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I took my laptop into the laptop repairing place today. Online on the parental computer, which is slow. I’ve managed to quadruple its speed but it’s still slow. Only solution: pause the internet for me. I will catch up when laptop returned.
Played netball today, first outing on the ankle post-injury. I did not make it worse. This is good.
Instead of this, go read the other moose’s post about how our psychology influences our political tendencies. Is good, and includes micro-summary of Lakoff, who I’ve been mentioning here of late.

Late Afternoon Sun In A Toronto Park
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(It’s a Canadian sweep of the top three! Go Canucks!)
One of our afternoons in Toronto we made it out to the cool neighbourhood where Andrew H and Janice live. We went for a wander through a big park that was right nearby, and as the sun got lower in the sky the whole place became really pretty.
I just really like this photo. I like the way the lines fall, the treetrunk and the path making a cross shape, Janice and Andrew and the tree all backlit, the more sculpted garden away down the hill… Janice has her hands up because she’s just noticed that the light is great to take a photo of someone standing against the tree, a photo that was taken a minute later on someone else’s camera.
Mostly I like this photo because it brings back the feeling of that day so vividly. It’s one of the few photos I have that combines the pretty scenery with a candid photo of people, and those are two things I like, so, yeah.
Andrew H, by the way, I met on the same trip to Portugal that led to me meeting Aaron (who was in photo 8 with the Guru Josh record) and Ella (who took me to the prairies for last week’s sunflower photo). That was a good trip.
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So those are my favourites. Except it’s a stupid exercise, choosing favourites. There are other photos I also like a whole bunch which didn’t make it in this list. Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed lookin’ at them. I’ve enjoyed revisiting them, that’s for sure.
🙂

From the Dom Post today:
Joe Bennett’s column title: “Do-gooders do no good”
Key paragraph: “Doing good makes people feel gooey inside, but it springs from exactly the same desire as warmongering. It springs from the desire to feel superior.”
(Joe Bennett is pretty moderate as far as columnists go in NZ newspapers, btw.)

All The Shah’s Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer, Wiley, 2003
I’ve been reading about Iran, and one of the books I read was this account of the 1953 coup that toppled Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mossadegh. New York Times veteran Kinzer dug into the archives to provide a detailed account of the secret actions driving the coup, as well as putting the oil standoff that had led up to it in clear context. (The title is at least slightly misleading – the British had much more responsibility for the coup than the US, even though the work on the ground was done by the CIA. Kinzer’s pitching the book towards those Americans who want to know why America is viewed with hatred and suspicion in the Middle East, hence the downplaying of Britain in some of the copy.)
I knew going in I’d be angry at what I read, and appalled at the level of interference by the US and Britain. I was surprised by just how angry I’d get.
The story goes like this – it’s worth reading, I promise:
* Early 20th century! Great Britain is a colonial power in Iran, extracting its oil via the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, still later British Petroleum a.k.a. BP). The Brit govt owned a majority share of the company – it saw Iran’s oil as essential for its national wellbeing. For all intents and purposes, the British government was extracting the oil directly.
* The company was massively exploiting Iran – its workers were forced to live in appalling conditions for pitiful pay, no Iranians were trained up to work above the menial level, and Iran was given only a minuscule proportion of the oil revenue.
* Negotiations with Britain to strike a better deal over the oil met a complete stone wall. The US, among others, repeatedly advised Britain to make concessions and improve the terms of the deal with Iran. They did not budge. Their stonewalling led to popular Prime Minister Mossadegh’s decision to nationalise the Oil industry.
* Britain tried to wait Iran out. They removed all their personnel from the oilfields and prevented Iran from recruiting trained workers from other countries; they stopped ships from entering and leaving to transport the oil; they generally tried every trick in the book to break Iran’s spirit and force it to allow them back in. Mossadegh did not back down, and refused to negotiate.
* Britain had the Shah, ruler of Iran, on side the whole time but Mossadegh had proved impossible to control. They wanted to organise a coup, but their Embassy staff had been removed from the country. They approached the US to perform the coup, and as soon as Eisenhower gained power this went ahead. The fledgling CIA sent Kermit Roosevelt into Iran to depose Mossadegh.
* The British had established a small army of paid contacts within Iran. Roosevelt accessed this network and threw a hell of a lot of money around. As a result, newspapers condemned Mossadegh, mullahs condemned Mossadegh, gangsters who ran neighbourhoods in south Tehran condemned Mossadegh. Massive demonstrations were held in which enormous numbers of attendees had been paid off.
* There was more to it than this – Kermit was a sophisticated operator, and he knew how to stage events to drive public opinion. He carefully constructed a plan for the final coup, in which his hand-picked military man would succeed Mossadegh. The coup didn’t exactly go off without a hitch, but it ended as Roosevelt wanted, and Mossadegh was arrested. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was recolonised by the British, under more liberal (but still exploitative) terms.
* The Shah gained renewed power after Mossadegh’s fall. His regime became more and more totalitarian until 1979, when popular revolution removed him from office and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mossadegh’s name was invoked frequently during the revolution, but afterwards, to the horror of the democratising forces within Iran, Khomeini removed him from public discourse and put in place the Theocracy that remains in power today.
* Kinzer’s position is also that the US’ role in the 1953 coup was the direct inspiration for the hostage-taking in the US Embassy in Tehran – a situation that set the tone for fractious Iranian-US relations ever after. It’s a reasonable suggestion, I think.
The book was an incredible read. Most eye-opening was the extent to which the British government and CIA could and did undermine democracy in Iran – as soon as your newspapers and Mullahs have their opinions co-opted by foreign interests, you’ve lost the ability to engage in free decision-making.
Most anger-making was reading about Kermit Roosevelt, true believer in the Greater Good, sitting with his friends sipping drinks and waiting for news while hundreds of people die during the coup-struggle he had initiated.
It makes me wonder what the CIA and other such agencies are up to today. Meeting a newspaper editor in an alley with a pre-written story and $1000 cash is a bit too clumsy for todays wired and paranoid Western world, but I don’t doubt the same covert control over news is pursued today. (Of course, overt control of the news agenda continues to be a battleground, but that’s one we at least have some kind of handle on.)
Of course, this was the first major operation by the CIA, and its success led directly to a series of interventions in other foreign countries. In Iran, it all came back to oil; the British government, and then the US government, had ample opportunity to support a strong democracy in the difficuly Middle East, but they chose to destroy that democracy in order to maintain their oil access.
It would be sickening if I didn’t already expect the worst.

