-century manuscript residing in Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, named “Constitutum domini Constantini imperatoris” is better known as the Donation of Constantine. It was believed to have been issued by the fourth century Roman Emperor Constantine I, granting the Popes of the Roman Catholic Church dominion over lands in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, as well as the city of Rome, with Italy and the entire Western Roman Empire. The text claims that the Donation was Constantine’s gift to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith, baptizing him and miraculously curing him of leprosy. The document is now believed to be a forgery made by Pope Stephen II to persuade Carolingian King Pepin the Short to donate his lands in Italy. The impact of this fictitious document was undeniable—these lands would become the Papal States and would become the basis of the Papacy’s secular power for the next eleven centuries.

 

The Sale that Never Was

One of the greatest con men in history, Victor Lustig (above rightmost, seen leaving prison) had his finest hour in trying to sell the Eiffel Tower. It was 1925. France was recovering from the First World War. In a Parisian newspaper, Lustig saw an article discussing the problems the city was encountering in maintaining the Eiffel Tower. Posing as an anonymous government official high up in the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, Lustig summoned six important scrap metal merchants to a meeting at one of the top hotels in Paris, where he explained that the city could not afford to maintain the Eiffel Tower and so wanted to sell it for scrap – although everything had to be kept utterly secret to avoid a public outcry. Lustig even gave the merchants a full tour of the Tower, enabling them to see it all at first hand, before inviting their secret bids the following day. He even took bribes from Andre Poisson, who ‘won’ the bid. Embarrassed, Poisson could never bring himself to go to the police. Lustig returned to the city a month later and attempted the same trick with six more scrap metal merchants. This time, however, the police were informed. Eventually, Lustig was arrested in the US for counterfeiting and died in jail in 1947.

 

The Fortune that Never Was

In 1881, Therese Humbert received a letter from an American millionaire Robert Henry Crawford, whose life she saved two years ago. The letter stated that Crawford had died and made her a beneficiary in his will. The will said that Therese was to look after the family fortune, which was locked in a safe, until her younger sister, Marie, was old enough to marry one of Crawford’s two nephews. In fact, there were no American millionaire named Crawford and Therese created the entire hoax. The story of the inheritance enabled Therese and her husband to obtain loans and improve their lifestyle. The larger loans were raised to cover the interest on the original loans and for 20 years, the Humberts were lived in luxury atop their pyramid scheme. By 1902, financiers realized that the amount of the inheritance would not be enough to cover all the loans. Calls were made for the safe to be opened. When it was opened, the authorities found a brick and an English halfpenny, but by this time the Humberts had disappeared. They were arrested in Madrid in December, 1902. Infamous trial (above) ensued. Therese was jailed for five years and her two brothers, who had played the fictitious nephews of the non-existent Robert Crawford, were sentenced to two and three years each.

 

The War that Never Was

Berwick was historically a royal burgh on the Scottish border. Traditionally, it was regarded as a special, separate entity, and some proclamations referred to “England, Scotland and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. It was claimed that in the Declaration of the War against Russia in 1853, Queen Victoria supposedly signed as “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions”. However, when the Treaty of Paris (1856) was signed to conclude the war, “Berwick-upon-Tweed” was left out. This meant that one of Britain’s smallest towns was officially at war with one of the world’s mightiest powers for over a century. An investigation in 1970 disputed the story: although Berwick was not mentioned in the Treaty of Paris, it was not mentioned in the declaration of war either. However, only four years earlier, in 1966, a Soviet official waited upon the Mayor of Berwick and town councillors to sign a peace treaty. The mayor quipped: “Please tell the Russian people that they can sleep peacefully in their beds.”

 

The Country that Never Was

The killing of many thousands of Ibo tribesman in Northern Nigeria in 1966 plunged the country into the civil war. Home to around 8,500 Ibos, South Eastern region of Biafra declared itself to be independent (and it remained independent for three years). Biafra’s ‘President’, Oxford-educated Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, then 34, tapped a medical officer Albert Nwazu Okonkwo to lead the province of Benin. As Nigerian forces were to retake the province, Okonkwo declared the independence of the Republic of Benin at 07:00 on 19 September 1967. The republic lasted a little more than a day. On 20 September 1967, it was terminated as Nigerian forces recaptured the province. It was not recognised, not even by its “parent” country, Biafra, mainly because of the brevity of its existence.

 

The Book that never was

English explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton was a man who never shied away from sex and sexuality. He translated The Book of One Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. He frequented brothels on his expeditions. Burton also translated The Perfumed Garden, a seminal work of erotic literature, but his translation was incomplete, apparently because the latter chapters concerned homosexuality and pederasty. When Burton died towards the end of 1890, he was working on a new translation of the original manuscript, which included the exised chapter. This translation was never published as Burton’s religious wife Isabel burned the manuscript soon after his death—despite being offered six thousand guineas for it. She regarded the burned manuscript as his “magnum opus,” and she said she was acting to protect her husband’s reputation, and imagined she was instructed to burn the manuscript by his spirit.

10 Greatest Monopolies

Some used shrewd business decisions, some illegal practices. In some instances, states sponsored it, in some, the nature of the market promulgated it. No matter how they rose (and fell), these monopolies gained more than money. They achieved something some governments dare not dream: power, influence and enduring legacy:

1. Standard Oil

History’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller, presided over an oil monopoly a century before the Middle East sheiks do. Formed in 1870 mainly by John D., who had already made a substantial fortune by commodities trade during the Civil War, Stanford Oil incorporated oil producing, transporting, refining, and marketing into one single behemoth which grew both vertically and horizontally (purchase of producers and distributors). In 1882, all of Standard Oil’s properties were merged into the Standard Oil Trust, and by the end of the decade (1890), it controlled 88% of the refined oil flows in the United States. That same year, the Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act — the source of all American anti-monopoly laws – which was used two years later against Standard Oil. In 1911, the corporate behemoth was divided into smaller companies (which included many currently famous oil companies Amoco, Texco, Exxon, Chevron) but the monopoly wasn’t broken because the old John D. still controlled all those smaller companies. The real competition began only years later when Rockefeller’s heirs sold the inherited shares.

