More entertaining than the luge

The games have begun. You know—the 2014 Winter Olympics, in Sochi. Hey—it’s been in all the papers…

I’m not really big on winter sports, so I’ll be following at a distance. Especially since NBC is “covering” them for the US audience and that network couldn’t report a ham sandwich without Matt Lauer and Meredith Veiera blathering on and on for eight minutes about the lettuce.

But so far the Russian organizers (if I can actually use that term) have provided lots and lots of entertainment value, especially if you’re on social media. Because as of yesterday, there are lots of questions about whether this whole thing is actually coming, you know, together. In fact, they’re making the run-up to the London games of 2012 look positively streamlined by comparison.

The thing is—while they seem to have got the Olympic Village put up (somewhat Spartan, but at least complete with such amenities as working plumbing and functional doorknobs), as far as the accommodation for journalists goes, uh, not so much.

And we know this because the journos have been tweeting it. For example, Shaun Walker, of the Guardian:

Or Kevin Bishop of the BBC:

But I think my favorite (so far) is Stacy St. Clair, of the Chicago Trib. She has this thing going about the water that is not to be missed.

The Russians got so tired of all the whining about no doorknobs and unsafe face water that Dmitry Kozak, the minister in charge of prep for the games, told a reporter (and I am not making this up) that “We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.”

Which might be indicative that the plumbing is, in fact, working. And that there’s no problem with connectivity. But a horrified aide to Kozak pulled away the reporter before a follow-up question could be asked about installing cameras in hotel bathrooms.

Later on a spokesperson denied all ideas of surveillance in hotel rooms or bathrooms. But, I dunno; there might be temptations of getting some viral stuff going. We should ask the NSA about this.

Naturally, there is now an @SochiProblems Twitter account. At the time of writing, it had more than 110K followers.

The official Twitter account of the Sochi Olympics has 127K followers.

And there is another parody account, Sochi Problems. All those tweets begin, “C’mon guyz…”

God bless the Internet.

Slippery slope

This amusing photo came around on social media a while ago:

But it got me to thinking about the place I lived in Seoul—a complex of 12 six-story apartment buildings (half with indoor toilets; none with elevators). The play area was behind my building. It consisted of a sandbox and a slide. The slide was in the shape of an elephant:

And the entire thing was made of concrete, including the elephant’s-trunk slidy part. Unpolished concrete. If it had ever been painted, that had long since been worn away by little butts.

Not so bad in winter, of course, but in summer…

Well, as you can see, the kids didn’t seem to mind about it. In fact, they very seldom bothered with the actual steps.

And if they’d still had the box it came in, I’m sure they’d have had a grand time playing in that, as well.

Large whisky, please

Apparently giant cracks have appeared in the earth’s surface and the sun did not come out this morning, because Americans are being out-drunk (per capita) in the whiskey stakes. By the French. And by the Uruguayans.

This according to a story encapsulated in the Washington Post last month. Here it is, in shocking pink:

It came to my attention via one of the email lists I’m on, and of course I was stunned. Not by the French so much (although I really don’t feature them drinking mass quantities of Johnny Walker or Jim Beam when they've got Courvoisier) as by the Uruguayans. I mean—what’s going on there?

Plus—United Arab Emirates coming in ahead of the UK?

So naturally I did a bit of further research. Basically all that accomplished was to confirm Mark Twain’s observation about lies, damned lies and statistics. Really hard to get down to comparing whiskey with whiskey—or even with whisky. The Economist broke out Scotch, but not other types of whiskies, but still had France ahead of the US and Britain (but no sign of UAE or Uruguay):

Of course, everyone is pretty much a piker when compared to the Russians. They apparently suck down 13.9 liters of vodka each year—about seven times the next load of lushes (the French and 1.9 liters of Scotch). They should have made it an Olympic sport.

(I suppose they still could if things don’t pick up in Sochi pretty sharpish.)