One of the cell networks here in NZ is running a long-term promotion: texting is free on weekends to other phones on that network. It’s a genius bit of marketing, but I don’t know how the heck they afford it.
Anyway, it’s given birth to an entirely new phenomenon – new to me at least.
Four times this weekend I received texts from unknown numbers. The content was text-speak for ‘hi, who is this?’. They were all from different numbers at different times of day.
(One of them’s in the title; another read ‘Hae!Wad u up 2 hu dizb??…’, I deleted the other two before I realised this was a phenomenon worthy of note)
So, I figure there are only a few possible explanations:
* my number is written on a wall somewhere with an encouragement to text me
* the cellphone virus we’ve all been dreading is here, and it communicates like a fourteen-year-old girl
* there are people out there who take advantage of free text weekends to randomly text any number they can think of, and see what response they get
It is a bit odd to me that out of nowhere I get four texts from different numbers in the same weekend. That’s a pretty incredible hit rate if it’s people entering numbers pseudo-randomly, which leads me to suspect that the third explanation isn’t the true one.
I didn’t text back to any of them in case they were some weird spider trying to harvest active cellphone numbers or something. I dunno. Also I didn’t care enough.
So, anyone else experience this? Anyone know what it means?
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This, over on the new-look Xenodochion and Matt M’s LJ, is extremely worth a look and a ponder, combining amusing cute kid story with epistemological exercise: Part 1 and Part 2

So I made a final push until the wee hours last night and finished Draft 2 of Ron the Body.
Hurrah. But there’s plenty more work to be done. This just takes me to the next stage…
…I need to get some people to read it and give me some feedback of the brutally honest variety. People who can print their own copies/read off a screen particularly welcome, since I am poor writer bastard and can’t afford to print many. Volunteers are invited to apply to the usual address.
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When I got home at Christmas, I set a goal for myself to get to this stage by the end of March. So I win by, like, two weeks. Yay for me.
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You may now fill my comments section with adulation. Begin.

