Indiana Jones and the Movie Mistakes of Doom
AFP, 29 May 2008

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080528/ten-entertainment-film-peru-archaeology-1dc2b55.html


LIMA (AFP) - - Most of ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ takes place in Peru, but many Peruvians are suffering heartburn after seeing the movie’s many clumsy -- and often insulting -- mistakes about their country.

Viewers here cringed when the world’s most famous fictional archaeologist arrives in Peru and announces that he learned to speak Quechua, the language of indigenous people across the Andes, when he was captured by Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Villa and his revolutionaries raided the US town of Columbus, New Mexico in 1916 -- and in an episode of the 1990s TV show, ‘The Young Indiana Jones,’ the young Jones is kidnapped.

But Villa’s men spoke Spanish, not Quechua, which is spoken by some 10 million people in places like Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

‘This is outrageous,’ said Hugo Neyra, who heads Peru’s National Library.

Neyra and others are also angry at seeing Maya warriors from Central America speaking Quechua in the Peruvian jungle, where hundreds of native languages, but not Quechua, are spoken.

The movie also shows quicksand, man-eating ants and enormous Hawaiian waterfalls, all of which do not exist in the Peruvian Amazonia.

In what is perhaps the biggest insult, director Steven Spielberg and writer George Lucas place the Maya pyramid of Chichen Itza, located in Mexico, in the Peruvian jungle.

Another mistake: the location of the Nazca lines -- which give clues to Jones in the movie -- created by the Nazca culture sometime between 200 BC and 700 AD.

Visible only from aircraft, the lines representing stylized animals are etched on a patch of coastal desert some 370 kilometers (230 miles) south of Lima -- and not next to the Incan capital of Cuzco, smack in the southern Peruvian Andes.

The Maya civilization thrived in southern Mexico and northern Central America between 250 and 900, while the Quechua-speaking Incas thrived across the Andes from 1200 to the 1533.

Historian Manuel Burga, the former head of the University of San Marcos, said that Spielberg and Lucas were given bad advice.

‘Even if it is fiction there are many incorrect facts,’ Burga said. ‘This is going to be damaging to many people who do not know our country, because it shows a Peruvian landscape that is not real.

‘It is not possible to mistake the Amazon region with the Yucatan jungle in Mexico.’

Neyra said that many informed Americans and Europeans will realize that it is ‘an aberration’ to mix Maya and Inca archaeology. ‘They know that Machu Picchu is in Cuzco, and that Chichen Itza is in Mexico,’ he said.

Historian Teodoro Hampe is scathing in his view of they way Americans view the geography of Latin America: ‘For them Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia or Peru are all the same.’

The New Paper, Thursday, 15 July 2005, Net Buzz

People Really Said These in US Courts
Spotted by CT Lim

Q: Were you present when your picture was taken?

Q: How far apart were the vehicles at the time of the collision?
Q: You were there until the time you left, is that true?

Q: She had three children? A: Yes.
Q: How many were boys? A: None.
Q: Were there any girls?

Q: You say the stairs went down to the basement? A: Yes.
Q: These stairs, did they go up too?
(*I thought this makes some sense . . . after all there are flight of stairs that cover many floors.)

Q: Mr Slattery, you went on a rather elaborate honeymoon, didn't you? A: I went to Europe, sir.
Q: And you took your new wife?
Q: How was your first marriage terminated? A: By death.
Q: And by whose death was it terminated?

Q: Was it you or your younger brother who was killed in the war?

Q: Can you describe the individual? A: He was about medium height and had a beard.
Q: Was this a male, or a female?

Q: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
A: No, this is how I dress for work.

From an email:

A reward of $1,000 was offered for information leading to the capture and conviction of a man robbing taxi drivers. The man turned himself in and demanded the reward as a result. He received a 20 year sentence for aggravated robbery instead.

A couple robbing a store caught on camera could not be identified until the police reviewed the security tape. The woman filled out an entry form for a free trip prior to robbing the store.

