I woke up this morning to radio broadcast of a snippet of a press conference held by Senator Craig, the guy who found himself in a Denver(?) Airport scandal so saucy that it took several days of ambiguous reporting for me to figure out what had happened. Of course the media can't say that he was arrested for trying to pick up guys in the bathroom. No, they have to be family-friendly and oblique about it. I thought he'd been arrested for jacking off, Pee Wee Herman style.
Anyway, back to the press conference: There's nothing like waking up in the morning to repeated cries of an conservative family-values politician saying "I'm not gay!" to make what is an otherwise dreary morning interesting.
Apparently this isn't the first time he's had this problem either.
To which my first thought is:
(Note: the previous video got pulled from YouTube - Sucks to be me - so this one will have to do)
Though honestly, I kinda understand where he's coming from. I grew up in that neck of the woods (rural Pacific Northwest), and it's quite homophobic in the hinterlands up there. And this is even with the liberalizing (or civilizing, depending on who you ask) element of radical Wilammette Valley, Oregon, nearby my town. Out in the even crazier hinterlands where Craig is from, it can get really backwards. And I don't mean to offend Idahoans by claiming their state is backwards, but sometime remind me to tell you the story of my friend who got chased out of the state by the local Aryan Nation.
It wasn't until I moved to the big city to go to school until I met people who were not only gay, not only admitted it, but practiced it in the open. It was surprisingly schocking to my innocently provincial mind to see two men romantically cuddling each other during a rock concert for the first time.
And since then, I've moved to San Francisco, where practically anything goes. The minute it gets sunny in Dolores Park, the whole south-west side of the park is covered by men in various conditions of scantily-cladness. And in a reminder of my provincial smalltown roots, it was thoroughly intimidating the first time I walked through the Castro District when I got kinda lost exploring my neighborhood.
I guess the one thing that makes Craig's press conference silly and childish is the realization since I've moved to the city that steamy man-on-man sex doesn't necessarily make one gay. Just like the stories that circulate about women who sometimes feel the need to experiment (a large part of them probably apocryphal), it seems likely that the same is true of men. To repurpose a line from Kevin Smith, sometimes straight men "just need a deep dicking.*"
*At least, I think that's what Kevin Smith wrote - my memory is bit hazy.
So, Senator Craig, if you were gay, it'd be ok.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Early San Francisco's Vicious Gang of Australians
The following writing is an article that I'm submitting to http://www.damninteresting.com/. They are on the look for new writers, and I thought it might a fun diversion (^_^).
----
The small Mexican village of Yerba Buena was a sleepy place to live, farm and ranch. This all changed when gold was discovered in relatively nearby Sutter's Mill in 1849, shortly after the territory of California was taken over by American settlers and soldiers following Presdient James K. Polk's War of 1848.
A map of that shows the approximate coastlines of early San Francisco super-imposed on modern day San Francisco. The black line is the coastline of Yerba Buena in the 1840s; the blue line is the filled in coastline from 1852. The green square is the early central plaza of Portsmouth Square, where so many of the Vigilance Committees actions were held. The red is the approximate location of the Barbary Coast.
NOTE: due to some server error, the image above is not displaying. Click this text to see a large version.
When the news of gold was spread around the world, the first to respond were immigrants from the western portion of the world - first Chile, then Australian and China. Immigrants from the east coast cities of the US soon followed, and San Francisco sprung from nothingness (and Yerba Buena) into a highly multicultural city, like Athena springing fully formed and armed from Zeus's head.
Any sudden growth like that seen in San Francisco, where the population grew from 400 to 25,000 in just a few months, is sure to bear with it some problems. Especially if it is compounded by the fact that less than 3% of the population were women. Men in the sole company of other men tend towards the rambunctious, and San Francisco fast became the proto-typical wild west town where ranchers, farmers, prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and vigilantes all mixed together
It was on to this scene that a group of Australian immigrants arrived. When the British monarchy lost Georgia as a penal colony in the American Revolution, they turned to newly found Australia as a place to deport their undesireables. Thus many of the Australians that immigrated to San Francisco were actually British felons and convicts once removed. They quickly established their own place in this forming metropolis - the neighborhood where they gathered was called Sydney Town; and the cackling laughter as they went about their business earned them the name of the "Sydney Ducks."
