Things getting less and less surprising

I will be missing in action for a couple of days, as I have tons of school-related work to do till the end of this week. I wanted to wish you a heart-felt happy anniversary, as Romania's National Day is on December 1, but I read these two sad stories and saw this even sadder picture, which made me think you might not care. A friend from home asked if I really miss Romania, and the truth is that I do, notwithstanding. Sometimes I find myself watching the soppy "Romania Simply Surprising" video on this website (you need to scroll down a bit to find it), although it's quite old.
This being said, I wish you a happy first day of winter! :)

Orwellian doublespeak

The Nation put together a dictionary of American political discourse. According to the hegemony theory, it's not through violence and political or economic coercion that people are controlled, but through hegemonic culture and elite values that the media pick up and transfer to the lay citizens who absorb them as "common sense." Here are some words (that might ring a bell) and what they really mean:

alternative energy sources n. New locations to drill for gas and oil

class warfare n. Any attempt to raise the minimum wage

climate change n. The blessed day when the blue states are swallowed by the oceans

compassionate conservatism n. Poignant concern for the very wealthy

democracy n. A product so extensively exported that the domestic supply is depleted

faith n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary

Fox News fict. Faux news

God n. Senior presidential adviser

laziness n. When the poor are not working

leisure time n. When the wealthy are not working

9/11 n. Tragedy used to justify any administrative policy, especially if unrelated

See the entire list from the Nation here.

About snow and rain

I saw The Polar Express last night and it made me crave for snow even more, especially since I hear of people making snowmen up North or back home. The movie is about a doubting boy who learns that in order to believe in the magic of life one mustn't necessarily see. The are things that one can see only with one's heart. Do you believe?
After quite an unusually dry year (except the horrible hurricanes), it rained in ole time Louisiana fashion yesterday (they warn you before visiting the gulf coast to bring un umbrella in your luggage -- well, I hardly needed it this year). Friends who travelled to Mississippi and Alabama some weeks ago told me they saw fields on fire, that's how dry the land was. The warm, thick rain felt good on my face, I just wish it was huge snow flakes instead, like the computer-animated ones that filled my screen last night. Now the temperatures rose to about 80 Fahrenheit degrees, which is about 26 in Celsius, so snow is out of question. I read somewhere that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she handles unexpected rain or lost luggage. One doesn't have problems with rain down here when even November is so summery. Here is a fave video about rain, but if you find it annoying I'll take it out. It's just an experiment.

ELECTRICAL STORM (U2)

Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

My hat off

One can definitely find the spirit of Romania on the internet, in this amazing website that features travel logs, practical information and some of the most beautiful images of Romania. I also stumbled into a photoblog maintaned by a Romanian student and the images on it make me be even more anxious about going home for the holidays. The name of the blog, I love you Romania, says it all.

About death and shopping

I liked the idea of Buy Nothing Day (I heard of it from Monica), because it challenges, even for only one day, consumerism and the "having" mode that I talked about in a previous post. Just because it fits the theme "don't shop 'til you drop" and also my desire of not having an expensive funeral (I actually thought about it when I saw Autumn Spring) I decided to paste the results from a silly 'quiz' where you type your name and they randomly assign you an epitaph. Of course, the test doesn't hold several times. The second time I did it, it said something about not messing with the Mafia :)

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Thank you

Just because it made my day, along with the perfect weather, I will toot my own horn and tell you that my humble blog reached a record of over 40 visitors yesterday. It may not be much for some, but it certainly meant a lot to me. Frankly, I don't know how it happened, especially since I didn't post anything yesterday. Like some of you, this newly discovered routine gets me thinking about blogging and bloggers, about myself, about how amazing it is to be able to reach so many people despite my busy life, about how plain scary it is that one can take any identity online (although those of you who know me also know that this blog is a fraction of myself, not a reinvention). I'm still in the experimental phase (hmm, they say that curiosity killed the cat), and I'm happy I convinced a resistant friend to join the club :)
As Thanksgiving is knocking on the door, I'm not going to talk about food, although it's quite important, nor about missing home, although it's even more important, but about the things I'm grateful for. Therefore, I would like to thank

• you, for reading my page and sharing your opinions and insights
• him, for loving me
• my family, for treating me like a 3-year old, to protect me (I should post about this later), and for visiting me every night, in my dreams (the call of blood, as my mom says)
• my friends, for accepting me as I am, always in the clouds, always on the run
• my professor, for being a good friend and helping me take the right decisions
• Mumu, for making me smile every morning
• coffee & chocolate, for helping me get through the day
• the universe, for conspiring to get all the miracles mentioned above into my life.
  

