Feeling the ground

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.
–Buddha

In the continuing saga of my ankle surgery with no health insurance, I have  been told that I *can* now put 25% of my body weight on my toe. The difference between can=permission and can=ability is painfully obvious here as I can only manage 30 pounds without pain. Unless it means that I only weigh 120 pounds. Highly unlikely, that, although I have surprisingly lost some 20 pounds during the last few months of forced inactivity.

I have just come across a photo of the first time I learned to walk at 9-some months.  I looked much more cheerful that time.

Eye of the beholder

An interesting view of reporting of the Lara Logan assault in Egypt using a word cloud generator.
How We’re Talking About Lara Logan, by Gender

For my part, I hope this story gets wide play and stays long in the news cycle. Whenever there is some rumor about a Muslim woman having her scarf pulled off on a western country, it receives wide coverage in the Arab press, even if it is later discovered not to be true.

But the frequent sexual assaults (both major and minor) of western women in Arab countries is a taboo subject. And Arab women won’t report sexual assaults at all, for fear of being killed (honor killings still happen.)

via The Crawdad Hole

Mountanee

Jordanian schoolchildren start the school day by lining up in the courtyard of the school and singing what is possibly the shortest national anthem in the world, plus another song that sounds like “Mountanee”. The song, I have discovered, is now the national anthem of Iraq, and is based on a poem موطني‎ “My Homeland” by Palestinian Ibrahim Touqan.
Here are the words to the Jordanian national anthem as usually performed in public:

عاش المليك
عاش المليك
سامياً مقامهُ
خافقاتٍ في المعالي أعلامه

A-Sha-al Maleek
A-Sha-al Maleek
Sa-Mi-yan-ma-qa mu-ho
Kha-fi-qa-tin fil ma-ali
a-lam m-hu

Long live the King!
Long live the King!
His position is sublime,
His banners waving in glory supreme.

And here is mountanee (mawtini?), but I think in the video the third verse gets lost, and they just do the first verse twice:

My homeland, My homeland
Glory and beauty, Sublimity and splendor
Are in your hills, Are in your hills
Life and deliverance, Pleasure and hope
Are in your air, Are in your Air
Will I see you? Will I see you?
Safe and comforted, Sound and honored
Will I see you in your eminence?
Reaching to the stars, Reaching to the stars
My homeland, My homeland

My homeland, My homeland
The youth will not tire, ’till your independence
Or they die, Or they die
We will drink from death
And will not be to our enemies
Like slaves, Like slaves
We do not want, We do not want
An eternal humiliation
Nor a miserable life
We do not want
But we will bring back
Our storied glory, Our storied glory
My homeland, My homeland

My homeland, My homeland
The sword and the pen
Not the talk nor the quarrel
Are our symbols, Are our symbols
Our glory and our covenant
And a duty to be faithful
Moves us, moves us
Our glory, Our glory
Is an honorable cause
And a waving standard
O, behold you
In your eminence
Victorious over your enemies
Victorious over your enemies
My homeland, My homeland

Some Links

How to order Indian food in Hindi. (via Organizations and Markets)

Which countries have the most dentists per capita? Look for the UK.

Average faces – select or upload faces to average  (thanks, read)

Coffee map of Ethiopia (thanks, Jake)

King Alfred’s Grammar Book (Jake again)

Jake’s sig:

Singapore Jake:
The Best Banjo Player in Bangkok

“If wishes were horses we’d all be eating steak.”
Jayne Cobb

The Iowa Republican focus group Obama muslim video.  I count 26 people in this group of “Republican caucus voters”. The moderator asks how many people believe Obama is a Muslim and 6 people raise their hands.  Everyone looks around, then an additional 4 people raise their hands.  Let’s see, 10 out of 26 is about 38%, not even a majority.  So what is the title of the video?

Iowa Focus Group on Obama Agrees: He’s a Muslim

Ha, ha, ha.  38%.  “The group agrees.”  Ten out of twenty-six.  And four of them didn’t even know the answer until they looked around to see how many people had their hands up. That’s why I stopped reading political commentary.