Moving into the area north of Market Street after a gang of former US soldier Know-Nothings (known as the Hounds) were expelled, the Ducks quickly set about making themselves at home. They founded many pubs with distinctly British names such as "The Boar's Head", "The Noggin of Ale" and "The Bird-in-Hand." These bugs soon became the wellspring from which drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, violence and all manner of other vice issued. Such was the rough atmosphere of this coastal neighborhood that it was likened to the Barbary Coast of northern Africa, from where Berber Pirates terrorized the Mediterranaen and at where the fledgling U.S. Marines saw their first action on foreign soil. The name stuck, and from the 1850s until a decade after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, this neighborhood was known as the Barbary Coast. It is now located in the San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach.
Particular to San Francisco, of all the wild-west towns, was the practice of "shanghai'ing" - so called because the victim of shanghai'ing was a sailor that would find himself bound to an undesireable long journey to ports such as Shanghai, with no recourse but to see the sailing through. While this practice continued for many decades in San Francisco, it was of particular usefulness in the early 1850s during the peak of the gold rush years. Captains that set port in San Francisco during this time found themselves on an abandoned ship as crew after crew fled north east to make it rich in area around Sacramento. The harbor of San Francisco was cluttered with hundreds of abandoned ships rotting away with no crew to sail them. Many of these abandoned ships gave up all hope of sailing away, and were beached to become hotels, stores, even jailhouses.
It was rough for all of the ship captains, but thoses captains with a particularly bad reputation found themselves unable to hire crews to sail their ships. Having their reputations for a reason, tehese ship captains would then unscrupulously contract with "crimpers" who would raid the Barbary Coast saloons for sailors to shanghai. The saloon operators were often complicit with such acts, if not active crimpers themselves. A sailor would find themselves in the charming companionship of a barmaid who would pass them a shot of whiskey spiked with laudanum or other drugs. If that failed to work, then a billy club was often sufficient to render them unconscious. The Bar's job done, the crimper would then load them on to a ship to nurse a nasty hangover while they discovered where they were headed when they woke up the next day.
Another phenomenon of early San Francisco were routine fires that would raze the city of timber houses to the ground. Originally thought to be the handy work of the Sydney Ducks, recent writers are of the opinion that these firse were set by merchants wishing to cash out on insurance policies held on warehoused good that the volatile market forces had rendered impossible to sell for a profit.
Regardless of who set these fires that burned the town to the ground six times in as little as two years, they tended to be set when prevailing winds would be blowing out of the east or north, away from Sydney Town. The Sydney Ducks were not above reproach, either, as the would use the incendiary chaos to loot the burning houses and cart the goods back to Sydney Town, earning the emnity of the rest of the town.
The city government during this era was under-staffed, under-equipped, and under-motivated. With most of the eligible populuous out in the fields trying to strike it rich, the police and city government appeared to be more concerned with using their public powers to make themselves rich. This, combined with the fact that police work in an era of solo beat patrols before the advent of radio communication and immediate back-up made police work particularly dangerous. Especially since many policeman were denied the use of guns unless they supplied them themselves. And if the suspects were apprehended, they were housed on the scuttled brig Euphemia, which was bought and turned into a jailhouse, and from which escapes were routine as inmates dug out of their cells while the wardens failed to watch. It was little surprised that the inhabitants of early San Francisco felt that the local wheels of justice incapable to do the work necessary.
Then, in June of 1851, during the reconstruction after a particularly nasty fire blamed on the Ducks, self-styled civic leader Samuel Brannan, himself an interesting character, and a couple hundred of other San Franciscan citizens formed the first Committee of Vigiliance, dedicated to cleaning out the city of the criminals that infested it. Just days after the committee was formed, they were given cause to act by the theft of one John Jenkins, known even to his fellow theives as "the Miscreant." Following his theft of a safe from a local merchant, which the Miscreant threw into bay while rowing away from a throng of citizens chasing him, Vigilance Commitee took steps to immediately apprehend the thief before the police could be roused. They took him to immediate trial, found him guilty as charged, and then sentenced him to be hung from the central plaza at Portsmouth Square. Lacking a gallows, they threw a rope over a beam that projected out from an adobe building there, and ran with the other end of the rope until John Jenkins was lifted off of the ground. All two hundred members of the committee took turns holding him aloft so that they would all be "equally to blame" for his death if legal action followed. They then published their entire roster of members to openly declare what they had done.