I did not find anything else pointing up UAE, which of course comprises seven emirates, with Islam being their state religion. I don’t know where you’d find data on alcohol consumption in a place like that, where it is apparently sold legally, but you need to get a drinking license from the government to, you know, imbibe.

The population is about 9.2 million people, but the impression I’m getting is that liquor concessions are only made for foreigners, not citizens. So someone is drinking a whole lot extra to make up for the majority. Could there really be that many ex-pats and tourists there to account for the per capita statistics? If so, how the hell are they not in a permanent state of picklement?

Well, I dunno. But I’d purely like to be on the research team that sorts it out. And finds out what’s up with the Uruguayans, too, while we’re at it.

Drinks of detection

Last month I wrote about tea and coffee in a general way. I also introduced you to Reginald Hill, one of the finest writers of detective fiction ever. Now, while Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield almost never drink anything without some considerable alcoholic content, tea does loom large in several detective series of my memory.

Going back farthest, the year I graduated from college I was introduced to Arthur Upfield’s novels about a half-Aboriginal detective inspector named Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police. Bony applies his understanding of both the land and humans of all varieties in solving crimes from the 1930s to the 1950s.

I have no take whatsoever on the accuracy of these “skills”, but they’re excellent story devices, and Upfield used them the way Tony Hillerman did with his Navajo detectives, Jim Chee and (to a lesser degree) Joe Leaphorn. (Chee and Leaphorn are coffee drinkers, though.)

(Let me just point out that having two of the best writers of police procedurals so close together on the “H” library shelf has made my patronage quite efficient.)

Anyhow, my recollection is that when Bony needs to step back from a problem, he often brews up a cuppa using his billy can over a small fire. He never goes anywhere without his billy.

By way of indicating how this sort of device can affect the reader, my sister started reading the novels during one of her summer breaks, and she was quite taken by that whole tea thing. Story is that in the wee hours of the night one time, her husband came out and found her in the kitchen making tea to accompany whatever book it was she was immersed in at the moment.

“What are you doing?” he asked, never having seen her make actual, you know, tea before.

“I’m boiling my billy,” she replied.

He retreated back to bed.

In Alexander McColl Smith’s series about Botswana detective Precious Ramotswe (which begins with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency), things also move slowly, in the rhythm of nature. Bush tea becomes a mechanism for Precious to encourage an emotional client to divulge the nature of his/her problem, or to focus her own mind on a case.

Well, I actually think she must have it delivered to her office in industrial quantities, because she goes through a lot of it. Like Bony, Precious relies on her understanding of the largely rural country around her, and her insights into human emotions, to solve her clients’ problems.

I was introduced to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency at a dinner party a few years ago in Palm Springs. Several of the women were reading the series and they recommended it to me; one gave me about five of the books. They also discussed the whole bush tea thing.

Turns out that bush tea is Rooibos, “a broom-like member of the legume family of plants growing in South Africa’s fynbos”. The same woman who gave me the books said that she’d been so interested in it that she’d gone out and bought some. I asked her how she liked it, but she shook her head. Not much, apparently.

Still—when you’re reading something like that, you have to give it a try. I did, and I tend to agree with her—probably an acquired taste.

Finally, another sort of tea figures heavily in the series by Eliot Pattison about Shan Yao Yun, a Beijing police inspector who ran afoul of the Party and was sent to prison camps in Tibet. The books are very well written, to the point that they’re actually harrowing to read at times. (And you understand that, as a military historian, I come across some ghastly stuff; so when I say “harrowing”, I mean that I’ve had to put the book down and literally walk away from it for a while.)

During his imprisonment with “outlaw” lamas, over the course of the series, Shan comes to understand the land and people of Tibet, knowledge which he uses to unravel complex and delicate problems. (Anything that puts you in the way of the Chinese government is de facto complex—and life threatening.) The beverage of choice here, though, is something called po cha, butter tea. It’s made from tea leaves, yak butter and salt.

