RConversation

Going offline for a while

I'm going on medical leave today. I am unlikely to return to this blog - to post anything or even to moderate comments - until next month.

So if you post a comment and it never appears, or takes a week to appear, you're not being censored. I'm away.

Since I regularly get e-mails from people who object to my comments moderation policy and who accuse me of censoring, let's just clarify: I always approve all comments unless they contain obscenity, excessive personal attacks or threats. Sometimes things get eaten by the Typepad spam filter. I am not online 24-7 and thus there are delays. I have to moderate comments because if I don't, there will be spam and porn links, and some other occasional nastiness which has no business appearing here. If I didn't moderate comments, another group of people would condemn me for proliferating obscenity and defamation. You can't win.

There have been a lot of things I wanted to write about over the past few weeks related to global media, China, the Internet and the Schizolympics... but I haven't been well enough to do so let alone finish all my other work. Oh well.

Lately I've come across remarks by a couple bloggers around the 'sphere who accuse me (and some other people too) of bias or conspiracy for not writing about this or that. Whatever. I will, however, plead guilty to having major human physical limitations. When I was younger I wished I could be half borg or at least Vulcan or something but no such luck. Maybe in the next lifetime...

Happy new year from the banks of the Mekong

I spent the new year in Luang Prabang, Laos, former home of the Lao royal family when they were still alive, and also a former French outpost when the French were in Indochina. It's a lovely, mellow, friendly place to spend a few days recuperating after running around the ruins of ancient Angkor in Cambodia with various family members.

Luang Prabang is home to many hundreds of monks - most of them "novices" who come from poor villages around Laos. Their parents send them to live in the temples here so that they can get free room and board while attending local high school or college. Many are eager to practice their English with tourists. None of the monks I spoke to plan to make a career of monkhood - instead they hope to get jobs in the tourism industry or as teachers or something after they graduate. A couple of them admitted that when they first arrived here, they didn't know what to make of all the foreigners - ranging from student backpackers to well-heeled European families on holiday - who come in droves at this time of year to take in the good vibes of this peaceful buddhist town, enjoy great coffee (a legacy of the French), eat fabulous Lao-French fusion food, and take trips up the Mekong.

For these young boys, serving as a human tourist attraction seems to be an acceptable tradeoff in exchange for an education. Every morning at dawn, it has long been the tradition in Luang Prabang for the monks to walk through the town in procession, collecting alms from pious townspeople. In recent years, however, the procession has turned into a major tourist circus. The town now posts warning on signboards at temples and distributes flyers in all the hotels asking tourists not to touch or harass the monks during their morning procession. There is also a problem with unscrupulous vendors selling unsafe leftover food to tourists, who then give it to the monks, who then get sick. According to Wikitravel's Luang Prabang page, the problem got so bad that the senior monks threatened to stop the morning procession altogether. They relented when the government threatened to continue the procession using laypeople dressed as monks if the monks refused to go along. So the procession continues every morning, and the boys get their educations - in buddhism, all the secular subjects, and a bizarre experience in globalization.

Speaking of tourism, if you haven't yet been to Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples from Cambodia's ancient Angkor empire, go soon before it all gets completely overrun. My favorite temples were The Bayon (a palace not far from Angkor Wat), with these fantastic face-covered towers...

... and Beng Meala (an hour or so away), a quiet, overgrown ruin.

For more photos see my Flickr page.

Once back in Hong Kong I'll be posting a few things about the conference on technology and social responsibility I attended in late December - but didn't have time to write up before leaving on vacation.

On Vacation

I am detoxing in Thailand. Back at the end of August. No new posts and limited comment moderation till then.

I'm ok.

After a week of not posting anything, not even links, I've started getting e-mails from people with subject lines like "are you ok?"

Yes, I am. For a while I wasn't though. I lost my voice, was diagnosed with "acute laryngitis," and was generally flattened for the better part of two weeks. I have never taken so long to recover from something like this. Nearly three weeks after I first started to get sick, I still wake up in the morning feeling weak and nauseous - and no, I'm not pregnant, that is absolutely, completely, impossible given my general lack of a personal life for the past year. I wonder if the excessively polluted air in Hong Kong lately has something to do with it.

It has been a pretty exhausting few months since I moved to Hong Kong, I must admit. I've been over-committed on pre-existing projects and writing commitments that I brought with me. My teaching load has been heavy. People say that the first semester teaching full-time is always a ton of work under the best of circumstances - let alone when you're the only person teaching anything related to "new media" to both undergraduates and graduates in a journalism program. Plus the pressure is already on to churn out academic research ASAP...

I feel bad because there are lots of people here in Hong Kong who I've been wanting to be in touch with, who I've failed to even contact since I arrived. I'm months behind on returning a lot of e-mails from people who I really need to respond to, and I've failed to spend quality time with visiting friends and colleagues. So if you're one of those people, please accept my apologies and don't take it personally.

Arrived in Hong Kong, jetlagged and roasted..

The past month has been rather insane, what with a conference in Delhi, evacuating from Cambridge, MA, family holiday obligations, and some early January writing deadlines. But fortunately I have survived it all and arrived in Hong Kong relatively unscathed except for the worst case of jetlag I've had in years. Usually I sleep through the night even on the first day after a trans-pacific flight, but no luck this time - can anybody recommend any super-early-morning breakfast places or all-night noodle joints in the Pokfulam/Kennedy Town area?