The next step of the Vigilance Committee was to let all the of the criminal elements of the Barbary Coast know that they had five days to leave the city, or they would be lynched or thrown out of the city, whichever was felt to be expedient at the time. There was a mass exodus of many of the lesser criminal elements, but the serious elements of the Ducks stayed put, somewhat ironically putting faith in the machinery of city government to protect them from these vigilantes. Another fire, said to set in Revenge when the winds were blowing away from Sydney Town, burned the city down again soon after.
Then next action of the Vigilance Committee took place when English Jim, a particularly nasty Duck, a sort of leader among the rabble of Sydney Town, returned to San Francisco and tried to rob the Captain of an English ship while he slept in its cabin. English Jim had as earlier notable exploits, killed a Sheriff in nearby Marysville in a burglary, and escaped from jail a few days after, gone to San Francisco, where he robbed Jansen Bonds and hightailed out of there with $2000. In an interesting twist, one Thomas Berdue, who was so physically similar to English Jim as to share the same scar and missing finger, was literally sent up the river to the interior to hang for English Jim's crimes, narrowly escaping a mob lynching himself in the process.
As English Jim tried to rob the Captain's cabin, he was held fast by the Captain's wife while she called for help from the other sailors on the ship. Thus caught in the act, English Jim was taken to summary trial by the Vigilance Committe and almost immediately confessed to the crimes for which Berdue was sent to hang. English Jim was sentenced to hang for the multiple robberies and the murder of the Sheriff, and they paraded out into the street with him in tow. English Jim seemed to believe that he'd be rescued by his fellow Australian cronies before he'd make it to the gallows, but the sheer mass of the entire city gathered to watch rendered any escape impossible. English Jim had to be carried the last few steps to the hastily erected gallows at the head of Market Street, where he was hung. Riders were dispatched to the interior to exonerate Thomas Berdue now that the real English Jim had been hung, and Thomas was given some thousands of dollars to compensate him for their mistake. He quickly left town, and it is unknown where he went to.
Two more Sydney Ducks were soon apprehended by the vigilantes and sentenced to be hung. This time, though, the police stepped in to prevent mob justice from being executed. The sheriff arrived with a large contigent of police force and an order from the governor of California to demand that the two Ducks be turned over to him for a legal trial. Most of the Vigilance Committee being elsewhere at the time, the scant few guarding their makeshift prison assented. Two days later the Vigilance Committee in full force raided the police jailhouse and took the two Sydney Ducks out for an immediate hanging. Samuel Brannan then announced to the gathered crowd that the citizens Vigilance Committee would not be swayed from exacting justice regardless of what the police, city government or state goverment said contrariwise, and that every felon that valued his life should immediately depart from San Francisco. Sydney Town was quickly depopulated, with only a few bars, pubs and brothels remaining in operation, and this rambunctious town was quiet for a spell. Some of the Ducks would later return, but by and large their power was broken, though in time they would be followed by a next in a long series of thugs - including the now eponymous hoodlums - that would continue to ravage wild-west era San Francisco.
----Information comes from:
History of the Barbary Coast - An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld - Herbert Asbury. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1933.
{Out of print, text found online at http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hbtbcidx.htm}
The Strongest Gang in Town - Kevin J. Mullen. Noir Publications, Novato, CA, 2005.
Walking the Barbary Coast Trail - Daniel Bacon. Quicksilver Press, 1997.
----
The small Mexican village of Yerba Buena was a sleepy place to live, farm and ranch. This all changed when gold was discovered in relatively nearby Sutter's Mill in 1849, shortly after the territory of California was taken over by American settlers and soldiers following Presdient James K. Polk's War of 1848.
