How to gain 5-8 Pounds of Healthy “Stay There” Fat

I have been looking through some old English-language newspapers in Japan from 1915 (more on this later). I found an interesting advertisement/article on page three of the April 7th issue of The Japan Gazette. Despite the proximity to April 1st (both now and in that daily newspaper), considering some of the strange advertisements I saw in other issues, I can’t tell if it is a joke. I don’t think it can be protected by copyright anymore so I reproduce the whole article here:

How Thin People Can Put On Flesh

A New Discovery Thin men and women – that big, hearty, filling dinner you ate last night. What became of all the fat-producing nourishment it contained? You haven’t gained in weight one ounce. That food passed from your body like unburned coal through an open grate. The material was there, but your food doesn’t work and stick, and the plain truth is you hardly get enough nourishment from your meals to pay for the cost of cooking. This is true of thin folks the world over. Your nutritive organs, your functions of assimilation, are sadly out of gear and need reconstruction.

Cut out the foolish foods and funny sawdust diets. Omit the flesh cream rub-ons. Cut out everything but the meals you are eating now and eat with every one of those a single Sargol tablet. In two weeks note the difference. Five to eight good solid pounds of healthy, “stay there” fat should be the net result. Sargol charges your weak, stagnant blood with millions of fresh new red blood corpuscles – gives the blood the carrying power to deliver every ounce of fat-making material in your food to every part of your body. Sargol, too, mixes with your food and prepares it for the blood in easily assimilated form. Thin people gain all the way from 10 to 25 pounds a month while taking Sargol, and the new flesh put on stays. Sargol tablets are a scientific combination of six of the best flesh-producing elements known to chemistry. They come 40 tablets to a package, are pleasant, harmless and inexpensive, and North & Rae, Ltd., and other druggists in Yokohama sell them.

Tokyo Metropolitan Library

I enjoyed meeting my friend Tony Laszlo for lunch in Hiroo last week when I made a run down there for a month’s supply of Norwegian goat cheese. A grocery store there that tends to the families of the many embassies in the area (including the Norwegian one) sells the big full size blocks of the toxic brown substance I love to cover my sandwiches with. Although our lunch of tea-flavored gruel was no match for a post-lunch snack combination of his rye bread and my cheese, we enjoyed a good talk in the park at Hiroo. We also stopped by the Tokyo Metropolitan Library which has its central branch in the park. I love this library and used to hang out there when I was studying Japanese in Yokohama years ago. Apparently they have wireless access in the library now, but I think you need an account with some commercial service. Also, I’m told they have a lot of materials in their closed stacks which you would normally only find at the Diet Library. So if there is anyone who is tired of the lines and hassle there, you might want to try the library in Hiroo, with its view over the park, as an alternative. Tony and I happened to get there while the cherry trees were blossoming outside. Today the blossoms have mostly fallen, covering much of Tokyo’s concrete in a thin blanket of pink petals.

Grade Inflation

Lots of people moan about grade inflation, especially in graduate school. Some complaints take the form of, “People who don’t deserve an A are getting an A,” and pretty much end at that. Others defend the inflators with, “The grading system is so arbitrary and varies so radically across schools and from professor to professor that it is foolish to injure, however remotely, the chances of students to succeed in the future by actually trying to enforce a meaningful grading system in a class.” Then there is the issue of “performance relative to one’s classmates” vs. “performance relative to a particular standard of learning achieved.” The latter in turn leads to the question of, “Standard? Recognized by and established by who?”

I haven’t really given this or grade inflation in general too much thought. Nor have I read anything by anyone who has (links appreciated). I do know, however, that at Western Washington University, many of my classes had very tough grading practices. In some of my philosophy classes, in particular, it was very hard to get above a B+. The same went for a few of my history professors. In other classes, lower than a B was reserved for “punishment” for students who knew damn well what they did to get it. I was surprised when I discovered that at Columbia, during my masters degree, my grades in the majority of my classes (some notable exceptions) ballooned upwards irrespective of my actual mental investment in the class and in two cases totally irrespective of whether I had a clue or not of what was going on in the class. I assure you I didn’t suddenly get smarter when I entered graduate school and I’m also very sure I didn’t get smarter, more knowledgeable, or more harder working relative to my classmates.