2. Salt Commission

In Tang China, (618-907 AD), the Salt Commission is one of the most influential agencies. After a peasant revolution, the land tax revenues fell in China and salt commission was created in 758 (based on Guanzi, a book written in 3^rd century BC book which proposes various salt taxation methods) to intensify the taxation of salt. Salt was essential for its nutritional and preservational values. Since the government controlled all major salt productions, the Tang dynasty was able to maintain th virtual monopoly on the salt trade, and benefited greatly from allocating licensed producers and licensed merchants. The enfranchising of licensed merchants enabled the imposition of the policy even to the further reaches of the nation. The revenues from salt taxation of salt slowly exceeded half of tax revenues within a few years of its inception, and by 1300 AD, it was creating 80% of all tax revenues in China. Although the salt commission began and ended with the Tang dynasty, the state monopoly on salt in China existed from sometime in 1^st century BC to the end of Imperial China in early 20^th century, making it the most enduring monopoly of all time.

3. De Beers

For a firm that started out by renting water pumps to miners during a diamond rush, De Beers succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founder, Cecil Rhodes. In 1888, De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed with the sole purpose to be the owner of all diamond mining operations in South Africa. Using his colonial influences, Rhodes negotiated a strategic agreement with the London-based Diamond Syndicate in 1889, which fixed diamond prices. Whenever a new mine is discovered, it is absorbed into the De Beers cartel. At its height in the middle of the 20^th century, De Beers controlled 80% of the diamond market. Discovery of new mines in Russia, Canada, and Australia ended De Beers monopoly but De Beers is now more profitable today with a 40% market share than when it maintained an 80% market share.

4. Dutch East India Company

Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), established in 1602, was the world’s first multinational and mega- corporation, which possessed quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, negotiate treaties, coin money, and establish colonies. It is only natural that it also coined the standards for monopolies. To counter English and Portuguese colonial expansions, the Dutch government in 1602 sponsored “United East Indies Company” that was granted a monopoly over the Asian trade. The charter of the new company empowered it to build forts, maintain armies, and conclude treaties with Asian rulers. To establish its monopoly for the spice trade, the entire native populations in Indonesia were deported, decimated or enslaved in the Dutch plantations that replaced them. Although by 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, a series of mismanagements and colonial encroachments by other great powers bankrupted the VOC in 1800.

5. Thurn and Taxis Mail

In 1489, Jeannetto de Tassis was appointed Chief Master of Postal Services in Italy. From that moment on to the early years of the 19^th century, his descendants, Thurn and Taxis family held its virtual monopoly on mail and postal services through a letters of grant and nobility given by Holy Roman Emperors Frederick III, Maximilian I and Charles V. In 1615, the position, Imperial Postmaster General was made hereditary. In its heydays at the end of the 18^th century, it took only forty hours to a letter from Paris to reach Brussels. The family’s horse relay system that connected nearly all of European capitals was the gold standard in communication. However, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars greatly disrupted the family business. In 1867, postal monopoly was nationalized. By then, the family had diversified into a various other enterprises from foodstuffs to banking to to railroads and to this day, the family is one of the richest families in Europe.

6. Pan Am Airways

Thurn and Taxis monopoly may be broken, but the importance of communication and transportation (and monopoly producing power of it) was not. For the better part of the 20^th century, Pan American Airways dominated the airmail and transportation not only of the United States but also of both Americas. Founded in 1927, Pan Am greatly expended under Juan Trippe who bought out many independent carriers in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and in South America. To counter the competition from foreign companies, the U.S. government itself endorsed the airline as the “chosen instrument” for U.S. air routes. After the World War II, however, despite its enormous lobbying campaign in the Congress, Pan Am gradually lost its status as America’s international airline to various American and foreign carriers. By 1991, “World’s Most Experienced Airline,” was broke.

7. U.S. Steel

U.S. Steel’s alumni were who’s who of America industrialists. J. P. Morgan and Elbert H. Gary founded it in 1901. The steel operations were owned by Andrew Carnegie. Its first president was Charles M. Schwab. Within five years of its founding, the corporation had become the largest steel producer and largest corporation in the world (as well as the world’s first billion-dollar corporation). During WWII, the U.S. Steel spearheaded American war efforts, employing over 300,000 employees and producing 20-30 million tons of steel every year. However, after the war, the Corporation (as it was famously known) has become a leviathan that had outlived its usefulness. As early as 1911, the federal government tried to break up the corporate goliath (which initially controlled 67% of all the steel produced in America), but it was the American steel industry’s own lack of innovation and efficiency that doomed U.S. Steel. It now produces less than 10 percent of the steel used in America and employs less than 50,000 people.

8. Caviar

Caviar lined the Soviet coffers with gold during the Cold War. However, the Bolsheviks and the Communists are not the first in imposing the state monopoly on caviar. Although sturgeon and their eggs have been eaten by the Russians as early as the 8^th century BC, it was not until Ivan the Terrible’s time that sturgeon producing Northern Caspian region was annexed from Muslim Tatars. Caviar monopoly was enforced by Tsar Peter the Great, who also tried to introduce the delicacy to the fashionable French court (without much success). However, by the time it was reintroduced to the Western Europe in 1860, caviar had already became the symbol of Russian luxury, and the Tsarist state had slowly relaxed its monopoly laws. However, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the powerful Soviet Ministry of Fisheries reintroduced tight measures to conserve sturgeons and to maintain the high caviar prices. The collapse of the Soviet Union killed the state monopoly, but also opened the Pandora’s box of overfishing, pollution and caviar smuggling.

9. American Telephone and Telegraph

Originally founded by Alexander Graham Bell and his financiers, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company managed to corner the telecommunications market of the United States even though Bell’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894. Since it was expensive to place copper wires all over the country (for different companies) the U.S. government itself agreed to this natural monopoly of having one telephone company for the nation. In 1907, AT&T president Theodore Vail announced “One Policy, One System, Universal Service.”–a guideline which AT&T used to purchase competitors. In 1918, the federal government’s nationalization of telecommunication industry profited AT&T which won the contract for the laying out of a coast-to-coast telephone system (potential competitors were forbidden from installing new lines to compete, with state governments wishing to avoid “duplication.”) The ‘natural monopoly’ was broken in 1970s with new technologies slowly replacing copper wires approach. Upon the settlement of United States v. AT&T, AT&T was split into seven companies and the monopoly was ended.