A map of that shows the approximate coastlines of early San Francisco super-imposed on modern day San Francisco. The black line is the coastline of Yerba Buena in the 1840s; the blue line is the filled in coastline from 1852. The green square is the early central plaza of Portsmouth Square, where so many of the Vigilance Committees actions were held. The red is the approximate location of the Barbary Coast.
NOTE: due to some server error, the image above is not displaying. Click this text to see a large version.
When the news of gold was spread around the world, the first to respond were immigrants from the western portion of the world - first Chile, then Australian and China. Immigrants from the east coast cities of the US soon followed, and San Francisco sprung from nothingness (and Yerba Buena) into a highly multicultural city, like Athena springing fully formed and armed from Zeus's head.
Any sudden growth like that seen in San Francisco, where the population grew from 400 to 25,000 in just a few months, is sure to bear with it some problems. Especially if it is compounded by the fact that less than 3% of the population were women. Men in the sole company of other men tend towards the rambunctious, and San Francisco fast became the proto-typical wild west town where ranchers, farmers, prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and vigilantes all mixed together
It was on to this scene that a group of Australian immigrants arrived. When the British monarchy lost Georgia as a penal colony in the American Revolution, they turned to newly found Australia as a place to deport their undesireables. Thus many of the Australians that immigrated to San Francisco were actually British felons and convicts once removed. They quickly established their own place in this forming metropolis - the neighborhood where they gathered was called Sydney Town; and the cackling laughter as they went about their business earned them the name of the "Sydney Ducks."
Moving into the area north of Market Street after a gang of former US soldier Know-Nothings (known as the Hounds) were expelled, the Ducks quickly set about making themselves at home. They founded many pubs with distinctly British names such as "The Boar's Head", "The Noggin of Ale" and "The Bird-in-Hand." These bugs soon became the wellspring from which drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, violence and all manner of other vice issued. Such was the rough atmosphere of this coastal neighborhood that it was likened to the Barbary Coast of northern Africa, from where Berber Pirates terrorized the Mediterranaen and at where the fledgling U.S. Marines saw their first action on foreign soil. The name stuck, and from the 1850s until a decade after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, this neighborhood was known as the Barbary Coast. It is now located in the San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach.
Particular to San Francisco, of all the wild-west towns, was the practice of "shanghai'ing" - so called because the victim of shanghai'ing was a sailor that would find himself bound to an undesireable long journey to ports such as Shanghai, with no recourse but to see the sailing through. While this practice continued for many decades in San Francisco, it was of particular usefulness in the early 1850s during the peak of the gold rush years. Captains that set port in San Francisco during this time found themselves on an abandoned ship as crew after crew fled north east to make it rich in area around Sacramento. The harbor of San Francisco was cluttered with hundreds of abandoned ships rotting away with no crew to sail them. Many of these abandoned ships gave up all hope of sailing away, and were beached to become hotels, stores, even jailhouses.
It was rough for all of the ship captains, but thoses captains with a particularly bad reputation found themselves unable to hire crews to sail their ships. Having their reputations for a reason, tehese ship captains would then unscrupulously contract with "crimpers" who would raid the Barbary Coast saloons for sailors to shanghai. The saloon operators were often complicit with such acts, if not active crimpers themselves. A sailor would find themselves in the charming companionship of a barmaid who would pass them a shot of whiskey spiked with laudanum or other drugs. If that failed to work, then a billy club was often sufficient to render them unconscious. The Bar's job done, the crimper would then load them on to a ship to nurse a nasty hangover while they discovered where they were headed when they woke up the next day.
Another phenomenon of early San Francisco were routine fires that would raze the city of timber houses to the ground. Originally thought to be the handy work of the Sydney Ducks, recent writers are of the opinion that these firse were set by merchants wishing to cash out on insurance policies held on warehoused good that the volatile market forces had rendered impossible to sell for a profit.
