Category Archives: travel

by Joel | 30 September 2009 · 6:11 am

Wind vs. Coal Power in Pacific Shipping

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 141-142:

The companies secure within colonial territories made more capital investments in land, stores, and shipping. A major item was the shift from wind power to coal in propulsion and from wood to iron in ship construction. In many ways sail was still more suited to Pacific conditions. Distances were great—some 6,500 miles from San Francisco to Sydney. By then more information was available on favorable winds and currents for passage planning under sail, where calms had always been of more concern than storms. The early steamships, carrying around 1,500 tons of cargo, were disadvantaged, as they burned about thirty-five tons of coal per day to give a speed of seven knots. This meant coaling stations were required across the Pacific, including Honolulu (2,100 miles from San Francisco), Suva (2,800 miles from Honolulu), and to reach Sydney, another 1,700 miles away. Coal was expensive whereas wind was free. Bunkers took up cargo space and added weight, as did the engines, which required spares, skilled engineers, and technical maintenance. Coal in turn had to be brought to bunkering ports by other ships and stockpiled. By the 1870s there were bigger steamships with more efficient engines, requiring a coal consumption of fourteen tons per day at nine knots. Sail then focused internationally on low-value bulk but continued on some Pacific routes.

In the island trades the strategies adopted by several companies were to continue using sail for the long-haul supply ships from main ports, ultimately with auxiliary engines, and steam vessels for trading permanently around the islands, for a time with auxiliary sail. The advantages of steam and diesel propulsion in the islands included improved schedules, greater maneuverability in reef areas, ability to work clear from a lee shore, and the facility to leave lagoons regardless of wind direction. On Chong [Trading Company] employed the barque Loongana for the 2,500-mile passage from Sydney to the north Gilberts, and steam vessels such as the St. George for trading around the islands. It was such a successful division that when the Loongana was lost, she was replaced by the sailing ship Alexa, until she too was lost in 1924.

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Filed under economics, energy, Pacific, travel

by Joel | 26 September 2009 · 4:53 pm

Preference for Pacific Island Seafarers

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 102-103, 106:

As a result of continued shortages of crew, British and American ships frequently sailed shorthanded for the Pacific. The trips involved passages that were four to five months long, via the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. American ships sometimes picked up a few sailors in the Atlantic Islands but generally shipowners were not unhappy with depleted crews, which reduced labor costs during these unproductive legs of voyages. Not so for the disgruntled seafarers whose lives were endangered from shortages of experienced shipmates in bad weather and when beating around Cape Horn against strong headwinds.

Arrival in the trading and whaling areas of the Pacific entailed supplementing the crew, all the more necessary because ships would lose many of the original crew during the three to four years the men were employed in the Pacific. Most losses were due to desertion….

The cautionary note on the recruitment of Samoans as sailors reflected the persistent bad reputation of those islands, arising from the massacre of the boat’s crew of La Perouse in 1787. [I believe La Pérouse was the name of the commander, not the name of his vessel.—J.] Whalers by the 1820s were likewise returning with stories of treachery and savagery experienced in parts of Melanesia and Micronesia. Such tales led to more misgivings regarding taking crew from several of these islands. The situation was different in Tahiti and Hawai‘i, where local seamen were encouraged by chiefs to serve and showed reliability even in difficult Arctic voyaging. Several Hawaiians are recorded to have been on that coast in 1788 under Captain John Meares. The New Hazard increased her crew from twenty-four to thirty-three in 1811 for voyages to the northwest coast, additions that were simply designated as “kanakas” in logbooks and journals. The ill-fated Tonquin had a Hawaiian crew of twenty-four when it was destroyed possibly by the captain after Indians boarded on the coast, and the fur trading ship Beaver took on ten “kanakas” in 1812, together with an experienced island sailor, bosun Tom. American whalers subsequently obtained most of their crews in Hawai‘i and Tahiti and also periodically at the Marquesas, the Carolines, and New Zealand….