A lawyer defending a man accused of burglary tried this creative defense: ‘My client merely inserted his arm into the window and removed a few trifling articles. His arm is not himself, and I fail to see how you can punish the whole individual for an offense committed by his limb.’ ‘Well put,’ the judge replied. ‘Using your logic, I sentence the defendant’s arm to one year’s imprisonment. He can accompany it or not, as he chooses.’ The defendant smiled. With his lawyer’s assistance he detached his artificial limb, laid it on the bench, and walked out.

A man was arrested and charged with the robbery of vending machines. The man posted bail, entirely in quarters.

A teenager in Belmont, New Hampshire robbed the local convenience store. Getting away with a pocket full of change, the boy walked home. He did not realize, however, that he had holes in both of his pockets. A trail of quarters and dimes led police directly to his house.

A guy wearing pantyhose on his face tried to rob a store in a mall. When security came, he quickly grabbed a shopping bag and pretended to be shopping, forgetting that he was still wearing the pantyhose. He was captured and his loot was returned to the store.

A man robbed a convenience store and ran out with a bag full of cash. He got down the street and realized he had left his car keys on the counter. When he returned to the store, he was promptly arrested.

Archduke Karl Ludwig (1833-1896), brother of the Austrian emperor, was a man of such piety that on a trip to the Holy Land, he insisted on drinking from the River Jordan, despite warnings that it would make him fatally ill. He died within a few weeks.

The Belgium news agency Belga reported in November that a man suspected of robbing a jewellery store in Liege said he couldn’t have done it because he was busy breaking into a school at the same time. Police then arrested him for breaking into the school

A man went in to rob a bank. He demanded the clerk to give him all the money. They told him to go sit out in his car and they would bring him the bags of money. He agreed and went out to his car. In the meantime, the people in the bank called the police. When they got there the man was still sitting in his car waiting for the money and they arrested him.

R.C. Gaitlan, 21, walked up to two patrol officers who were showing their squad car computer felon-location equipment to children in a Detroit neighborhood. When he asked how the system worked, the officer asked him for identification. Gaitlan gave them his driver’s license, they entered it into the computer, and moments later they arrested Gaitlan because information on the screen showed Gaitlan was wanted for a two-year-old armed robbery in St. Louis, Missouri.

Dennis Newton was on trial for the armed robbery of a convenience store in district court when he fired his lawyer. Assistant district attorney Larry Jones said Newton, 47, was doing a fair job of defending himself until the store manager testified that Newton was the robber. Newton jumped up, accused the woman of lying and then said, ‘I should have blown your head off.’ The defendant paused, then quickly added, ‘If I’d been the one that was there.’ The jury took 20 minutes to convict Newton and recommended a 30-year sentence.

A Texan convicted of robbery worked out a deal to pay $9600 in damages rather than serve a two-year prison sentence. For payment, he gave the court a forged check. He got his prison term back, plus eight more years.

From an email:

Instructions for Life


1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three R’s: (a) Respect for self; (b) Respect for others and (c) Responsibility for all your actions.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

7. When you realise you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone everyday.

9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honourable life. When you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never seen before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Pangrams

From Fun with Words
http://rinkworks.com/words/pangrams.shtml


A pangram is a sentence that contains all letters of the alphabet. Less frequently, such sentences are called holalphabetic sentences. Interesting pangrams are generally short ones; constructing a sentence that includes the fewest repeat letters possible is a challenging task. However, pangrams that are slightly longer yet enlightening, humorous, or eccentric are noteworthy in their own right.

