A Blond Scientist in India

the next adventure

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:04:00 +0000

I've started a hitchhiking trip across the country to meet people and talk to scientists conducting cool research. The blog is called The Joy of Lex.

last post

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:37:00 +0000

My adventures abroad have ended and I declare this blog CLOSED. Here's my new blog about life in the rotten apple:

http://www.anopenlettertonyc.wordpress.com

from a freedom fighter

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:25:00 +0000

I've talked about my friend Tenzin Choedon before. She's a nurse who graduated from college and started her new job just before the start of the March to Tibet. She only worked at this hospital for a month before the March called her to say they had no one else to watch the health of the marchers. They said they needed her. She had a hard decision. If she quit her job, they would hold her nursing certificate until she paid a penalty worth a year of pay. She decided she would rather work for her country's freedom. She left the job and spent the next three months attending the aches, blisters and general health of the marchers on the March to Tibet. After three months, the march disintegrated in the face of extreme opposition from the Indian police and Tenzin had no where to turn. After staying in Dharamsala with the Che Guerva of Tibetan freedom, Tenzin Tsundue, she finally had to return home. This is what this dedicated freedom fighter wrote recently:

Back home for now,
sleeping in my cosy bed
thick mat and warm blanket
no more hiding...
no more hungry...
i am free now,
free from the indian jail.
free from the march,
the protest.
free from my patients,
free with my family,
but really?
i am happy with my family,
but in alien land.
i get to eat well,
while my brothers die of huger.
i protest and get a night in jail.
my sisters protest and gets death.
so no more fake freedom...
no more pain and crying ....
keeping faith in 'never giving up"
i stand up for my land.
forever till my last breath.
BHOD GYA LO !!! (Victory to Tibet)

home to my books

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:35:00 +0000

Back in the States. I have actually gone up to my book depository and simply sat there admiring them. I missed having my books for those 8 months. This means I better jump on the bandwagon I've been seeing around the Interwebs and put up the list of the top 100 books that's been floating around.

Everybody is supposed to do post this on their blog for reasons unknown to me. I just wanted to show off that I read more than half of them. The Big Read says that US adults have only read an average of 6 books on this list.

The Legend:
Read it
Favorite
Started it

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (great movie too)

6. The Bible (I don’t want to ruin the ending but the bad guys lose)

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (see London, England)

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (the funniest book I know)

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I might have the Jabberwocky tattooed on my back)

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (my parents got all of our names from this book)

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (we read these together out loud after dinner for a long time)

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I stole it from a nice little restaurant in India and got my only food poisoning of the India trip, damn karma)

40. Winnie the Pooh -

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (not only should this not be on the list, it shouldn’t be in public libraries)

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (one of the best I know if you can keep the names straight, it gets tough as he travels through a few generations of a family where every male has the same name as his father and grandfather)

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (I like Irving but he repeats his themes way too much, enough about wrestling, open marriages and the guy letting the animals out of the Vienna zoo in WWI only to get eaten by the lion)

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (a master of characterization)

48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (second worst book on the list)

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (another great movie, I love Peter Sellers)

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (with the only opium induced wet dream I have ever read, three greek godess statues coming to life sounds pretty great to me)

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (captured the go go go spirit of the 50’s in Neal Cassady, I liked his Dharma Bums best which captured the spirit of the 60’s in Gary Snyder)

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (for some reason we have three copies of this depressing book floating around our house, who keeps buying it?)

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (another master of characters with an amazing eye for the details of India)

87. Charlotte's Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (gets a little repetitive)

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (inspired the wonderful Redwall series)

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (a damn funny book published after the kid who wrote it died and his mother got lucky enough to find an editor who bothered to read the manuscript that turned out to be quite clever)

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

9177480323

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:14:00 +0000

I love Nevin. He's the father of my friend Kerri Koch who's engaged to my buddy Kurt. I actually asked her out first during our sophomore year of high school but it turned out that she wanted to go to prom with Kurt instead. She wanted someone clever and kind instead of annoying and wrongly convinced of his own hilarity. Go figure. I stopped by Kurt and Kerri's new house and found Nevin hard at work.

He's a great white haired guy with arms like Popeye and a knack for the Mennonite game. PA terminology corner: When playing the Mennonite game, you try to find out how everybody is related to everyone else, where they grew up, where they work, who married who and whose father used to run the general store that became a restaurant ran by the son of the guy who used to live on E Main St that ran an electrical business that shut down twenty years ago. It's complicated and you win by knowing everything. Nevin knows everything.

He has an inside track because in 1955, he began reading the water meters for our town. It meant he had to go into the basement of every single house in Lititz. Naturally with our friendly community, he talked to alot of people and obtained alot of valuable information for the Mennonite game. He also mentioned that back then, almost everybody left their door open so he could walk into the empty house to read their water meter. He said he doesn't find open doors anymore. Ah, the good old days.

He asked me about my recent travels. After the normal short synopsis, I told him, "it's time to head back to NYC because I'm flat broke but it was worth it."
"Yeah", he says, "you have to do it now while you're not tied down." Then he starts telling me about his adventure year of 1964. He went to British Columbia for a year with a buddy. By helping an old mountain man gather hay "more like swamp grass", they got a cabin 25 miles outside town. The best part: no roads. In winter, it could take two days to snowshoe into town for supplies. They didn't need much though. They spent almost all their time hunting and fishing. During the summer, he shot moose and deer, caught a lot of trout and even bagged a small bear. In winter, they trapped and shot red squirrels. If you got the sucker in the head, you could get 60 cents for the pelt. They shot 360 squirrels that winter. That's a hell of a lot of good shooting. He even once trapped a lynx that brought in twenty bucks for the coat (that's 33.3 squirrels if you're keeping score at home). It sounded like an amazing way to while away a year.