Many thanks to my friends and colleagues who work with me on Global Voices for the very funny goodbye "roast" that they unveiled to me by e-mail right before I left the U.S. on Saturday. It came as a complete surprise and I was really touched. I tend to forget that most people on this planet still think it's a big deal when you pick up and move from one continent to another - and somehow for this reason I tend to dismiss and discount any tendency on my own part to feel phased by the effort of moving halfway round the world on my own, once again.

I'm sharing the "roast" slideshow below because it's very funny and creative and shows what a cool bunch of people our Global Voices team is, and why I love them. But first, a bit of explanation as it starts out with a very inside joke: about two years ago some bloggers called me a "kitten eating evil cyborg" because I failed to invite them and their friends to a certain conference. It turned into a running joke with my friends and colleagues who still make cracks about me eating kittens from time to time. What some of my friends and colleague probably forgot is that I have just moved to a part of the world where kitten-eating can be a very serious allegation. So just in case the local animal rights groups or SARS-prevention health inspectors around here get any wrong ideas: I HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY EATEN KITTENS AND HAVE NO PLANS TO DO SO!!

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As my future students and colleagues may deduce from parts of the slideshow, the people I work with think that I'm a type-A personality. I wonder how they ever arrived at that conclusion...   

As I settle in to my new job and new life in Hong Kong, I'm looking forward to blogging more regularly again. My life over the past half year or so has had zero routine and way too much insanity on too many fronts. I can't remember exactly where or when he posted it, but my friend Roland Soong once wrote that it's difficult to blog regularly when your life feels out of joint and disconnected. "Out of joint and disconnected" has been one of the few unifying themes in my life for the past six months and I am thrilled to have brought that chapter to a close, finally.

Tagged

Ok ok... David Isenberg and Mindy McAdams have both tagged me in this blogger game of "Five things people don't know about me."  I feel rude ignoring them and feel I need to write something.

There are many things people don't know about me. There's a reason I don't write about those things on this blog: I'm not interested in putting my entire life on the web, actually. That said, I think I can offer these items:

1. When I was little - probably around 6 - I was obsessed with the Walt Disney cartoon version of Robin Hood. I related to Robin Hood much more than to Maid Marian or any other female characters. In fact I can recall very few female role models from my childhood. Star Trek Voyager's Captain Janeway came too late.

2. Art class was always my favorite thing in school. I used to be pretty good at drawing, and especially loved doing faces. I stopped drawing sometime in high school. Maybe some day.. when I actually have free time...

3. When I was 10 years old I was obsessed with the Lord of the Rings. I returned to the books in 2003, to get my head away from that damn war.

4. I was concertmaster in Arizona's all-state high school orchestra, attended Tanglewood's high school program for three summers, and considered going pro on the violin as an orchestral player, but decided against it because having to practice 4-5 hours a day makes it hard to do a lot of other things in life. Every time I go to the symphony I feel a little wistful about the other path I might have taken.

5. In spite of what you might think given my career so far, I am naturally a pretty shy person.

Ok... so... I hereby tag... Ethan Zuckerman, Georgia Popplewell, Boris Anthony, Neha Viswanathan, and Rachel Rawlins. There. Done. Whew.

1-800-GIANT-MEN

This is one of the things I'll really miss about living in the Boston area. Where else in the world can you call 1-800-GIANT-MEN when you need a few??

Today it was mainly giant Lithuanians, to be more precise... These guys from Gentle Giant Movers packed up and carted off all the stuff I'm either shipping to Hong Kong or shipping to my dad's place for storage and safekeeping.

The stuff included two long-legged Chinese tables, which, due to my ancient Cambridge building's strangely constructed doorways and hallways, had to be crane-lifted out my fourth-story window. Unfortunately the outdoor action photo isn't great, but you get the idea...

See my cousin Melinda perform in Taiwan!

Continuing the theme of shameless plugs for my relatives...

If you happen to be reading this from Taiwan (and I know some people do), go see my cousin Melinda Heywood Pavlata and her partner Sacha Pavlata perform their Cirque Passion trapeze act this weekend.  They are on tour with the world famous Flying Wallendas who perform death-defying high-wire stunts without any safety net.

Click here for an article in Chinese about the performance, and here for info in English (scroll down towards the bottom of the page). Essential info: 空中飛人大馬戲團 on October 21 and 22 at the Taipei Arena台北小巨蛋 ( Nanjing East Rd. Sec.4, Taipei 台北市南京東路四段2號; Tel: (02) 2577-3500 ) Click here to book tickets.

Here's a (not very good) video of the Wallendas in action, taken last year on my digital camera at a Circus Flora performance in Nantucket:

"Nixon's Nixon:" Shameless plug for my uncle

(Photo from Playbill) I just came back from New York where I saw my uncle Gerry Bamman play Richard Nixon in "Nixon's Nixon." If you're in New York between now and October 28th, go see it. The New York Times recently published a very nice review, pointing out that the play, set in 1974 on the night before Nixon announced his resignation, has been re-staged at a rather apt point in time:

This vision of the country’s leaders retreating happily into a fantasy world of their own invention may strike some in the audience as having a certain grimly funny currency at the moment. The squabbling and finger pointing between politicians bent on burnishing their own images, even as they casually total the numbers of civilians and soldiers who have died on their watch, might also strike an eerily contemporary note (especially since Bob Woodward’s new book, “State of Denial,” suggests that Kissinger continues to play an influential role in United States foreign policy).

There's even an interview with the director, playwright, and the two actors available on YouTube. Check it out:

On Vacation

I'm on vacation and trying hard to stay offline as much as possible. This blog won't be updated again until the last week of August.