New Orleans Blues

It's worse than you think, says the latest issue of Time magazine. Only 60,000 out of half a million new-orleanseans returned to their homes and the rest are not sure they ever will. "The city that care forgot is in the throes of an identity crisis, torn between its shady, bead-tossing past and the sanitized Disneyland future some envision." Money and sympathy are drying out, but New Orleans is still far from resurection. Trying to find things of hope rather than despair, PBS is airing as I write the stories of pet rescue in post-hurricane New Orleans. But Time says it all:

"On Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, the neon lights are flashing, the booze is flowing, and the demon demolition men of Hurricane Katrina are ogling a showgirl performing in a thong. The Bourbon House is shucking local oysters again, Daiquiri's is churning out its signature alcoholic slushies, and Mardi Gras masks are once again on sale. But drive north toward the hurricane-ravaged housing subdivisions off Lake Pontchartrain and the masks you see aren't made for Carnival. They are industrial-strength respirators, stark and white, the only things capable of stopping a stench that turns the stomach and dredges up bad memories of a night nearly three months ago. Most disasters come and go in a neat arc of calamity, followed by anger at the slow response, then cleanup. But Katrina cut a historic deadly swath across the South, and rebuilding can't start until the cleanup is done..."

What's in a name?

As you might have noticed, I like alliterations. Except when they are cacophonies (from the Greek kakos - bad, and phone - sound). My name, Raluca Cozma, is such a cacophony. In school, we were taught that there are only three acceptable cacophonies in Romanian: Biserica Catolica (The Catholic Church), Tactica Cavaleriei (the tactics of the cavalry), and Ion Luca Caragiale (one of my favorite satirical Romanian playwrights). This trinity of unavoidable cacophonies endured because of the elements' importance. What's my excuse? - or Coca Cola's for that matter :)
Communism saved me from my name as I grew up, as they required a last name - first name order. I was Cozma Raluca for a long while. There are still people who prefer that order. They think it's more formal or polite. I think it simply minimizes the individual. Anyways, later I started to think that marriage would save me again. In the meantime, I got quite used to my name, although I still don't know its etymology. I got an e-mail from as far as the Czech Republic, from a man whose niece was to be named Raluca and who wanted to know what the name meant. I didn't know what to answer. Do you? I remember that a priest once tried to explain the names of all of the kids in our class - and most of them were easy, as they had Latin roots or were names of saints. When my turn came, he made a pause. Then, from the top of his head - I think, said that Raluca comes from Ra - the Sun, and Luca, the Romanian for Apostle Luke (whose name means "luminous"). I wasn't convinced. Till I solve this mistery, let me share with you one of my favorite alliterations - from Lolita, by Nabokov - try to read it aloud, to see how it flows:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of threee steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

You are welcome to add more, to help me get past my self-centered mood :)

Wind up the future

Via Vivi (note the alliteration :)), good news from MIT. They are currently working on a $100 laptop (yes, you read correctly), for the children from developing countries. No more dumping of old, recycled desktop computers. With a novel, cheap dual-mode display, a wind-up power system that doesn't require electricity anymore, and a sleek and light body, the new gadget sounds like a promising step towards bridging the digital divide.

Happy together

We discussed happiness in our class yesterday about Alex Carey's theory that corporations use propaganda to protect corporate power against democracy and to advance business interests as national and patriotic interests. It goes back to Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and touches upon the capitalist ideology of consumerism and what values institutional structures inculcate with their strong symbols: Americans identify with what they have rather than with what they are. Erich Fromm, in his To Have or to Be, opposes materialism, or the having mode, with engagement in meaningful, creative activities and love, which is the being mode. It's not only money that makes us happy.
The Louisiana Survey (conducted before the hurricane tragedy) found that the happiest people are not in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, or Shreveport. They are in Acadiana: the cajuns who have a strong sense of community and who do everything together. Laissez les bonnes temps rouler is their motto. Their music, beside its funny French accent, is amazing through its joyfulness (they play it often on the New Orleans jazz radio station). I was a bit upset some time ago to read a Reuters piece about Romanians being one of the unhappiest nations in the world. Nigeria and Mexico, on the other hand, despite their poverty, ranked highest in the level of happiness. When I visited Mexico, I was struck by how much they valued family, offsprings, and connectedness. They were always smiling in their small and modest houses and were walking and eating out in groups. My previous post on Buthan's pursuit of happiness as a national objective is another example that financial prosperity and material possession are not everyhting.
So what mode do you exist in? The "having" or the "being" mode?