Captains clearly preferred Pacific seafarers, who were used to compliance toward chiefs and thus unlikely to give captains trouble by demanding seafaring customary rights on board. The islanders were useful too as interpreters and understood the Pacific ways of trade. As sailors they were skillful at handling loaded boats through heavy surf when ships had to stand off and on. On whalers they acquired reputations as good harpooners and for boldness in closing on a whale. The keen eyesight of island sailors earned them the tobacco bonuses for spotting whales, and this, along with reading the signs of the sea for sudden squalls and reefs, made them invaluable as masthead lookouts.

Swimming and diving proved other important assets. Turnbull was impressed when, on approaching Hawai‘i, he encountered people a mile offshore supported only by “a thin feather-edge slice of wood.” He refers also to Hawaiians diving from topgallant yards and swimming under the ship. This skill of deep diving was employed on pearling and bêche-de-mer ships, as well as for making underwater hull repairs and clearing fouled cables. The extent to which island men and women were at home in the sea is further alluded to in dramatic rescues. Copping describes how, when the Harriet of Sydney was totally lost near Te Puna in April 1840, “the crew would have been lost also if it had not been for the Maori women on board the ship swimming them ashore.” He relates also that when his own whaleboat broached to, and he was knocked overboard and trapped under the boat, a shark “lay hold” of his shoulder, but “my harpooner a Maori jumped overboard after me.” Similarly when James Bagley fell from the topgallant crosstrees, a Hawaiian seaman, John Mowhee, dived after him and told Bagley to hold on to his shoulder until they were rescued.

For the shipowners a more compelling reason for employing Pacific seafarers was their lower costs in wages and victualing. The whaleship owner F. Parbury, who gave evidence at the British House of Lords Select Committee on the Navigation Laws, readily attested to this and expressed preferences for New Zealand (Maori) crews.

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Filed under Britain, economics, Hawai'i, labor, Pacific, Polynesia, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 10 September 2009 · 6:01 pm

Tahiti, 1767: Sex for Iron

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 64-65, 69:

The master of HMS Dolphin under Captain Wallis in June 1767 was George Robertson. He was typical in many ways of the normal run of career masters [equivalent to Master Chief Petty Officers] in the Royal Navy. Robertson was a good seaman who gave discreet guidance but showed suitable deference to the young gentlemen officers. He was also highly patriotic, with a firm belief in the rights of the British nation to take possession and rule over these “poor ignorant creatures,” as he described the Tahitians. In one respect he was less typical than the average master in that he kept a journal of his voyages. This is an important document recording the first relationships between sailors and Tahitians.

Robertson’s journal describes alternating scenes of violence and friendship. At one stage a large canoe approached, and at a signal its occupants launched a storming of stone missiles. The Dolphin replied with a volley of grapeshot from its great guns. Noting that this “carried all before it and drove [the canoe] in two,” Robertson added, “I believe few that were on her escaped with life.” The carpenters were also sent ashore and “cut in the middle” some eighty canoes. The attitude of the master was clearly one of exasperation that these “poor creatures” would have the temerity to challenge sailors of the Royal Navy “and put us under the disagreeable necessity of killing a few of them.” He was pleased that the Tahitians eventually recognized the error of their ways and that sailors and natives soon “walked arm in arm.”

The conversion to close friendships between the sailors and local people appears to have come about when the older men of the island discerned the obsession of the Dolphin sailors for women. The Tahitians were puzzled that the Dolphin had no females on board and may have assumed they came from islands with a dire shortage of women. In any event the Tahitians concluded that what they themselves regarded as normal relationships within society could be a means of obtaining iron from the Dolphin. For the sailors the availability of sex for payment was simply regarded as playing at, as Robertson puts it, “the old trade.” They did so with such enthusiasm that it threatened the integrity of the ship as iron and nails were drawn from it. When the Dolphin left, Robertson described the sorrow and weeping of the people….

The acts of debauching female morals in Tahiti by commerce in iron was echoed by the [HMS Bounty mutineer] bosun’s mate James Morrison when he reminded the more high-minded about corresponding effects of gold in his own country, where, he observed, “as fine a woman as any in Europe are said to prefer it to virtue.”

