The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

At one point on Sunday, my credit card stopped working.  I’m not a deadbeat – I swear – so I was sure that the card companies were wondering who’s the guy in India using Joe’s credit card.  (This was particularly annoying seeing that I had called my main card provider to tell them that I coming here, but I suppose I should be grateful that they’re keeping me safe.

When I got in, I called the American Express hotline to tell them to knock it off and let me start using my credit card already.  But using the hotel phone to make an international collect call to AmEx seemed nigh impossible.  So instead I used Skype to make the call.

As it happens, the representative that I spoke to was in Mumbai.  So here I am, in Bangalore working with Indians, talking over the internet to the US American Express customer service line, connecting via some network back to Mumbai, where I was speaking to an Indian rep from another US company.

Welcome to the wonderful world of globalization!

After touring, I did a little shopping.  (The family have all got their favorite India items, after being the beneficiary of many of my previous trips, but some are in need of replacing.)  Let me describe what it’s like to shop on Commercial Street, one of the major centers of shopping in Bangalore.

FIrst off, you should note that Commercial Street is the place where, when Julie visited here, she threw her hands over her eyes and said, “Too much visual stimulus!  Make it go away!”  Sure enough, there’s vast amounts to see in all directions, all sorts of color, plenty of small shops, and a wide range of humanity.

A typical street in this area is a narrow one-lane road with small shops lining each side.  People walk in the streets, dodging the occasional car, motorbike, or autorickshaw (these are three wheel vehicles that in stability and size resemble a golf cart.  I love them, but Julie, that wise woman, wouldn’t get in one when she was here).  The crowds are big, the shops are small, and the road is crowded.

But if that’s too open, if you’re feeling a sense of agoraphobia, you can always turn down one of the alleys.  Now you’re in a much tighter space, surrounded by yet smaller shops and stalls, and with even more difficulty dodging the cars.

Still, though, things seem rather open.  Now it’s time to go down the alley-off-the-alley.  This is about five feet across, there’s no more cars or autorickshaws, and the motorbikes tend to be being pushed.  But there’s still plenty of small stalls and even a few shops.

Finally, you come out and see the following mixed among the traffic:

Shopping in a shop can be fun too.  They believe in lots of service here.  Visiting one of my favorite shops, Mysore Saree, to pick up some silk (yes, Diana, I got your silk) involved sitting down on a stool at a small table, having the sales staff bring me a drink, and having other salesclerks running this way and that finding bolts of cloth that match my descriptions of what I need.  And match their ideas of what else I might be persuaded to buy.  Finally, when I’ve picked out all of my cloth, they say, “Would you like some pashminas?”  What do you know, those are on my shopping list too, so I say yes.  And they bring forth the nicest ones I’ve seen all day (and I’ve been looking), and I pick out several in different colors for my womenfolk to divide however they so choose.  (Yes, Julie, Kate, and Diana – I’ve got your pashminas.)

(Don’t worry, Andy, I found your wooden snake.  Though I think you would have best enjoyed the Bangalore shopping experience, with your taste for bizarre bazaars.  You probably would even have bought food from the street vendors, a little too daring for me!)

Special bonus picture of animals in traffic:

This was the first time I’ve seen a camel in Bangalore.  I’ve seen them in other parts of India – even rode one once.  But never before here.

After four years, I’m back in Bangalore, once more a tool for global outsourcing.  (When I leave Mixx, a team of UberMedia developers out here will be taking over my code.  I’m here preparing them for that moment.  And a special bonus: I’ll get a chance to meet Raghu Somaraju, ace Mixx developer and our only offsite developer.  Although I’ve worked closely with Raghu for four years, this will be my first chance to meet him face-to-face.)

A few things to note.  First, while India is much different than the US, it’s hard to find a place to be strange and exotic when you’re visiting for the sixth time.  Bangalore has changed a little since last I was here (they’ve got a nice new airport, and they’re working on a light rail system – about time they started beefing up the local infrastructure!), but it’s pretty much the same place.

Second, I flew Qatar Air this time, instead of United (which was AOL’s airline of choice).  An excellent experience – I rather like Qatar Air and would gladly use them in the future.  (They layover in Doha, Qatar, was my first time on the soil of a dictatorship, for those keeping track.  I seem to have survived the experience.  So did the dictator.)