Bittersweet

I watched Babí léto last night, a Czech comedy that is translated "Autumn Spring" in English, but whose title actually means "Indian Summer." It's that season when nature seem to come back to life right after autumn showed its teeth with cold wind and rain and when the sun has some more fun for the last time before the deadly winter sets in. It's the story of a 75-year old man from Prague, Fanda, who feels younger by playing practical jokes on people with his friend, and whose wife, despite her constant nagging about him spending the savings for their funeral and death announcements (she already knows how her perfect burrial should be like and is willing to go to a retirement home to let her irresponsible son bring his third wife, as she thinks she doesn't have much left to live for anyway), is very much in love with her childish husband. When Fanda, trying to open her eyes, goes too far with his jokes and pretends to be dead, Emilie files for divorce. She ends up defending her husband in court and in the end teaches her ungrateful son a lesson - "You have your job, you have your youth. You have time." - and mends her uptight way but adopting her husband's playful lifestyle. A very heartwarming movie, it made me shed some tears, especially because it reminded me of my late grandparents, who were very much like the two old heroes of the story, always teasing each other, quarelling at times, but not able to live without each other (they died one right after the other). Moreover, the action takes place in a setting that resembles so much a Romanian town, so it strikes a special cord. I wonder how the American audience felt about it.

Blogs - heroes of upcoming book

The Manship School hosted the Breaux Symposium this past weekend and gathered mass comm and political science scholars and also journalists to talk about how new technologies affect foreign affairs coverage and news media in general. Each paper presented will turn into a chapter of a book.
The conference allotted significant time to the discussion of blogs (the CNN effect had been replaced by the Nokia effect -- sounds visionary, right?) and the foreigners' perception of Americans (and how cultural media -- Hollywood movies and American television programs and video games -- affect the world's attitudes and opinions of the United States, its people, leaders, policies, and way of life).

From Kaye Trammel and David Perlmutter's synopsis of "The New 'Foreign' Foreign Correspondents: Personal Publishing as Public Affairs" :

"Blogs are Internet sites on which anyone--from Harvard professors to 13-year-olds--can rant, rave, debate, flame, pontificate, and gush about issues of the day, including foreign affairs. Domestically, a number of these blogs have grown tremendously in readership, e.g., Wonkette, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit. The webmaster of the latter recently noticed that hundreds of thousands of people check his site daily for information about domestic and international affairs, and that his "correspondents" from all over the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan, send him reports and pictures and thus "cover" the news. Blogs like these have gained power as well by their attacks on mainstream media; many in mainstream media consider blogs to be a threat to the basic paradigm of journalism as an industry.

For the first time in history, people who are part of a foreign affairs story--but not in the capacity of enemy warlord, propaganda minister, or other kinds of powerful elite--are able to speak directly to the American people and possibly influence foreign affairs. What is happening and what could happen when Ahmed the fisherman has his own public affairs Web site? Some foreign blogs, like that by Salam Pax the Iraqi, have become famous. Beyond individuals, groups--including those in opposition to America such as al Qaeda--have created their own Web sites to bypass the editing (and presumably ethical constraints) of mainstream American media. (Their pictures are out there in the news stream; they often appear in Arab media, for example, as uncredited stills or videos.) Independent foreign bloggers, writing in English with some expectation of an American audience, are having an increasing influence on the coverage, creating, shaping, and operating of foreign affairs; they are both part of the story and tellers of the story of news from abroad."

Here is a related story on the rise of the bloggers. Some guidelines for bloggers and perspectives on business blogging and blogging ethics are also worth reading about.

"The earth is bleeding on us..."

