Japanese Video -- What to do if Mugged Abroad

Passed along to me by a Hungarian friend through Facebook. Oh, our wonderfully globally connected world is good for something. Apparently posted on YouTube by someone who found it on Kontraband.com.

I'm dreaming of a California Christmas . . . but it sure is white outside.

It is so incredibly snowy here, you would hardly believe it. But we're expecting up to 8 inches in Southeastern Michigan. And it looks like there already nearly that much piled up on the whole world around the cottage. It feels a little like being in a gingerbread house with icing piled up around it.

I've added some posts over the past couple of days to Our Lady of the Woods, a place I envision for environmentally-oriented posts, links to media reports, information about consumption, and so on. It may be artificially segmenting my life to section those things off, but I envision this spot as a little more personal -- not in the sense of more important to me, necessarily, but just more chatty, more about my quotidian life, and far less likely to be of general interest to someone who doesn't know me. Also, I know Mom is deeply disturbed by my Keeper, so this way she doesn't need to hear all about things like that if she doesn't want to. :)

I am sitting here hidden away in my winter wonderland, reading my field notes from Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, in 2006, trying to make sense of everything, and thinking about bonds, partnerships, "sweat equity," and participation in housing programs in Central and Eastern Europe. I love the idea of this paper, but it's going to be hard to pull it together in the next day. I seem to be headed in the direction of thinking about global housing builds as a simulated religious experience for international volunteers, drawing on Victor Turner as well as an outstanding book called Participation: The New Tyranny? edited by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari. I'm also going to be drawing on the readings for a course I took with Julia Paley last spring, on Democracy: Ethnography and Social Theory. Great class, great readings.

Now I just need to pull it all together . . . . and keep my mind calm while knowing that I still need to grade 15 more undergraduate papers, all (75) of the last quizzes, and check off the museum assignments of my students, and issue their final grades by the 20th, as well as writing my evaluation report for AFG and finishing up 22 more hours of field placement work. Luckily I can be writing my report in those hours. But still. That's all I have to do by the 21st. That, and work out the details of my academic planning with my advisor, and meet a professor to talk about prelims and hopefully manage to convince him that it's worth it to work with me even though he's about to leave the University of Michigan.

And my family wonders why I can't fathom talking about when I'm coming home for Christmas. Well . . . Mom, that's why! :( I miss you guys . .

Little saviours

I was really horrified the other night to find that my digital image files on my SM card had effectively disappeared in my struggling to get them to be read in either my card reader or my camera, plugged into my computer via USB. So, it was a huge relief to find that I could recover them rather painlessly with free software called Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery 3.1. It's small, quick to download, and completely free. Consider me a new fan.

The other software that makes my life happier on an almost daily basis is Google Desktop. If you're not familiar with it, here's how it works. Imagine the capability of google for searching the web. Now apply that to all the files on your computer, divided into categories such as web pages you've visited, emails you've sent and received, and documents, images, and other files you have saved on your hard drive. You can set it to include or exclude certain files, like an external hard drive or a certain folder, or whatever. It is how I magically found the photos I thought I'd lost for good, from my trip to Europe in 2003, that I just posted earlier today. It was also really handy two days ago when I decided I wanted to write some prelim questions for Social Work, and knew I had written some previously, but hadn't the foggiest idea where I'd filed them away. When you search, you can identify what particular type of file you're looking for. . . Yeah, it just rocks.

Mom, my first issue of Martha Stewart Living has arrived, with "all the comforts of home". :) Thank you so much. It's nice study-break reading.

I totally covet the high-tech/old-fashioned kitchen on the cover, though I would substitute warm, sunny yellow on the walls and red or blue accents in place of the pale yellow ones.

All this makes me think, though. I finally share the opinion that Martha is rather retchingly bourgeois. Of course, it would be swell to have a hydraulic lift in a linen cupboard that carries a hidden flat-television screen upwards to watch the Daily Show before bed and then tucks it away under a piece of wood that is seamlessly integrated into the surface of the furniture when you're finished with Jon Stewart. But give me a break. Who has that kind of money and space, besides Emily and Richard Gilmore?* Really. Seriously. It's too much.