Third, I gave myself an extra day here in Bangalore, arriving a day in advance of when I’m expected in the office.  While I made the most of my day, it wasn’t just a junket.  One thing I’ve learned in my trips to Bangalore is that jet lag sets in strongly in the afternoon of my first day here.  I’d be useless in the office once lunch is over (not surprising, given that I got a total of eight hours of sleep over the past two nights, and four of those were in a plane, and the clock is pretty much turned upside down here – India is 9 1/2 hours ahead of the US at this time of year (they don’t do daylight savings)).

So I spent the day visiting Bangalore.

In my previous trips here, I spent any down days I had visiting sites a few hours from here.  As a result, I never did visit the Bangalore sites.  Today I made up that lack.  Though as it happens, Bangalore is a bit short on tourist sites.  But there were a few:

– Lal Bagh, a lovely and large botanical preserve.  Here’s a picture:

– The Bull Temple, a temple featuring a large statue of Nandi, the pet bull of Shiva.  Here’s me with the bull:

(Note: this is the second holy statue of Nandi I’ve seen in India.  He’s obviously a popular subject.)

– Tipu Sultan’s Bangalore summer palace.  Tipu Sultan fought against the British in the late 18th century, about the same time we were fighting the Revolution (and, in some cases, against some of the same generals that we fought).  I’ve visited others of his sites before.  This was nice enough, but the places near Mysore are nicer.

– Bangalore Palace.  Built in the 1870’s by the British, this is a nice looking castle currently owned by the local maharajah (India still has some, though their powers are limited).  Here it is:

I enjoyed it, but I should note that the Maharani seemed to like furniture made from animal parts, like these rather odd footstools:

The maharajah, on the other hand, really enjoys having art that prominently features naked women, ranging from classic nudes gathered together on a wall:

to this rather strange and suggestive Frank Franzetta-style item:

Now don’t get me wrong: I like female nudes as much as the next guy.  But geez, dude, how about a little variety?  I mean, you might want to have at least one landscape!

Okay, I lied.  I actually did do one more trip in 2010.  Well, a trip that started in 2010 and then ran over into 2011.  The family went to Puerto Rico again this year.  I like it there – see my last year’s blog post for details.

But the weather wasn’t great this year – more cloudy days than not.  So it was fun, but not as beachy as I would have liked.

Still, I did get out scuba diving one day, and did a lovely tour of the rainforest (complete with a trip into a cave).  So much fun was had by me, at least – though I didn’t get any complaints from the family!

I’m falling behind on this rather dreadfully.  Let me see if I can summarize the other trips I’ve taken since fall.

Back in fall, Julie and I went:

– To New York city, to see Sara, Gary, and Marjorie.  This was a trip full of happy coincidences.  First off, we went one day to visit the Medieval art museum at the Cloisters.  A lovely place, but best of all: there was a medieval fair going on that day which we greatly enjoyed.  Then we went to see “American Idiot” on Broadway, a show based on the album by Green Day.  That day, it happened that one of the cast members was out, so instead of an understudy they brought in Billie Joe Armstrong to play the part.  I’ve never seen a show where the audience was so excited – there was thunderous applause throughout, starting with the announcement that Armstrong would be appearing that night.  (And the show was great too, and Armstrong had tremendous stage presence.)  A fun trip.

– To Charleston, South Carolina.  We visited a bunch of Civil War sites, including Fort Sumter and the Hunley.  (The Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel.  Built by confederates, it rammed and sunk a Union blockading vessel, subsequently sinking with all hands lost itself.  It was recently discovered in Charleston Harbor and is being restored – I strongly recommend visiting it if you have the chance.)  And we walked around Charleston and had a lovely meal.  Plus, we stopped off in Raleigh on the way back and had dinner with Kate.

– To Los Angeles.  These were a couple of business trips that I went on.  (My company was bought by an LA company back in early November and I was visiting them.)  So lots of boring business stuff, but I did manage to visit a couple of sites, including watching the sunset over the Pacific (always a pleasure), driving through one of those dry southern California valleys in the hills (a fun drive through strange landscapes), and a visit to the La Brea Tarpits (also fun).

And that rounded up my travels for 2010.

For various reasons, work slowed down drastically in the fall.  I took the opportunity of going on several short trips.

The first of these was a road trip to Civil War sites in Tennessee.  I’ve wanted to try a road trip sometime, and this seemed an opportune moment.  So I hopped in the car, crossed the border, and visited the state that had the second-most number of Civil War battles (first, of course, being Virginia).

(As it happened, I had business at the beach right before the trip.  So I drove all across Virginia at its widest point, from coast to mountains, to get to  Tennessee.  Coming home, I came from the southern border of Virginia to Northern Virginia.  So I literally crisscrossed Virginia on this trip.)