Regardless of who set these fires that burned the town to the ground six times in as little as two years, they tended to be set when prevailing winds would be blowing out of the east or north, away from Sydney Town. The Sydney Ducks were not above reproach, either, as the would use the incendiary chaos to loot the burning houses and cart the goods back to Sydney Town, earning the emnity of the rest of the town.
The city government during this era was under-staffed, under-equipped, and under-motivated. With most of the eligible populuous out in the fields trying to strike it rich, the police and city government appeared to be more concerned with using their public powers to make themselves rich. This, combined with the fact that police work in an era of solo beat patrols before the advent of radio communication and immediate back-up made police work particularly dangerous. Especially since many policeman were denied the use of guns unless they supplied them themselves. And if the suspects were apprehended, they were housed on the scuttled brig Euphemia, which was bought and turned into a jailhouse, and from which escapes were routine as inmates dug out of their cells while the wardens failed to watch. It was little surprised that the inhabitants of early San Francisco felt that the local wheels of justice incapable to do the work necessary.
Then, in June of 1851, during the reconstruction after a particularly nasty fire blamed on the Ducks, self-styled civic leader Samuel Brannan, himself an interesting character, and a couple hundred of other San Franciscan citizens formed the first Committee of Vigiliance, dedicated to cleaning out the city of the criminals that infested it. Just days after the committee was formed, they were given cause to act by the theft of one John Jenkins, known even to his fellow theives as "the Miscreant." Following his theft of a safe from a local merchant, which the Miscreant threw into bay while rowing away from a throng of citizens chasing him, Vigilance Commitee took steps to immediately apprehend the thief before the police could be roused. They took him to immediate trial, found him guilty as charged, and then sentenced him to be hung from the central plaza at Portsmouth Square. Lacking a gallows, they threw a rope over a beam that projected out from an adobe building there, and ran with the other end of the rope until John Jenkins was lifted off of the ground. All two hundred members of the committee took turns holding him aloft so that they would all be "equally to blame" for his death if legal action followed. They then published their entire roster of members to openly declare what they had done.
The next step of the Vigilance Committee was to let all the of the criminal elements of the Barbary Coast know that they had five days to leave the city, or they would be lynched or thrown out of the city, whichever was felt to be expedient at the time. There was a mass exodus of many of the lesser criminal elements, but the serious elements of the Ducks stayed put, somewhat ironically putting faith in the machinery of city government to protect them from these vigilantes. Another fire, said to set in Revenge when the winds were blowing away from Sydney Town, burned the city down again soon after.
Then next action of the Vigilance Committee took place when English Jim, a particularly nasty Duck, a sort of leader among the rabble of Sydney Town, returned to San Francisco and tried to rob the Captain of an English ship while he slept in its cabin. English Jim had as earlier notable exploits, killed a Sheriff in nearby Marysville in a burglary, and escaped from jail a few days after, gone to San Francisco, where he robbed Jansen Bonds and hightailed out of there with $2000. In an interesting twist, one Thomas Berdue, who was so physically similar to English Jim as to share the same scar and missing finger, was literally sent up the river to the interior to hang for English Jim's crimes, narrowly escaping a mob lynching himself in the process.
As English Jim tried to rob the Captain's cabin, he was held fast by the Captain's wife while she called for help from the other sailors on the ship. Thus caught in the act, English Jim was taken to summary trial by the Vigilance Committe and almost immediately confessed to the crimes for which Berdue was sent to hang. English Jim was sentenced to hang for the multiple robberies and the murder of the Sheriff, and they paraded out into the street with him in tow. English Jim seemed to believe that he'd be rescued by his fellow Australian cronies before he'd make it to the gallows, but the sheer mass of the entire city gathered to watch rendered any escape impossible. English Jim had to be carried the last few steps to the hastily erected gallows at the head of Market Street, where he was hung. Riders were dispatched to the interior to exonerate Thomas Berdue now that the real English Jim had been hung, and Thomas was given some thousands of dollars to compensate him for their mistake. He quickly left town, and it is unknown where he went to.