No wonder everyone thinks Americans are crazy, and we are spending all our money on consumer goods made in China, and making our houses bigger and bigger all the time to make room for all these things. "In my house, all the juices, fruit and vegetable, have to be FRESHLY SQUEEZED." And in mine, Martha, I'll accept nothing less for cream for my coffee than the milk fresh from the bosoms of my ladies in waiting, which they provide right after polishing my silverware, and right before getting on their hands and knees to scrub my grout with a baby toothbrush.

Oh, oh, and you know what else? Her cat is named Vivaldi. Are you serious!? It almost makes me want to get a cat to name it Poulenc or Shostakovic. But that would be cruel, and having an ironically named pet is almost as bad in my book as getting an ironic haircut.

Still, though, I love the gift, Mommy, and I will happily take her magazine with me into the bath, to manufacture desire. You know I need something to get pedantic about sometimes.

*I just made my way through season 6 again, and it made me remember how good The Gilmore Girls was before Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband Daniel left for greener pastures. (What a shocker. The network was withholding a decent contract to them. Seriously, isn't this case-in-point about the importance of good writing to good television. Things went south SO fast when they left.)

P.S. I just got the news in email. My Nigerian payment slip is ready. I am SO EXCITED.

Oh my GOD, I thought this scam would surely be finished by now.

Radio -- NPR, Radio C, and the whole world at your fingertips

I love radio.

When I was younger I never really understood the point. I was irritated by most radio announcers who seemed to have little to add to any conversation. And why just listen, when you can watch, I thought? TV seemed infinitely superior to radio, which seemed like its ugly cousin. And why would you want to listen to the music someone else had selected, anyway, when you could choose it yourself with tapes and records and then, wonder of wonders, CDs? (Yes, kiddies, I'm that old.)

Well, I've come around completely, and for many years now radio has been rather an obsession. I think I "discovered" (American) National Public Radio when I was on a road trip -- maybe when I was driving up to northern Minnesota with Mom and all we were able to find was the worst top-of-the-charts country, some evangelical Christian talk radio, and NPR news.

I became a real junkie around the time I started commuting by car between San Francisco and Emeryville to a job at Avalon Travel Publishing years ago. And I've never looked back. When I was in Hungary, and the streaming technologies were just getting going, and I had an incredibly crappy ISDN line for internet, I used to lie on the parquet floor underneath my desk where my laptop slowly and laboriously downloaded a program in fits and starts and I would tingle with emotion, a strange mix of homesickness and relief.

KQED was my most beloved station for a very long time, and even when I spent two years listening to KUT in Austin, I longed for its programming and schedule, which had come to feel natural as a heartbeat to me. When afternoon rolled around and I didn't hear All Things Considered, I felt irritated, slighted. Didn't they understand it was the time for that unique blend of quirky, funny, heartfelt, and off-the-beaten-track you find there?

Lately, though, I think I've been won over completely by Michigan radio, which has some wonderful programs I had never heard back in California. Through it I've discovered the joys of Lynne Rosetto Kasper's Splendid Table, Dick Gordon's The Story, which often leaves me open-mouthed with wonder, and the ever-incisive Diane Rehm, who has an amazing knack for keeping her finger on the pulse of the American zeitgeist.

Since radio broadcasts have started becoming available over the web, it adds a whole new level of possibilities. Downloading podcasts for long drives, or walking commutes. . . it's a wonderful world. But I also really appreciate the streaming capabilities, particularly with non-US-based radio stations. One day, just for the hell of it, I decided it would be quite interesting to listen to a radio station in a place I know next to nothing about. So, I settled on Namibia. And then Besim, who was sitting on the couch wondering what was going on, directed us to Trinidad and Tobago. You can go most anywhere to listen to both majority and minority stations at RadioStationWorld. You might be surprised what you find.