BTW, if you ask that question in Jordan, I hear you get 100%. That’s because a person’s religion is supposed to be inherited from their father.  And that’s why Muslim men are allowed to marry outside their religion, but Muslim women are not.

Of course it doesn’t always work that way.  What really happens is that the bride’s family threatens to kill her, so it is the husband who ends up changing his religion, then the children are raised without any religious instruction.  (There is no civil marriage, it’s all done by the families.)

Egypt. Again.

Some Egypt commentary.

“Game Over: The Chance for Democracy in Egypt is Lost” asserts that the military is firmly in control, and Egypt’s future, now that Mubarak’s civilian  son Gamal is out of the picture, will be “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”:

The threat to the military’s control of the Egyptian political system is passing. Millions of demonstrators in the street have not broken the chain of command over which President Mubarak presides. Paradoxically the popular uprising has even ensured that the presidential succession will not only be engineered by the military, but that an officer will succeed Mubarak. The only possible civilian candidate, Gamal Mubarak, has been chased into exile, thereby clearing the path for the new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman….

The last challenge remaining is economic. Even before demonstrations broke out a few weeks ago, the economy was just limping along. It is now broken. Even in the best-case scenario of a rapid return to stability, Egypt faces a cash crunch. Capital flight, loss of foreign direct investment, drying up of tourist revenues, downgrading of sovereign debt and commensurate increase in interest, and lost earnings from interrupted production will all hammer the revenue side of the balance sheet. The expenditure side will be placed under yet more stress by acceleration of inflation already running at 10 percent, devaluation of the currency, and need to repair damage resulting from the clashes. Egypt will have to turn to its “friends” if it is to avert economic disaster and if the regime that just narrowly survived defeat is not to be challenged yet again.

“Game Over!” views the protests as an outgrowth of exponential population growth

Nothing symbolizes the fact that this is Generation Next Rising more than the widely used slogan “Game Over!” The generation who grew up playing video games and whose language incorporates international-video-game-English is turning against the gerontocracy.

In 50 years, less than two generations, Egypt’s population has exploded from less than 30 million to close to 75 million. Its population pyramid looks like a pyramid sitting on a huge raised dais as the vast majority of the population are under 30 years old, with a median age of 24….

I spoke with many highly educated young people who chafe at their economic marginalization, who are alternately depressed and angry about the fact that their talents, ambitions and best years are going to waste and who want out, nothing more than out.

Without wanting to compare Iran and Egypt in any way, population pressure is real across much of the Middle East, and indeed the global South, and it has generated masses of angry, frustrated and largely hopeless youths….

To date, the marginalized youths of the global South have mostly been kept at bay by plying them with video games and virtual worlds – the social equivalent to parenting-by-TV. English has been part and parcel of those virtual worlds….

The most sensible analysis comes from “Why Mubarak is out“:

Many international media commentators – and some academic and political analysts – are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events. This confusion is driven by the binary “good guys versus bad guys” lenses most use to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate. There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage:  (1) People versus Dictatorship: This perspective leads to liberal naïveté and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising. (2) Seculars versus Islamists: This model leads to a 1980s-style call for “stability” and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist “Arab street.” Or, (3) Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth: This lens imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures.

The dynamics of the power groups are then explained, the police, the gangs, the divided military, the generals who are not allowed to fight wars any more, but are “granted concessions to run shopping malls in Egypt, develop gated cities in the desert and beach resorts on the coasts” and “are encouraged to sit around in cheap social clubs.” The same generals are “blood rivals of the neoliberal ‘crony capitalists’ associated with Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal who have privatized anything they can get their hands on and sold the country’s assets off to China, the US, and Persian Gulf capital.” A group of “new businessmen” whose interests overlap somewhat with the business generals, labor movements, and “new leftist political parties that have no relation to the Muslim Brotherhood” have joined the “new nationalist capital alliance”, along with the “new leftist, feminist, rural and worker social movements,” all aligning themselves with the protesters.