By far the most well-known pangram is, ‘The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.’ Frequently this is the sentence used to test out new typewriters, presumably because it includes every letter of the alphabet. Curiously, this sentence is often misquoted by changing ‘jumps’ to ‘jumped.’ The past tense version, lacking an ‘s,’ is not a pangram. Often, too, it is misquoted as ‘the lazy dog’ rather than ‘a lazy dog.’ This error is not as grievous; the sentence remains a pangram, just a slightly longer one.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there are no particularly clever 26 letter pangrams in English. Constructing a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet once and no more -- essentially an anagram of the alphabet -- seems to require the use of acronyms, initials, and strange punctuation. The most interesting I’ve seen is, ‘Glum Schwartzkopf vex’d by NJ IQ.’

Also note the section on autograms, as that contains some autograms (sentences that self-document their letter content) that are also pangrams.

A number of pangrams are given below, listed from longest to shortest.


Examples
Forsaking monastic tradition, twelve jovial friars gave up their vocation for a questionable existence on the flying trapeze. (106 letters)

No kidding -- Lorenzo called off his trip to visit Mexico City just because they told him the conquistadores were extinct. (99 letters)

Jelly-like above the high wire, six quaking pachyderms kept the climax of the extravaganza in a dazzling state of flux. (96 letters)

Ebenezer unexpectedly bagged two tranquil aardvarks with his jiffy vacuum cleaner. (71 letters)

Six javelins thrown by the quick savages whizzed forty paces beyond the mark. (64 letters)

The explorer was frozen in his big kayak just after making queer discoveries. (64 letters)

The July sun caused a fragment of black pine wax to ooze on the velvet quilt. (61 letters)

The public was amazed to view the quickness and dexterity of the juggler. (60 letters)

While Suez sailors wax parquet decks, Afghan Jews vomit jauntily abaft. (59 letters)

We quickly seized the black axle and just saved it from going past him. (57 letters)

Six big juicy steaks sizzled in a pan as five workmen left the quarry. (56 letters)

While making deep excavations we found some quaint bronze jewellery. (56 letters)

Jaded zombies acted quaintly but kept driving their oxen forward. (55 letters)

A mad boxer shot a quick, gloved jab to the jaw of his dizzy opponent. (54 letters)

The job requires extra pluck and zeal from every young wage earner. (54 letters)

A quart jar of oil mixed with zinc oxide makes a very bright paint. (53 letters)

Whenever the black fox jumped the squirrel gazed suspiciously. (53 letters)

We promptly judged antique ivory buckles for the next prize. (50 letters)

How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts! (49 letters)

Crazy Fredericka bought many very exquisite opal jewels. (48 letters)

Sixty zippers were quickly picked from the woven jute bag. (48 letters)

Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes. (40 letters)

Heavy boxes perform quick waltzes and jigs. (36 letters)

Jinxed wizards pluck ivy from the big quilt. (36 letters)

Big Fuji waves pitch enzymed kex liquor. (33 letters)

The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. (33 letters)

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (32 letters)

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31 letters)

The five boxing wizards jump quickly. (31 letters)

How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. (30 letters)

Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim. (29 letters)

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. (29 letters)

Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud. (28 letters)

Blowzy night-frumps vex’d Jack Q. (26 letters)

Glum Schwartzkopf vex’d by NJ IQ. (26 letters)

Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?
By Noam Cohen

The New York Times: Technology, 4 February 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/technology/04link.html?ex=1218517200&en=f4c25b765e9aade7&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=TE-D-I-NYT-MOD-BIG-M033-ROS-0108-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click&mkt=TE-D-I-NYT-MOD-BIG-M033-ROS-0108-HDR

An email from Dr Wong Yin Onn which says that money is not always the route to happiness – it does bring about short-term satisfaction but in the long run, it causes unhappiness especially where money takes precedence and other aspects of life are compromised.

Which reminds me of what one of my lecturers said, ‘There is life after the exams.’ Similarly, there is life beyond money – that is, beyond the cash that maintains your basic survival!

===================================================


Money and Happiness under the Microscope


University of Southern California professor Richard Easterlin, the father of research on well-being, began studying happiness in the late 1960s, when happiness wasn’t cool.

