The Pope: Rock star or Bin Laden of the West?

I’ve been watching with some amusement the news coverage of the Pope’s visit to America. It seems pretty transparent to me that “W” is leveraging His Holiness as a moral rallying point not only for Catholics, but for everyone else who doesn’t stand behind Bin Laden.

So now we two opposing (and some would say imposing) figureheads, each on opposite sides of a quite arbitrary paradigmatic divide, vying for the hearts and minds of the global massive.

Georgie-boy gets the rub-off of the supposed authority of his god (as represented by the Holy C), while the Vatican gets to exercise the kind of political influence possibly not seen since the Dark Ages.

Think about it; although there’s no danger of anyone being excommunicated, we’re seeing all the signs of an over-powerful church. Relics are on sale in the form of T-shirts, cups, caps and other merchandise; there’s even debate at ground level as to what actually constitutes valid mementos. One’s place in the bosom of the kerk, as it were, is no longer a given – you need tickets. The Pope himself is feted and fawned over by politicians just as his predecessor was all those years ago.

We need a modern day Oliver Cromwell; one who'll bring us a modern day Restoration.

And perhaps that is an Obama. Not just of the Bin Laden variety.

There is an alternative to cybernetic totalism

Jaron Lanier coined the phrase cybernetic totalism in an article entitled One Half Of A Manifesto to describe what he perceived as society's idolisation of technology to the point where our relationship with the technology itself becomes the only measure of our humanity - the idea that "...evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore's Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people."

Heady stuff indeed. But lets take a step back.

What he's really saying is that there are those among us (computer scientists in the mold of Turing) who believe that computers will ultimately become sentient, begin to write software for themsleves, build more machines like themselves and ultimately take over at the expense of poeple - in very much the same way as presented in the movie, The Matrix. These same poeple, as I understand the gist of the thing, don't however see this as an apocapyptic outcome; rather, they embrace it as the only eschatalogical path worth considering.

Lanier makes an interesting and very eloquent atack on this line of thought, and it really is worth reading.

The trouble is that Lanier himself seems to be mired in the same AI paradigm as his colleages, albeit from a contrary point of view.


But let me get to the point. While I agree with Lanier's thinking in response to the his cybernetic totalism, I offer another point of view on the thing.

Maybe the Internet, cybernetics and all the other stuff is merely practice for the next life.

Maybe the so called "age of aquarius" is a natural foil to technology and technological advancement. For just as we as a society are becoming more accepting of the huge potential of the technology we have created, there is also a greater acceptance of the more ethereal side of ourselves - our ability to tap into the unseen energy of the universe.

The difference of course is that you can actually touch a computer and cause measurable and repeatable things to happen, whereas when it comes to the more airy fairy phenomena we simply cannot. But does that make it any less important?

I think not.

Furthermore this merely serves as yet more fodder for the age old argument as to what constitues science; the had sciences, or their soft bretheren (sometimes known as the social sciences for lack of a better term).

Therefore, like Lanier, I feel that there is nothing to fear, but for different reasons. And I look forward to the time when we are all joined in the reat melting pot of consciousness in the sky.

The one buck wee

Malaysians have a strange love/hate relationship with 2 things: food and public toilets (I suppose there is a sort of progressive logic there somewhere if you look hard enough).

On the food front, missing a meal is seen as the closest thing to blasphemy after disparaging Islam; however, the philosophy is the cheaper the better. The price of a roti canai goes up from 80 sen to 1 Ringitt and there's a national outcry (ministers make pronouncements, "inspectors" are sent out, etc). Everywhere you go, large buckets of badly cooked, sticky, soggy rice stand by to satisfy the needs of a never-ending stream of overweight diners.

But it's the toilet thing that I feel the need to relieve myself over. Malaysians treat public toilets as ... well, I can't actually think of an apt description. Suffice to say that you don't want to be down wind.

