In LA

Sonic Youth playing to a packed house in Beijing last night.

I’ve never seen so many cell phones and tiny video cameras held over people’s heads as I did at the Star Live last night. Perhaps tired arms excuses the lack of truly thunderous applause. When I was in the front section, I couldn’t see over the pogo-dancing crowd, but the view on all the raised phone LCD screens was excellent.

On a purely rational level, chocolate processed cheese should seem no more objectionable than the oft-encountered Kraft American Cheese or any other gooey yellow-orange processed slab which only just meets the legal definition of cheese. Perhaps the bar for my expectations was set very low by the fact that I’ve been in China a while –certain colors of amorphous food now scream to me,”don’t go there”. Hence my instant original interpretation of the photo on the packaging: pork-blood flavored cheese. Nowhere to go but up. Chocolate Cheese Slices: yum.

It feels like the world is going crazy, with the locus of craziness currently hovering over the East coast of the U.S.A.

1. Virginia Tech killing spree –good god! Hopefully the fact that the killer is getting more than his 15 minutes of fame by sending out a press packet in between killings won’t encourage other publicity-hungry violently-disturbed individuals to follow suit.
2. Congress and Justice Department in standoff –the Justice Department appears to just be ignoring a subpoena for missing and redacted portions of documents issued by the House Judiciary Committee. I tend to think that a lack of accountability at high levels within the government is a bad thing.
3. Supreme Court upholds Federal ban on an abortion procedure. A procedure that, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists includes no exceptions for the physical or mental health of the mother. According to the vast but fumbling-towards-accuracy online encyclopedia Wikipedia: “The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that bans must include exception for threats to the woman’s life, physical health, and mental health”. Guess it’s time to revise that entry.
4. Chocolate under attack! This is an order of magnitude less crazy than the other items, but it bugs me nonetheless, and I need something of less earth-shattering important than the first 3 items to think about as a cool-down exercise: Hershey and other big choco manufacturers are asking the U.S. Food an Drug Administration to “permit them to replace cocoa butter, chocolate’s key ingredient, with vegetable oils and, in the case of milk chocolate, replace whole milk with milk protein concentrates“. If these companies are not going to continue to make chocolate out of the ingredients that define the essence of chocolate, they should come up with a new name and not try to legally redefine the word “chocolate” to mean any sweet bar of saturated fat that happens to be brown. One chocolatier has posted a more nuanced take on the issue.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. I used to like his books, a lot, but admit I haven’t picked any of them up for a long while. I met him in 1995 when he visited the University of Washington and I shot some photos to accompany an interview in the school paper.

He impressed me at the time as a cranky old man and a bit of a luddite, the latter a surprise. The forward-thinking man who could conceive a novel in which characters and story shuffle through space and time with abandon did not take to the new online world. This at a time when a techno-utopian vision, such as that expressed in then two-year-old Wired Magazine, were stoking the imaginations and aspirations of us geeky liberal arts majors who were soon to staff the coming wave of online startups. Kurt didn’t feel the internet was all that, and thought buying products online was a completely inferior experience to walking to the local store and interacting with the sales clerk. In hindsight I could substitute “humanist” for both “cranky” and “luddite” in the topic sentence of this paragraph and spin the statement in a different and equally true direction about his prescience (or I could just substitute for “luddite” and leave “cranky” be; Crankiness can be charming and such an accusation could be seen as complimentary). There’s truth to the idea that us net-connected folk spend too much time poking at keyboards and looking at increasingly large monitors, but on the other hand, I’d bet he made at least a few online purchases in his latter years.

Luckily I was not conducting the interview, as I would likely have spent the session trying to convince him of the merits of the wonderful world wide intarwebnet (wwww) and would have missed the opportunity to shoot one of my favorite portraits. It’s too bad I’m 5500 miles away from the negative or I’d post a few frames at better quality.

There’s a video of Kurt Vonnegut’s 2005 appearance on The Daily Show available for view on onegoodmove.org. It’s nice to see that he kept his wicked sense of humor so late in the game, though it pains me to see that he speaks a lot more slowly in that video than he did 10 years previously in his interview with The Daily. It’s tough to see such clearcut evidence of the toll that the aging process takes on people.

So long Kurt and thanks for all the books.

A Chinese mac developer named Feng Huajun has made a Chinese pinyin input method for the mac called “Fun Input Toy” (henceforth FiT). According to a blog post I read on the www, it is a big improvement on the standard Mac input method. I don’t know if my Chinese is at the level where I can really tell the difference, but I tried FiT out and it seemed to me that it predicted my input better than the ITABC method that ships with OS X, and it also allowed me to type full sentences at a time.

Those of you who have never tried to type a non-phonetic language into your computer might find that last paragraph to be unintelligible. The basic idea is that, in order to enter Chinese ideographs (characters) from a keyboard that doesn’t have tens of thousands of keys, you instead type in the pronunciation of each character. As you type the sounds of the words, the computer checks these against a database and starts replacing the syllables with its best guess at the appropriate character. A good input method will notice combinations of syllables that make up common words and phrases, and will also remember words you use most frequently and will present those to you first when you are asked to select from a long list of identical sounding words that match what you’ve typed. It all works better than you might think.

For example, to type this phrase that my sister knows well (her standard phrase when she worked at a Chinese hospital for a few weeks), I switch to the FiT input method and start typing the sounds using the pinyin romanization system:

Notice that FiT has guessed each character or phrase as I’ve gone along. If I hit the ‘1′ key, it’ll convert the text I’ve entered to this string of Chinese text “你的小儿是很漂亮”. The other options are there in case when I began typing I really meant to enter one of the other characters that sound like “ni”. If I choose say character #6, FiT will just replace the first character of my text with that choice and will go on to try and match the rest of the sentence:

That’s much more like the experience of using OS X’s built-in ITABC input method, which requires you to choose character or phrase by phrase. It’s very nice that FiT lets you type a lot more, and shows you the options as you type. So if you use a Mac, and enter Chinese, you would do well to try the free FiT input method. Kudos to Feng Huajun for releasing it. It appears to be superior to the input method that came on your machine by default.