Glyphs of Warding, Icons of Doom

I got in a car accident a while ago.  Everybody’s fine, no injuries at all; quite a blessing considering I had the entire family in the van.  A trio of young roosters were taking their daddy’s Mercedes out on the town of a Saturday night and were blatantly at fault.

Around here, unless the accident is really bad, negotiations will often be handled informally without police or insurance company involvement, more so than I remember from the States, with the party at fault paying out of pocket at a neighborhood mechanic of his choosing.  Maybe accidents are handled that way more often here because the low cost of labor makes it cheaper than insurance penalties for most repairs.  The generally high level of honesty helps too.  But in this case, the guilty party – that would be them – needed to take it through insurance since those Merces ain’t cheap.

In order to process an insurance claim, I had to go to not just any bump shop, but one of only a few large garages that handle seriously ruined vehicles.  Approaching the garage was unnerving.

A long gravel road barely wide enough for two cars to crawl past one-another was lined on both sides by one ghastly wreck after another.  The impact marks of heads on windshields and the angles and breaks of the wreckage compelled you to imagine the tragedies that created each one.

IMAG0246

It was like entering a hospital by passing through an allée of corpses.

Chinese Calligraphy
Chinese calligraphy over the doorway

Like the majority of businesses around town, this one was Chinese-owned.

In Chinese-owned businesses in Kuching, it is common to find a talisman of some sort above the door.  Typically, these artworks look individually made to me, with calligraphy and woodblock stamps arranged, often with graphical embellishments and red ink to go with the black.  They can be quite striking.  The picture I’ve shown you here is unfortunately a plain and unexceptional example of the type, just what I could snap at my favorite local nursery.  I don’t know what any of them say, but I think it is safe to assume that they are posted above the door to bring luck or profit and ward away misfortune and calamity.  These sorts of sacred or blessed texts are of course not unfamiliar to muslims as well, as most muslim homes and businesses will have the Bismillah, Ayat al-Kursi, Khatam an-Nubuwwah or simply the words “Allah” and “Muhammad” hung strategically around the premises.  (And in fact there is a tradition of Chinese Islamic calligraphy which is stunning.)

But in this case, I noticed as I approached the office building that something hung above the door that did not look like Chinese calligraphy at all.  It looked like a Hindu icon, but that would make no sense.  There are few Hindus in Sarawak to begin with, and besides this shop was clearly Chinese owned and run.  What was going on?  Puzzled, I drew closer until I could finally make it out.

 

IMAG0214Looking around at the twisted remains of vehicles spilling their innards all over the shop floor, I realized I needed no further explanation.

Why Most Mass Murderers are White Men

James_Holmes“White men from prosperous families grow up with the expectation that our voices will be heard. We expect politicians and professors to listen to us and respond to our concerns. We expect public solutions to our problems. And when we’re hurting, the discrepancy between what we’ve been led to believe is our birthright and what we feel we’re receiving in terms of attention can be bewildering and infuriating. Every killer makes his pain another’s problem. But only those who’ve marinated in privilege can conclude that their private pain is the entire world’s problem with which to deal. This is why, while men of all races and classes murder their intimate partners, it is privileged young white dudes who are by far the likeliest to shoot up schools and movie theaters. ”

Read the rest at: [RoleReboot].

Via [Metafilter]. 

On Flunking a Nice Boy Out of School

A mimeograph of John Ciardi’s poem was waiting on each boy’s desk as we took our seats for the first class on the first day of 7th grade at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy.  I nearly fainted.  Amazingly, my mother kept the sheet of paper all these years.  RIP, Wendell Hall: may God increase your reward with every word I write.

I wish I could teach you how ugly

decency and humility can be when they are not

the election of a contained mind but only

the defenses of an incompetent.  Were you taught

meekness as a weapon?  Or did you discover,

by chance maybe, that it worked on mother

and was generally a good thing …

at least when all else failed … to get you over

the worst of what was coming.  Is that why you bring

those sheepfaces to Tuesday?

They won’t do.

It’s ten month’s work I want, and I’d sooner have it

from the brassiest lumpkin in pimpledom, but have it,

than all these martyred repentences from you.

Stryker’s War

Crazed hippie in a bad wig: Sam Raimi stars.

I’ve boasted before about how Sam Raimi directed the nintendo commercial I was in, but it wasn’t the only time we were both involved in a production.  He and I both starred in a movie!  Well, I had one line.  And he plays a villainous hippy in a bad wig.  And it wasn’t much of a movie.  Ladies and gentlemen, it was Stryker’s War.   The plot: vietnam vet returns home to find girlfriend abducted by

Buckets. Of blood. And you thought I was joking.

crazy cultists, shoots the place up; warnings about the deadly nature of jarts go unheeded.  It was a blood-bucket of a movie, in the very literal sense that they had buckets of blood, premixed on set in the morning, so they would have sufficient blood for all the scenes to be shot that day.  It is the sort of movie you never expect to see the light of day.  But one day I googled myself (come on, you know you’ve done it) and amazingly, I had an entry on the IMDB.  When I first found it, the reviews of the film described it as the D-movie crap that it surely is.  But as Sam Raimi’s star rose, so did the evaluation of the film: now you can find glowing reviews calling it a “camp masterpiece”  with a healthy 3-star rating.

