Hey, How About We Finally Abolish White-Blindness?

I originally wrote this piece on "white-blindness" back in the mid-1990s when I was a grad student—and it shows—but it's strangely relevant once again, for reasons I don't need to get into as history is rhyming once again.

Recommended Reading: Year-in-Review Stories

The LPGA has been counting down the top 13 stories of 2013.  What do you think of their choices?  You can tell what I think perhaps by the made-up titles I give them....

#5:  Suzann Pettersen Surfs Solheim Cup Wave to Late-Season LPGA Dominance
#6:  Rain, Rain, Go Away!
#7:  Hi, I'm Inbee Park, and I'm the #7 Story of 2013.  You Heard Me Right.  #7.  Yup.
#8:  Shanshan Feng Wins 1st LPGA Event in Home Country's Mainland with Walkoff Eagle.  And Is #8.
#9:  Look Out, World, Lexi's Learned How to Putt!
#10:  Meet the World #1s of 2013.  You May Have Heard of Them.
#11:  Karrie Webb Wins #39 for Grandma
#12:  Ariya Jutanugarn to Inbee Park:  After You!
#13:  The LPGA's Back, Baby!

Perhaps more imaginative (although it takes a lot of imagination to put Inbee's run for the Grand Slam anywhere but #1!) is bangkokbobby's approach of profiling the top 30 LPGAers and WTAers by pairing the #30, #29, and so on from each sport together.  I won't link to them all, but here are my faves thus far:

#3:  Li Na/Stacy Lewis
#4:  Maria Sharapova/Shanshan Feng
#5:  Agnieszka Radwanska/So Yeon Ryu
#7:  Marion Bartoli/In-Kyung Kim
#9:  Na Yeon Choi/Angelique Kerber
#11:  Paula Creamer/Roberta Vinci
#22:  Ji-Yai Shin/Hsieh Su-Wei
#27:  Ai Miyazato/Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova
#28:  Morgan Pressel/Lucie Safarova

So what have been your favorite year-in-review stories?  I found The Sports Network's to be all right (although there was no rock involved in Feng's approach on 18 in China)....  Haven't had time to read Golfweek's multifaceted approach.  But I did enjoy Randall Mell's incredulity that Inbee Park didn't win the AP's Female Athlete of the Year award.

[Update 1 (12/31/13, 10:11 am):  Here are the LPGA's top 4 stories of 2013:

#1: The Year of Inbee
#2: Enter the Ko
#3: Euros Take 1st Solheim Cup on U.S. Soil
#4: Stacy Tames the Road Hole

OK, so move the weather story to #13 and make it clearer that the intermediate Inbee story is just that and I'm pretty ok with this list, as snarky as I was earlier....]

[Update 2 (10:15 am):  Inbee only made #6 in Golf Channel's year-end review.  What do you all think?  Behind "controversy" and "anchored stroke"?!  Come on!]

'Twas the Afternoon Before Honika... Uh, Two Weeks Ago

OK, so I'm a little late with this, but I finally finished grading and it's time to celebrate! Actually, T-Joh is to blame for this departure from my usual anime Hanukah thing:



That's the real Lady Gaga in there, right?

For background on Smooth-E, check out this youtube timeline of Hanukah-themed parody songs:





Merry QSMS, everyone!

[Update 1 (12:24 pm): OMG, I'm such a bad Jew I even got the title and timing of this post wrong! Should have posted it at sundown so I could have called it "'Twas the Sundown Before Honika... Uh, Two Weeks Ago"! Yeesh.]

All Hail 3Tops-san

Ashes to ashes

Paint to paint

Where 3Tops was

Now 3Tops ain't

And a Very Animated Hanukkah

I haven't found anything on youtube to help us celebrate Hanukkah Mostly Harmless style that beats last year's finds. Well, there was this one that I chose not to use:



So, reruns and leftovers for Hanukkah. Some miracle of lights!

How Koga Won the Ricoh Cup

In comments, eagle-eyed reader John posted a link to a youtube clip documenting the disasters that befell Mi-Jeong Jeon and Yuri Fudoh on the final hole of the JLPGA Tour Championship Ricoh Cup which handed the victory to Miho Koga. Here it is--watch it while you can!



In case we lose access to this quickly, Fudoh was -6, tied with Koga, and stuck her approach shot about 4 feet above the cup. Jeon was -7 and just needed to hit the green to put pressure on Fudoh to make her birdie putt, but missed it badly to the right and ended up in a bunker. She then skulled out and failed to get up and down from near the grandstand. Her double bogey dropped her to -5. Fudoh babied her downhiller and opened the putter face so badly that her putt barely touched the right edge of the cup. Then she overcompensated on the 2-foot comebacker and pulled it left. The look of shock and disbelief on Koga's face after each putt was priceless! Sure, she had birdied 4 of her last 6 holes, but a win was the furthest thing from her mind.