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by Joel | 7 September 2009 · 6:48 am

Danger of “Pooping a Heavy Sea”

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 33-34:

Long west-to-east voyages, frequently into the prevailing trades, would inevitably involve extended periods of exhausting tacking or reversing lateens, as these vessels could sail no closer than about 75 degrees to the wind. When running free with a strong following wind and sea, a heavily laden double-hulled vessel required competent handling in adjusting to combinations of wind and sea. Twyning observes that the sea has to be kept on the quarter, for if a high wave was allowed to run between the two hulls, it could part them. Scudding before a gale could also make any of these craft difficult to control, and there was the danger of being overtaken by waves and pooping a heavy sea, which could wash over the length of the vessel. It is likely that experienced seamen would in such weather pay out a long line with buoyant material, such as wooden spars attached to act as a sea anchor, and ride out the storm or drag it astern to slow down, but there is no evidence of this in the Pacific. Some vessels carried a heavy stone on a rope for anchoring.. This could be hung in the water over the bow, then weights shifted aft and the vessel kept nearly head-on to the sea, assisted by expert use of a steering oar. Morrison also observed in Tonga that “when taken by a squall they luff head on to it and shake it out—if long they jump overboard and hang her head to windward till the squall is over.” He added that bringing the sail down on very big vessels could be dangerous, but they carried plenty of cordage and masts to repair damage.

Calm weather could bring other problems, particularly where strong ocean currents were encountered…. The equatorial current can set in a westerly direction at thirty to forty miles per day, and under fresh trade winds at about three and a half knots. The easterly countercurrent has a rate that reaches over one knot. These currents vary seasonally, with the equatorial countercurrent extending just south of the equator in June and July. Captain G. H. Heyen, who commanded the brigantine Alexa, the last sailing vessel to operate regularly out of Sydney to the Pacific Islands in 1929, recalls becoming becalmed twenty miles west of Tarawa on the fifty-fifth day out of Sydney and drifting away; the Alexa did not reach the Gilberts again for another one hundred days.

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by Joel | 1 September 2009 · 8:35 pm

One Pacific Island Sailor’s World

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 6-7:

THE PACIFIC SAILOR who is waiting for a jumbo jet at Nadi International Airport in Fiji has been in transit for almost three days. He has travelled by local boat from his home island of Nanouti in Kiribati to Tarawa, the principal island of Kiribati, and from there by small plane to Fiji. He is bound for Townsville, Australia, via another flight from Sydney to rejoin a large bulk carrier as an AB (able-bodied seaman). The ship will probably be heading next for the United States. It is owned by a German company in Hamburg and flies the Liberian flag. This ship once again will be his home and workplace for the next twelve months.

A similar procedure is repeated in various ways throughout Oceania. Some eight thousand or so young men, and a very few young women, move from their home islands to world ports to join foreign-going ships. They are recruited as sailors by agencies of the global labor market and will be sailing worldwide on vessels carrying cargoes of raw materials, oil, chemicals, and consumer goods in containers. Rarely, if ever, will they sight their home islands during these trips.

The sailor from Kiribati was born on a small, flat coral atoll close to the equator (0°40′ S). The atoll is remote and only twenty-four miles long and ten miles wide. There are nine villages, with a total population of about 3,200. These are subject to drought conditions, when water and island foods are scarce, and survival has depended on sea resources. When growing up, the future sailor was never beyond the sound of the wind and sea, and at an early age he learned to swim, dive, sail, and fish. Few strangers would have come to his village. Only when an interisland vessel came through the boat pass and anchored in the lagoon to unload flour and other goods by workboat would there be any significant changes in the repetitive rhythm of daily life. The boat would load copra off the beach, which is the only cash product on Nanouti and can be depleted during droughts.

As a youngster, the I-Kiribati sailor would have known male relatives who returned on leave from foreign-going ships. They would tell sailors’ yarns and bring money, radios, perfumes, toys, and other attractive items. These were soon distributed within the extended family through the social obligations of bubuti (sharing on request). Some of the younger unmarried sailors would spend only the minimum time on leave at home. They preferred to return to the company of mariners from other islands who congregated in South Tarawa, with its cinema, cafes, bars, and girls and its distance from the rule of the old men and the eyes of the clergy on their home islands.