10. HBC

The Hudson’s Bay Company (Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson) is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and is one of the oldest in the world. Once the de facto government of North America and later its largest landowner, the company controlled nearly all of fur trade in the New World from its headquarters at York Factory on Hudson Bay. Although the company’s monopoly on fur trade (chartered by England’s King Charles II) was never complete due to the small competitions from independent fur traders, its trade covered 3 million square miles (where settlements are forbidden by its monopoly rules ) and employed 1,500 traders. Its network of trading posts formed the nucleus for later official authority in many areas of Western Canada and the United States. The decline of the fur trade and a high-profile illegal fur trade trial in 1849 broke the monopoly, but the company evolved into a mercantile business selling vital goods to settlers in the Canadian West. Today the company is best known for its department stores throughout Canada.

Afterthought:

Demysterifying Hoover ….

 

What happens in the Hoover Institution stays in Hoover. Usually. Sometimes some debate about this bastion of conservatism spills over to the adjacent university, and all the hell breaks loose in Stanford. So how did the liberal West Coast’s premier university end up with a conservative thinktank on its campus?

The 84-year-old Hoover Institution is the legacy of former Republican President Herbert Hoover, a graduate of Stanford’s first class, who retired to Stanford after his disastrous presidency and presided over the cataloging of papers and documents he acquired in his early days. Until his death in 1960, Hoover ruled his institute (later renamed institution to rival East Coast’s Brooklyn Institution) with an ironfist from his ninth floor office at the Hoover Tower, Stanford campus’ most ironic and iconic building.

From shelves inside the lanky tower, the collection itself has expended greatly—now there are two annexed wings and a vast underground storage where the non-browsable library in tightly guarded. The institution’s treasures include the video footage of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima (one of the most requested archival items), a skull X-ray of Adolf Hitler (from which picture’s bad teeth appearances that experts deduced the Fuhrer has contracted some sort of STD) and recently, the Saddam Hussein papers—the diaries and governmental papers of the late Iraqi dictator which the university agreed to keep from public for next seven years.

Originally funded directly by the university, the institution now has an endowment of $450 million and is generously supported by donors–some famous, some controversial—which include Boeing, Exxon and Chrysler. However, more controversial than its donors themselves is the institution’s distinguished fellowship program. Originally named to distinguish itself from ordinary fellowship (which any scholar wishing to study at the institution can apply to), the Distinguished Fellowship are nominated by any of Hoover’s research taskforces in a process not much different from the one the university’s various departments use. However, since the Institution’s director is answerable to none but the President of the Stanford University, the nominations are usually scrutinized under a different light.

Distinguished fellows are usually invited to lead or to participate in the institution’s research departments, but under a system formulated by Mr. Hoover’s handpicked successor at the institution, W. Glenn Campbell, many of them ended up teaching in Stanford’s economics and political science departments—a fact the liberal student body cannot stomach. Distinguished or visiting fellows in the past included Newt Gingrich, George Shultz (whose honorary fellowship was commuted/demoted to a distinguished fellowship by the current director), Gen. John Abizaid, Edwin Meese, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Amy Zegart—the list has become Who’s who of Republican Party in recent years that under the Bush administration, as many as eight Hoover fellows sat on the Defense Policy Board advising Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who after his resignation would also be nominated for the fellowship.

Historically as well, Hoover has always been the centre of controversy. W. Glenn Campbell, director of Hoover from 1960-1989 was a staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan, whose crackdown on student protests of the Vietnam War he vocally supported. Meanwhile, his fundraising, which focussed on fighting communism abroad and on campus was frequently criticized. When Campbell turned 65, he fought vehemently against mandatory retirement age policy and secured a generous retirement package. Although his successor and the current director John Raisian hasn’t made any honorary fellow appointments in his 20-year tenure (and as he confided to me in a dinner last week, he hasn’t no plan to do so in near future), his predecessor did. As it is normally in the politicalized world, none of Campbell’s nominations (not of Margaret Thatcher, not of Ronald Reagan or not even that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn) were well-received. But it is with Mr. Rumsfeld that the sh*t hits….well, you get the idea.

Rumsfeld’s nomination being made in late August of 2007 before the university opened, many faculty members viewed this as Hoover’s deliberate attempt to overstep its authority, to downplay the issue before the students arrive and to bypass the university. Mr. Rumsfeld’s involvement in everything from Iraq War to torture to Abu Gharib was discussed bitterly. Usually politically removed, the faculty itself lend its voice of dissent to student petitions—an action which led to the Hoover Institution being examined by the Faculty Senate.

In front of the Faculty Senate, Raisian expressed his regrets that his nomination was misconstrued but he refused to withdraw the nomination. Mr. Rumsfeld’s own decision not to come to Stanford averted the potential crisis but not before the Standard Daily lampooned the choice with a mock headline: “Fidel Castro nominated as a Hoover Fellow”.

Like it or not, Hoover Institution is here to stay. In 2003, a political on-campus group, SCPJ (Stanford Community for Peace and Justice) petitioned the university’s president John Hennessy and John Raisian to change Hoover’s mission statement and its ‘partial’ political stance. The petition was not reviewed because it is not in par with the university’s policies. Meanwhile, the students may just have to be thankful that in 1987, the plans for the construction of Reagan Library on the campus (a plan not unsurprisingly endorsed by the Hoover Institution) were defeated in the board of trustees, which no doubt thought that the legacy of one Republican President is enough for this already politically divided campus.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ghosts of Politics Yet to Come….

Future. Such an enticing mistress–and an unfaithful one at that. I submit to you recent articles: 

 

The Nation That Fell To Earth,  Niall Ferguson

The article appeared in 5th 9/11 anniversary issue of TIME in 2006, as a look back from a generation removed (2031).

Predictions: “For a time, Bush’s approval ratings sank below Richard Nixon’s and Jimmy Carter’s worst. Yet history has been a kinder judge of Bush’s presidency. … on Nov. 3, 2008, [John] McCain conceded defeat to Mark Warner, the former Governor of Virginia…. To most Americans, the key issue in 2008 was … “the economy, stupid.” …. The Chinese stock-market crash sent a shock wave through the entire Asian economy. … Output collapsed. Unemployment soared. The Chinese banking system, which had never been entirely free of corruption, imploded.”