Early in his career, Easterlin examined data on economic growth and reported happiness in a range of countries, and discovered that big jumps in growth in nations such as the United States and Japan were accompanied by declines, or only marginal increases, in reported happiness. This became known as the ‘Easterlin Paradox.’


A Paradox Revisited

Recently, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, two economists at the University of Pennsylvania, re-examined the data, and suggest that economic growth does indeed correlate with happiness. They found that people in countries with higher incomes report higher life satisfaction.

National economic growth and happiness is one thing, personal wealth and happiness is something else entirely.


1. Money buys moments of pleasure -- but they don’t last long.

The problem is the more we have, the more we want. In a separate study, Easterlin analyzed the results of a survey that asked adults about their material aspirations and achievements. People were presented with a list of items -- a lot of money, a home, a swimming pool, a vacation home, cars, travel abroad, etc. -- and asked which things fit their definition of ‘the good life.’ Then, researchers asked them to go down the list and name all the things they had. The study was conducted twice -- once in 1978 and again in 1994.

Because the two surveys were conducted 16 years apart, Easterlin was able to analyze whether people’s aspirations shift as they age and their circumstances change. He found that as consumers moved through each stage of the life cycle -- early, midlife, and older years -- they generally acquired more of the goods on the list. But as they accumulated more, their aspirations for material goods also rose in proportion to the amount of things they owned.

In other words, the study offered scientific proof of the old saying ‘the more you have the more you want.’ Researchers call it the ‘hedonic treadmill.’ It means -- we quickly adapt to the improvement in our circumstances, and then seek more.


2. We constantly want more because we’re bad at predicting what will make us happy.

[*My comment: this is the kiasu syndrome…]

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in this area. A fundamental rule of economics says that people are motivated by self-interest: They know what they want, can predict the most desirable outcome, and choose the best course of action to maximize their welfare. But Kahneman and a group of behavioral economists have found that’s not always true: We don’t always act rationally.

One reason is the way our brains recall experience. Kahneman had people record how they were feeling about an event in real time, and then interviewed them after the fact. He discovered their accounts didn’t match. Our brains pay attention to the peak and the end of an experience, and tend to forget what happens in between.

If we only remember the peak and end of an experience, we can make poor decisions. For instance, a salesperson will remember the rush of closing a big deal, but might not remember what it cost in time away from family, lost sleep, high stress, or poor health -- so he’ll repeat the behaviour. A shopper will remember the thrill of buying a Louis Vuitton suitcase, but she might not remember how long or hard she had to work to pay for it (or worse, pay for the bag and the finance charges on a credit card) -- and dig herself ever-deeper in the hole. If we aren’t consciously in touch with what we really value, we can make career and money decisions that make us unhappy.


3. Money might buy interesting experiences, but researchers say cheap thrills create happiness.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and author of ‘The How of Happiness’ examines research suggesting that 40 percent of our happiness is inherited, and 10 to 15 percent is based on life circumstances like money, health, where you live, whether you’re married or have kids, and so on.

But the rest of well-being -- a good 45 to 50 percent -- comes from your choices: Should I work extra hours for more money, or spend that time with my friends? Should I watch television, or go running or biking? Should I go to the mall, or spend time volunteering? Should I browse through the catalogs in my mailbox, or spend that half-hour meditating?

Researchers have found it’s the latter choice in each pair that promotes happiness. Everyday decisions have a huge impact on your happiness, and many of those happiness-inducing choices -- socializing, volunteering, exercising, meditating -- don’t have to cost anything at all.

[*My comment: and then it becomes a vicious cycle, because when that thrill runs out, you need more.]


4. People chase money because they think it’s something else.

We tend to place a lot of symbolic meaning on money. We think money is security, power, freedom, happiness, or love. Money can certainly buy us a measure of freedom or security, but money itself is none of those things.

If we think money is security, we’ll never amass enough to feel secure.

If we think it’s freedom, we’ll never earn enough to be free.