The Nanouti sailor is following in the footsteps of the itinerant sailors of the past. He is twenty-nine, has qualified at the Marine Training Centre in Tarawa, and has already served three years at sea. He is now a well-paid (by island standards) AB. His young wife and baby daughter have been left on Nanouti, where he has also left part of his personality. From now on, he will adapt to the ways of shipboard life, with its terminology known only to fellow seafarers, its discipline, and its food and customs. He has likewise been transformed in appearance. While on leave on his home island, he lived the relaxed life of a bare-bodied, barefoot villager in a wraparound lavalava. He is now wearing a T-shirt, blue jeans, a baseball cap, sunglasses, and an outsize pair of trainers. He carries a case and a bag, which contain shirts, pullover, socks, underwear, a woollen cap, a boilersuit, boots, shoes, hard hat, oilskins, and a knife, all previously supplied by the company.

Onboard discipline is exercised by a German captain and, on deck, three Polish officers. The engine room has similar numbers and nationalities in charge. The cook is from the Philippines; consequently, for the next twelve months he will not eat the “true food” of Kiribati—fish, coconut, and taro, supplemented by bread, rice, tinned meat, and on occasion pig and fowl. Instead the daily diet will be German and Polish dishes cooked by a Filipino. But he is happy that at least six other ratings [see nautical glossary entry below—J.] will be from the islands of Kiribati. He could of course have found himself in a much more ethnically diverse seagoing community. In any event he will be different in many respects from what he was on his home island.

The front matter includes a brief nautical glossary, which defines ratings thus:

Usually there are three departments on a cargo vessel: deck, engine, and catering. Each has three levels of crewings: officers, petty officers, and ratings. On-deck ratings comprise mainly ordinary seamen (OS) and able-bodied seamen (AB); in the engine room they are mainly motormen (MM), firemen, and greasers; and in catering, various assistants. Some of these designations have changed with technology and minimal crewing, but AB and MM have been retained.

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Filed under economics, migration, Pacific, travel

by Joel | 1 August 2009 · 4:21 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Nisshoku, Shironiji, Tatsumaki

I’ve just returned from Japan, still jet-lagged, with a harvest of about 600 photos to sort through and dozens of new words. The weather was terrible almost the whole time, and so I’ll start with a few of the meteorological terms I gleaned on this trip.

日食 (or 日蝕; see below) nisshoku ‘solar eclipse’ (lit. ‘sun eating’) – We arrived at Kokura station in Kita-Kyushu to find many bystanders glancing up at the solar eclipse in progress, in a cloudy sky between rainstorms (the previous day and the following day). We had arrived there by rail pass via bullet train on a diversionary quest en route from Hiroshima back to Nagoya. Flooding had closed train lines between Hiroshima and Kokura the previous day.

Our quest was first to find the site of my hilltop home and kindergarten 55 years earlier, where my father began his first job after Japanese language school in Tokyo as a missionary chaplain of Seinan Jo Gakuin. His Japanese teacher there was the head of the English Dept., who used to translate my father’s sermon drafts into flowery, archaic Japanese using vocabulary that students would sometimes later ask him to explain. That prompted my father to begin writing his own drafts in Japanese, using a more down-to-earth style that he still employs in both Japanese and English, whether preaching or conversing.

We finally found both sites after talking with a teacher in the current Mt. Zion Kindergarten, which now stands on the site of a once-separate kindergarten for burakumin children in the neighborhood, along the road to Tobata. The kindergarten I attended was for school employees, and has since been replaced by a swimming pool. The teacher’s husband had attended the same kindergarten during the 1950s, and she was the only person I queried who knew anything about the history of the school going that far back.

白虹 hakkou, shironiji ‘corona, fog bow’ (lit. ‘white rainbow’) – We spent the rest of the afternoon sightseeing in quaint old Mojikō (‘Moji Port’), which advertises its Retro attractions. (On the way there, we mistakenly got off at Moji Station, home of the equally retro Beer Masonry Museum.)

In front of well-preserved Mojikō Station is an unusual statue of three boys at work harvesting wakame, with a poem on the pedestal by a writer whose pen name is (横山)白虹 Yokoyama Hakkou (1899–1983). The poem reads 和布刈る / 神の五百段 / ぬれてくらし (wakame karu / kami no ihodan / nurete kurashi), which I suppose one could translate as ‘The 500 steps to the gods of the wakame harvest lead a wet life’. Better suggestions are welcome.

