Happy Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for sitting on my ass while others cook. Go patriarchy.
Thank you! I hope all of you have a great holiday.
Thanks! And a happy thanksgiving to you all.
For the third year in a row, we've visited friends who do all the cooking. It's the best.
People who feed people are the luckiest people of all.
props to ajay for playing the part of "that uncle" at this virtual turkey day table. strong showing from a non usa-ian.
I couldn't sleep last night, so I thought I'd make myself drowsy by listening to a recording of someone reading the entire Havana Syndrome New Yorker article (over an hour; I didn't speed it up), and then I really, REALLY couldn't sleep. Was it Alejandro? Did we quickly reach a tipping point where no groups in the U.S. government can successfully coordinate on something like this? Can this hypothetical weapon fire automatically or would it have to be controlled by snipers? I'm going to be punchy all day.
I have made a dick joke and now I want to talk about mystery weapons. Is this the right address? (also, love for 8)
Fine, comment on literally every other thread, I am literally going and eating worms.
That article is so fucking long I doubt I'll finish it, but so far this looks like an adequate explanation.
I've been in a bar for the past two hours. I'm not reading anything. It with be rude to the other people at the bar.
I didn't buy a turkey for thanksgiving, just a rotisserie chicken because only two meat eaters present. But then I bought a turkey today because Costco has them quite nearly free- 99 cents a pound minus $15 per bird so I got one for $2.71. I saw another shopper who bought four, I'm kind of curious what their plans were.
I'm somewhat motivated to establish a religion with all the same civic and religious holidays as most people, just delayed a week.
13: Thanks for the link! But it raises questions, right? The main questions for me are "is the U.S. being secretive, incompetent, or both [above the obviously high known baseline levels]?" and the intended purpose of bombarding U.S. personnel with microwaves (even in the Soviet case, the article suggests this wasn't totally clear). And, I suppose, why the New Yorker expended 20,000,000 words or whatever to elaborately obfuscate the situation.
Presumably these microwave beams fire frequently but rarely hit people? And this is a post-Trump thing because Cuba is nervous? QUESTIONS.
I'm not sure I find gummy worms less disgusting than dead earthworms. They're probably less nutritious.
I thought earthworms were supposed to be alive when you ate them.
17: It does raise questions.Cuban infighting might make sense in explaining the obviousness and apparent pointlessness. The most obvious course for US investigation, placing sensors in these locations isn't mentioned at all. That could be blinding incompetence, or it could be the one thing the New Yorker couldn't get a source on. I'm not sure who would be tasked with doing such thing. CIA scientific people, but maybe NSA or even JSOC people instead. Neither of those organizations are as leaky as CIA.
13 That still doesn't explain the incidents at locations like hotels which presumably aren't US diplo/spy installations.
Cuban infighting
Did you skim/skip to the end of the article where the guy says Alejandro Castro must have been behind it, because there's no other reason Raúl would blackball him? I feel that as a journalist I would have had serious doubts about including that speculation, even with hedging, but at the same time I was intrigued. I don't know. I do find the likely prospect of US-Cuban relations seriously deteriorating again depressing. It would be nice if it could thaw before Miami ends up underwater; on second thought, maybe that's what it would take...
(FWIW I had a dissertation chapter, and second mini-chapter, on Cuban literary-historical stuff, so this interest is not completely random. I'm apparently dealing with current stress via academic nostalgia.)
20: Right, but that strengthens the "used for listening" hypothesis. They knew where these people were going to be and set up a post? I bet the Cuban side of this story is both fascinating and batshit crazy.
20: Unless they think (not insanely) the Americans could be carrying sigint gear with them. Or they were just trying to hound people out, as the article suggests.
NMM to Ricky Jay. A great magician.
21: Yes, I finished it. There could be any number of reasons Castro got blackballed. What your Cuba research about?
23 And character actor (his bit in Deadwood was fantastic and he even wrote an ep).
25. Yes! There are some great clips on YouTube.
What your Cuba research about?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no, sorry. The best explanation of it all to a general audience is that, while you're not supposed to get negative results in the humanities, I found a way. This is a testament to stubbornness, self-defeating skepticism, and the fact that after a certain point PhDs start to cost money rather than supplying it.
Um. Ok then. Hope you're feeling better now.
Also a great historian of magic and con games. What a profound loss.
28: No, I really am sorry! I wish I had done a bunch of research I was proud of and happy to talk about with people. The project was a cross-cultural comparison of the essay as a form, and as a mode within novelistic prose: the latter is the subject of a small but extant Eurocentric critical literature. I found a lot of this critical literature to be crap, and thought I could do a better job. The better job I did was to refine virtually every point out of existence. I wrote it all in a four-month rush at the end of 2014 before I ran out of money and I'm sorry. I don't think it would have made a difference to the Cuban people or the diplomatic corps if I'd managed to write a full, respectable chapter on Lezama Lima's Paradiso rather than five pages of really deep and heartbreakingly poignant thoughts. This is a comment that is begging to be deleted rather than posted, but given that it's never going to matter to anyone on earth that I spent almost seven years doing this, let's just hit post. This is easily the most painful thing I've ever written in this little box. Incidentally I am 100% sober.
I'm sorry lurid! Would it make you happier if you told what Paradiso is about, since I've never heard of it or Lima?
Or just eat more worms if you'd prefer.
I will say that I thought Louis Perez's Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution was a good one-stop shop for political history, and is now up to its fifth edition, but there may need to be a sixth. This is a book I remember reading about the "special period" and its reflection in fiction; the kind of academic text I was never going to write, about books I wouldn't get much joy from reading, but it captured the history for me. I never found a good single source on the U.S. exile community, i.e. with no real selection criteria besides "open call for an especially good book on this subject."
The other book I wrote about, in much more depth, was Alejo Carpentier's dictator novel Reasons of State (in Spanish, Recurso del método), which is basically a good time, full of in-jokes, a pretty well-executed composite of various figures before 1950 (Machado, Federico Tinoco Granados in Costa Rica, Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala) and send-up of Latin American francophilia. Carpentier couldn't roll his r's at all, which I found comforting because I can't either.