 

The Countdown to a Meltdown, James Fallow

The article appeared in June issue of The Atlantic magazine as a look back from two election cycles later (2016).

Predictions: An independent will win the White House in 2016. “But by dying when he did, at eighty-two, [Fidel Castro became] the “October surprise” of the 2008 campaign. … The fourth—and worst—world oil shock started [in 2008]. Our [unnamed] forty-fourth president seemed actually to welcome being universally known as “the Preacher.”" There came a market crash in 2009-2010. “Toyota’s acquisition of General Motors and Ford, in 2012, had a similar inevitability. … Political pros had always assumed that America’s first black president would be a Republican and a soldier, and they were right. He just didn’t turn out to be Colin Powell. … The Historic Campus of our best-known university, Harvard, is still prestigious worldwide. But its role is increasingly that of the theme park, like Oxford or Heidelberg, while the most ambitious students compete for fellowships at the Har-Bai and Har-Bei campuses in Mumbai and Beijing.”

 

Apocalypse Later: A Futurologist Looks Back at 2008, John Feffer 

The article appeared on August 21, 2008 at TomDispatch.com, as a nostalgic, apologetic look back from 2016.

Predictions: “[We thought] the new team in Washington … would close down Guantanamo and reverse the U.S. position on torture. They would begin the long process of withdrawing troops from Iraq. They would repeal the tax cuts for the wealthy and renegotiate the free trade agreements, and launch an Apollo-style program to develop alternative energies….  As it turned out, we were all wrong. But they came close enough. We finally signed the Kyoto agreement. The new administration made a big deal about it. The president gave the pen to Al Gore, who said that it meant more to him than the Nobel Prize and the Oscar combined.”

 

The Age of Mammals: Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century, Rebecca Solnit

Ms. Solnit writes this apocalyptic future of 2026 in the Republic of San Francisco as the year-end summary for Tomdispatch in 2006.

Predictions:  “By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two adversarial wings dubbed the Fundament party and the Conservatives, the American Empire was dismantling itself. Of course, the United States still nominally exists — we’ll pay a bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on July 4 — but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020. … Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can recite the lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of Bangladesh, the Amazon Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai lowlands. …. former President Bush the Younger, extradited from Paraguay [was] found guilty [for war crimes] in 2013.”

 

 

Tomorrow’s world war today, Niall Ferguson

The second of three Ferguson articles on the list. Although not a futurist (and he himself hates futurists), Mr. Ferguson shared his MidEast views for 2007-11 in this January 16, 2006 article in LA Times. 

Predictions: “More than two-fifths of the population of Iran had been aged 14 or younger in 1995. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007. Tehran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel Aviv. … The devastating thermonuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy; … the true significance of the 2007-11 war was to vindicate the Bush administration’s principle of preemption. For, if that principle had only been adhered to in 2006, Iran’s nuclear aspirations might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And then – hard though it is to imagine now – the Great Gulf War might never have happened.” Mr. Ferguson later defended his fiery article with an article equally controversial: One strike, Iran could be out. 

 

 

 

An imaginary retrospective of 2009, Niall Ferguson 

Niall Ferguson looks back from a year ahead (end of 2009)

Predictions: “Timothy Geithner, US Treasury secretary, requested an additional $300bn to provide further equity injections for Citigroup, Bank of America and the seven other big banks, just a week after imposing an agonising “mega-merger” on the automobile industry. … Japan was plunged back into the deflationary nightmare of the 1990s by yen appreciation and a collapse of consumer confidence.  Obama’s decision to fly to Tehran in June … produced a dramatic improvement in the Middle East region. Al-Qaeda’s bungled attempt to assassinate Obama – on the eve of Thanksgiving – only served to discredit radical Islamism and to reinforce Obama’s public image as “The One”.”  

Running Away from Revolutionary Road

Spoilers Alert: The latest movie from Sam Mendes is a little movie that could, but it is no American Beauty

Verdict: 7/10

There are a few things revolutionary about Revolutionary Road. It is about a couple living in the 1950s suburbia, who are united only by their defeated ambitions if by anything. Kate Winslet and Leonarod diCaprio in their first onscreen reunion since Titanic deliver powerful performances as April and Frank Wheeler. Into their life an array of character, including an insane mathematician John Givings, who provides the voice of conscience through his blunt observances and Mendes’ astute camera focuses. However, Givings’ voice was artificial, manufactured and reminiscent of Mendes’ earlier, more beautiful American Beauty.

From the first moment we met him, Frank Wheeler doesn’t have ambitions–he has ideas, whims and anti-ambitions. April, on the other hand, has a strong ambition to be an actress–an ambition perhaps tailored to her desires of escaping reality. Escapism is the prevailing mode in the movie–April wants to escape her suburban Stepford wife status; Frank wants to escape the conformity of the male-dominated workplace; all people in their surrounds try to find escapism somewhere or the other, whether it be in television, gossip about others, adultery or insanity.

April’s Great Escape plan to Paris, however, is not fueled by her love for the city life there, but by her unrealistic assumptions of life there, and by her desire to escape suburbia dead or alive. Frank also briefly shares this escapism, but after he managed to find another way to break the monotony of his office life (but not through adultery, the movie emphasizes), he finds his feet firmly on the ground of reality again.

The marriage of Frank and April is an example of the attraction of the polar opposites. However, when they began to live in two different worlds, the rift widens. Even Frank’s attempts to reforms the ways of  his citylife cannot heal the differences. In the end, to April, the child she is carrying becomes the fetters weighing her down. So she leaves by cutting those fetters loose, but not before leaving the scarlet letter of condemnation in her home, her prison.

To surmise, Revolutionary Road–not so-titled because the Wheelers are revolutionaries or they are traveling towards some cloud-cuckoo-land, but named after the road they reside–is a good movie. It is a big movie that explores a small facet of the 50s suburbia, before the woman liberation movement that switched gender roles between Kevin Spacey’s and Annette Benning’s characters in American Beauty. Despite engaging acting, the movie lacks certain elements, foists some onto the viewers (through John Givings) and overuses sex and running away as physical forms of escape.