Instead of consciously setting and pursuing goals to create a life in which we feel free or secure, we shortcut to money as a proxy.

Tim Kasser, associate psychology professor at Knox College, and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester have found that people who make the pursuit of money a significant goal score lower for mental health. They suffer a greater risk of depression; have more anxiety and lower self-esteem; experience more physical, behavioral, and relationship problems; and score lower on indicators testing for self-actualization and vitality (or feeling alive and vigorous). The findings were similar across different countries, income levels, and age groups.

Once we remove the emotional baggage, we can acknowledge that money is just one component to achieve our goals instead of an all-encompassing solution. If freedom is a value, we have to ask which people, qualities, and experiences have made us feel most free in the past: Where do I need to live to be around those people? What should I do for my work, and how should I spend my leisure time? How much money do I need to help me create a life with those qualities and experiences? Being as specific as possible about how to manifest these qualities in our lives will keep us from running on the hedonic treadmill.


5 Distinguish temporary from genuine Happiness

Finally, there’s the issue of what people mean when they tell a pollster they’re ‘happy.’

Researchers had subjects go into a phone booth to make a call. The researchers put a quarter in the coin return of the telephone; some people find it, others don’t. Immediately afterward, the researchers asked them to rate their overall satisfaction -- and it’s the people who found the quarter who rate life the best.

The study underscores the importance of separating temporary euphoria from genuine happiness.

And long-term flourishing requires discipline, persistence, hard work, faith, and, most important, pursuing goals that are close to your heart and based on your personal gifts.

This isn’t the smiley-face, instant-gratification kind of ‘happiness’ that popular culture promotes.

Some fun stuff from my lecturer who teaches the tourism module:


What Gets You Through a Stressful Day / Week / Semester?
Views from your Friendly Geography Lecturers
Originally compiled for ‘Geog Soc’ in 2005, updated in April 2008

[Dr Shirlena Huang]
Prayer, the sympathetic ears of friends, and my kids.

[Dr David Higgitt]
Knowing that we live in a tropical paradise. Well, at least it’s a tropical paradise compared to a damp winter in northern Britain.

[Dr Victor Savage]
By relaxing with music, appreciating art and enjoying travel.

[Dr Wang Yi-Chen]
The 3Cs: coffee, cake, and cartoon (especially Japanese animation)

[Dr Henry Yeung]
As usual, a good afternoon nap is all I need to get through a tough week!

[Dr Brenda Yeoh]
Reflect on past times when the going was good, and think of the wide spaces that stretch beyond today.

[Dr Pow C P]
(1) Rummaging through my grad school photos and remembering the bygone carefree days
(2) Stuffing myself silly with honey-glazed doughnuts from Clementi Interchange (at least 3 different stores to choose from); and last resort
(3) Going to Dr Harvey Neo’s room and pulling out his IKEA sofabed and… zzzzzz.

[Dr Lu Xi Xi]
Having short-term and long-term plans written down; then forget them till the particular day/date!

[Dr Harvey Neo]
Hmmm, good question though I never seriously though about how I relax, I guess my answer would be ‘Snack, Shower and Sleep’ in that order.

[Dr Tim Bunnell]
I am a self-confessed former Red-Bull addict. I would not have finished my PhD without the stuff. I’m still know to need a can now and then during semester; I am also still (sadly) partial to the ultimate evil black liquid (Coca Cola). But mostly I now use high-caffeine drinks for clubbing rather than work. Sunday morning matches are my main stress release – I take it out on the ball, and sometimes, opponents.

[Dr Carl Grundy-Warr]
(1) Music, anything by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (cos they don’t pretend to be young or nice);
(2) Wonderful family and friends (though not always relaxing!);
(3) Red wine or dark beer in the evenings (but not every night!) and definitely a Kopi-O (every morning!);
(4) Watching Newcastle United when they play well. When they play badly this is a cause of intense stress!;
(5) Doing work I enjoy is actually anti-stressful (as opposed to the work I don’t enjoy, which has the opposing effect, and I dare not be too specific about this!!!)

