Happy Birthday!

I have been so preoccupied with schoolwork that my self-congratulatory birthday entry is long overdue. On the day before my birthday, I got a very pretty postcard from Jacob. Jacob has been living in Japan for three years now. It is very thoughtful of him to remember my birthday and post me a letter way in advance. Jacob is one of the people who inspired me to start this blog. If you want to learn about his experience in Japan, please visit his blog at http://jlevine.oiiiio.net/blog/.

As my birthday gift, I was taken out to a nice Brazilian BBQ place for dinner. The meat was grilled so tender and juicy that I had lamb chops dancing around in front of me the next day.

Naeem’s son, Faiz Saadat Ahmed, was born on February 19th. Faiz Saadat Ahmed means most highly honored bleesing, grace. It is a funny coincidence--Faiz is 1 day younger than me, plus many years…

Foresight

Four days after the accidental shooting of his hunting partner on a quail hunting trip, Dick Cheney, our Vice President, finally made his first appearance on an interview with the Fox News yesterday afternoon, after much media questioning on why he did not promptly make the accident public until a small local newspaper in Texas leaked out the accident one day later.

During the interview, Mr. Cheney regretted the occurrence of the accident; however, he insisted that the news release was handled properly--given the situation then, he would have acted the same.

Two nights before Mr. Cheney’s interview, on Comedy Central’s Daily Show, Rob Corddry made a report on the quail accident. I quote: “Everyone believed at the time there were quails in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.”

No doubt, Rob Corddry and Jon Stewart are smart men, but I have to say I am amazed by their uncanny power of divination.

To be fair, we should never, ever, blame others based on pure hindsight. Our administration just has been unlucky: even though they had always acted promptly and appropriately given the situation then, reality consistently did not turn out the way they thought would have turned out, and information revealed were invariably at odds with the information available to them then.

That said, we should nonetheless try to improve the feng shui at the White House. Maybe the White House should hire the Daily Show crew for intelligence and divination?

Grizzly Man

I watched a documentary called Grizzly Man last weekend. It is about a man, named Timothy Treadwell, who went off to Alaska to live with grizzly bears for 13 summers and was in the end eaten by a bear. His story is so fascinating that I still think about him today.

Half the documentary is videos recorded by Timothy himself. He talked about how he felt towards the bears, and there was quite a bit of introspection in front of the camera. The other half is interviews with people who were familiar with his life so we can connect the dots. Before I saw the movie, I thought he would be an unfortunate version of the Crocodile Hunter, but he was really different. The Crocodile Hunter tells the audience how beautiful animals are, from a good understanding of biological science and awe of nature. Timothy, however, did not leave us any information on the habitat of grizzly bears, and alternated between telling us how great he was among grave danger and how much he loved the bears and foxes. He seemed to have anthropomorphized and deified the bears, and under the unrealistic conviction that he was their protector, he deified himself.

It is both fascinating and sad to watch Timothy attach human characters to the bears. He tried to pet a bear; he related the courtship of bears to his personal experience; he cried over bears eating their young when there was a drought… He lost sight that grizzly’s are not domesticated animals, that their behaviors are driven strongly by basic instinct.

The movie hinted here and there that Timothy was troubled. He was having trouble ridding himself of alcoholism, until he found his noble cause of bear protection. Living with grizzly bear is extreme, but it is fundamentally not so different from people who blindly ignore reality and devote to certain cause or religion after their recovery from drugs or alcohol. Unfortunately, Timothy happened to have come upon this crazy idea and lost his life for it. He somehow believed the bears were going extinct and the state park rangers were the bears’ enemy. He ran around calling himself their sole protector, when in reality, the bear population there was at a healthy biological level.

I would not just dismiss Timothy as a troubled person. Timothy had such a sweet mannerism and such tainted view of the world that his story is mesmerizing. He really reminded me of this 60-Minute interview with Michael Jackson when Michael was most recently accused of child molestation. Michael’s answers were so off that he is the antithesis of street smartness. Both are ostracized. I do hope reality did not hit Timothy in the last moment of his life. That would be too cruel.