He went back with Kerri 33 years later. He found the mountain man and former professional ice hockey player who rented them the cabin. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember Nevin because he almost lost his life in a grizzly attack that apparently made him a little soft in the head. We agreed that it's hard to find tough old birds like that mountain man but fascinating once you do.

That prompted me to tell Nevin about meeting the toughest guy I know. On a trip to Arkansas to visit my buddy and teacher of all things redneck, Nat Sumers, we went for a mule ride with the a local mountain man and some of his friends. He spent his entire life with horses and mules. By trimming their hooves, shoeing them and breaking them, he makes enough to scrape out a happy little existence in a shack surrounded by his favorite quadrupeds. On the ride that day, he rode a half wild horse that he was breaking in for someone. Nat, a good horseman himself, said he wouldn't take a half wild horse on these trails. To make it more interesting, this horse whisperer hitched two completely wild horses to his saddle with lead ropes to begin the process of breaking them in. Now that's tough. A half-broken horse with two completely wild ones attached. With this impressive display of prowess we set off on our ride.

After about an hour of leisurely beer drinking, talking and riding, we stopped for our first piss break. When he got off his half wild horse, the other two started freaking out, jumping and kicking all over the place. When they settled down, he was in the middle of a tangled knot of horses. One had its legs off the ground, wrapped in a lead rope while one had its front end completely over the last horse. A sticky situation because its easy for a horse to break its leg in those positions. He calmly starts untying ropes and slowly rearranging the horses. After a minute, something spooks them again and they start going wild. Right in the middle of the bunch, he narrowly misses a kick to the head before they settle down again. Then he delivers my favorite line of the week in his Arkansas drawl, "Well, I reckon I ought to put down my beer."

I'm proud to say my story got a laugh out of Nevin with his great infectious chuckle. Because of men like him, it's fun to be home in Lititz.

I just realized I used the post title to save Asa Wilks' number. I can't think of a better tittle anyway so I'll leave it in. Call him and tell him he smells like a monkey.

fun in the townships

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 05:36:00 +0000

Her last year in college, my girlfriend ran a program called SHAWCO - !!insert name, a student run organization that sends college kids into the township (slum) schools once a week to teach a class. I went along for the first time last Friday to check out the scene. What a rush.

As both regular readers of this column know, I love kids. I like babies too but I'm not as stoked about caring for one 24/7. As my dad says, “It only really gets fun when they start talking back.” Since I spent most of last week in bed with tonsillitis taking some strange South African concoction called “Grandpas” to stave off the feverish nightmares, I had plenty of time to fantasize about my future family. I pictured a warm sunny day at Lititz Springs Park with children swarming everywhere while my five to eight rugrats wander around stirring up trouble. Then I yell “Pelger Flash” and all of my kids swing into action by jumping up, yelling at the top of their lungs and running around the park waving their hands over their head like in a Godzilla movie. After a minute of this hopefully disconcerting behavior, we all meet at a spot in the grass for a giant dog pile. Our family motto will be: making the world more surreal, one freakout at a time. I can't wait to be a father.

Anyway, the above scenario helps to illustrate why I loved this township school. As we drove up in our short bus, half a dozen kids swarmed through the gates to meet us. A few had vicious looking dogs on rope leashes. One little guy had a dog that dwarfed him. I said to him, “That dog looks like a killer. Is that dog a killer?” He just solemnly nodded his head as the dog took off running presumably to go lunch on the third grade. I turned to another kid. “Do you think you could beat that dog in a fight?” Big shake of the head no. “What if I gave you a knife?” I look at the dog again. “A really big knife.” A big smile this time but still a shake of the head no. “Yeah, I think you're right. Them's some mean looking dogs.”

I walk into the classroom with the two college girls who will run an art class here next week. Their only plan for this week: get the names of their new charges. Instead, there is chaos. Absolute and glorious chaos. A room of forty 7 to 13 year olds who seemed to only be slightly afraid of the principal who yelled at them in Afrikaans to shut up. They were not at all afraid of the two english speaking girls in the front who didn't understand Afrikaans. I heard some of the boys use some bad words in Afrikaans but I decided to feign ignorance. If my teacher didn't speak my language, could I resist insulting them? Probably not. I couldn't throw stones on that point.

Whenever the girls asked for silence, the noise would drag on as various factions tried to silence the others. The hissing and shouts of “shut up” chased each other around the world in a seemingly endless echo. Kids kept standing up to walk around. A little blonde girl repeatedly punched one of the older boys and somebody kept making fart sounds which made me hide a smile. While everyone else tried to silence each other, only the long row of older boys in the back simply would not shut up. However, once I squeezed into one of the tiny seats in the middle of their group, they went from being the loudest offenders to being the most annoying keepers of the peace. They would vehemently yell at anyone standing up or making noise. This often led to a yelling contest about who should shut up. Everybody wanted everyone else to be quiet and instead they took the roof off the old building. I giggle about it again even as I sit here and write it.

Once I got the boys on my team, they enthusiastically played Simon Says and the rainmaking game. We all especially enjoyed the part of banging on the desk to make thunder. I don't think real thunder reaches this level of cacophony. My new buddies started questioning me. “Why did you come to South Africa?” I told him, “Because of a girl, the age old reason.” I'm a big believer in speaking to kids like adults so I went on to say, “Girls are like a drug. You do things because of them even though you don't want to.” He tells me, “I know that. I have two girlfriends.” “Alright,” I said, “So you know what I'm talking about my man.”

Once the games and name gathering finished, class broke for the day. I somehow acquired two monkeys on my back before even leaving the classroom. Two cute little ones jumped on my back as I walked out. I had fun asking them if they wanted to go for a swim in the nice warm mud puddles dotting the field. Unfortunately, the little girl called my bluff because she actually did want to be thrown in the mud puddle. I had to be the weak one who backed down from carrying out the challenge. Girls always win.