One station you won't find there, though, as of yet, is one that is very near and dear to my heart for a variety of reasons, one I sometimes tune in to, thanks to streaming technology, and turn on at full blast on my favored PC in the doctoral lab when it's late at night and I'm there by myself trying to finish a paper. Rádió C, short for cigány, or the Hungarian word for "Gypsy," is a station that started several years ago in Budapest. It's been plagued with financial troubles, accusations of corruption, and loads of other troubles, but for now it's still in business. Sometimes I think I need to write at least a bit about it in my dissertation.

Why is it great to listen to? Well, think about Romani musical talent, for a moment, whether or not you buy into the "it's in the blood" ideology that even Roma themselves often promote. And then think, don't musicians always listen to the coolest music of all? Well, I sure think so. There's lots of Hungarian Romani music, for sure, but they also play unexpected jazz, plenty of pop from all over the world. You even hear Hindi filmi music sometimes. And sure, yes, they announce in Hungarian, and have some talk-radio shows. But most of the time it's music, and a mix you won't hear anywhere else. Check it out. (Just choose your preferred media player and format under the heading "Élő adás!")

They say about themselves: "Budapesten és környékén körülbelül 200,000 cigány ember él (ebből csak Budapesten több mint 100,000!). 2001. október 8-a óta létezik egy rádió, amely közvetlenül nekik szól, az ő nyelvükön, az ő problémáiknak hangot adva. Ez a Rádió ©."

"In Budapest and its environs, about 200,000 Gypsy people live (out of which, in just Budapest, there are more than 100,000). Since October 8, 2001, there has been a radio station that speaks directly to them, in their language, giving voice to their problems. That is Radio C." (translation by yours truly.)

If you find yourself wanting a Hungarian-English dictionary while looking at the site, I recommend the SZTAKI dictionary. However, given the intricacies of Hungarian grammar, with its prefixes and suffixes, and all, it probably won't get you very far. So, I'd encourage you instead to ask your favorite Hungarian-speaker to help you navigate, if you get as far as their website! :)

You may think that this is what those Romani musicians look like.

Well, maybe they do when they dress up in costumes to perform in a square for a Hungarian public. (I took this photo in Budapest at the Spring Festival in Erzsébet tér in 2003.)

But when they're just hanging out, playing music, they're more likely to look like this.

These are my friends Orhan (on accordion) and Dragan (on guitar), at the Amala School of Gypsy Language and Culture in Valjevo, Serbia, in August of 2003.

Orhan is (or was, back then) a director in a Romani theater in Skopje, Macedonia. (I've lost track of him and would love to know what happened to him if you know him!)

Dragan Ristić is the head of the band Kal, which he founded with his brother Dušan. It has an album out that has become immensely popular in Europe, according to my friend Sani Rifati, founder of Voice of Roma. Yup, and they've even made it onto Wikipedia. I should be up on these things, but I've been hiding out in my little world in Detroit & Ann Arbor. But lucky for us, Sani is helping to organize a tour for them in the United States in fall of 2008.

Okay, now, um, back to the task of grading undergraduate papers, which I'm doing a very good job of avoiding here, clearly.

The thin ice of modern life

So, after my walk today, I was 100% convinced that it was time to buy a thing I heard about from a hard-core runner from the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for those of you who aren't Michiganders) in one of my MSW classes: Yaktrax. Why is this so important? Well, the driveway to my cottage is so thoroughly glazed with ice, I almost did a full slide down it when I got to the top of the hill, found myself sliding, and had to move with hands AND feet toward the side of the road to avoid falling completely. A neighbor on her way into the subdivision in her car seemed to be having a good laugh at me. I was a little irked.

Well, I've started salting the driveway, I've been parking at my neighbor's for the past few days, and I've ordered my Yaktrax over the internet. Now, it's time to see about getting snow tires. As a Californian, I'm a bit clueless about this stuff. Smart Michigan friends, do you have any suggestions?