[Dr Matthias Roth]
Work hard, play hard. The latter, unfortunately, often comes up too short.

[Dr Lily Kong]
With the help from friends whom one can relax with, laugh with, eat with, play with…

[Dr Lim Han She]
Meeting Porsches on the road and my Russian cameras get me through the week.

[Dr TC Chang]
Any form of physical exercise energises me. Swimming long laps, Saturday morning walks with my dog, yoga, hitting the gym, and then a backbreaking massage. These activities take my mind off teaching, writing and other concerns, and give me a fresh perspective when I do return to work.

A little section from my textbook on Southeast Asian history contains a brief introduction as to how Buddhism – one of the three ‘world’ religions, the others being Islam and Christianity – made its way to this part of the world, and how each school of Buddhism – Mahayana and Theravada – found popularity in the various regions (Mahayana: Vietnam; Theravada: Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar). You can also find out about the social organisation of the sangha in relation to the societies that they live in.





Quoted from Norman G. Owen (ed.). The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005, pp36-42, pp50-51


… Other religions too played formative and important roles in the life and beliefs of Southeast Asia’s peoples. By the eighteenth century three such religious systems originating outside the area – Buddhism, Islam and Christianity p had established themselves. For historical reasons, each was primarily associated with particular parts of the region: Buddhism with the mainland countries from Myanmar across to Vietnam, Islam with much of the Malay Archipelago, and Christianity with the Philippines.


Varieties of Buddhism

Buddhism is named after its founder, Gautama, prince and heir-apparent of a ruling family in Nepal around 600BCE, who eventually became known as ‘the Buddha’ (the Enlightened One). In his twenties, he embarked on a nomadic life of meditation, until he finally understood life and death. Thereafter, he wandered over northern India teaching that life is cut short by attachment to things and people, and that the goal of life should be to avoid greed, lust and attachment, ultimately reaching not death but Nirvana, a state of being that transcended both life and death, escaping the never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. In its purest form, Buddhism reveres the Buddha not as a god but as a teacher. His sermons were collected to form the core of the Tipitaka (or Tripi-taka), the ‘three baskets’ of teaching still upheld by Buddhists today.

Mahayana Buddhism is the ‘northern school’ of Buddhism, which spread historically from India to Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan, and northern Vietnam. Theravada Buddhism (sometimes called Hinayana) is the ‘southern school’, which spread from India to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Siam, Cambodia and Laos. To cite some of the differences between the two schools, Mahayan insists on a broad and eclectic interpretation of the scriptures, whereas Theravada venerates only the Buddha himself as the founder of the religion and emphasises his own teachings rather than the many sytras attributed to others found in Mahayana. Mahayana worships bodhisattvas – self-denying saints, lay or in order, who had become Buddhas-to-be but compassionately helped others to reach Nirvana before entering it themselves; Theravada considers such worship to be idolatrous. Ideally, followers of Theravada practice religious devotion to save themselves, Mahayanists to save themselves and others. Mahayana tends to allow laymen and women a greater role in its religious community than does Theravada, which strictly separates monks from lay people. Theravada monks in such countries as Thailand and Myanmar wear saffron robes and accept alms for their food, while Mahayana monks in Vietnam wear brown robes and do not accept alms.

Theravada Buddhism from Sri Lanka spread rapidly between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries through the countries of mainland Southeast Asia, from Myanmar to Cambodia and Laos. On its arrival it had to contend not only with well-established animism (see below*) in both village and court (the oath of allegiance in all the courts included the threat of being punished by spirits if one broke the oath) but also with court and folk Brahmanism. In the first millennium CE, many courts in Southeast Asia had adopted rituals learned from India, performed by religious specialists called ‘brahmins’, as a means of codifying and legitimising their rule. The beliefs associated with this practice, which developed in the subcontinent into what we call ‘Hinduism’, do not appear to have spread widely among most local Southeast Asian populaces and are openly retained today only in Bali, but, like animist beliefs, they occasionally surface even among practitioners of other world religions.