In my first trip to a township school, I didn't learn anything about their needs or desires. I did see the loudest, wildest and funnest group of kids. I have a feeling that when I go back, I'm going to more of a hindrance than a help to the other teachers. I'll just want more chaos.

insights that are queer but true

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:41:00 +0000

What a great weekend. I explored some cool places and met interesting people with strange skills. When I say strange skills, I’m using a poorly worded phrase from my own mental dictionary. I just found a better definition of what I mean from Kurt Vonnegut. He calls them “insights that are queer but true." In his novel Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut gives the example of Claire Minton, a master indexer. Not only could she index a book perfectly, she could learn things about someone when they indexed their own book. In Cat’s Cradle, after examining someone's self-indexed book, she rightly concluded the author was gay. A fictional example but such “insights that are queer but true” abound and I love finding them.

They tend to turn up when least expected like at a crappy rock show in the back of a bar. At the show I have in mind, I left the annoying music and dead looking crowd to sit a table by myself with a beer and a notebook. Shortly, a waifish blonde sat down next to me who we will call the Analyzer because I'm a lousy journalist who rarely remembers a name. She said something in Afrikaans, the bastardized Dutch language of South Africa. Looking like the classic little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke (Dr. SS: can we please spell it this way instead of dike to see if anyone catches on, twenty bucks says you don't hear a peep), I understand how she mistook me for a native in this white as Wonder Bread neighbourhood. She told me, “I'm waiting for your pen.” After I gave it to her, she opened up my book and wrote something that could be paraphrased for a family paper as “I wish I had huge tracts of land.” (How many Monty Python fans out there?) Then she simply smiled impishly and wandered off into the crowd without another word.

I shook my head in bemusement and amusement. Several minutes later, the Analyzer showed up again and we started talking about science. I don't remember how we started on it but I tend to bring up science fiction ideas a lot (too much?) so the topic probably branched off that. As it often happens, just when I think that this conversation will go nowhere, I get surprised. In an abrupt change of subject, she tells me that I dress funny. I'm wearing suspenders and a T-shirt so I tell her that I look normal where I come from and she would look weird in Lancaster. As the talk turned towards clothing, she gets more animated. She points at various people in the bar and tells me about them based on their clothing. I start writing down her words because I sensed I had something interesting here. During her lecture on fashion and personality, my girlfriend, Astrid, comes up with her friends. I tell them about the Analyzer's skill and she offers to tell Astrid about me. Before she pulls Astrid out of earshot to give her the Lex rundown, the Analyzer has me pull up my pants to show her my socks.

Astrid gave me the summary on the ride home and I found out that this girl picked up a lot of information from suspenders and big woollen socks. She said some general things such as me being sensitive and emotional but she found me sitting alone in a bar writing. A pretty easy guess. Then she said I had grown up in an outdoors environment and had a collection of something back home of which I was immensely proud. Sure enough, I had all of the Boy Scout camp for a backyard and I am proud of my book collection to the point of arrogance. For her most impressive point, the girl told Astrid that I wasn't well behaved up until 9^th grade but then I got into trouble. She said my parents gave me a stern talk and I straightened up after that. We don't need to get into my middle school self control and kleptomania issues but I'll just say she got that one right too. Somehow, this girl talked about me for several minutes and got everything right including some fairly precise predictions. Astrid also told me that the Analyzer was an exotic dancer who married someone from Astrid's high school and now they live happily together with three kids. Things started falling into place. In her profession, she must have excelled at reading men and learning how to massage their ego, the true purpose of male entertainment bars. Interesting insights, “queer but true.”

When my friends woke me up Sunday morning, I tried to shake off a massive hangover and ready myself for a big day. A bunch of us were going to the Guguletho township (slum) for the infamous MZoli (SS: this is correct spelling and caps) restaurant. Not so much of a restaurant as some tables where beers cost a buck and $3 gets you a heaping plate of sausages and chicken. While we waited for our food, I walked around the neighbourhood with my friend Sarah.

The houses ranged from nice multi-room concrete structures to shacks made of spare wood with a corrugated tin roof. Children ran happily all over the streets while men and women sat in circles enjoying the lazy Sunday afternoon often with the help of beers and a car blasting some tunes. Whenever I caught someone's eye, I got a nod with a smile or a “howisit bra?” I found friendly people who didn't overwhelm me with questions like in India. We ended up sitting and joking around with a few guys enjoying some beer on the street corner. They knew everybody passing by and beautiful girls tended to sauntered past slowly as they exchanged flirtatious yells with our new friends. The young men wanted to hear my impressions of South Africa and seemed proud when I told them I enjoyed my experience so far.

I also learned the magic word of South Africa. In India, I would say how much I loved the Indian people for their “big heart.” I meant it every time but I also knew that phrase would always make people like me. In South Africa, I learned to tell people that you like their country for its spirit of ubuntu. Not an easy word to define but I'm starting to realize it contains the continent. Ubuntu is a spirit of unity and watching out for others. I always hear that this sense of community pervades the townships, which they are the place to be if you're down and out because people will take care of you.

Not to say the townships don't have an extremely high crime rate, massive gang infestations and entrenched drug problems. However, that happens anywhere young men cannot get work from Moscow to Paris to NYC. Would America be so orderly if a young man had a choice between letting his family go hungry or joining a gang to fight turf battles over the methamphetamine trade? I believe a creature hungry for survival lurks below the surface of most people and if you're lucky you never have to call on it. How many of us have faced a true survival situation with little chance of escape? How civilized would my reaction be against hopeless odds of survival? I (maybe) have a lot of years left on Earth and who knows what kind of trouble the human race could create in that time? So many doomsday scenarios with life becoming cheap and survival hard to imagine. Alright. Enough pessimism. I've been reading too much about the evils of the past again and that always puts me in a dark mood waiting for them to return.

Back to this township: Once we returned to the restaurant, the area had turned into a block party with dance music and people just enjoying the day. I loved the scene. Everybody out talking to their neighbours, having a great time. I love places where you know everyone and people slowly pass the time together. Hopefully, I'll get to know more about this very soon. It looks like I'll start teaching kids in the townships this week. I'm damn excited.

first Lititz Record column from SA

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:59:00 +0000

Somehow in spite of no posts for two weeks, I still have 40 to 50 people checking in on me every day. Thanks you guys. I've been stricken with the devilish cocktail of tonsilititis and writers block so bear with me. I need drugs for the tonsils and booze for the writing and we should be back in business. Until then, here's a Lititz Record column I wrote:

Biking Cape Town, Running South Africa

The first full week in Cape Town brought some exciting new developments to the life of Lex. I got the green light for my first paid article from a travel website about tips for traveling India. I ran my first half marathon though I'm paying for it now. But the biggest and best thing to happen to me since I left NYC, I got a bike. This trumps other notable occasions from the last year including two arrests, a deportation and moving to Africa for a girl. I really like bikes and everything is coming up Lex!

The next day, I took my new bike out for a ride. I spent five hours in the saddle exploring the waterfront, taking pictures of myself in front of a giant golden sea lion statue and biking down the Atlantic coastline. Beautiful country. Sheer, almost lunar cliffs tower over the town reminding me of the Cliffs of Insanity in the Princess Bride (wow, second PB reference this month). The morning sun lights Lion's Head Mountain on fire. On my bike down the coastal road, beds of kelp undulate in the surf to my right while green hills rose sharply on my left; studded with high priced houses which are surrounded by the high and frequently barbwire topped walls so typical in this crime ridden country.

Time for a side note on language: Since I've been here, English has shifted on me. A robot is a traffic light and a braai is a BBQ with lots of dop (booze). More importantly, the connotations of racial language become a moving target. In this column, I will frequently be using terms like black, coloured and white. They may have offensive connotations to some in Lititz but I am using these words as this culture uses them. A South African hero, Steve Biko led a powerful movement to instill pride in South African blacks and coloureds. These designations have no shame attached to them here. I apologize for any offense but I will speak from the culture that I am trying to understand.

During my bike ride, I stopped in a park looking over the beach of rock and sand where children of all colours played and yelled. A babysitter pushed the seesaw down for her young blond charge and seemed genuinely surprised at his swift descent when she let it go. What surprised me was how easily the little brat cried. My father taught me no sympathy for whining or tears produced for attention. He's the reason I'm (somewhat) tough today and it's also because of him that I cry like a little girl at animated movies. A wise teacher.

I always find my best stories while wandering on my bicycle. This time I stopped to talk an old man feeding the birds. From the first word, I knew I had a classic Brooklyn native on my hands. Just like me, he came to South Africa for a girl. I know a magazine who would love the story about this old NYC cabbie who grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression and ended up in Cape Town. It's not a magazine that will pay but it's good practice. Most importantly, I just love getting to know an old person and learning about his or her life. My plan is simple: work hard at getting and writing stories that I find interesting and hope that my passion pays off.

After that superb bike ride with a crack bang finish passing cars down the long hill back into town, I hopped into a VW microbus with some friends headed towards the Knysna marathon. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful drives I have ever taken. The gently rolling green hills reminded me of scenic Lancaster County but the gray snow capped mountains over the lush valleys belied the difference. I've also never seen this many sheep and ostriches dotting our fair farm country.

The next day vastly increased my already substantial respect for my sister Anna. A few years ago, she ran a full marathon with absolutely no training and only walked for one mile of it. Last Saturday, I ran a half marathon with no training and the last 2 miles felt like torture. I could never have kept running without being so close to the finish line. Granted, I did run in the only shoes I own, a pair of old man loafers that both sisters apparently mock me for behind my back. I had several runners comment on my utterly inappropriate footwear but I just kept referring to them as the “winged sandals of Mercury.” I set a goal of 2 hours to run the 12.6 miles because I figured I should be able run it in twice the time as the fastest person.

A cold cold morning invigorated us as we waited for dawn and the start of the race. I started off fast, too fast I realized later. The race went about like I expected. I spent the first third getting into the rhythm and the second third feeling great with a runner's high while admiring the magnificent views. Around every bend, I discovered more beauty as I ran through the pine forests of the Knysna National Park. For the last third, I simply hated running and kept cursing my lack of genetic enhancements and titanium body implants. Near the end, I did have fun talking to some sheep farmers. When they told me their line of work, I immediately remarked on the stupidity of sheep. They told me there's a saying in their hometown that the only thing dumber than a sheep is a sheep farmer. I laughed as they pulled ahead of me like everyone else for the last five kilometers.

I ended with a time of 1:53 and beat all my friends by a long shot. I felt pretty great about my time especially with my habits of occasional smoking and moderate to heavy drinking. At the finish line, I gingerly sat down on my rubbery legs next to a man built like a panther. He came in at the same time as me but he ran the full marathon while I had only run the half.

Cue ego evaporation.

mule talk at dinner

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:38:00 +0000

I had dinner with my girlfriend, her dad and his parents. I love those old people. The grandpa likes to tell stories that I always enjoy but that tend to end abruptly. I'm never quite sure if he finished it. I really hit it off with Granny though I only met her twice.

The first time, at breakfast when I met the whole family, I sat down next to Granny. I found out later that Astrid's aunt thought to herself, "oh no, he sat down next to Granny and she is hungry." Granny gets grumpy when she is hungry but I found this out right away. Luckily, I am the same way. Until our food came, we sat together and bitched about being hungry while she told stories. She gets so excited by her stories that she starts laughing in the middle and they get hard to understand. I'm told I have the same habit.

At dinner last night, Grandpa started talking about the smart mules they had on their farm growing up. They plowed every Wednesday and those damn mules always escaped on Tuesday nights. The story, of course, ended abruptly. Granny picked up to tell about how much her father-in-law loved those mules. One time while she was pregnant with their first child, she was standing in her father-in-law's kitchen with her back to the dutch door. She heard the whistle from the local factory for the end of the day. She didn't know that every day when the whistle rang, one of the mules came to the kitchen for a slice of bread. When that mule's head appeared over her shoulder, she told me she almost jumped over the kitchen table. Then her father-in-law came into yell at her for scaring his mule. "And me with pregnant with his first grandchild" she said with an indignant laugh.

celluoid inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:46:00 +0000

I saw two movies recently that inspired me to greatness.

In "All the President's Men", Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford played Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two reporters from the Washington Post who broke the Watergate scandal through dogged determination and a sharp reporter's nose. The movie got me all worked up about this writing thing. Will I ever break a big story like that or do something like these other greats of journalism? My biggest will probably be more along the lines of "Kitten Rescued from Tree" but at least I can dream big.

And to dream truly big, all I needed was "The Man Who Would Be King." Based on a tale by the always wonderful Kipling, two rascally former soldiers in India decide to head north and vow to become kings. Sean Connery and Michael Caine make a great team for this movie. They leave India which is good because it drove me a little crazy that their India didn't have one Indian in it. They were obviously North African. It didn't help that once they got to Kafiristan, everybody in this region of present day Pakistan spoke Hindi. Cultural details aside, a great movie about adventure, arrogance and the Masons.

Napolean's haircut or: Zee Germans

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:20:00 +0000

My very first activity in Cape Town: shave and a haircut. Apparently, if a girl flies you around the world to come stay with her and she has to show you to her friends, she doesn't want you to have a patchy beard that suggests facial leprosy. We found the Waterloo Barber Shop. The old German woman running the shop told me that when she took it over thirty years ago, it was too much hassle to change the name. The name also suggests the losing battle she waged against my hair. How do you screw up a buzz cut? Seriously?

She came to South Africa to learn English. After three years working here, she knew this was her home. "The people here rich and poor, are very friendly." I asked her about changes she saw in this neighborhood that had gone from rough to uber-hip in her tenure. She said that when she first started, the blacks had to be off the streets by 6PM. If not they faced a fine worth a month's wages. My first introduction to apartheid.

freak outs and poison rhinos

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:45:00 +0000

I went to the Iziko Museum of Cape Town with some friends. It had interesting cultural exhibits on the native people and I learned more about Xhosa, a language with many clicks that to my ear seem impossible to contain meaning. As we looked at ancient cave paintings, my friend Darren kept expressing amazement at man's insistence on art and recording. It came up many times on our wanderings that day.

We had a fun time at the giant taxidermy wing. I went in by myself. The silence and dark lighting made me nervous. I kept turning around to check if certain carnivores hadn't moved. For me the tension broke when I found the hornless rhino. It turns out that thieves had broken through the glass and stolen the rhino's horn. Most likely, it will be sold and ground down into an aphrodisiac powder. A sign on the case warned the thieves that the horn had been soaked in arsenic to preserve it. That made me laugh. Take a powder to get rigid and you end up with rigor mortis instead.

Unfortunately for Darren, his hangover increased his susceptibility to the creepiness of this frozen menagerie. His bloodshot eyes made things waver at the edge of his vision. As he got more nervous, he finally decided to take the plunge and stare down the leopard. He laughed later as he told me, "I bolted."

The score stands:
Stuffed Leopards: 1
Humans: -1 (penalty point for poisonous boner)

babies

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:17:00 +0000

I want babies so bad. Unfortunately, this will be me:

Link

congress in a word

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:01:00 +0000

via the excellent OpenCongress blog, the open source Congressional information center:

At O'Reilley News, they had a great idea: turn the Capitol Words into a tag cloud with Wordle. Capitol Words posts the most frequently used word that day in Congress such as defense, budget or iraq. Wordle is a free online program that makes a tag cloud out of any submitted text. With their powers combined, I present the most frequently used words so far in this session of the House and Senate:

Goodbye India

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:46:00 +0000

Expanded version of my latest column for the Lititz Record:

Hello ladies and germs. The bear has emerged from his cave and now we'll have six more weeks of winter. I feel refreshed and slightly drained from ten days with my family. You know how that can be. We had a great trip with a lot fun, insults and antics. We spent a few days in Mumbai (Bombay), a week in Goa and a week in paradise, Bali.

The first surprise of the trip: my sister Anna showed up at the airport instead of my parents wearing a kindergarten style Indian headdress with feather for the occasion. I believe that's called pulling a Columbus. We did not think she could come because of training for summer camp but the family decided to pull a fast one on Tessa and I. My parents came on a later flight and I took them to rest at a hotel near the airport. I picked out a classy joint: hot water, flush toilets, a television with two english channels. I felt a little guilty splurging their money for a room that cost fifty bucks a night but I figured they needed a nice spot to rest. My sister soon reassured me that not only had I not splurged, my entire definition of nice must have been drastically altered in the last few months. Guilty as charged.

I went into tour guide mode and led the Pelger clan around the city for a few days, dousing them with facts, figures and anecdotes. I showed them Crawford Market where Rudyard Kipling's father made the bas reliefs on the outside and inside you could buy anything you wanted: fruit, cell phone covers, knock off DVDs, pet birds, bolts of fabric and dead animals of any type, slaughtered right there for your shopping convenience. I mentioned how I would like to tour guide someday because I think I'm good at it. I don't recall anyone rushing to encourage me but Bombay's not a touristy city. There's just not much to see. I saved the best for last.

My aunt and cousin flew in with only time for a few hour outing in Bombay before we migrated south. I took them to my old neighborhood in North Bombay. They loved the visit and I was proud to show them a little bit of the real city. We walked through the entrance with the open sewer river on the right choked to sludge with trash. Kids ran up to say, “Hello Uncle.” I responded with Namaste for the Hindus and Christians or Ass Salam Walakum for the Muslims. In this small little neighborhood of twisting streets not wide enough for two men where foreigners never appear, we gathered a crowd of children fast. Well dressed, smiling and with enthusiastic grins, these children loved playing with my family and posing for photos.

I got to see my three favorite children from Bombay. I swear, in a country of cute children, I had the very cutest outside my front door when I stayed there. Antra, the baby girl next door still remembered and reached for me in spite of the three month gap since I had last seen her. Omkar, the three year old little troublemaker who loves his uncle's mototcycle. He climbs on to it constantly and nobody worries about him. Kids start running around by themselves no later than 5. It's a safe place and I've seen that a woman will slap or hug any child if she sees they need it. People watch out for each other. I'm most happy that I got to see my little buddy, Sourab. A smart ten year old living across from me, he took me under his wing and showed me around the neighborhood when I first got there. He even became my Hindi teacher for awhile until I started using the words around my friends and they laughed at me for speaking Marathi. Sourab was teaching me his first tongue of Marathai, the language of the Mahrashtra state that contains Bombay. When this happened, I suspected I wouldn't be living in India so I used this as an excuse to stop learning Hindi although I did pick up some choice insults that came in handy later. The one thing I've learned: If you want to fight, just insult his mother.

Leaving that neighborhood made me nostalgic for the first and last time about leaving India. In my mind, I have pegged this country as a great place to visit but a lousy place to live. It will sound odd but my biggest reason to leave: I was sick of being famous. I never went to tourist areas so everywhere I went, people watched me and stopped me to talk. I’d answer the same questions over and over. Now, I'm a friendly guy but it got to be suffocating. It felt like being a B-list celebrity. Everywhere I went, I could never just be by myself. With every move I make attracting attention, I could never feel at home. I think if I could have walked unnoticed through the crowds, I would have lived there for a long time, maybe not forever but longer than seven months. That's why I liked the tiny little neighborhood in North Mumbai. By the end, I started to feel like I belonged and not like an outsider. It felt simple, warm, homey.

A week later, as I stepped up to the immigration counter to leave India, fruitlessly worried about that overstayed “Quit India” notice, nostalgia warmed me as I thought about this tiny little apartment with running water for only an hour a day but the cutest children in the city right outside my front door. I remembered lazy days playing cricket with the young guys, having chai with my neighbors, flying kites off the roof of the bathrooms, walking to those same bathrooms for my morning constitutional with a small bucket of water for cleaning up while getting yelled at by the kids for using the free toilets instead of the nicer one that cost 2 rupees (4 cents), coming home late at night and avoiding the rats to find old men singing their old songs after a Hindu festival, jumping into a lively dance party on some Muslim holiday where we all jumped up and down to bad rap and my fondest memory of all, the mornings sitting outside playing with kids and watching the old women gossip as they washed their clothes on the stone walk. It makes me happily sad even as I write it.

We spent the next week in the beach state of Goa. The hippy party mecca of the 60's, now it's a rapidly gentrifying place as the state cracks down on the noisy weirdoes to attract the well-heeled crowd who spend their money on cocktails and knickknacks instead of hashish and club entry fees. You can still find the crazy party and drug scene but it's not like the old days. If you need advice, ask Tessa. She spent a month down there with a local girlfriend and now is one hip Goa cat.

I spent the week eating. I finally killed off my tape worm so I enjoyed the sensation of eating for one again. I'm a weenie because I didn't like having a little tape worm for two months. I can't imagine carrying a baby for nine months that gets up to ten pounds. Now that's a parasite. I want a huge family but I must admit the prospect is much easier knowing that I won't have to carry all of them. I want enough to form a Harlem Globe Trotters type team that tours the country. However, that's just the cover because they will all be clandestinely trained to act as my Pelger's 11 for jewel heists. They will practice on Lititz establishments to cut their teeth. Watch out Hendricks Flower Shop. We're going to loot the place for Mother's Day. It's the least we could do for the amazing woman who helps me produce this brood.

Next stop on the trip: paradise. Beauty everywhere. Landscapes of lush jungles and green rice paddies stretching off to the giant breakers of the ocean. The intensely religious Balinese people obviously value aesthetics because I have never seen such attention to beauty everywhere I look. Every family has a temple in their house and the wealthier the family, the larger and more intricate their temple of wood and stone carvings featuring dragons and deities. I especially enjoyed the stone demons guarding every bridge. Small towns had art galleries and artisan workshops obviously geared towards tourists but nonetheless, they produced impressive and beautiful merchandise. I know I used the word beauty a lot in this paragraph but it simply astounded me at every turn. Understandably, a place like this also produces the loveliest girls I have ever seen gathered in one country. nreal.

We spent the week in Bali doing a lot more exploring. We saw a temple of Shiva filled with devotees coming to visit and newly married couples taking the mandatory tour of holy spots following their wedding. Dad and I enjoyed the wonderful in the church of St. Xavier. In an odd coincidence, I had just read a short history of St. Xavier’s life in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We read the section together and laughed that the only time I will probably ever read about St. Xavier, I show up at his church the following day.

I snorkeled for the first time in the clear waters off Bali with our guide Puta. He told us to call him Puta Tattoo to prevent confusion with the many other Putas. According to him, in Indonesia, your name depends on your birth order. There’s only three different names you can give to a firstborn son. For each new child, you have only a small pool of names to choose. As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of confusion and nicknames galore.

As for the snorkeling, an amazing experience for seeing an array of brightly colored fish and coral. Simply indescribable. Unfortunately, now I have a problem. I started snorkeling in arguably the best spot in the world. It's like losing your virginity to a porn star or having your first whoopee pie at Green Dragon, the cool farmers market in Lancaster. It’s all downhill from there. On that note, I just received my press pass from the renowned Lititz Record. My editor, Steve Seeber told me that if this doesn't get me laid, nothing will. He claims that when he goes to Green Dragon with it, he gets all the whoopee pies he can eat. That's power!

We went to the touristy town of Ubud to see a woman from my Dad’s high school class who has lived there for the last twenty years after marrying a Balinese man. They have a great house away from the town in the middle of rice paddies. I'm glad they live away from the town because Dad said about Ubud, “If this is traveling, I wouldn't travel.” Filled with tourists, men offering taxi service at every turn and overpriced though still lovely clothing and native wares. It could be the tourist street of any city in this hemisphere. I mean, there's a freaking Polo store there. I want to walk in and ask the people, why did you come to Indonesia if you're going to the same store that's all over the world. Arghhh. I know I'm harsh but whatever, I'm young and annoyingly idealistic. After this vacation, I think my family might just simplify that to annoying. Anyway, when I travel now, I dislike showing up somewhere for a few days and then moving on. I want to get to know a place by living with and around the native people. When I find a place where I never see a tourist, Lex is happy.

stereotypes make everything easier

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:13:00 +0000

At the opening plenary session of the WSSD in Johannesburg,
delegations were asked : "Would you please give your honest opinion about
solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?"

1. The subsequent debate was a complete FIASCO and ended in deadlock.
2. The Africans did not know what "food" meant.
3. The Western Europeans did not know what "shortage" meant.
4. The Eastern Europeans did not know what "opinion" meant.
5. Delegates from the Middle East did not know what "solution" meant.
6. The South Americans did not know what "please" meant.
7. The Asians did not know what "honest" meant.
8. And the United States did not know what "the rest of the world" meant.

From my new friend: Kerry Mauchline

Childhood Games Re-imagined By A Shark

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:19:00 +0000

From Fake Interviews With Real Celebrities:

Go Fish

This is a fun game for two delicious children. First, they go for a dip in a vat of butter, then, they roll around in breadcrumbs, as if they were fish preparing to be cooked. Then, they get into a big frying pan made by a clever Shark. Like me. I’m in Mensa.

Chutes and Ladders

Each child is placed at the top of a chute. Then the delicious children slide down the chutes into my mouth.

Tag

I eat a boy named Tag.

Emily Ku on her trip

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:01:00 +0000

just got home from china. every chinese girl under the age of 6 is cuter than puppies and butterflies and bunny rabbits combined. i am now despairing because i passed my prime 18 years ago.

annie

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:14:00 +0000

On the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bali, everyone in the family got a free upgrade to first class except for me. Luckily, I got on the plane much later because of a Burger King run and nobody noticed when I simply sat next to my aunt in first class. It's the first time I've ever been up front and in the words of Aunt Cindy, “I think I must just stay and live here.” Beautiful Malayasian stewardesses bringing fresh fruit juice and tasty meals, free portable entertainment systems with movies and games and an array of magazines including the China issue of National Geographic that I liberated from the plane. Wonderful. I used the handy movie thingy to watch a documentary about Annie Liebowitz.

Of course, I've seen many great portraits by Annie over the years but I never realized how much she has accomplished. She started with Rolling Stone in San Francisco at the beginning of the rock revolution of the late 60's and went onto to become the rock photographer. A tour with the Rolling Stones ended in a trip to rehab. Afterwards, she went to work for Vanity Fair where she became the photographer who could make a star.

Whoopi Goldberg said that after the photograph of her emerging from a bathtub of milk came out, people started recognizing her on the street. I love her shot of a naked and very pregnant Demi Moore that got Vanity Fair yanked from the shelves in North Carolina. Of course, I cried a lot during this movie because of her family photos, talk of her recently deceased father and the poignant photos from her archives. Two stand out to me. One, a photo of her lover, Susan Sontang, the intellectual who ironically wrote a classic essay on photography before they met, looking into the camera shortly before her death.

The second photo requires a little back story. Jan Wenner got the first true interview with John Lennon and Yoko after the breakup of the Beatles and Annie begged to go along. New at the magazine, it was her first time meeting a big rock star. They liked this passionate young girl and the pictures she took recalls Yoko in an interview. Many years later, Annie them again for a photoessay on the couple. Yoko described them as being at “the height of their intimacy” living happily and quietly near Central Park. John liked how Annie came with suggestions and ideas for photographs instead of orders like many photographers. They played and experimented that day. Annie asked Yoko to remove her clothes but she said no. John volunteered and she took this shot of John curled around his lover (annoyingly blurred by the Muslim censors of Malaysia airlines). Five hours later, he was dead. Rolling Stone ran the photo on their cover with no captions. Jan Wenner said “no words could express the tragedy”.

my best work yet

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:42:00 +0000

I hereby present my cinematic masterpiece: The Wacky and Wonderful Ned Pelger

Paul Bunyan meets the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:48:00 +0000

A great story called Paul Bunyan and the Spambot:

"Paul had always been the world's biggest logger, so naturally he took a real cotton to the word "blogger", once he'd heard it. He had to ask what exactly it meant, though -- fortunately, Babe the Blue Ox had considerable Google-fu, and was able to point him in the right direction almost immediately. And while they were all sitting around the camp jawboning about this new development out in the city world, his old friend and camp cook Sourdough Sam made him a bet that, even though he was the world's most famous logger, he probably couldn't be the world's biggest blogger.

Well, Paul Bunyan was always a sucker for a bet, and anyhow lumber futures were down, all the rivers he knew of had been tamed, there was no room for new Great Lakes, and frankly, life had been boring of late. So with a gigantic laugh that was heard as far away as San Francisco, Caracas, and Berlin, he took Sam up on that bet."

vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:46:00 +0000

If anyone cares, my family is here for a visit and blogging will be light. I plan to restart the deluge upon reaching Cape Town, South Africa the beginning of next month.

a monkey with a good thing going

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:05:00 +0000

A troop of monkeys play, sleep and groom on a rooftop. A tiny baby crawls around the barbed wire running across the middle of the roof. One male had a good thing going. A female would be grooming him and then he would suddenly jump up, get behind her and give some quick pumps before flopping back down. I liked his style.

Later, a local guy told me the monkey wasn’t actually enjoying “physical congress” with the female. He show fucked her (I like this phrase) to show dominance and possession probably in response to me standing there with my notebook. He didn’t have to worry about me. She was out of my league anyway.

a tribute

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:00:00 +0000

For my Aunt Cindy because she will like this quote and be here soon:
“There are more horse’s asses than horses in the world” – Dharma Bums

reviews from Utarkhand

noreply@blogger.com (Lex Pelger) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:27:00 +0000

short reviews of my recent books and movies:

Into the Wild: Combine this with an old copy of Dharma Bums and you have a dangerous combination for a young man with too much testosterone and not enough sense. An excellent movie by Sean Penn with a soundtrack by Eddie Vedder that I listen to over and over. About an idealistic young man who wanders America before finally setting off alone into the Alaskan wilderness before poisonous berries (nearly identical to the safe ones) finally finish him off. The most poignant scene came when, near the end, he weakly writes “Happiness is only real when it is shared.” Penn turned a great book into a great movie.

August Rush: Almost a great movie. I can’t describe why it missed pulling at your heart strings but it certainly did. A kid uses his almost magical musical ability to find his lost parents. Robin Williams comes in as a somewhat creepy man who shelters homeless young musicians in return for the money they make playing on the street. I cried during this movie but I cry during almost every movie so that doesn’t count.

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The last months in the life of Simon Bolivar, The Liberator. Not a typical Marquez book and never quite connected with me although it would be excellent for Bolivar buffs. It still has the beautiful language and turns of phrase that makes him a master. “Fourteen years of war had taught him that there was no greater victory than being alive.” Stripped of his power, “memories were more of a burden than the years.” Bottom line: not the best of Marquez but it’s still Marquez. I’m happy I read it.

We Tibetans by Rinchen Lhamo: Written by the first Tibetan woman to marry a foreigner, Rinchen traveled to London with her husband and then wrote a book about life in Tibet. She matter of factly lays out the details in matter of fact chapters such as House and Furniture, Dress and Religious Life. She writes this nonfiction book in a warm voice filled with interesting observations. I most enjoyed the Tibetan sayings that she sprinkled throughout the book:

Talking about innocent looking people, “when the hornless yak strikes, he pulverizes you”

“Round stones bring the wall down, the round man makes trouble” referring to small squat men who often have “pugnacious temperaments”

“A lazy fellow eats likes a pig and works like a worm”

If giving advice to someone on whom it will be wasted, it’s like “teaching ethics to a wolf.”

My favorite: “A dog dislikes being shown a stick; a man, the truth”

She mentions how Tibetans find Westerners unattractive because “we consider your noses too big, often they stick out like kettle-spouts; your ears too large, like pigs’ ears; your eyes blue like childrens’ marbles; your eye-sockets too deep and eye-brows too prominent, too simian. But I ought not to say such things for I am plain myself (editors note: she quite pretty) and we have a saying, that before laughing at others’ faces your own should be as beautiful as an image; at others’ clothes, your own should be of the very finest fabrics; at others’ horses, your own should be like a lion.” She also made an observation identical to one uttered fifty years later by Gary Snyder as recorded by Jack Keourac in the Dhrama Bums describing a mountain “like Buddah sitting in meditation on a lofty dais.”

Being a feisty girl from the tough people of Kham, her comparisons with the English way of life come out quite definitely on the side of the Tibetans. Since I’m trying to escape most of the mores of the Western world, her words are welcome to me. A wonderful little book that only took me a day to read, it’s great for anyone looking for an unvarnished account of life before the Chinese invasion.

Guerilla Warfare by Che Guerva: Another dangerous book for a boy dedicated to the liberation of a certain country and convinced of his own immortality. I am proud to say that I created a maxim from this book synergized from Napoleon and Che: “If an army travels on its stomach, guerillas live by their ammo.” He made it very clear that almost no attack should be undertaken unless you can recover ammo equal to the amount expended. He stresses Danton’s maxim for revolutionaries: “Audacity, audacity and more audacity.” The guerilla must have the absolute cooperation of the people and a minute knowledge of the terrain. He describes the guerilla soldier as “an acetic” and that “discipline must be one of the bases of action of the guerilla.” This book is no history of the Cuban Revolution but a detailed manual on guerilla operations amongst a sympathetic people. Clearly written with knowledge learned in the field, it’s a must have for the budding revolutionary.

Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guerva: Unfortunately, I borrowed this book so I could not annotate it like I love to do or quote it for my dear readers. A stirring adventure tale of two young doctors making their way across South America on an unreliable La Ponderosa (The Mighty One) motorcycle. Marketed as “Das Kapital meets Easy Rider”, the book showed part of Che’s transformation as he sees the poverty and exploitation across South America. He writes about social issues and his youthful hedonism with equal enthusiasm and with a passion that draws the reader to the open road. I highly recommend it.

Seven Years in Tibet by Henrich Harrer: This guy is crazy. Seriously nuts. He escapes from an Indian prison camp where he was sequestered because of his Austrian origins during WWII even though he only came to study the mountain he planned to climb. After his escape, he hikes into Tibet and spends a long time fooling officials into letting him pass while facing some of the most inhumane terrain on the planet until he finally gets into the Forbidden City, Lhasa. There he gets welcomed with open arms and eventually becomes a mentor to His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso. One of only seven foreigners in this city before the Chinese invasion, he got a unique view of untouched and isolationist Tibet. He painted a beautiful picture of an untouched land with honest people who enjoyed life to the fullest. He had three tips for modern explorers:

Always carry whisky
If you want to explore, always cross the inner line
Hide your own fear