竜巻 tatsumaki ‘waterspout, whirlwind, tornado’ (lit. ‘dragon roll’) – In addition to all the news reports of rainstorms and flooding, we saw one report about a rare tornado cutting a swath through Tatebayashi, a city in the panhandle of Gunma Prefecture just south of where we lived in 2005–2006 in Ashikaga, on the edge of the Kanto Plain outside Tokyo.

UPDATE: Reader Doc Rock notes that the character for ‘eat’ (or ‘food’) that appears in ‘eclipse’ has another possible shape in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: 蝕 ‘eclipse, occultation’, with the phonetic element (Sino-Jp. shoku) on the left and the semantic element (虫, ‘bug’) on the right. (The ‘bug’ radical usually occurs on the left or the bottom of characters containing it.) In native Japanese, the same kanji can be read mushiba(mu) ‘to be wormy, bug-eaten; to gnaw into, undermine’. In Sino-Korean, 日蝕 ‘sun eclipse’ means ‘solar eclipse’, while 日食 ‘[land of the rising] sun food’ means ‘Japanese food’ (Jp. 和食 washoku).

Note that the Chinese character for ‘rainbow’, 虹, also has a ‘bug’ radical. Why would early Chinese scribes have associated such magical meteorological phenomena as eclipses and rainbows with creepy-crawly creatures? (And barbarians: 蛮 Ch. man, Sino-Jp. ban!) Weather phenomena are more typically written with radicals associating them with ‘sun’, ‘rain’, ‘water’, and so on.

I am not at all sure, but there are striking parallels in many Austronesian languages, where certain unusual “prodigies of nature” tend to be marked by prefixes that often have shapes derivable from *qali- or *kali- (although there is much variation and irregularity). Compare three words for ‘butterfly’: Brunei Malay kulimpapat, Tagalog alibangbang, and Gedaged (PNG) kilibob. The same prefix tends not to be found on words for much more common and familiar creatures, such as ‘flies’ (Mal. langau), ‘lice’ (Mal. kutu), or ‘mosquitoes’ (Mal. nyamuk).

Now compare three Austronesian words for ‘whirlwind’: Malay kelembubu, Tagalog alimpuyo, and Lakalai (PNG) kalivuru. The same prefix tends not to be found on words for normal phenomena like ‘fire’ (Mal. api), ‘rain’ (Mal. hujan), or ‘wind’ (Mal. angin).

The Austronesian patterns have been analyzed rather comprehensively by University of Hawai‘i Professor Robert Blust in his (2001) “Historical morphology and the spirit world: the *qali/kali- prefixes in Austronesian languages” in Issues in Austronesian Morphology: A Focusschrift for Byron W. Bender, ed. by J. Bradshaw and K. Rehg, pp. 15-73 (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics).

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, language, travel

by Joel | 17 July 2009 · 7:56 am

Summer Travel Hiatus

Back in August

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by Joel | 7 July 2009 · 9:06 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Two Teas, A Bug, OMG

Anybody who’s paid attention to my latest batch of Flickr photos will know that I took a short trip to Korea in June. Unfortunately, the rudimentary Korean I had learned before my last visit there on a wonderful junket in 1995 had faded to the point that I felt rather frustrated by my inability to say very much, despite my ability to read and sound out far more words in hangul than I can understand. However, I did manage to pick up a few new Korean words for things I ingested, plus one new Chinese expression that showed up repeatedly in the subtitles of an in-flight movie too silly to listen to.

This time I learned the names for two new Korean teas, one of which I’m sure I sampled during my last visit back in 1995.

오미자차 omija cha (五味子茶) ‘five flavor berry tea’ is made from Schisandra chinensis (Ch. wǔ wèi zi, Jp. gomishi), whose flavor, as its common name implies, is supposed to be sweet, tart, salty, bitter, and aromatic all at once. I found it to very refreshing.