Thanks, John!

Cool Japanese Pictures

Here's a bunch of Japanese fairy tales, illustrated, of course.

And toys.

And links to lots of other pages of cool Japanese historical pictures and stuff.

Infomercial for the New World Order

Don't worry! Be happy! Get civilized! Free introductory starter package. Financing available from selected customers.

On That Day in History

Finally got a few minutes free to catch up on what the Japanistas of Blogoramaville have been up to lately and found out from Japan Probe that I missed another Mostly Harmless anniversary, one which I only belatedly and incompletely blogged about while in Japan. February 3 is Setsubun, a Japanese holiday I know little about except that you visit a temple, do a trivia contest, and get beans and candy thrown at you from on high. Little did I know last Setsubun that the best place to experience it is from the margins of the crowd, particularly if you have a 9-month-old in the Baby Bjorn and a 3-year-old in a carriage.

Yup, just over a year ago, I suggested to the Full Metal Archivist that it would be cool to move into the middle of the crowd before the next round of candy and bean tossing, so we could have a real Setsubun experience. How could I have known that the kindly grandmother and the nice middle-aged guy with the broken arm right next to us would join the rest of the people in the temple courtyard and turn the space into a mosh pit once the candy started flying? That I would soon be crouching over onechan and shielding imoto with one arm while regretting that the crowd noise was too loud for the FMA to hear me from a few feet away, much less make her way over to help me protect our girls from the surging crowd? That the people around us would later blame her for bringing the carriage into the courtyard, inadvertently blocking some of them from snagging some beans and tripping one or two who didn't notice it--rather than, say, apologizing for endangering a toddler and an infant?

I still don't know what to make of the experience, and I hesitate to draw any large conclusions from it. But it still strikes me as very strange that such a thing would be possible in a culture in which sensitivity and solicituousness toward others are valued and manifested in so many ways and forms. If anyone has any insight or guesses to share, I'm all ears.

On This Day in History

Well, actually it was yesterday last year that it happened, but it was a year ago today that I blogged about missing the unfolding of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie advertising-campaign-cum-terrorist-threat-uh-hoax-(not!)-kerfluffle. Good times.

Happy Blogiversary, Mostly Harmless

If I was really together, I'd put together a Hitchhiker's Guide to Mostly Harmless, but since I'm in full-blown pre-semester panic mode, I'll just have to note that our first post was a year ago today, Fukuoka time. The most I can do to honor this historic day is to pass along this public service message from Home Movies:

1000 Buddhas

Well, not yet a thousand, but they're working on it. Go here to see a bunch of interesting photos:

http://www.lensculture.com/buddha.html#

Pink Weeds on Saturday

Saturday Morning Hot Style

Zutto Zutto Tomodachi; and, The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far)

Cross-posted at Citizen of Somewhere Else

Has a better ring to it than "best friends 4evah," right? Well, it has about the same meaning. It's a line from the song onechan and her friends sang at the graduation ceremony for the older kids in her yochien this past spring. Since we're leaving Fukuoka before she can get to take part in a similar ceremony herself--in fact, we've already spent a full day in Chiba--I'm taking a break tonight from LPGA blogging to convey a big "sayonara" to all the Fukuoka friends she's leaving.

Maybe their parents can read them the Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far), courtesy of Uncle Bill Benzon, and leave a comment or three here for him and onechan....

July 9: For onechan [in response to this and that]
July 10: The discussion continues
July 11: Onechan's Adventure [in response to this]
July 12: Where's Onechan? and Calling Onechan! Calling Onechan!
July 14: Help is on the way and There They Are! Yippieeee! [in response to this]
July 17: Onechan's Choice
July 19: Calling all kidz! Calling all kidz! [in response to this]
July 23: Sigh
July 28: Catch you later alligator
August 1: Where's the bunny rabbit?

[Update (8/3/07): New one--Onechan Tells a Stpry]

[Update (8/11/07): Another new one--The Little Worm from Kansas]

[Update (8/14/07): And another--Twas brillig]

[Update (8/16/07): And yet another--Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre]

[Update (8/21/07): Check the comments on the last installment (thus far) for onechan's and imoto's immediate reactions to Sparkychan and Gojochan showing up in Dunkirk!]

A Brief History of Star Wars Blogging at Mostly Harmless

Since I am the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party's designated Star Wars geek, I have been ordered cajoled graciously invited by the relevant Party Ministries into posting a follow-up to this 30th Anniversary Blog-a-thon contribution at WAAGNFNP. This has nothing to do with the fact that I am just the slightest bit late with a certain sequel in a certain series of my own at WAAGNFNP. Nothing at all. So what is the real reason for this ordeal assignment great and undeserved honor?