I still have my copy of the videocassette that my high-school buddy PA miraculously found at a store out in like Maine, where it had been released straight to video as “Thou Shalt Not Kill… unless violence demands revenge”.   I doubt it’s playable anymore even if I still owned a VCR.  But I can present to you here the key 1 minute of the film where I deliver my immortal line and some weighty foreshadowing re: jarts is introduced to the dramatic arc of the film:

Jarts, of course, being those big lawn darts, right?  Well you know what they say: if there’s a gun above the mantle on the set, it must be fired before the end of the play.  Lo, the same principle is true of jarts.  Chekov’s Jarts, you might say.

For those with an exceptional tolerance for forgettable low-budget film-making, I present the full slideshow:

It was first screened in Detroit at the Esquire Theater on Jefferson. It was rated R so Mom and Dad didn’t take me. They did take my grandmother. Boy was that embarrassing.
Crazed hippie in a bad wig: Sam Raimi stars.
Dire warnings go unheeded.
Sgt Stryker bonds with his squad over firearms.
Suffering of the innocents.
The aforeshadowed menace comes to pass.
Buckets. Of blood. And you thought I was joking.
Our heroes arrive as carnage ensues. Hippies lie strewn across the fields.
Bechained cultist: Ted Raimi stars.
Good triumphs over evil.
The villain is dispatched. Lo, falsehood is ever vanishing.
We end as all good movies should, with blood vomited on to the camera.
Whiskey the dog, played by Dandy the dog, gets star billing ahead of me.
…but I’m ahead of Sam Raimi’s brother! So that ain’t too bad.

Now that the internet has arrived, nothing will ever disappear again.  In fact, Stryker’s War is now available, in a Collector’s Edition release no less.  Get yours today!

suicide, expatriation, or revolt

The higher education bubble will not pop because student loan debt is not dischargeable.  There are no bills in congress on the horizon to address the student loan problem.  The government won’t fix it because it is making money:

 Not only are student loans not a burden on the federal government, they’re a good investment. In 2012 the DOW estimated its subsidy for student lending at -17 percent. In other words, the DOE “subsidies” actually represent money coming in. Including all expenses, from loses on defaults to debt collection to program administration, the DOE will pull in more than $25 billion in profit from student lending this year alone—billions more dollars than the IRS will assess in gift and estate taxes combined, and more than enough to pay NASA’s whole budget.

I chose option 2.

Article: Pomp and Exceptional Circumstance
How Students Are Forced to Prop Up the Education Bubble  [via]

Somatotypology, Craniometry and other detritus

KakNgah came home the other day asking about ectomorphic body types. Do you know about this? I’d never heard of such a thing. Apparently her teacher took some time out of class to tell the students about the Three Body Types of Man, ectomorphic (tall and thin), endomorphic (short and chubby), and mesomorphic (the ideal and perfect one, of course). “I’m ectomorphic, aren’t I?” she said with a frown. It sounded like nonsense to me, and since I had literally just finished “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, I thought right away of craniometry. I explained to KakNgah how scientists used to go around measuring skulls by the thousand and grouping them according to size and shape (dolichocephalic or brachyocephalic) which presumably revealed the existence of Three Head Types of Man. She thought that was pretty funny and I left it at that with her.

A little compulsive googling later that night showed I was righter than I knew. The theory of body types, or somatotypology, was developed by one William Herbert Sheldon, psychologist, numismatist, eugenicist, an Ivy League professor who earned his PhD back in the ’20s when craniometery was still going strong, most especially among the dolichopodulent waspomorphs who were everywhere running the show. But rather than tie skull metrics into intelligence, personality, natural fitness to rule and similar racial divination, William Sheldon moved on into body type. That slouch your mother warned you about? Proves you’re an idiot. Or something like that.

Bill and Hill via

And that’s when I realized I’d heard of this guy before. Somewhere over the long 20-odd years of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political career, it came out in the papers that there were, or were rumored to be, nude photographs of her, taken when she was an Ivy League college co-ed. But wait, these nude photographs were for research. The late Dr. Sheldon’s patented research technique was photographing thousands upon thousands of college students in the nude with pins in their backs, and then gazing at and presumably making lots of scientifical compumatations from the pictures to develop his grand theory. This was all back in the ’50s and ’60s and has since been thoroughly discredited and dustbinned.

Which brings me to the big question: what is a bizarre pop-psychology holdover from sixty years ago doing being presented as fact by a Malaysian schoolteacher to a room full of 6th graders? Sadly, a PhD and a Harvard appointment cast a long shadow, and cursory googling reveals an embarrassing number of Sheldon citations in Bahasa Malaysia among Educational Psychologists, Physical Education instructors, Sports Science researchers and more.

Wahai cikgu-cikgu Malaysia! Please leave behind this appalling pseudoscience. WH Sheldon adalah seorang yang sudah lama di tolak. Teorinya tentang ektomorf, mezomorf dan endomorf sudah basi dan tidak dapat pakai lagi di bidang ilmu psikologi mahupun di bidang perubatan. Lihatlah rujukan yang berikut:

“It was the pop-psych flavor of the month for a while … Half the textbooks in [ his ] area fail to take [ him ] seriously,” remarked one academician in a 1992 paper on Sheldon’s legacy. Others, like Hans Eysenck, the British psychologist, have suggested that Sheldon wasn’t really doing science at all, that he was just winging it, that there was “little theoretical foundation for the observed findings.”