On Monday went to see Tuwhare with Cal. Man, it was good. Hone Tuwhare is one of NZ’s great poets, also notable as the first Maori writing poetry in English. The show consisted of a bunch of his poems set to music and performed by a whole mixture of different Kiwi musos, linked by a narration by Rawiri Paratene (the grandad in Whale Rider) which talked about Tuwhare’s life, his artistic practice, particular notes about the poems being performed, and potted biographies of the performers.
It was pretty wonderful. It’s hard for me to single out a favourite – but I’ll say I enjoyed Strawpeople doing ‘Covetous’, organizer Charlotte Yates doing ‘Mad’, and Don McGlashan doing ‘Rain’. I was particularly looking forward to Kiwi rap pioneer Te Koopu (Dean Hapeta) performing a politically charged piece from anti-Vietnam days ‘Speak To Me, Brother’, in order to see what the famously prickly Hapeta would be like – I hadn’t seen him on stage since he supported Spearhead in 1995. He came out and lost the crowd more thoroughly than I’ve ever seen a performer lose a crowd, because he read the whole damn thing off a bit of paper he was holding. Granted, it was a long piece, but man, you coulda learned that thing. Disappointing and weird.
The final song was an odd vibe, too, Goldenhorse raising the volume and the tempo to try and rock out a largely middle-aged sit-down crowd. It was a good piece but everyone just sat stone-still (except for one of the women from earlier performers Wai, who was dancing like crazy down by the stage, nice work on that one).
Anyway, the poetry did get a big hearing, and it’s nice for that. Almost shamefully, I’m not familiar with Tuwhare’s work. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by him. Poetry isn’t a huge thing in my life, I’m yet to find the poet or poem that really seizes me the way I’ve been seized by work in other media, but I have an abundant respect for the form and it makes me happy to see this kind of event. So I guess I have to go and read me some Hone Tuwhare now…

Prairie Sunflower Field
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Ella always told me the prairies would blow my mind, which they surely did when I finally made it up to Winnipeg. I tool a bunch of amazing photos of the Prairies but this one was my favourite. Even in the narrow frame you get a sense of the sheer enormity of the sky. It’s an awesomely cool sight.
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Also, and I almost hate to mention this but I am compelled, over on Tall Poppy Jack considers how to best prepare a Slippy Bar…

I’ve been thinking lately about the word ‘do-gooder’. About how we all instantly understand it to be a derogatory term with a bunch of related implications.
It is usually used to refer to particularly naive or impractical attempts by liberals to ‘do good’ (evaluations made by conservatives of course), but it can be and often is applied more generally.
One of the things that bugs me about it is that it implicitly undermines the whole project of attempting to ‘do good’. Such attempts are always misguided – good can only be achieved indirectly by maximising individual freedom. In Lakoff’s account of the morality underlying conservatism (I’m reading Lakoff right now), it actually becomes immoral to attempt to do good.
We have thoroughly internalised a conservative value system. I can’t think of any term that shows our culture has internalised a liberal value system – but there must be one, right? Any suggestions?
One attempt to reclaim the term is here – a Canadian social justice site named DoGooder. It’s kind of charming, but by Lakoff’s analysis such a reclamation will never overcome its status as a shorthand for moral evil on the conservative side.
(And just to partially prove me wrong about all of us understanding its negative connotation, a Canadian local press article celebrating a local man as a ‘do-gooder.)

This past weekend I was up at the new-style Megaroleplaying Weekend.
The old version of this weekend had a bunch of people descending on a lovely small beachside holiday house (known in this part of NZ as a ‘bach’) to play a bunch of roleplaying games, hang out and talk, run around on the beach, and occasionally actually sleep.
The new version had us up at another coastal spot – the homes of Matt/Debz and Sam/Luke. There were about twenty bods, and we did the sunshine thing, the frisbee in the park thing, the barbecue thing, the hang out and talk thing (including a too-short politics chat with idiot/savant) and even the sleep thing. Of course, there was a lot of the game thing.
The games were amazing. I was lucky enough to be roped into Jenni‘s high-school girl clique game I Know, Right which was an absolutely terrifying experience. It lands you in the heart of a five-strong group of best friends, whose internal power politics are inevitably vicious. I started off in the ‘banker’ spot in the clique, knowing stuff and being able to stay in the good books of the Queen Bee by filtering information through to her. A power play later landed me in the coveted Queen Bee position, which I immediately discovered was even more stressful. I was completely out of my depth, and I soon found myself plummeting down to the awful position of ‘target’. I got a huge amount out of this game – I understand the dynamics of girl friendship cliques a lot better as a result. But, man, it’s harsh, harsh stuff. Fellow players were Debz, Giffy, Sam and Matt. Matt’s writeup. Debz’ writeup.
The other big game was ‘Phoenix’, which used the lovely Primetime Adventures system. We together hashed out an imaginery story structure for a TV series, and then played through a couple of episodes. It was really intense stuff, with play focused on two levels – the protagonist character’s experience inside the story, and the story-creation discussion happening around it. I was impressed by the way in which the system encouraged us to keep finding the crucial moment in scene after scene, and it resulted in an incredibly engaging game and story, although one far removed from more traditional roleplaying styles. This was run/managed by hix, and fellow players were Luke, Debz and Svend. An account of it is being developed here.
I also ran some game about crab truckers, which I wrote about on my LJ.
Overall, it was a splendid short weekend, and I look forward to the next one!