The final scenes of other couples reminiscing the Wheelers serve as a testament to the fact that the rifts exist in all couples and that there are things even couples shouldn’t talk to each other about–their escapisms, for instance. Yes, that may be the reason we ourselves go to movies to escape too, but it is now almost cliched to see the movie couples trying to escape their two-dimensional confines too. If there is a lasting moral to Revolutionary Road, it is that by running away, we are no closer to our ambitions, aspirations and even destinies.

An Evening With A Tricky Dick

No, I didn’t see Nixon, but Musharraf was his natural successor. However, Stanford University’s hosting of former Pakistani President was not as eventful as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance in Columbia last year.

Magnanimity. The word sounds extremely ironic coming from General Pervez Musharraf—the former President of Pakistan—who displayed little of that in his eight year Presidency. However, magnanimity (on part of India and the international community) is exactly what Mr. Musharraf advocated to solve the recent crisis between India and Pakistan who arose form the Bombay terrorist attacks last month.

Mr. Pervez Musharraf gave a talk and a Q&A session to a packed Memorial Auditorium in Stanford University on his lecture tour on the United States. It is not an extraordinary event; many heads of state do that after they left the office to earn extra cash and to rehabilitate their popularity. (Note to President Bush: don’t do that, unless you want more shoes.) Surprisingly, Mr. Musharraf’s popularity also grew after his resignation last year, partially due to the economic rebound Pakistan witnessed under his rule and to even worse corruption levels in the government that succeeded him.

This polarizing attitude is reflected inside the Memorial Auditorium today. Musharraf said as little as possible (information-wise) in his own talk to the crowd, but the candid Q&A session was wildly received with both boos and cheers by one of the rowdiest audience I have ever seen in an academic setting. The first question-cum-accusation of an Indian student who listed Musharraf’s undemocratic acts starting from his coup d’etat was well-received; so was Musharraf’s strongman reply that he can go back to the podium and justify every single one of those accusations.

The mainstream media also reports this event: here and here. I see however from a totally different perspective. The event is just the reflection of the politics at its worst; Musharraf is a prime example of two classic adages: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Today, he talked about the global community’s shared commitments to defeat extremism and terrorism, but also defended his Pakistan’s questionable tactics in pursuing those commitments, by underlining the differences between strategies and tactics. However, it seemed Mr. Musharraf’s sole strategy was to remain in power and he no doubt used all tactics in the book.

Last year, A.Q. Khan—the Pakistani scientist accused of selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and DPRK—gave an interview to ABC News saying he had been made a scapegoat by Musharraf and his government to cover up the government’s own involvement in the issue. In this case of he says, she says, Musharraf apparently didn’t have much to say—he defended his detaining (without access even to the Western intelligent services) and somewhat contradictory pardon of A.Q. Khan by using that magic word: “sensitivity”.

On Afghanistan and Taliban, Mr. Musharraf is quick to admit failures but even quicker to point fingers at the West, which abandoned the region after the Cold War ended. Maybe Mr. Musharraf’s statement that CIA/Charlie Wilson’s War was the last nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin is correct, but the West’s sanctions on the Pakistan (which Mr. Musharraf dated to the end of the Cold War) didn’t occurred until Pakistan started pursuing its nuclear ambitions eight years later.

During the heated Q&A session, Musharraf stated he has constitutional authority to sack of the Chief Justice (although he didn’t elaborate on the justification) and that he didn’t consult the legislature because of a conflict of interest between the legislature and the judiciary. He also blamed the bad press he and Pakistan has been receiving to ‘aspersions’ which became an overused word by the end of the talk. He skillfully treaded around the controversial issues of misappropriated U.S. anti-terror assistance funds (by noting Pakistan only received a few billion, as opposed to many billions of aid) and of National Reconciliation Ordinance, which granted amnesty to politicos accused of various crimes which ranged from corruption to terrorism (by taking a shelter behind his empty facade of democracy).

By the end of the talk, Mr. Musharraf’s talk has become nothing but a vacillating effort to redeem his presidency. Whether he was talking about his control over military or Kashmiri crisis or his deportations of Al-Qaeda and Pakistanis to U.S. torture camps, he glorified himself and shifted the blame to the others (not unlike a certain U.S. president a generation before). In his main talk, Mr. Musharraf metaphorically pointed out the tree of terrorism, its branches and ramifications and repeatedly, ad nauseum, emphasized its roots being more political. Yes, I partially agree. Maybe politicians like Musharraf are the root of many problems.

The Tale of Two Webs

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, ending a symbolic ornament of the Cold War, the conflict that staked paranoia into the hearts of the people on the both sides of the wall. It has been twenty years since that chilly November morning, but since then, more walls has been created in Russia and China-the invisible ones that are far more segregative and deadlier than the Berlin Wall.

The walls are of course those instituted on the internet. It is true that a conglomerate can never monopolize a market like internet. That is the reason that we believe in little search engines that could like cuil. That explains why Orkut is phenomenal in India and Brazil and Friendster is in Asia in this age of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. However, in nowhere is this gap more prominent than in Russia, where they apparently have an entirely different internet structure.

A photoshop contest winner in Cracked.com asked us to harken back to the past, and ponder about the future

The Russians have Yandex, their own search engine. They have moiKrug.ru-the Russian equivalent of Linkedln. Instead of Facebook, they use vkontakte.ru, which copycats the former’s design. Instead of youtube, they have another clone, rutube.ru. This self-imposed segregation creates a internet society similar yet different from the West in Russia, something  a Soviet Russia which invented this own version of MonopolyTM will probably revel.

However, it is bad for the outside world. Through social networking, one can have friends from Estonia, New Zealand, Peru, Germany, and South Africa but it is less likely to get one from Russia because they have their own social spheres, which hinders communication and spreading information-the values which can make the world a safer, better place in this new century.

Russians may not be deliberately disassociating from the Western networks, but China actually is, on the other hand. Taking lessons from glasnost and perestroika, China has learnt to monitor the websites,  to control the information available, and to change history itself. To use a recently popular buzzword, China imposed ‘pay to play’ policy on Google and Yahoo! to comply with its ideological whims. And when even the prestigious organizations like the IOC yield to China, and when social networking got filtered (MySpace launched squeaky clean, non-political China version), you know it is bad times.

Nonetheless, the specter of internet is haunting China and Russia. We have seen the advance of Web 2.0-an age where everyone contributes to the community. It is time to usher in the era of Web 3.0-an age where everyone is spurred into an action, whether it may be environmental, social or political. The era has already begun with grassroot internet movement for Obama presidential campaign, and has the precedent in 2001’s ousting of Philippine President Joseph Estrada through a riot coordinated through text messaging.

In 1989, China’s democracy movement was crashed in the bloody square of Tienanmen [see China's efforts to change that history here] when the Politburo called in the troops from the far away provinces to quash the revolt. Imagine an era when the troops from afar feel equally compassionate and caring towards the revolting students. It is an era where globalization has bridged the gaps and information has spread its wings. It will be the era of Web 3.0-the era in which we truly transcends meager national boundaries to network and communicate, the era in which the web-coordinated governed supplants their puppet masters. It is an era I am looking forward to; it is an era we can achieve in our watch. Let a billion free netizens bloom.

I don’ approve of the following, but I thought these quotes are illuminating and reflective of a culture not far historical:

Thomas Jefferson on Immigration:

“They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. [Notes on Virginia]

….Uncle Thomas had pretty strong advice on racism, too…

“The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life….. [N]ature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America. I can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be as fast as the imbecility of their present existence….[U]nfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. [Notes on Virginia]

10 Famous Bridges

10. Chapel Bridge of Lucerne

The oldest wooden bridge in Europe and the most photographed entity in Switzerland,  the Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge) spanning the Reuss River in Lucerne was built in 1333. Originally designed to protect the city from attacks, the original bridge and its paintings dating from the 17^th century were destroyed in a 1993 fire. The bridge is over 200 m long and adjoining it is the 43 m Wasserturm (Water Tower), an octagonal tower made from brick, which has served as a prison, torture chamber, watchtower and treasury. Today the tower, which is part of the city wall, is the guild hall of the artillery association.

 

9. Brooklyn Bridge

One of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, the Brooklyn Bridge, designed in 1867, was the dream of John A. Roebling, the inventor of wire cable and an accomplished bridge builder. Roebling was injured while surveying the property and died of tetanus before the bridge was built. Fourteen years later, the project was completed by Roebling’s daughter-in-law, Emily. The gothic towers of the bridge are entirely of granite, and the roadway platform is supported by two-inch diameter steel suspenders strung from two pairs of cables – the catenaries – sixteen inches in diameter. The opening of the bridge in 1883 was marred by the deaths of twelve pedestrians, who were trampled during a panic set off by an anonymous shouted warning that the bridge was in danger of imminent collapse.

 

8. The Bridge of Sighs (Venice, Oxford and Cambridge)

The view from the Bridge of Sighs in Venice is said to be the last view of the fabulous city that convicts saw before their imprisonment. The bridge name, given by Lord Byron in the 19th century, comes from the suggestion that prisoners would sigh at their final view of beautiful Venice out the window before being taken down to their cells under the palace roof. In reality, the days of inquisitions and summary executions were over by the time the bridge was built, and the questioned cells were then occupied mostly by small-time criminals. A Venetian legend says that lovers will be assured eternal love if they kiss on a gondola at sunset under the bridge.

In 1914, a bridge, connecting the Old and New Quadrangles of Hertford College, Oxford was designed by Sir Thomas Jackson. It has since been referred as the “Bridge of Sighs” because of its supposed similarity to the famous Venetian bridge. In Cambridge also, there is a bridge named “Bridge of Sighs”. The bridge is one of Cambridge’s main tourist attractions and reputedly a favorite spot of Queen Victoria. Locals jest that the bridge is named in reference to the sound that Cambridge students make as they cross the bridge on their way out of exams.

 

7. Bridge to Nowhere

Gravina Island Bridge, a proposed road bridge over the Tongass Narrows to the town of Ketchikan in Alaska, became a controversial topic of the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaigns. The bridge was proposed to replace the ferry that connects Gravina Island’s 50 residents and the Ketchikan International Airport, and projected to cost $400 million. Members of the Alaskan congressional delegation were the bridge’s biggest advocates in Congress, and the bridge became an egregious symbol of pork barrel spending.

 

6. Stari Most

Mostar is a city and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the biggest and the most important city in Herzegovina. Mostar, on the Neretva river, was named after its Old Bridge, Stari Most, and its side-towers,   “the bridge keepers” (Mostari). The bridge was commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1557 to replace an older wooden suspension bridge. Charged under pain of death to construct a bridge of such unprecedented dimensions, the architect reportedly prepared for his own funeral on the day the scaffolding was finally removed from the completed structure. Upon its completion it was a technical marvel and contained the widest man-made arch in the world. The bridge was destroyed by the Croatians during the Bosnian War in 1993, to erase any sign of Ottoman architecture in Bosnia. After the end of the war, the bridge was rebuilt with the help of UNESCO. Its 1,088 stones were shaped according to the original techniques in a reconstruction that cost €12 million. It reopened in 2004.

It is traditional for the young men of the town to leap from the bridge into the Neretva. As the Neretva is very cold, this is a very risky feat and only the most skilled and best trained divers will attempt it. The practice dates back to the time the bridge was built, but the first recorded instance of someone diving off the bridge is from 1664.

 

5. The Bridge on the River Kwai

Originally a novel by Pierre Boulle (Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai), it is adapted into a movie which won seven Oscars, including the Best Picture and the Best Director, despite a controversy over the book’s portrayal of collaboration with the enemy in the building of the infamous Burma Railway. The bridge pictured in the movie is actually built (and destroyed) in Sri Lanka, and it is a fictive amalgamation of many railway bridges constructed over the Mae Klong River. The destruction of the bridge is also entirely fictional: two bridges, a temporary wooden one and a permanent steel/concrete one, were built; both were destroyed by Allied bombing (above), but the steel bridge was repaired and is still in use today.