Whether this would be an acquired taste or not, I can’t say, as so far I’ve not found any butter tea to try here in the Valley they call Silicon. Lack of yaks might be part of the problem. I imagine yak butter would be extremely expensive.

But if I do come across it, I’ll let you know.

Gratitude Monday: Public radio pledging

On this Gratitude Monday, I’m giving it up for my local NPR outlet, KQED. I’m thankful that they’re there to give me Morning Edition and All Things Considered (weekdays and weekends), and for Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me; Fresh Air; Car Talk; World; and other programs. NPR is my primary source for news, both on air and online; and for on air that means KQED.

Plus, unlike their sister TV station, they only run pledge drives about three times a year. (I swear KQED-TV trots out the tired old warhorses and guilt-trip interruptions on average three weeks out of seven.)

In the past, I’ve donated money, but this year I decided to volunteer. So if you called for the past few mornings between 0700 and 0900, you might have got me at the other end of the line. It was an interesting experience.

First of all, let me remark on how good-natured the pledgers are. The very first day of the drive, the KQED people didn’t actually have all the systems properly set up (which seems odd, because after all, this definitely ain’t their first rodeo), and their idea of training on both the computer and the phones was a little on the sketchy side. But callers were really exceptionally patient as I stumbled through the various screens.

Thankfully, they did have an address verification capability that meant all you needed to do was input the street address and a ZIP code, and it filled in the city and state. This was apparently from the USPS, which is interesting, because my experience with USPS reps back in December seemed to indicate that they themselves aren’t capable of extrapolating that information from a ZIP code.

Naturally, most contributors were calling in for the “thank-you gifts”. Because they’re trying to encourage sustaining (= never-ending) membership, there were only two levels of giving that got you gifts, $15/month and $30/month. At the higher amount, the one gift on offer was 125 years of National Geographic on DVD-ROM, which wouldn’t have inspired me (and they’ve been giving that away for a couple of years), although you also got to choose any of the ones being offered at the lower level.

Those, in my opinion, varied in attractiveness. One (which they apparently thought was going to be a door-buster) was Season 4 (currently being broadcast) of Downton Abbey on DVD or Blu-Ray. Listen, you couldn’t pay me enough to have that in my house, and it did not seem to be raking the callers in. (The Soda-Stream water carbonator was somewhat more attractive, as was a water purifier. Although they did make me wonder about the quality of the local water systems.)

On the other hand, if they’d just consistently offered the AAA backpack with emergency kit and Rugged Ruckus solar-powered radio (with USB port so you can charge your mobile phone), they could have ended the entire pledge drive after about five days. (Instead, they parceled them out ten or so per nine-minute break, so that if you called after all ten had been taken, you were stuck with Downton Abbey. So people rang off to call back another time.)

Not everyone was in it for the giveaways, though. I had a couple of callers who made their pledges and refused the gifts on offer. And one woman raised her monthly pledge from $2 per month to $5, which (when you think of it) is more than doubling the commitment.

And there was one guy who called not to pledge, but to express his disgust that the gift for that break was four tickets to the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio, because Disney was a “known fascist”. (There was no real mechanism for me to take his complaint, so I gave him the number of member services.)

My fellow volunteers were interesting. One day I was seated next to Pep Squad Girl—you know the one you went through high school with, who oozes perkiness in equal measure with omniscience. I rather got the feeling that the rest of us were surplus to requirements with her in the room; had this image of her answering multiple lines simultaneously and sprouting octopi tentacles to enter data into three rows of laptops…

There was also one guy with Ted Baxter hair and an ego to match. All conversation with him was a pivot for him to talk about himself. After a while I was taking the (very polite) piss; but he never noticed.

One last interesting point for me was the whole concept of the relativity of time. The nine-minute pledge breaks (two per hour) just whizzed by when I was answering phones. But when I’m listening to them, they last about 20 minutes, just like they always do.

Still, I’m grateful for public radio, for the people who support it, and for the opportunity to get in there and help out from the inside.