As a consequence of this, some enterprising individuals, or indeed facility owners, have taken to charging one for entry ( I assume the proceeds go towards paying various poor buggers to wipe, mop, splash and otherwise maintain some semblence of cleanliness. KLCC shopping centre, for eg, has, on the ground floor, an "executive toilet," the entry to which is RM2. Let me be the first to say that it is clean, to their credit. (The upper floors' toilets, not so much.)

So here's my point: If I pay for a one buck wee and only manage a 30 sen wee, do I get a rebate? I mean, one might be struck with stage-fright. And can I get a double entry ticket? What if I have a coffee while shopping (it's a diuretic, as we all know)? Are tickets transferrable? What about season tickets?

It's a complicated issue. And one that deserves serious debate.

Thalydomide golf

If you're at all politically correct then best you surf elsewhere.

For years I have been taking the piss out of life by referring to the thalidomide golf championships. Ok, so I don't really mean it. OK. But the interesting this is that I've just seen a report on CNN which featured a golfer with no arms - like short ones - like uh huh - thalidomide pills for morning sickness short arms . I kid you not.

Weird.

This is weird

...er, physics was never my strong suit

It has come to my attention that acceleration, and not velocity, was what I should have been talking about in my previous post.

...will self destruct in 5 seconds...

Perhaps it's an indication of the increasingly increasing (velocity = meters per second per second)speed of our reality; even secret messages have a shorter half life these days.

I was watching Mission impossible III the other night and I noticed that Ethan's message went poof in 5 seconds as opposed to the original 30.

Jeez man. What happens if you get distracted. "Hey, what was the middle bit again?" There's no going back. And the bad guys are usually foreign, or something; with names like Rastapopopulous (apologies to Herge). Then what? Do secret agents go to memory school?

God help you if you're an old fashioned secret agent, used to the regulation 30 seconds, and you're a bit tardy in pulling the secret-message-containing-spy-lomo-miniature-camera away from your eyeballs? Oh, wait, I forgot - spy guys wear sun glasses, so it's ok.

I dunno.

We accept all major credit cards and currencies

Good god. The free wi-fi at Hong Kong airport is an absolute fuck-up. In typical fashion, the "you don't have to actually deliver; if you pay lip service, that's good enough" policy obviously applies.

Anyway, after an hour of fighting with the invisible chi of the Internet here, I have finally managed to connect.

Hong Kong is an expensive place. Either that, or KL is just cheap and I don't get paid nearly enough for my trouble.

It's also very fast moving. Or the people are. Or both. Which is refreshing.

And speaking of refreshing, the temperature was a temperate 17degrees celsius during the day and about 14 or 15 at night.

The cold weather was quite difficult to deal with after 2 and a half years living in a sauna. But nostalgic at the same time. Cold weather seems to smell different. Or maybe the air in Hong Kong is just cleaner than the air in KL. Probably the latter.

Enough of this.

Saddam is dead. Long live Saddam.

I didn't really know how I felt about America's intervention in Iraq until now. I've always said that I'd rather have the pax Americana than the alternative, and I stand by that.

But...

It sucks, actually.

Me? Time person of the year?

What bollocks. What shameless overeditorialising. What rediculocity. Time Magazine has clearly gone pearshaped. It's named me / you / anyone who looks at the latest cover (there's a foiled, mirror type, reflective panel), including my cats, person of the year.

Here are a couple of cycnical interpretations:

(1) It adds 23 extra pages to the edition in question
(2) More space = more advertising revenue (see number 1 above)
(3) Samsung placed a really boring, really big - and no doubt expensive - pull-out in this edition (see number 2 above)
(4) The editorial team have gone soft
(5) The managing editor's son came up with the idea
(6) They wanteed to test their new foil printing machine
(7) They're scared of stirring up controversy
(8) They really think it's a clever idea
(9) What-ever

Dear Father Christmas

What I really want for Christmas is a day off from work.

Starbuckster

I'm sitting at a coffee shop calling itself Friendster. The place first came to my attention due to the fact that their logo resembled that of Starbucks. In fact I thought it was a Starbucks at first.