 

4. Pont d’Arcole

The Battle of the Bridge of Arcole, which took place from November 15^th to 17^th 1796, was the result of a bold attempt by Napoleon to outflank the Austrian army. The road that went north across the bridge intersected the Austrian lines of communication, which Napoleon hoped to be able to cut. However, it proved to be difficult even to reach the bridge at Arcole, let alone capture it. Although the French did manage to cross the bridge on the first day of the battle, they had to retire again. By the time the French managed finally to cross the bridge, the Austrians had managed to move the bulk of their army to safety, but Napoleon could still count himself successful in that he had forced the Austrians to abandon their plan of relieving Mantua. The battle was a complex engagement that concerned more than the crossing of a bridge, but the bridge figured prominently in many paintings of the battle for dramatic and allegorical reasons. The most famous painting is Napoleon at the Bridge of the Arcole by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros which is based on one eye-witness account that he saw Napoleon holding a colour and leading his grenadiers in an assault.

 

3. Bering Land Bridge

The best-known of the geological land bridges, the Bering land bridge joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at various times during the Pleistocene ice ages, enabling humans to migrate from Eurasia to the Americas. It is believed that a small human population of at most a few thousand survived the Last Glacial Maximum in Beringia, isolated from its ancestor populations in Asia for at least 5,000 years, before expanding to populate the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago, as the American glaciers blocking the way southward melted.

 

2. Pons Sublicius

The Pons Sublicius is the bridge that led across the Tiber to Rome. According to Roman legends, a lone hero, Horatius Cocles held the bridge against the invading Etruscans army of Lars Porsena, King of Clusium, in 507 BC. In Livy’s account, two other men (Titus Herminius & Spurius Lartius) stayed with Horatius while the others fled. The other two eventually left at Horatius’ request. As he defended the way to the bridge, the Romans destroyed it behind him. When they were done, he either swam to safety on the Roman side (according to Livy), or was drowned in the Tiber (according to Polybius). According to Livy, Horatius was rewarded with as much land as he could plough around in a single day. A one-eyed statue (Cocles mean one-eyed) in the temple of Vulcan near the Vatican Hill was erected in his honor. The story is famously retold in Lord Macaulay’s the Lays of Ancient Rome.

 

1. The Tay Bridge

Dubbed by Ulysses S. Grant as “a big bridge for a small city”, Tay Bridge spanning Firth of Tay in Scotland was designed by Thomas Bouch, inspired by the innovative use of cast iron in The Crystal Palace. Upon its completion in early 1878 the Tay Bridge was the longest in the world. On 28 December 1879, the bridge swayed and collapsed during a violent storm, while a train was crossing it. Seventy-five people (including Sir Thomas’ son-in-law) died in the crash, in the worst bridge disaster in history. The disaster is made famous in a poem by William McGonagall, who is regarded as the worst poet in history. McGonagall, who had previously written a poem in praise of the Tay Bridge (and who would later write a similar ode for the replacement Tay Bridge), penned these immortal lines:

                “And the cry rang out all round the town,

                Good heavens! The Tay Bridge has blown down.”

TIME Person of the Year: Barack Obama

TIME magazine today named U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama as her Person of the Year for 2008. This coming after rounds of debates and expert opinions (where they even considered iObama, his online persona) is a surprise indeed.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/personoftheyear

However, strictly speaking, this is Mr. Obama’s fourth Person of the Year honor. Born in 1961, Mr. Obama was a baby-bloomer and a Middle-American, both of which were chosen as TIME’s People of the Year in the 1960s. Obama’s last nod was two years ago, when coupled with an unusual bout of creativity, TIME magazine named “You” as People of the Year.

Meanwhile, people in Japan are wondering why “little beach” is named the Person of the Year. May be they will think this is a repeat of TIME’s 1988 nomination of Planet Earth as POY (Planet of the Year). Yes, Obama means Obama means “little beach” in Japanese, and it is even the name of a small fishing town in Fukui.

8 things we don’t need on airliners

Commercial air travel has become so expensive that a lot of airlines have either increased their fares or cancelled some of their routes or both. Can we get to the solution of the problem with a few modifications to the existing flying conditions? Here follows eight things that the airliner of the future shouldn’t have…

Sunshades

Nearly every passenger sitting at the window seat is asked to open his window shade during the take-off and landing. This is a wise decision, for allowing more light into the cabin and letting the passengers and the crew aware of their surroundings is crucial. However, closing them is essentially superfluous. It helps to nullify the external light and adjusts the passengers to the changing timezones, but apart from that, the window shade does nothing. So, it must go.

Headphones, entertainment systems

No doubt the movie studios got paid thousands of dollars to show their latest films in flights flying all over the world. Actually, we are paying the airlines to enjoy those songs, radio and TV shows and movies. Yes, a long flight can be pretty boring without any entertainment, but the cabin entertainment system is a relic in an age where people don’t have their ipods, iphones, laptops and other gadgets. Headphones, personally delivered to you by the flight attendants, are also covered in plastic wraps, which lead to …

Plastics

From headphones to pillows and blankets, everything is wrapped in plastics somehow. Maybe passengers think that only those under plasticized veneer are clean or worth using, but the logic is a flawed one. Airlines can just repackage those items without cleaning, just saying. So, after all, it seems like we are wasting a lot of money for something that is not even guaranteed. Maybe we need pillows and blankets for warmth, comfort or even for health reasons, but plastic wraps are just too much, and tones of plastics discarded from the planes also ruin the environment.

Food

In long international flights, you got offered a lot of food. In domestic flights, you are ‘encouraged’ to buy them. Not many people do. The take-away is that people can do without food for short flights. However, tonnes of food are delivered to the airport tarmacs, only to be wrapped in plastic and eventually wasted.

Skymall

Another thing people can buy while air are cosmetics and other products that cater to impulsive buying and people’s need to give gifts to the loved ones whom they are visiting. Perfumes, liqueurs, jewels and cosmetics may be duty-free in air, but their already-incremented price offset this taxation. Also, as with food, it wastes energy and it adds additional weight to the airplane.

Flight Attendants

In recent years, the position has been a bone of contention for feminists. Their main purpose to explain safety rules and to deliver food. Both can be substituted: first by automated messages (which already exist) and the latter by vendor machines.