Every war is different. Every war is the same. I saw Jarhead this Friday, but I had a full day yesterday (recording the Breaux Symposium -- I will focus on it in the next posts) and could not deliver my fresh impressions. The movie, strongly and refreshingly anti-war, tells the story of some 20 year old Marine snipers (called jarheads because of their high and tight haircuts and because of their empty heads ready to be filled with hate for an invisible enemy, after procedure brainwashing) who got lost in the first Gulf War on their way to college. Excruciating heat, infinite sand dunes, boredom, frustration, masturbation, misplaced aggression and no "satisfaction" of firing the riffle at least once. ''Are we ever gonna get to kill anyone?" asked a soldier, tired of so much practice. The most intense part comes in the end, when the trained fighters get to stumble in the dark, poisonous oil soaking into their skins and eyes, fried bodies hanging around, killed by someone else, a horse staggering out of the night into the Marines' firelight, lost like everyone else. "The earth is bleeding on us" says one of the platoons. The movie has some good humor and is, naturally, very upsetting at times. Jamie Foxx, Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard play admirably under Sam Mendes's direction.

Excitement

I've just found out that we will celebrate the New Year's Eve at Lacu Rosu (or the Red Lake), not far from my home town, and although I have a long paper on political economy due tonight I could't help but go online and look for some pictures of the familiar but dearly missed place. You might argue that I have plenty of lakes here in swampy Louisiana, but believe me it's not even nearly the same. The Bicaz Gorges are minutes away and on the way there you can see not far the Ceahlau massive - or Kogaion, the sacred mountain of the dacians, where I learned how to climb and fell in love with trekking. Oh, and the air there... it's so fresh and crisp. You feel like a giant when you get it in your lungs. Before I get my personal pictures, enjoy these photographs taken probably very long time ago, considering the car models...

Nerd tips

The pressure of publishing scholar work does not affect only professors, as I discussed in a previous post, but also graduate students. While having your name in a scholar journal is quite rewarding in itself, being a published author brings many other benefits later in your academic career. Here is a compilation of tips (many of them of common sense) that I gathered this summer at the two panels on publishing at the AEJMC convention and also in our special-topic seminar today:

• don't let the 15-17% acceptance rate scare you -- analyze closely the content and style of the journal to see if your manuscript fits (I counted 56 scholarly communication journals in the LSU library alone -- so the pool is quite large)
  
• the journal that appears most often in your references might be a good target for your study
• state the purpose of your study directly and clearly
• have a good descriptive title
  
• stick to the point, quote only the literature that is directly relevant to your research, don't exceed the page limit
• have respect for what you are doing - have solid research, clear presentation and organization and deliver what you promised you would (the clear research questions should have clear findings)
  
• ask for a second opinion from a friend/colleague before submission
• be theoretically focused but have a larger point to make outside your little set of data -- what it means in the larger picture, why it is important, how it contributes to the field. Some journal editors said they favor work that explains how real people in the real world can make use of the findings
• refrain from overclaims; be aware of your study's limitations
  
• be patient (it takes up to 3 months to get an answer back from the editor and, if you get accepted, it can take one more year to see your work hit the print)
• some good luck doesn't hurt anyone :)
  

So that you know I'm not the greatest dork, here are my results from a nerd quiz:

Cute Animal Quiz

Now I understand why I want a puppy so bad! Thank you, Riri, for the link.

You Are A: Puppy!

Beloved by all, puppies are energetic, playful, and loving. Your friendly nature is part of what makes you a puppy. Known for their loyalty, puppies make great pets for young and old alike. And an innocent puppy face can melt anyone's heart!

You were almost a: Pony or a Monkey
You are least like a: Turtle or a GroundhogWhat Cute Animal Are You?

The relativity of success

Some of us are very self-conscious when it comes to work and projects and can't relax until that fire in our bellies is fruitfully consumed. We live in a very competitive society and, if you don't have your daddy's bank account or some sort of blind luck, only your will and ambition can help you succeed. Here's what the latest issue of TIME magazine says about the "people who want more" and the importance of having goals and the energy to achieve them. According to the article, anthropologists say that "primate-wide, males are more directly competitive than females" and I wonder if that is so, considering that I'm surrounded by so many high-aiming, intelligent, and workaholic women. Today I also stumbled into quite an amazing example of feminine strong will that shows that even the most unfortunate of us can succeed.
Some might argue that there's something scary about wanting to succeed at all cost. The secret is in finding your balance and not letting yourself transformed into a robot. A professional life might isolate you from friends and family, and, as a woman, you might end up alone. A friend of mine, single mother, says she turned all her potential partners away with her intelligence. And she's a great woman. Isn't that a pity?