Two more Sydney Ducks were soon apprehended by the vigilantes and sentenced to be hung. This time, though, the police stepped in to prevent mob justice from being executed. The sheriff arrived with a large contigent of police force and an order from the governor of California to demand that the two Ducks be turned over to him for a legal trial. Most of the Vigilance Committee being elsewhere at the time, the scant few guarding their makeshift prison assented. Two days later the Vigilance Committee in full force raided the police jailhouse and took the two Sydney Ducks out for an immediate hanging. Samuel Brannan then announced to the gathered crowd that the citizens Vigilance Committee would not be swayed from exacting justice regardless of what the police, city government or state goverment said contrariwise, and that every felon that valued his life should immediately depart from San Francisco. Sydney Town was quickly depopulated, with only a few bars, pubs and brothels remaining in operation, and this rambunctious town was quiet for a spell. Some of the Ducks would later return, but by and large their power was broken, though in time they would be followed by a next in a long series of thugs - including the now eponymous hoodlums - that would continue to ravage wild-west era San Francisco.
----Information comes from:
History of the Barbary Coast - An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld - Herbert Asbury. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1933.
{Out of print, text found online at http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hbtbcidx.htm}
The Strongest Gang in Town - Kevin J. Mullen. Noir Publications, Novato, CA, 2005.
Walking the Barbary Coast Trail - Daniel Bacon. Quicksilver Press, 1997.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Thoughts about Stockholm Syndrome
The other day, I was reading up on the grand adventures of Ms. Hearst, and there's a link there to the counter-intuitive phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome.
In a nutshell, Stockholm Syndrome is where, if you kidnap somebody, cut off all their contact with their friends and family ("their group"), treat them like crap for a long period of time, and then gradually ease off on them until they are treated like one of your family or group, they will transfer their loyalties away from their old group to yours.
From a historical perspective, this phenomenon isn't actually all that new. Humans have known about it, at least implicitly & experientially. Raiding for wives & slavery-manumission cycles are quite attested for, everywhere in the world. I have heard one somewhat tenuous interpretation that the honey-moon was originally a kidnapping-elopment that lasted one month before they returned to the husband's group as a couple. It's probably not that factually true, but it makes an entertaining anecdote. Come to think about it, the use of one month is probably to guarantee impregnation so that the kidnapped wife would feel bound to the husband to support her imminent and-as-yet unborn child.
From my own studies in Amerindian history, capturing of warriors for one's own tribe was pretty common. Though, anti-capturing of warriors (steal the women, kill all the men) was common as well. A journal entry of those that first met Chief Seattle (Sealth) of the Duwamish* was told the story of how some number of years before that a raiding party was sent against the Duwamish. The raiders were ambushed in creek-shed and captured. Among the people that the writer met were some of the people captured - when released, they refused to return to their tribe of origin, "Because of Chief Seattle's Great Magnanimity."
* Insert Mini-Rant Here: While I was living in Seattle, I heard word that the Federal Government (*ahem* Bush) had refused to grant tribal status to the Duwamish Nation because of a 5-year lapse of enrollment in the 1920s. Gee, thanks - take a tribe that is struggling to maintain its identity after 150 years - to whom you ower the land greatest port in the US Pacific Northwest - and then refuse to let them have their identity because they struggled to maintain it the the past.
The numerous anecdotes of Puritan & European settlers that would refuse to return to the colonies after their capture by Iroquois/Abenaki/Potowatomi (sp?) may be a reflection of those tribes' great valuation of personal liberty & value in comparison to monarchical Europe; but it might also be a sign of these captives identification with their new group.
But on the face of it, it seems odd that something that essentially a crushing & manipulation individual will would be so widespread and forceful to a person. One would naively think that a person in such circumstances would cling to the memory of what they had ever so much more, since that is all that they have in such a hostile situation. Such a counter-intiutive development makes me wonder if, biologically, the wife & warrior capturing behaviors are something that people have been practicing for millions of years. If they are a biologically beneficial, if individually detrimental, behavior. After all, humans often operate on the social level, and a person that is flexible enough to adapt to their new environment rather than fight it to their death, is probably more likely to survive to have kids.
In a nutshell, Stockholm Syndrome is where, if you kidnap somebody, cut off all their contact with their friends and family ("their group"), treat them like crap for a long period of time, and then gradually ease off on them until they are treated like one of your family or group, they will transfer their loyalties away from their old group to yours.