First Class

Airbus A380, the largest passenger aircraft in the world, houses beds large enough to sleep two people. First class passengers pay more—but are they getting their money’s worth? A better legroom and gourmand food are the entices of the first class but in reality, there are no real “first class passenger” class. The Super-Rich and the celebrities fly in their own private jets. So who flew first class? Mostly, the executives who use their companies’ money for lucrative business trips. “First class passenger” class exist because First Class exists. If it doesn’t….

Private Jets

From First Class to Private Jets? ‘Is this becoming a class war?’ one may ask, but even if it is the case, it is not me who is waging this war. It is the progress of the age that is calling for abandoning of private jets. In recent years, despite high fuel prices and threat of global warmings, private jest have become so affordable (but still costs a few millions dollars). It is nothing more than an expensive toy—a toy that needs hiring experienced personals to operate.

Bratislava, Slovekia

The old guidebook which I found still refers to Bratislava by its pre-1919 German name Pressburg. The name is perhaps a fitting tribute to the city which has remained in an Austro-Hungarian time-capsule for the past century. The capital of the Magyar Kingdom under the Habsburgs from 1536 to 1783, Bratislava again became a capital in 1993, after Slovak independence.

The least known of the Danube capitals, Bratislava is slowly catching up: it now boasts a beautifully restored old town with thriving cafés, fashion industry and nightlife. However, if one is visiting the city for history (most tourists in Slovakia are), the Old Town is the place to go. The oldest part is the medieval fortifications, of which Michael’s Gate is the best preserved. It should be visited not only for the great views from its tower, but also for its gun museum. The oldest building is a small Franciscan Church, dating to the 13th century, has been a place of knighting ceremonies.

The most memorable building of Bratislava will be its Castle, on a hill overseeing the Danube. First constructed in the 10th century, the castle was remodeled in to Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque styles at different points in its life. The walls and corridors still contain the fragments of this various construction styles, but the original castle had been destroyed in 1811. It was rebuilt since the 1950s in the style Queen Maria Theresa under whom the castle became famous throughout Europe.

The castle’s courtyard contains notably 80 m deep water well. The biggest of four corner towers is the Crown Tower (south-east) of the 13th century, which housed the crown jewels. Near the main entrance is the walled up entrance gate from the 16th century. A grand Baroque staircase, leads the Slovak National Museum (City Museum is in the Town Hall), which contains the Treasure Chamber, which houses, among other precious archaeological findings, a prehistoric statute called the Venus of Moravany. The Slovak Parliamentary Council still meet in the Castle.

The walk up to the Bratislava Castle passes through the old Jewish quarter, half demolished to make way for the brash Novy-Most (New) Bridge, built by the communists with a revolving, flying saucer café on top. En route, three delightful museums waits – one for clocks, another for decorative arts, and a third for folk music. A curiosity underground (formerly ground-level) is the restored portion of the Jewish cemetery, at the base of the castle hill.

In addition to the Castle, Bratislava is known for its numerous palaces: the Grassalkovich, built around 1760, is now the residence of the Slovak president. The Slovak government has its seat in the former Archiepiscopal Palace. The famed Peace of Pressburg between Austria and France after the Austerlitz was signed in the Primate’s Palace in 1805. After Revolutions of 1848, Ferdinand V also signed the abolition of serfdom, at the Primate’s Palace, which now houses the mayoral quarters.

The most famous ruins in the capital was Devín Castle (in German: Burg Theben) at the confluence of the Morava and the Danube Rivers. Not only strategic but also important to national identity, Devín Castle was destroyed by Napoleon’s troops in 1809. The last owners were the Counts of the Pálffy. Only some restored parts of the castle can be visited, but it houses an interesting archeology museum.
The University Library, erected in 1756, was used by the Diet of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1802 to 1848. The Gothic St. Martin’s Cathedral built in the 13th–16th centuries, seen the coronations of eleven kings and queens of Hungary. The Art Nouveau Church of St. Elisabeth is better known as the Blue Church for colour.

Bratislava has various parks and forests, natural and man-made lakes because of its proximity to the Little Carpathians mountains. (Slavin Military Cemetery offers an excellent view of the city and the Little Carpathians.) Even if a visitor has no time, he should drive through in the Rusovce borough which has Roman ruins. The district is own for its neo-Gothic Rusovce mansion, with its English park, and Rusovce lake, popular with nudists.

From nudists to voyeurism, just off Hlavné Square in city centre is a pavement sculpture of a workman idly peering out of a manhole called Peeping Tom. Our tour-guide said it was a statement on the way communists dished out hollow jobs. Up the street from Hlavné Square is the Art Deco Roland Café, the green-roofed 14th-century town hall.

Music is a key to the city: in the picturesque Venturskala Street, a couple of precocious kids (nine-year-old Liszt and six-year-old Mozart) once awed the citizens. Even today, many young people are amazing the visitors with various musical instruments in the streets. The Bratislava Opera is popular among international tourists for its quality as well as for its prices. The Opera is located in a Habsburg building in the center of the city on Hviezdoslavovo Square. The Opera is only subtitled in Slovak or German. Performances usually start at 7 pm, and can be booked one month in advance. Also on the Square is Reduta Building, the abode of Bratislava Redoute, Slovak Philharmonic, and Hotel Carlton. Tickets for Opera and Philharmonic can be as cheap as a tenner for the citizens, but for foreigners, it is SKK 600 (EUR 19.78).

Also on the Hviezdoslavovo Namestie (Square) is famous Slovenski Restaurancia, which serves traditional cholesterol-laden Slovak cuisine. Slovaks being who they are, the meal starts with a trolley (literally) of spirits wheeled to your table. Only Becherovka (a herbal spirit) is recommended for the beverage but roast goose, pancakes with red cabbage, and apple strudel are other Slovek specialties.
Look down on the town, up to the bobsleigh, skiing and toboggan runs on Kamzik Hill, then across the Danube to the concrete jungle of Petrzalka and its acres of Soviet tower blocks. From the quayside you can take the hydrofoil to Vienna. The uniquely designed Kamzík TV Tower has an observation deck and rotating restaurant.