A friend of mine in a masters program at Waseda University got his first “report card” back today. The program uses an A, B, C grading system as the US does in addition to the Japanese gradings 優、良、可. We discovered, however, that grade inflation, or rather, the complete lack of any meaningful differentiation in a student’s input of effort or output of work, is very much alive in his program as well. I was especially interested in a little sheet that came with his report card announcing a new grading system, beginning this semester, which saves professors the trouble and inflates things for them:

90-100% = A+ (formerly A) = 優
80-89 = A (formerly B) = 優
70-79 = B (formerly C) = 良
60-69 = C (formerly D) = 可
0-59 = F

What can we make of this sort of thing? Obviously I should ask the administration directly before making any judgments but my suspicion is that, like many schools, their eye is on how the students will be using these little markings on paper after they leave the school and take the next step. In this case, there is always the chance that students go on to study in the US. I apologize if I’m stating the obvious here, but the assumption seems to be that grades are a form of communication not from instructor to student, or instructor to school about student, but from instructor to everyone in the student’s future. If this is the case, as that old movie quote goes, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

When I finished high school with a 2.6 GPA, about the only positive thing I could have said about my performance in those years was that I showed an amazing respect for “grade diversity.” Finishing at nearly the bottom of my class, I consider myself lucky I got into college at all. I can’t shake the nudging feeling that the whole academic grading thing is a joke of near cosmic proportions, but that we are all prevented from laughing.

55 Days at Peking

I watched the old movie “55 Days at Peking” starring the National Rifle Association’s dear leader Charlton Heston. The movie is an account the Boxer rebellion in China in 1900, but specifically of the valiant defense of the foreign legations by a divisive group of Great Power diplomats and soldiers from around June 20th, when a German minister was killed by Boxers, to August 14th, when Allied forces take control of the city.

The movie was full of blanket stereotypes, weird music (presumably to give it a Chinese feel) and western actors speaking in a mechanical tone of voice to help us believe they are the Empress Dowager and her followers. Nothing more or less than common for a movie of its time.

To its credit, the Westerners don’t come across completely untarnished. In the first few minutes we hear some disgruntled Chinese say, “Different nations say the same thing, ‘We want China.'” The audience is also asked to respect the Chinese as Charlton Heston reminds his US soldiers, “This is a highly cultured civilization so don’t get any idea that you are any better than these people just because they can’t speak English.” It doesn’t help though that the next scene has Heston trying to save a Western missionary from torture and execution at the hand of Boxer rebels (who for some reason all seem to wave banners saying “Beijing” 北京 and “the capital” 京都). When he tries to buy the life of the missionary, our hero explains that the greedy capitalist Chinese will sell anything at a price.

Our American hero, as is often the case in these movies (and in reality?), is an impatient, aloof, but thoroughly seasoned warrior who doesn’t have time for the subtleties of diplomacy (that is left to the British ambassador). He only knows bravery, duty, and action and he gets very angry at the British ambassador when told that killing the Empress Dowager might not be a good way to resolve the crisis. I could see his eyes totally flashing, “Dude! But she’s like, EVIL!” More below…
Continue reading 55 Days at Peking

Common Sense Revolts at the Idea

I just started reading Lessig’s new book Free Culture, which is generously available for download under the Creative Commons license and I’m already loving it. On page 2 he quotes a Supreme Court ruling on traditional land rights including the sky above the land and how this conflicts with the new age of flight travel. Lessig focuses in on one quote from this and adds his own comment:

“Common sense revolts at the idea.” This is how the law usually works. Not often this abruptly or impatiently, but eventually, this is how it works.

When I saw this, I was immediately reminded of my moral theory courses as an undergraduate philosophy major, and I couldn’t help thinking that, at least for the field of ethics in analytic philosophy, the above statement needs little adjustment:

“Common sense revolts at the idea.” This is how ethics usually works. Not often this abruptly or impatiently, but at the heart of every logical argument, this is how it works.

In the case of a normative field like ethics, of course, it is the “when” and “who” absent in this formulation that gives rise to so much trouble.