Mubarak is already out of power. The new cabinet is composed of chiefs of Intelligence, Air Force and the prison authority, as well as one International Labor Organization official. This group embodies a hard-core “stability coalition” that will work to bring together the interests of new military, national capital and labor, all the while reassuring the United States. Yes, this is a reshuffling of the cabinet, but one which reflects a very significant change in political direction. But none of it will count as a democratic transition until the vast new coalition of local social movements and internationalist Egyptians break into this circle and insist on setting the terms and agenda for transition.

So why do they continue to demonstrate? It seems like a fast transition would only consolidate the military (and U.S, influence) in power, while a slower transition with Mubarak as a weakened lame duck president until September elections would give the smaller groups time to jockey for a democratic niche in the New World Order.

And via Marginal Revolution:

Hernando de Soto on Egypt:

• Egypt’s underground economy was the nation’s biggest employer. The legal private sector employed 6.8 million people and the public sector employed 5.9 million, while 9.6 million people worked in the extralegal sector.

• As far as real estate is concerned, 92% of Egyptians hold their property without normal legal title.

• We estimated the value of all these extralegal businesses and property, rural as well as urban, to be $248 billion—30 times greater than the market value of the companies registered on the Cairo Stock Exchange and 55 times greater than the value of foreign direct investment in Egypt since Napoleon invaded—including the financing of the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. (Those same extralegal assets would be worth more than $400 billion in today’s dollars.)

More “game over” signs

I was terribly excited last week when, on an impulse, I sent a photo of  Egyptian “game over” graffiti to Language Log,  and it was deemed interesting enough for a post.  After that, I started to see the phrase everywhere. [Image on right: "game over" sign montage from Tunisia and Egypt, via al-Jazeera]

After that, the phrase turned up on signs at protests in DC and in Chicago . The pre-printed signs in both cities looked very similar, as if they were from the same organized effort. Were the hand-written “game over” signs centrally planned?  There were demonstrations in several other U.S. cities as well, but I didn’t have time to look for the photos.

The “game over” meme also showed up in online titles.  Al-Jazeera had one “Game Over: First Tunisia now Egypt?“;  here are two more: “Game over: the chance for democracy in Egypt is lost,” and “Game Over.”

But my favorite Egyptian “game over” sign is from the Feb. 1 Jordan Times:

Another clue in the Bobby Franks murder mystery

Nearby Wolf Lake has been the scene of numerous crimes, but one that continues to haunt the imagination is the murder of Bobby Franks in 1924.  In particular, people like to speculate about the location of the culvert where the body was found. (I wrote about it here and here.)

I have received via email another clue to the location of this culvert–a small map that appears to be quite old.

I have no idea what this is from. It’s not drawn to scale,  but it has an incredible amount of detail, mostly of landmarks that no longer exist…house, hotel, etc.

Everything has changed since 1924.  The water levels have changed, wetlands have  have been drained, and the flow of the lake has been reversed to empty into the Calumet River to the west instead of Lake Michigan to the east.  An interstate highway cuts through the east side of the lake on the Indiana side, and a Nike missile site has been built and torn down on the north shore of the Illinois side.  The outlines of concrete missile bunkers can still be seen in the ground on the hill overlooking the lake. They are visible from satellite.

But a few things are the same.  The state line.  The railroad embankments. A few city streets: 106th street and 112th street.

So where is it? Impossible to tell, but you could probably get close. Today we have satellite images at our fingertips and image editing programs.  If you crop the images at 112th street at the top and the north shore of the Illinois side of Wolf Lake on the bottom, and distort the satellite image a bit, it starts to look like the proportions of old map.