Scholar ethics - nobody is perfect

An article from the Journal of Mass Communication Quarterly, Autumn 2004, signed by Renita Coleman (who happens to be my first mentor) and Lee Wilkins, shows that journalists scored fourth highest in moral development among professions, ranking behind seminarians/philosophers, medical students, and physicians but better than many other. My assumption from here (although I know it's always wrong to assume) is that scholar journalists should have even stronger ethics, especially because they even get to teach about it. That is why I was surprised (actually appalled) to discover in my research endeavors that many such authors do a lousy/sloppy/irresponsible job in their footnotes and references from books and journal articles. I am helping one of my dearest professors write a history book on foreign correspondence and he would have perpetuated a lot of mistakes if he had been content to merely quote other guys. We went to the sources they mentioned and found that the material was interpreted skewdly or did not exist at all. Research is supposed to be an incremental work -- you build upon other people's work. But if you trust them too much you get yourself a Babel Tower. We've been e-mailing to these people telling them they were wrong. Some thanked for bringing the fact to their attention and even promised a correction. I guess one could even make a career as a vigilante -- pointing out to people when they invent history. My professor says that this is somewhat similar to what communism produced in other countries (BTW, I'm really curious how the Romanian history textbooks look like now). Tenure puts pressure on people who have to publish more, then live up to their fame, and thus their accelerated work gets sloppier.

Nostalgia

Back home I used to collect chestnuts this time of year -- the glossier and bigger the better. I would put them in my pocket and carry them around, warming them up in my fist. I never see any chestnuts round here, although oak trees rule the land -- and I prefer to leave their nuts for the squirrels. Nevertheless, I found another thing in Louisiana: as I walk through at least three parking lots on a daily basis, it is seldom that I don't find a coin in my way. Pennies, nickels, dimes, and even quarters -- I pick them up (I have a full jar already and I doubt I'll ever use the money), to the surprise of the rushing people. Call me crazy, but I even created my silly superstition, and if I don't find a coin one day I feel something is wrong. Then again, I'm sure I find them precisely because nobody else bothers to pick them up -- so I guess something must be wrong with me. You may argue these are the effects of too much graduate school :) Or, to bring an ideological spin to it: it's the way an individual who grew up in an ex-communist country (I loved how the magazines for kids - Cutezatorii, Luminita, Somii Patriei, Luceafarul Copiilor - taught us how to create all sort of little animals with chestnuts) adapts to a capitalist environment :)

How expensive is happiness?

A Romanian saying goes something like "money doesn't bring happiness, but it maintains it." American economists, on the other hand, found out just the right amount of money necessary to buy your happiness when life isn't as you would like it to be, but, in "the land of the thunder dragon" - Bhutan - a landlocked principality in the Himalayas northeast of India, happiness weights heavier than money. Here is an editorial I found in the International Herald Tribune, October 11:

Net National Happiness

"Does the United States strike you as a happy country? July 1776, when Thomas Jefferson claimed the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right, might have been the last time that happiness was officially proposed as a national objective. But in Bhutan the question of national happiness is still up for discussion, thanks to a monarch who insisted, nearly a generation ago, that gross national happiness is more important than gross national product.

An economic cynic may argue that a country with a gross national product as small as Bhutan's can well afford to worry about its gross national happiness and that the best way to increase GNH is by increasing GNP. But that is essentially an untested assertion, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it isn't necessarily true. Our sense of happiness is created by many things that are not easily measured in purely economic terms, including a sense of community and purpose, the amount and content of our leisure and even our sense of the environmental and ecological stability of the world around us. (See my post on lifestyle and longevity -- it all ties back to happiness)

To talk about gross national happiness may sound purely pie in the sky, partly because we have been taught to believe that happiness is essentially a personal emotion, not an attribute of a community or a country. But thinking of happiness as a quotient of cultural and environmental factors might help us understand the growing disconnect between America's prosperity and Americans' sense of well-being.

Some sociologists worry that the effort to quantify happiness may actually impair the pursuit of happiness. But there's another way to consider it. The world looks the way it does as if it is being devoured by some grievous species partly because of narrow economic assumptions that govern the behavior of corporations and nations. Those assumptions usually exclude, for instance, the costs of environmental, social or cultural damage. A clearer understanding of what makes humans happy not merely more eager consumers or more productive workers might help begin to reshape those assumptions in a way that has a measurable and meliorating outcome on the lives we lead and the world we live in."