From a historical perspective, this phenomenon isn't actually all that new. Humans have known about it, at least implicitly & experientially. Raiding for wives & slavery-manumission cycles are quite attested for, everywhere in the world. I have heard one somewhat tenuous interpretation that the honey-moon was originally a kidnapping-elopment that lasted one month before they returned to the husband's group as a couple. It's probably not that factually true, but it makes an entertaining anecdote. Come to think about it, the use of one month is probably to guarantee impregnation so that the kidnapped wife would feel bound to the husband to support her imminent and-as-yet unborn child.
From my own studies in Amerindian history, capturing of warriors for one's own tribe was pretty common. Though, anti-capturing of warriors (steal the women, kill all the men) was common as well. A journal entry of those that first met Chief Seattle (Sealth) of the Duwamish* was told the story of how some number of years before that a raiding party was sent against the Duwamish. The raiders were ambushed in creek-shed and captured. Among the people that the writer met were some of the people captured - when released, they refused to return to their tribe of origin, "Because of Chief Seattle's Great Magnanimity."
* Insert Mini-Rant Here: While I was living in Seattle, I heard word that the Federal Government (*ahem* Bush) had refused to grant tribal status to the Duwamish Nation because of a 5-year lapse of enrollment in the 1920s. Gee, thanks - take a tribe that is struggling to maintain its identity after 150 years - to whom you ower the land greatest port in the US Pacific Northwest - and then refuse to let them have their identity because they struggled to maintain it the the past.
The numerous anecdotes of Puritan & European settlers that would refuse to return to the colonies after their capture by Iroquois/Abenaki/Potowatomi (sp?) may be a reflection of those tribes' great valuation of personal liberty & value in comparison to monarchical Europe; but it might also be a sign of these captives identification with their new group.
But on the face of it, it seems odd that something that essentially a crushing & manipulation individual will would be so widespread and forceful to a person. One would naively think that a person in such circumstances would cling to the memory of what they had ever so much more, since that is all that they have in such a hostile situation. Such a counter-intiutive development makes me wonder if, biologically, the wife & warrior capturing behaviors are something that people have been practicing for millions of years. If they are a biologically beneficial, if individually detrimental, behavior. After all, humans often operate on the social level, and a person that is flexible enough to adapt to their new environment rather than fight it to their death, is probably more likely to survive to have kids.
The Zen of Public Transport
Eh, what the hell, first night, I'm still excited; figure I'd copy and paste an entry from one of my old blogs, made a year & 4 months ago. It's just like free content (^_^).
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%I have not touched the steering wheel of a car since I was fifteen. At one point, I got my permit, took driver's ed, learned to drive, and then was given a choice: I could have a car, or live in Japan as a foreign exchange student for a year.
I've never looked back.
Richard Dawkins & Synesthesia
I'm not a biologist or a neuroscientist, but I play one on tv if my friends don't shut me up (^_^).
A while ago I saw this fascinating video by the pre-eminent Biologist Richard Dawkings titled "The Universe is Queerer than We Can Suppose." Take a few minutes to look at that video before you continue.
A brief synopsis of the video is that not only is the universe queerer that we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose. Meaning that the perceptions of humans are designed to work well in the human world. Any world outside of our daily existence is very hard (if not impossible) to correctly perceive. This is one of the reasons that Einstein's Relativity or Planck's Quantum Theories are difficult subject matter for most people. They are counter-intuitive. You get moving fast enough and you become shorter? You get small enough, and you can exist everywhere and nowhere all at once? WTF?!
What really drew my attention is his use of our visual sense as a metaphor for the senses of other animals. When he says that dogs might be able to smell color, or bats hear color, he says that because human eyes are remarkably senstive orbs whose main sensory perceptions are divided into amount of light and frequency of light. That's not necessarily a lot to go on, but our brain has learned how to interpret and comprehend the sheer amount of information encoded in just frequence as color. Color gives us an immediate intuitive handle on how to interpret the world. Healthy plants are green, dry plants are brown. Healthy humans have a red flush. Dark stuff absorbs heat & light, light color stuff reflects it. Poisonous animals & plants use the same colors as gatorade. I'm not sure how that matches up.