My first stop was pre-Civil War: I saw a sign from the highway for the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s home, so I stopped and visited.  Fairly standard early-19th century estate, nothing much to distinguish it.  But I did find myself getting really angry at Jackson, who was a pretty lousy human being and, as president, was a key figure in some of America’s most shameful actions (launching the Trail of Tears, for example).

Second stop: Fort Donelson, the site of Grant’s first big victory, in the northwest corner of Tennessee.  A beautiful place, where the Confederates set up a fort overlooking the  Cumberland River.  Here’s a battery of cannon overlooking the river:

Fort Donelson

Imagine gunboats coming up the river and these cannon firing on them.  Which is pretty much what happened on one cold day in February, 1862.

After the fort, it was back to the road, where I saw this lovely billboard:

Then it was back to Nashville, (in north-central Tennessee) where I spent an evening watching the Grand Ole Opry.  I’ve often seen the Lil Ole Opry down in Mathews, and I thought this would make an interesting comparison.  The music was a lot better in Nashville, but the audience was almost exactly the same: all older white people.  It’s not often these days that I find myself in a crowd that makes me feel young, but this one managed it.  And in an audience of around a thousand people, I saw one African-American.  (And yes, I did look.)

Next, off to Shiloh in south-west Tennessee, the first truly bloody Civil War battle.  A nice battlefield where I learned many things that I did not know about the battle – walking the field adds so much to reading the stories.  Plus a special bonus: it turns out that the Shiloh battlefield was, back around 1400 or so, the site of one of the biggest cities of the Mound Builder Indians, a civilization that thrived along the Mississippi valley but which was wiped out by European diseases well before actual Europeans got anywhere close.  Here’s one of the large mounds built by those people:

And another lovely view of a river, this time the Tennessee (the Civil War in the west was all about the rivers):

Then I drove the Chattanooga in southeast Tennessee, site of another two Civil War battlefields.  Chickamauga was interesting, but far better was the view of the siege of Chattanooga, where the Confederates besieged Union forces until Grant showed up and drove them off.

By far the best part of the battlefields was the view from Lookout Mountain, a 2300 foot mountain overlooking the city of Chattanooga.  On the top of the mountain, there’s a tourist trap called the Battlefields of Chattanooga which has a model of the city showing the various military actions involved in lifting the siege.  Then you step outside to a national park and voila, you can see the entire area where all that fighting took place.  Here’s the view:

I hit another tourist trap or two (Underground waterfall!  World’s steepest railroad!), then after a stop in Raleigh where I had some great sushi with Kate, it was back home again.  Zigzagging across Tennessee, then cris-crossing Virginia, and my roadtrip was done.

A long list to catch up with.

Audiobooks first:

– Star Island by Carl Hiaasen.  I’m a big fan of Hiaasen’s stuff, which is always funny, set in Florida, and generally angry about how people are despoiling a place that Hiaasen clearly loves.  In this book, Hiaasen takes on celebrity culture, focusing on a celebrity trainwreck on the Britney/Lindsay level.  Amusing stuff, though not his best.  (If you want to read Hiaasen, I’d recommend Skin Tight.)

– The Passage by Justin Cronin.  An interesting take on both vampire and end-of-the-world stories.  Genetic vampires are created by the military, and, surprise surprise, things go bad.  The first third of the book takes place before the world collapses, the second two thirds afterwards.  The characters, writing, and plotting are all excellent.  There’s clear indications that a sequel is to come, but the story stands rather well on its own.  Strongly recommended.

– The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer.  Yeah, geeky, I know.  But it made for a surprisingly good audiobook.  But there was one strange consequence of reading it like this: I usually listen to audiobooks while driving.  Occasionally I lose focus on the book (imagine, paying more attention to the road than to what I’m hearing), but generally come back eventually and realize what’s going on.  (Though I had to stop listening to David Copperfield at one point because I found that it required more attention than I could muster while on the road.  Which is a good aspect of the book, to be sure.)

So I’d be listening to all the talk about Nazis, start to space out a little, and realize that I’m listening to the description of a really despicable, definitely non-PC, point of view.  Hey, I think, that’s really an awful way to look at the world!  Then I realize that the audiobook is describing something said by Adolph Hitler.  So I suppose one thing I gained from this book is a clear realization that Adolph Hitler was not a nice guy.  Who knew, right?

– Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.  A comic take on Biblical Armageddon, containing about the most endearing representation of the Antichrist that I’ve come across.  Particularly amusing if you remember the movie “The Omen.”

E-books on the iPad:

– Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.  A reread of the sequel to American Gods. I like this one better than the original.  It includes moments that had me laughing out loud, both on original and second readings.  Strongly recommended.

– The Fever by Sonia Shah.  A book about the science, history, and current status of malaria.  A fascinating read, though rather depressing, seeing as it strongly suggests that we’ll never manage to eradicate this scourge of a disease.

– A Woman’s Crusade by Mary Walton.  This is a biography of Alice Paul, focusing on her efforts to get women’s suffrage passed.  Since Julie got her studio at the Lorton Workhouse, she has become fascinated with the story of the suffragettes who were once imprisoned there.  The leader of those suffragettes was a woman named Alice Paul, a fascinating and dynamic character who organized and led the more radical wing of the American suffrage movement.  Paul was a pioneer in the area of civil disobedience (the suffragists were the first to picket the White House), and a truly heroic woman who underwent torturous force feedings at the hands of authorities when she was imprisoned for leading the picketers.  The story of how she helped get the suffrage amendment passed is both fascinating and horrifying, and it’s a pity that her story is not better known.  Suffice to say that the suffragettes were not all the prim and stuffy old ladies of popular imagination.

– Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold.  I’m a huge fan of Bujold’s Vorkosigan series of character-driven science fiction.  This is the latest in the series.  It’s a fun read, full of rollicking adventure.  But it’s not one of her best.  I’d recommend it to a big fan of the series, but if you want to read Bujold, there’s better places to start.

– Inside Straight, Busted Flush, Suicide Kings, edited by George R.R. Martin.  Once upon a time, there was a science fiction series called the Wild Cards books, which was a multi-author universe in which people gained superpowers.  But it was a distinctly real-world take on superpowers, in which having powers can be more pain than fun, and no one would seriously consider putting on purple tights to go out and fight crime.  These three books represent a new generation of the series.  I enjoyed them – they’re fun reads, though they tend to take themselves a little too seriously at times.  Still, it’s fun stuff.

And one on print:

– Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky by John Ed Pearce.  I’ve started working on a set of rules for gunfight battles.  As part of this, I’m researching some real-life gunfights to serve as the basis for some scenarios.  This book is one source of such battles.

Eastern Kentucky was the site of several family feuds of the Hatfield-McCoy variety.  These included outsized personalities, vicious gunfights, and many many deaths.  This book was an entertaining read describing several of those feuds, and many of the battles.

I wasn’t thrilled with the prose style, which sometimes seemed a bit slapdash.  And at times it was difficult to keep track of all the personalities involved – a list of major figures in the various feuds would have helped a lot.  But the subject matter is fascinating and the stories moreso.  And I give the author credit for not trying to come up with a single catch-all explanation of why there was so much violence in that area: as he says, it wasn’t related to the Civil War (most of the veterans were from the same side, generally the Union), it wasn’t from being cut off from the rest of the world (some feuds took place in isolated counties, but some in places with railroad access), and not a matter of a bunch of illiterate hillbillies (several of the feudists were college-educated professionals, including a number of lawyers, doctors, and judges).  A fun read.

And that’s about it.  Oh, I’ve started a few other books, some of which I’m still reading.  And there’s at least one book that I’m not at liberty to discuss in a public forum.  But that catches me up to the end of the year.

Why hello, blog.  It’s been a while.  What have you been up to?  Really?  How interesting!

I’ve actually had a fairly eventful, and fairly busy, few months.  These have included much reading, and quite a bit of traveling.  I’m going to try to catch up here on what I’ve been up to.  But please be patient as the posts may well be describing things that happened some months ago now.

Anyway, on with the blogging!

I’m keeping up the reading tear…

Audiobooks first:

– The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.  The second and third volumes of His Dark Materials, the series that started with The Golden Compass. I enjoyed both, though not quite as much as the first volume.  Still, recommended, and it is nice to read a young-adults story like this that does not pull its punches.

– Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer.  A non-fiction that argues that much of the findings of neuroscience were first considered by a set of artists ranging from Proust to Whitman to Woolf.  Interesting enough, but not terribly compelling.

And read on the iPad:

– Innocent by Scott Turow.  I enjoy the world-weary tone of Scott Turow’s writing.  I greatly enjoyed his breakthrough novel, Presumed Innocent, back in the day.  I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much, but it was still an enjoyable read that kept me up late to find out what was really going on and what kind of legal shenanigans might ensue.

– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.  Somehow I never managed to read this, either in my own youth or when my kids were young.  But I’ve read it now.  My two biggest surprises: the Disney version stayed remarkably close to the story.  And just how short it was: I managed to read it in a couple of hours.  Still, justly a nonsensical classic that captures dream-logic better than just about anything else ever written.

– Columbine by Dave Cullen.  Back when the Columbine shootings happened, I found them quite disturbing.  The shooters reminded me of many my friends from high school, and I could easily imagine, had they done something similar, the press coming up with similar reports.

I suppose I can now rest easily.  It turns out that the initial press reports were almost all wrong, and the shooters bore only the vaguest resemblance to my friends from those days.  In fact, as the book makes clear, almost everything that the press initially reported about the shootings was wrong.  The shooters were not part of the Trenchcoat Mafia.  They were not the regular victims of bullying.  They did not specifically target jocks, or Christians, or blacks.  Cassie Burnell did not affirm her belief in God just before being killed (it was another girl who affirmed her belief, and she survived).

While I found some flaws in the book (while it does a superb job of introducing the reader to the shooters and to some of the victims, most of the victims are not described at all; I found the level of detail about the day of the shooting to be insufficient), overall I found it to be a terrific read.

– The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein.  Another old one that I never managed to read back in the day when I was devouring Heinlein by the truckload.  A fun little adventure and a good, quick beach read.

– Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha.  An interesting read that argues that the evolutionary psychologist view of human sexuality is wrong.  That view is that males evolved to try to gain exclusive sexual access to their mates in order to ensure that the children they raise are their own, while women evolved to trade sexual favors for the long-term attention of a man who would help raise her children (or, as one chapter title has it, “Your mother is a whore”).  Instead, this book argues, back in the hunter-gatherer days humans were promiscuous, and monogamy only became common with the rise of agriculture.

The book makes a convincing case, citing evidence ranging from details of human anatomy (human testicles are much larger proportionally than those of monogamous primates), primatology (our nearest relations, the chimps and bonobos, are promiscuous), anthropology (the few hunter-gatherer tribes that have survived into the modern era tend to be non-monogamous), and sexual behavior (ranging from female sexual vocalization to the fact that men are more quickly sexually exhausted than women).  The one flaw with the book is that it spends all of its time arguing against the dominant view of human monogamy and against the specific scientists who hold it, and too little time laying out its own theory.  You get the evidence for their view as they argue against monogamy, but I would have liked to have them focus on their positive arguments instead of structuring the book against the anti-monogamy view.

(One of the best quotes from an author of the book, which I heard in an interview with him: the interviewer asked if he, who is married, is monogamous.  The response: “Our relationship is informed by our research.”)

– The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.  I’ve never been a fan of Christie: I had only previously read one of her books, and in that one I figured out whodunnit and how while the murder was taking place.  But I decided to give this one a try, largely because it has a famous twist at the ending.  (I knew the twist going into the book.  But I’m not going to explain it here – look to Wikipedia if you must know.)  It was a fun read, and there were a number of minor mysteries that kept me guessing, even though I knew who the culprit was going in.  Impossible to say if I would have figured it out had I not known, but overall this left me willing to read more Christie at some point.

– No Way Down by Graham Bowley.  I have a certain fondness for tales of great explorations.  One of my favorite books is The Last Place on Earth (also published with the title Scott and Amundsen) by Roland Huntford, about the race to be first to get to the South Pole.  No Way Down is about one particularly bad day on K2 in 2008, when a group of climbers, delayed on the way up, found that their prepared path down had been wiped out by an avalanche, leaving them to struggle to make it back alive.  Eleven of them died that day or soon after.

Written by a journalist and not a climber, the book lacks the first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to climb up into the death zone, knowledge that informs books like Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air.  And the book is limited by the fact that conflicting memories of survivors means that some things that happened that day cannot ever be known with certainty.  But overall, an excellent read: if you like real-life life-and-death adventures of those who would risk everything to climb a mountain or reach some obscure geographic point, you’ll enjoy this one.

– American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  This is a re-read of a book that I first read soon after it came out about a decade ago.  A fun book set in an America in which aging versions of old gods, brought here by immigrants and then gradually forgotten, struggle to survive as best they can now that they have no worshippers to sustain them.  Not Gaiman’s best, in my opinion, but still a fun read.

Phew!  That’s a lot of reading!