Anyway, I've only now taken a picture of their logo, which I see they have now changed. It used to be green, exactly like Starbuck's. Shameless.

Malaysia by bike ep.#1

The first thing I noticed when planning my ride to Malacca/Melaka/Malaka was that there doesn't seem to be any consistent spelling of the name.

That being said, there are consistencies between the city named M and many other of its South East Asian counterparts. Congested , dirty, sprawling, poluted, disorganised, and without a single pair of synchronised trafffic lights.

The food, however, is well worth the trip (except for the Portuguese Settlement, but more on that in a bit). The cuisine is Nyonya/Baba, which I believe is a culture that arose out of the intermarriage between Malay aboriginals and Chinese settlers back in the day. The food is a bit like the matrix - you have to experience it to understand, but I can say that it's a little bit tart, a little bit sweet, a little bit chilli-ish, a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.

Anyway, lunch was indubitably the highlight of the trip. And so, having partaken of the provender for which the region is famous, I decided in my wisdom to check out the other cooking style for which I assumed it would be equally renowned; Portuguese.

Ha. One taxi ride through seventeen smelly neighbourhoods later we were duly deposited at the so-called Portuguese Settlement. In a word, it's dying. The food was decidedly unportuguese. Where were the hearty stews, firey chicken, chouricos, peri-peri squid, fried eggs and chips I find myself craving. Nowhere to be seen is the answer. What we did find, though, was the dodgiest bar in all of Negiri Sembilan, a couple of piss-cats playing pool. I seem to gravitate to these places.

On a creative note, the area in which we boarded - ChinaTown - is one big photo-op. I've included one image here, but if you're curious, please check out my Flickr space, where I will try to post a few of the more intresting pics in due course. Link in the side bar.

?

If we had more fingers, would pianos have more keys?

I've seen the future of air travel and I'm afraid

Low cost carriers are not new. But the thrend toward "no frills" is being taken to ever more horrible lows. The newest addition to this kind of travel is known as the Low Cost Carrier Terminal.

My god.

The purpose of these things - the experts tell us - is to move passengers through, up, down, around, in, out faster than is possible in the enormous terminal buildings national flag carriers are so fond of.

Hah.

I fart in their general direction. The logistics low rent. They seem to have a policy of hiring "special" people, or those severly challenged in the grey matter department. The acoustics sound like a a burp in a bucket.

The whole thing is just too 'orrible for words.

Oh, and the planes, of course, don't berth at the building - you have to walk along the tarmac; which in the case of AirAsia means as soon as it rains no-one wants to walk to the plane; which means the flight is delayed.

I despair.

Sights, sounds and smells

One of the groovier things about riding a motorcycle is that as one passes, one experiences first hand the natural efluviance of the environment. The smell of flowers, freshly cut grass, curries slowly simemring in giant copper pots. It's luvly.

And then you get behind a garbage truck.

The agony of choice

Two firsts have just occured: I've managed to use the phrase "the agoney of choice" in a sentence; and I now have to choose between watching the rugga (Springboks v Wallabies) on the telly and the kaioshung leg of the San Miguel Asion 9-ball tournament. The latter is the result of having satellite - I've never had the luxury before. Oh for a simpler better time when all we had to amuse ourselves was state sponsored propaganda. Perhaps I'll find solace in the fact that the commentary is equally as bad in either case. I don'nt mean the rugby. I mean the pool.

Zippo

Through the looking glass

I see taxis in my future

The groovy thing about riding a motorcycle is that you're constantly in a tug-of-war with Newton. Steering the thing requires overcoming intertia; just staying upright is a mystery. I sort of understand how a gyroscope works, but all these things remain a beyond the scope of my full understanding.

And so it was only a matter of time before a deceptively flat patch of road got the better of me.

Gravity 1 : Stuart 0

Result: Bent handle bars; bent gear level; distended thigh muscle; swollen calf; the elbow we won't even talk about; roasties all over; and a couple of weeks of taking taxis.