So, color becomes a metaphor for any highly developed sense that gives the user a way to intuitively grasp the world around them. Hence, bat's "hear" color because in a dark nighttime or cave environment, their principal perception is that of sound. They need to be able to interpret all of the details in the world around them in terms of sound.
This is where I jump off of the deep end, though I am sure that if I knew where to look this sort of stuff up, I could do more than just speculate -I could probably find studies that prove or disprove what I'm about to suggest. Either that, or studies that are inconclusive and point to that it's an open question.
People that have read about autistic, asberger (sp?) or savant people run into the term "synesthesia"a lot. Synesthesia is commonly defined to the layperson (like myself) as what happens when the brain's sensory wires get "crossed" and people begin to hear color, feel color, taste color, or even think color. One mathematical savant who can multiply ungodly large primes, or tell you whether any given day within the past 5000 years was a Saturday or not, describes his ability to do this as color & shape manipulation. He translates the starting values (say 17 & 19) into colors & shapes, combines the two into a new color & shape, and then translates that new shape back into terms that the rest of us understand (323).
So, now what I'm speculating about, is whether everything I said above is true. If color is the way that animal brains are designed to intuitively deal with complex data, and synesthesia is the psychiatrist's term for color-confusion, maybe the mental use & visualization of color is a way to hone and refine the abilities of people to think about complex computations or problems. Maybe it's only a short step from there to an engineer looking at a blueprint, and turning to his counterpart and saying, "I don't know Jim, this whole set of plans looks slimy green to me. Maybe we should redesign."
At the very least it lets us know that people that suffer from synesthesia my truly be "differently abled." Maybe their condition is something that can be trained and refined to give them an intuitive handle on the world that the rest of us lack.
I don't know if all that above made sense, but I'll play the "it's late at night, I'm going to bed" card and be done with it.
Deep and Darc and Stuff it Used to be
So, this first post of any major substance of is really just a test post to give me some idea of how text, alignment, etc looks, and gives me something to work with. It's hard to write random stuff, so here's some stream of consciousness for me use.
I used to have a blog over at http://drsmart.deepdarc.com. Actually I still do. My friend, Rob, who started that website told me "You should have a blog. You might have interesting things to say." I took him up on it, posted a few times and promptly got busy with the rest of my life. Like work. And I lost my internet connection for 9 months or so.
This is my attempt to restart that. Recently, I've been having some interesting thoughts that I've wanted to jot down really quickly before I forget and show them to friends for feedback, and this seems like a convenient way to go about this. Anyway, I've chosen to start up over here because though Rob's software is really cool, it's Rob's software and so I got to bug him if I want to get anything started, changed or fixed. And Apple's working him into the ground. Or maybed he's working himself into the ground on Apple's behalf. Hard to tell with him sometimes.
So, here's my try at independence. I dropped by to read a different blog and found out that having a gmail address gets me halfway to getting this thing off the ground, so it seemed like a low-risk investment. Let's see if it sticks (^_^).
I used to have a blog over at http://drsmart.deepdarc.com. Actually I still do. My friend, Rob, who started that website told me "You should have a blog. You might have interesting things to say." I took him up on it, posted a few times and promptly got busy with the rest of my life. Like work. And I lost my internet connection for 9 months or so.
This is my attempt to restart that. Recently, I've been having some interesting thoughts that I've wanted to jot down really quickly before I forget and show them to friends for feedback, and this seems like a convenient way to go about this. Anyway, I've chosen to start up over here because though Rob's software is really cool, it's Rob's software and so I got to bug him if I want to get anything started, changed or fixed. And Apple's working him into the ground. Or maybed he's working himself into the ground on Apple's behalf. Hard to tell with him sometimes.
So, here's my try at independence. I dropped by to read a different blog and found out that having a gmail address gets me halfway to getting this thing off the ground, so it seemed like a low-risk investment. Let's see if it sticks (^_^).
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