Archive for January, 2008
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Coordinating with others using Google calendar
I’m trying to coordinate data collection on two projects that use shared video equipment and have different, overlapping sets of people participating.
Google calendar may be the way to do it, and as part of that effort, I’m trying to embed that calendar on this page…
<iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=0t5gq7pugf0fhr33qnjb9gnmh0%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> -
What a difference an -r makes: 儿化音
Beijing Sounds looks to be a very neat blog, at least going by this discussion of érhuàyīn 儿化音, the retroflexed final “r” that’s added to the end of words in the Beijing dialect.
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塞翁失马 焉知非福 (another political post)
One of my favorite Chinese chengyu is quoted above. In pinyin, it’s “sai4 weng1 shi1 ma3, yan1 zhi1 fei1 fu2” or “when the old man on the border lost a horse, who could tell that it was a blessing?”
It was cited at the end of the movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, in a somewhat simplified form, to suggest that “winning” in Afghanistan might not be an unalloyed blessing. You can get the whole story here.
So how might the results of last night’s primary be a “blessing in disguise”?
One of the things that has impressed me about Obama is the respect he’s shown his competitors, something that’s not been matched by Clinton, who’s disdain seems evident every time they appear together. That’s been coupled by a flagrant distortion of his record and statements, which he chose not to respond to during the last week. Hillary Clinton is very good at playing a victim, so responding to her attacks is not going to be easy. But I think that if he finds a way to do so, he will have either demonstrated or developed a political talent that will serve him well in the future.
The one thing I like about the US primary process is the way in which it provides an opportunity to learn and to develop some skills and a team that will be useful in the future. So it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
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The day “the last dog died”
(and note that this has nothing to do with our own dog, who’s on her last legs, but teetering along on them with remarkable fortitude). When Bill Clinton was first running for President, he asserted that he would stick with New Hampshirites (?) “until the last dog died.” I was never sure what the meant until I watched him campaigning on CSPAN the other day and realized that, at least for me, that dog’s day has passed. Although I supported him with both money and my vote, Clinton was always a fairly slippery politician…I remember him tagging his opponent Paul Tsongas, a notably principled politician, as “pander bear.” But in the successful, for the moment, effort to defeat Barack Obama, Clinton went far beyond the pale. Here’s one discussion of the event, but I don’t think it catches the supercilious flavor of his speech—calling Obama a “kid,” and his campaign a “fairy tale,” and attacking him for things that actually reflect better on Obama than on Hillary Clinton. Among other things, he claimed that Obama has said his position on the war is the same as Bush’s, and that he didn’t know how he would have voted on the Iraq war resolution if he’d been in the Senate. Neither of which is quite, um, true (Obama did express some hesitation, when he was campaigning for Kerry and Edwards in 2004, both of whom had voted to support the war, but his own discussion of the Iraq war, then and since, has been unusually clear and even prescient.). He also said that he wouldn’t have gone into Iraq, but that we have some responsibility to that country now that we have (where his position is “the same as Bush’s”).
This comes on the heels of his prior claim that we should as well elect a TV interviewer as Obama.
Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s “abandon all hope” strategy will be successful, but I sure hope not. She has shown that she lacks the judgment and principles that would seem to be a minimum requirement for a successful presidency, and I doubt that they would work well together as a couple. The Clintons are welcome to their psychodrama, but I hope the electorate doesn’t play along. At least I won’t. I suppose there are some possible Republican candidates that would cause me to vote for Hillary Clinton, but I kind of doubt it. I don’t want to bear any responsibility for that particular train wreck.
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Happy happy joy joy
Americans have a reputation for being optimistic. Sometimes things happen that seem to justify that faith.
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