솔잎차 ‘pine leaf (= needle) tea’ (松葉茶) is written sol ip cha but is often romanized solnip cha and it sounded to me like sollip cha (and not sorip, as it would normally be with an /l/ between two vowels). This tea was was also refreshing, mildly aromatic, not sweet, and only slightly bitter. The native Korean root for ‘pine’ is sol- in ‘pine needle’ (솔잎 sol-ip) but is truncated to so- in ‘pine tree’ (소나무 sonamu). The Sino-Korean root is song-, as in ‘pine flower/pollen’ 송화 song-hwa and ‘pine dumplings’ song-pyeon (served at Chuseok). It is cognate with (Mandarin) Chinese sōng and Sino-Japanese shō (as in shōchikubai ‘pine-bamboo-plum’). (I revised this paragraph in response to Doc Rock in the comments.)

번데기 beondegi ‘chrysalis, pupa’ (borrowed into Jp. as ポンテギ pontegi) – In 1995, I got the chance to sample fried grasshoppers, thanks to a little old lady selling them by the parking lot at Sokkuram Grotto in Gyeongju. This year, I came across cooked silkworm pupae on sale by the footpath to Jeondeungsa temple complex on Ganghwa Island. I was surprised that several others in the group I was with sampled them. They’re more chewy than crunchy, high in fat, fiber, and calcium, and not too salty. They used to be a very popular snack in Korea—for kids as well as adults. They were also eaten in China. Nowadays, they’re much more commonly used to feed koi (carp), turtles, lizards, and chickens.

我的天 wǒ de tiān ‘OMG’ (lit. ‘my heaven’) seemed to be a signature opening dialogue tic in the Chinese subtitles of Bride Wars, an in-flight movie I tried hard to sleep through on the long flight back via Narita. (I won’t blog about my trip to Narita-san Temple during my long layover, since I’ve already put so much effort into enhancing its Wikipedia article. Wikipedia and Flickr have been soaking up most of my blogging energy these days.)

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Filed under China, food, Korea, language, travel

by Joel | 5 March 2009 · 9:14 pm

Rushdie on Slumdog Tourism

In a dyspeptic disquisition on screen adaptations from books in last Saturday’s Guardian, Salman Rushdie coughs up some colorful bile in the general direction of the recent Oscar favorite.

It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it’s still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.

via LaurenceJarvikOnline

Like most Oscar winners, Slumdog had not yet enticed the Outliers to make an effort to go see it in a movie theater. Nor is it likely now to find a place in our never-very-long Netflix queue. We’ve already seen, courtesy of Netflix, Thom Fitzgerald’s award-winning, disgusting, poverty-porn movie, The Wild Dogs (2002), which views Romanians as nothing but beggars, con-men, sex workers, or dog catchers—and compares them with heavy-handed symbolism to the wild dogs of Bucharest, which the government is determined to euthanize. All foreigners there (or at least all Canadians!), on the other hand, are either corrupt exploiters or naive do-gooders. And the path from exploiter to do-gooder requires finding your own personal beggar to support: the Canadian ambassador’s wife takes on a legless beggar boy, who follows her around like a puppy; the Canadian pornographer tries to redeem himself by repeatedly giving stuff to a reverse-kneed, hand-walking beggar, whose companions promptly steal it from him; and the Romanian dog-catcher tries to redeem himself by creating a refuge for dogs he was supposed to have euthanized, only to be arrested and have his dogs taken away. I fully agree with the reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes, whose review (no longer available online) includes the quote, “No one in this sterile film is redeemed, condemned or even particularly humanized…. Ultimately, Fitzgerald’s gutless film is a muddled, grotesque travelogue.”

Sorry. Next time I’ll tell you how I really feel.

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Filed under anglosphere, Canada, cinema, economics, India, Romania, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 27 December 2008 · 10:28 am

Holiday Hiatus

Our daughter is home for a week after her first semester teaching in Josiah Quincy Upper School. Then I head off for a small family reunion on the occasion of my father’s 84th birthday hosted by my brother who lives in the micropolitan area embracing Metropolis, Monkey’s Eyebrow, and Possum Trot. How many readers already knew where that is?

Among the university press books I will pass along to family members are In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar for my father (a retired foreign missionary and small-town pastor), The Tangierman’s Lament and Other Tales of Virginia for my brother in Virginia, and What Reconstruction Meant for my librarian brother in Kentucky.

My in-flight reading will be Great Leader, Dear Leader and Under the Heel of the Dragon, and bedtime reading will be Lipstick Jihad. Excerpts to follow in 2009.

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