Shanghai in August 1945

You pick up the most circulated newspaper in Shanghai on August 15th, 1945, the day of Japan’s surrender. What do you see? Well, the news of the surrender hasn’t made it for the day’s issue. Instead, in the days leading up to the end of the war the newspaper focuses on the Russian advances in Manchuria, or the arrival of B29 bombers attacking Japanese targets in China. Of course, you still see the usual advertisements for CPC Coffee, and various brands of penicillin. But how will the newspaper change in the next few days as Japan’s control over Shanghai comes to an end? While this wasn’t a question related to my research, it was at the back of my mind as I skimmed through an important Shanghai newspaper called 申報 from the second half of the year 1945.

I have become a big fan of the 郭廷以 library next to the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica (中央研究院) See my English entry about it on my reference wiki for more information. Pretty much anyone can use the library without any membership or introductions, and its stacks are open for browsing. Their collection of history related materials is great and includes a lot of Japanese and English materials as well as Taiwanese and mainland China sources. On this trip to Taiwan I have started looking at early postwar newspapers to get a preliminary look at how Chinese traitors (collaborators, or 漢奸) are portrayed. For now, I’m concentrating on the period of 1945 to say 1948, by which time most of the trials of 漢奸 had finished up. I was only able to get a start on this project this time. Also, newspapers (and “traitors” in China) are only a first stop, but hey, I haven’t even started my PhD program yet.

I have to say though, the leaning over musty (ok, they aren’t musty, but try to get in the mood with me here) volumes of old newspaper collections has so far been a lot of fun. Today I took a little extra time to jot down some notes on things I found interesting in Shenbao issues just after the fall of Japan. Read on if you think advertisements for cosmetics, candy and movies from 1945 can actually be interesting.
Continue reading Shanghai in August 1945

Echo Chamber

Sometimes Sayaka pats my head and in a patronizing voice says,「いい子いい子」Sometimes I pat her head and tell her she is an「いい子いい子」Today I tried to explain to her that what we essentially have going on here is an echo chamber (in which we each congratulate the other for being a “good little boy/girl”). She said, “No, we have an いい子 chamber.”

Open Access

One thing I hope to think a lot about in graduate school (assuming I will still have time for personal thinking) is how academic work is published/distributed. As most of my friends know, I’m very interested in and active in the “open” source/access/content movement but I’m far from having sorted out all my thoughts on this when it comes to history and the academic world. The key word, and most troublesome issue is “peer review” or more broadly the academic world as meritocracy. There are lots of blogs talking about this already but the postings are all over the place. One particularly high concentration of stuff is being written on the Open Access News blog. For example see this entry on how the scientific journal Nature is thinking about open access publishing.

Smurfs and Socialism

Karl Marx I love the smurfs. I always have. My sister and I were raised on Smurf songs and the cartoons. Never, never did I (and I doubt Carleen did either) turn the analytical eye on the holy smurfs. Others have, though. Now, after all these years, do I realize where my deep socialistic instincts find their source. I must overcome these urges towards an egalitarian society born of the propoganda of my youth and the seeming tranquility of Norwegian welfare society and embrace the invisible hand! 資本主義萬歲! :-)

History for the Youth

My friend Duckling, over at Blackberry Picking has a fantastic idea about creating a history related blog targeting young adolescents, say 10 to 15 years old. I think this will make for a very unique and valuable project. She is nearing the close of her own graduate studies in history. In the fall I begin a half decade or more journey of a doctorate in history. I hope eventually I’ll be able to call myself a historian, and with even greater pride, a teacher. I must confess though that, at the end of the line, I have rather quaint images of myself as a writer of children’s stories, holed up in a Norwegian mountain cottage which is somehow miraculously connected to the internet.

I don’t know what Duckling’s motivations are, but I tend to agree with a line from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, “It is through children that the soul is cured.” (p90 in my copy). Whenever I interact with children, I can almost feel the years of meaningless crap being scraped from an aging heart. It is the storyteller that inspires children. The only difference between them and us, as far as I’m concerned, is that we see this in them, but refuse to see it in ourselves. Whatever one’s stance on the relationship of history to literature, I think we can all agree that history is born of the storyteller’s craft. In my case, I fed a hunger for fantasy with reading and child’s play. The interactive element provided by a love for role-playing games was incredibly important as well. I think Duckling’s idea is an exciting one and I wish her luck in it and her other projects.