A Modest Construct

¶ Breaking news: China censors

Even when they lied to your face about having clean air and unfettered internet access for journalists, did you really think they were being forthright with you?

The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could “report freely” during the Games, Olympic officials acknowledged Wednesday.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

The restrictions, which closely resemble the blocks that China places on the Internet for its citizens, undermine sweeping claims by Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, that China had agreed to provide full Web access for foreign news media during the Games. Mr. Rogge has long argued that one of the main benefits of awarding the Games to Beijing was that the event would make China more open.

Everybody put on your shocked expressions: a country with a well-documented history of human rights abuses and draconian censorship has not ceded those habits at the wishes of the international community. Well, kiss my grits!

§2126 · July 31, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: internet, politics, stupidity

¶ Wednesday’s Word: dialog

dialog / dialogue: n. A conversation or other form of discourse between two or more individuals.

Conor brought this up, and when I looked into it I was too entranced to leave it as a mere comment. His post was to a great degree about the rebirth of dialog[ue] as a verb, which hearkens back to Shakespeare but hasn’t seen any real use in that way until politicians and businessmen, with their penchant for superfluity, occasional fatuity, resurrected it. My initial twinge of anal-retentive horror at misuse aside, I am genuinely glad for the reintroduction of the form, though I balk at the fact that we’re left to context from which to derive its part of speech.

But all this is neither here nor there. What inspired my curiosity was the various incarnations of the -log[ue] suffix in the English language, and why it’s inconsistently used.

As Conor so deftly points out, dialog[ue] has nothing to do with the prefix di- meaning two; it’s dia-, which means “across,” and legein, meaning “to speak” (Etymology Dictionary). The confusion here comes on multiple levels: as near as I can tell given my limited understanding of Greek, legein (or perhaps lego) is the infinitive “to speak,” but its present progressive (or whatever Greek equivalent) is -logos (λόγος), which is also the root for the many nouns related to words: speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, and reason.

¶ When You Are Engulfed in Flames

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris: Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Year: 2008; Pages: 336

I’ve previously read Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day as well as Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim for this meme, enjoying them every time.

This book of collected essays is his first in four years; I feel I should say something about the time it takes to produce good work in such a craft, but I also get the funny feeling that Sedaris is so compulsively self-chronicling that he must churn out scads of content. The tough part is choosing the best and refining them into the literary gold that we’re used to from him.

¶ Friday Random Ten CLVII

The “Because why not?” edition.

Jaga Jazzist – [The Stix #03] Another Day
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – [Yanqui U.X.O. #03] Rockets Fall On Rocket Falls
Doves – [Some Cities #10] Sky Stars Falling
Nine Inch Nails – [We're In This Together I #02] 10 Miles High
Radiohead – [Kid A #05] Treefingers
Hematovore – [untitled #02] blasting through the back nine
Ulver – [Teachings In Silence #02] Darling Didn’t We Kill You
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – [Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus CD1 #05] There She Goes, My Beautiful World
Frantic Bleep – [The Sense Apparatus #07] Mandaughter
The Gathering – [How To Measure A Planet? CD1 #06] Red Is A Slow Color
Radiohead – [In Rainbows CD2 #02] Down is the New Up

§2095 · July 25, 2008 · 2 comments · Tags: Friday Random Ten, memes, music

¶ Bonk

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach: Publisher: W. W. Norton; Year: 2008; Pages: 320

I picked up Bonk entirely on a whim: it was sitting precociously on the shelf of new books at the library. It wasn’t until later, when I was reading that, I noticed that “Amazon.com customers who bought Bonk also bought: When You Are Engulfed In Flames.” And was also asked by a friend of mine if I’ve ever read Stiff, which is Roach’s previous book. Clearly, the stars had aligned on this book in some way.

I’ve said before that I compare every “[science|history|other] made fun” book to the superb Bill Bryson, who I believe has mastered the right proportion of fact, narrative, and whimsy. An unfortunate side product of this is that every science-related book that I read ends up falling pitifully short of my unfairly high standard.

Bonk is a book about sex—not just any sex, but sex through the eye of the Scientific Establishment™ both contemporary and historical. Needless to say, the studies of Alfred Kinsey make an appearance, though they don’t play as large a role as you think. There’s mention of other sex studies of old (Masters & Johnson, for instance); the overriding theme throughout the book seems to be that sex is very complicated, but it’s also such a touchy subject that there’s no good way to learn about it.