To make it easier to compare the two images, I’ve marked the state line in blue and the railroad outlines in red, and also labeled 112th street. The railroad on the east is still there and the railroad on the west is now a foot trail that follows the old route of the tracks and is quite visible from satellite. The only missing pieces of information are the locations of the 1924 shoreline, now that the lake may be lower by as much as 15 feet and of the “drainage ditch” marked on the old map.

The culvert was at the intersection of the drainage ditch and the western train tracks.

The old map shows the drainage ditch constructed in an east-west orientation; I’m going to stick my neck out and say it flowed east into the lake.  So, the rain that dislodged the boy’s body washed it to the east of the railroad tracks, where it was then visible to someone on a passing train. The east side of the ditch is near the intersection of the state line and the railroad track that bisects the lake. The west side of this drainage ditch is marked as the location of the infamous culvert where it meets the other railroad track.

There are three possible locations for the drainage ditch.

1) Where the present day road is, between the shoreline and the Nike missile site .  In this case, the infamous culvert would have been at the place where I photographed the deer in the previous post, where there is a short footpath from the lake road to the old railroad path.  I think this is unlikely, as there is now marshland next to the road. (See previous photo of the north shore road looking east towards Indiana with the railroad that intersects the lake in the distance. The autumn cattails, that usually grow in ditches and  standing water, are evident on the left side of the road. )  I think this area would have been completely underwater in 1924.  But maybe not. The intersection of the state line with the tracks does not look all that different.  But then you get into the question of all the buildings–house, hotel, whatever.  There would not have been much space for them next to the water, with a road as well. A ditch is unlikely on the very top of the small bluff.   It is also unlikely that a ditch would be built on the shoreline and paralleling a lake, when the water could be much more easily routed directly into the lake at the west end. I think the buildings pictured on the old map were on the crest of the hill, and the road as well, with the ditch to the north of that.

2) The ditch might have been parallel with the present day 118th Street. Today there is a foot path from 118th Street to the trail on the old railroad embankment and another trail leading east towards Egger’s Woods, and if you go south a little, towards the Nike missile installation. I have never followed this path very far, the gang signs and drunk teenagers I have seen here from time to time don’t encourage me to venture  into such a remote a place alone, but it does look very much like the terrain from the photos of the discovery of the body–a sort of high pasture.  There is a line of trees on the left of the path–and from satellite it looks like a very straight line–that may indicate a place where water (from an old ditch?) might be more available.  The main thing that favors the 118th street theory is the curve in the railroad tracks. On the old map, the culvert is pictured at the curve, and the curve is here.  It’s now an industrial corridor with high voltage lines that cross where the path curves.

3) The theory I favor at the moment is that the culvert was somewhere between 118th and north shore of the lake.  The old photos are marked 121st Street, not 118th.  From satellite, there is a straight dark line, presumably a tree line, slightly north of the old missile site, that could indicate an old ditch.  The location is roughly at the guerrilla book exchange, which I wrote about here (03/07) and here (05/07) and finally here (9/08) (image).  This area is quite swampy, even now, as soon as you step off the path, so maybe the culvert was further to the north after all.

Maybe an old map would help, maybe not. If the culvert was by 118th street, why did the photos say 121st street?  Was that an approximation or an official location?  Was 118th Street even there in 1924? It should be easy enough to find out. Chicago has been well mapped by the fire insurance companies, and historical maps of the East Side neighborhood (directly north of the lake), and Hegewisch (to the south and west of the lake) should be in an archive somewhere. I think the originals are in the Chicago Public Library.

Walking around might yield some clues too.  What about those straight tree lines that you can see from the satellite image?  Are they the remains of an old ditch?  And the old Indiana road–where does that connect now, and is there any sign of a ditch on the east side?  For further reference, here is wikipedia on Wolf Lake (with latitude and longitude coordinates on the upper right corner that you can click to find satellite images). A map of the Burnham Greenway trail system is here; the paths leading north from Wolf Lake are real enough, any paths leading south are purely hypothetical as yet. Here is a map of William W Powers State Park, the area closely surrounding the lake.