Well, a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, back when Mostly Harmless was almost as naive and annoying as a young Luke Skywalker, I made a little confession. Then I followed it up with a big bleg that I really must ask you to go now and read, because it resulted in the talk that I gave a progress report on here and and supplied a link to the .pdf version of here--and which this post is a p.s. to. So that's four posts and my first paid public lecture devoted to Star Wars--not a lot in my book, but who am I to argue with the WAAGNFNP's MOJ?

OK, I admit I'm not counting my other Star Wars posts at Mostly Harmless: a few links here, a brief comparison to the amazing anime series Legend of the Galactic Heroes there, a hidden allusion in our Blogocalypse Carnival over there, and a plug for Rob MacDougall's blog-a-thon entry right here. They just don't relate that closely to the main point of this post, which is to raise a few questions about the relation between these two Return of the Jedi posters (the first actual, the second seriously parodic).

Here's one thing I love about the second poster. By casting President Bush as Lando Calrissian, its designer strongly implies that the role of Darth Vader is being played by Vice President Cheney. As I said in my talk,

It's Cheney, after all, who cultivates a Vader-esque image, who relies on technological implants for his survival, and who famously told Tim Russert five days after 9/11 on Meet the Press that "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will." Whereas Bush was downright Lando Calrissian-like in his campaign, pledging to be a "uniter, not a divider" and to work as closely with Democrats as President of the United States as he did as Governor of Texas. (Plus he has a real past that many would suggest is as wild as Calrissian's fictional one.) When we take into account, too, that Calrissian was intimidated by Vader into betraying Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back and then helped save him and destroy the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, [the] casting decision may even allude to the hope some still hold onto that if only Bush would distance himself from his Vice President and his closest political advisor, Karl Rove, he could yet salvage his Presidency. (The 2006 satirical movie American Dreamz is another example of this fantasy).

What I didn't go on to say then--besides the impossibility of imagining the young Dick Cheney as a young Anakin Skywalker--is how smart it was to leave today's analogue to Emperor Palpatine a mystery. I think it was Claude Lefort who said that in a democracy, unlike a monarchy, the seat of power is empty; rather than fill it (with, say, Rove), it's better to ponder, with Lefort and following Tocqueville, the nature of the despotism particular to a democracy in light of the relation between the Star Wars series and prequel:

The first trilogy tells the tragic story of a republic's descent into empire and a hero's fall into villainy, while the second tells the epic story of that empire's defeat by a rebellion's resistance and that villain's redemption through his children's heroics.

What better illustration of Samuel Delany's point that science fiction is a significant distortion of the present than Star Wars? It's not that I think the Democratic presidential candidates will actually act like Luke, Leia, and Han--the sarcastic casting of Al Gore as Jabba the Hutt says more about the real odds that the Democratic Party will lead a rebellion against Imperial America than anything else in the poster (note: the poster's designer says he made some casting decisions based on design principles alone; that's his story and he's as free to stick with it as I am to run with it). In my talk, I pointed out many problems with the Sith-Republicans/Jedi-Democrats analogy, emphasizing that Democrats have been/can be tempted as easily by the "power of the dark side" as Republicans. And I argued that it's unclear whether the U.S. today has become or will remain an empire:

In response to claims that the Bush administration's policies, doctrines, and strategies are entirely unprecedented, then, I have argued that they ought to be seen as "in the American grain." My point in doing so is not to condemn the United States as always already imperialist, but to suggest that the imperialist tradition in American history and culture, although it has deep roots, is not the only one and does not have to remain the dominant one. 9/11 has sharpened the deep and ongoing contestation among the various American traditions and raised its stakes. The appeal of American-style imperialism has only grown since 2001. But so have critiques of it, from several political traditions within and outside the U.S. What the result of these debates and maneuverings will be is anyone's guess.

Three months and a day after my talk, I still have more questions than answers. The ones I'm most interested in hearing your answers to are:

• What are your criteria for deciding when American democracy has become despotic and imperialist?
  
• Are we there yet? And if so, when did we start?
  
• Most important, at what point do you decide to rebel? And what forms does that rebellion take?
  

Phew--It's Still May 25th in North America

Rob MacDougall's gracious refusal to enjoy the privileges of the Mostly Harmless author function, Old Is the New Hope, reminds me that I technically still have time to finish my own contribution to the Star Wars' 30th Anniversary Blog-a-thon. Be back soon!

[Update 5/30/07: All right, who died and got May 25th declared Towel Day?]

Back to the Future

Still have no ideas for new posts that feel right to me for Mostly Harmless right now, but I did come across (via Boing Boing) a link to a YouTube video of Richard Dawkins introducing Douglas Adams, who then does a reading from the part of his Hitchhikers series that inspired my own conceit for the Blogocalypse Carnival from April Fool's Day. Here it is: