e pur si muove

Don’t you think that [committing] harakiri sounds like karaoke?

Hirata Oriza, Ronin Office Ladies (平田オリザ, 『忠臣蔵・ＯＬ編』)

I watched the Seinendan (青年団) Japanese theater troupe’s double bill [jp] of The Yalta Conference (『ヤルタ会談』) and the Ronin Office Ladies. I was incredibly amused by the irreverent Japanification of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and enjoyed Yalta much more than my limited awareness of the actual historical event would have led me to expect. It’s not everyday that you see Stalin placing a thumbtack on Roosevelt’s seat while he’s not looking.

However, I was much less amused by Ronin, probably because I lacked the cultural awareness of the kabuki play of which it was a satire of. (Chushingura, a.k.a. The Tale of the 47 Ronin) There was a lot of bushido-bashing (primarily about its formlessness and ineffability) that I simply didn’t get during the play, and took a lot of Wikipedia and Google fu to figure out.

The quote above (almost verbatim from the subtitles) really stuck in my mind; it is the mental equivalent of an earworm. Kind of like Ig Nobels, awarded to “research that makes people laugh, then think”. It’s macabre humor, no doubt, but the quality of truth strikes a lot deeper.

The Ig Nobel people, by the way, are webcasting a show tomorrow from Warrington, UK, which goes live at 1 pm CST. (Coast people, go convert the times yourself :p) I’ll try to tune in.

It’s not often a university professor gets Slashdotted. Go Orange and Blue!

I read an article this morning about Theodore Streleski, a graduate student who was told after nineteen years in the PhD program that he was not going to get a doctoral degree from the mathematics department in Stanford.

His response was to bludgeon his advisor to death with a clawhammer, an action he claimed to be “logically and morally correct” and for which he refused parole three times.

And I thought Mike Slackenerny had no basis in physical fact. *shivers*

Maybe what the graduate student community really needs is more Wiley Springer shows. (Transcultural spoiler: if you don’t get it, it’s about this.)

Now back to my regularly scheduled equation crunching.