The Brahmanical tradition, unlike Buddhism, offered absolute certainty in its explanations of natural and human action. As long as Buddhism was incapable of giving equally certain answers when asked whether, for example, a military campaign should be undertaken or a marriage contracted, Brahmanism remained of primary importance in everyday life. Over time, however, the Brahmanical element in religious life weakened with the strengthening of Buddhist scholarship, the popularisation of sophisticated cosmological ideas, and eventual official and popular disapproval of Brahmanical rites and practices. The same developments worked to reduce animism to an essentially residual category for the explanation of phenomena beyond moral and scientific reason. Hindu religious sites, such as the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and Brahmanical institutions, such as the concept of the devaraja or god-king, fitted easily into Buddhist terminology and practice.

Throughout the Theravada areas by the eighteenth century every village had a monastery. A village was considered incomplete without one, though it might consist only of a small preaching hall (vihara), an uposatha building for ordinations and rites, and a dormitory for the monks. Around these, other buildings and tower-like monuments (pagodas, stupas, or cetiya) containing the relics of ancestors or exceptional men might in time be built, with nearby a sacred tree reminiscent of that under which the Buddha preached his first sermon. The typical monastery was inhabited by a small group of monks clad in saffron or yellow robes who had taken permanent or temporary vows of poverty, chastity, and devotion to a life of religious study and meditation. Their activities were governed by 227 specific disciplinary rules. Forbidden to touch money and bound to accept alms for their food, they began their day with a walk through the village accepting the food offerings of willing householders. The monks returned to eat at their monastery, where food was served to them by students or willing volunteers. Food obtained from the faithful was supplemented by garden produce and delicacies – but never meat – offered to the monastery by people eager to gain merit.

The Buddhist monkhood in village society provided all males time and opportunity to perfect their moral being, to seek enlightenment, and to preach the Dharma, the teachings Buddhism, to the community. The institution of the monkhood can be seen as an outlet for the community’s desire to meritorious deeds. Women could best improve their moral state and hope for rebirth as men in their next incarnation by regularly giving food to the monks, attending preaching services, and offering their sons for ordination.

In day-to-day terms the monkhood’s most important function was to offer boys and young men a rudimentary education in reading and writing and the principles of their faith. For this reason probably more than half the men of Siam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia in the eighteenth century were functionally literate, at least able to read a simple piece of vernacular prose. To those who had the time or were unusually talented, monks offered advanced instruction not only in religious subjects, but also in the arts and sciences of Indian civilisation, from mathematics to astronomy to poetics and medicine. Such instruction, however, was not often available. It was generally concentrated in the monasteries under royal and noble patronage in the towns, which could encompass large monastic populations, support paid teachers, and provide incentives for the best trained, offering them official positions or ecclesiastical advancement.

At every level of society, however, the monastery was the repository of whatever the population – which, after all, provided the monks – admired and needed in the way of sciences and arts. In out-of-the-way monasteries some of this learning was un-canonically connected with manipulating events, interpreting dreams, and setting astrological rules for conduct. In village society the institutions of monastery and monkhood provided a coherent model of religious action and belief that transcended local concerns and tended to draw the community together by ties wider and deeper than those provided by language and agricultural custom.

In each of the Theravada countries, the abbot and monks of the village monastery belonged to a hierarchical ecclesiastical organisation, the sangha, that extended parallel with the civil hierarchy all the way to the king. The sangha was a channel for the transmission of information in both directions, up and down, and a vehicle of social advancement for those inside it. Monks frequently carried the complaints of their villages to higher authority, bypassing secular intermediaries, and the abbot was often the most respected leader in the village, sometimes more effective in his leadership than the headman, who deferred to him. Ambitious young men who found secular avenues to their advancement closed off by law and custom could, through ecclesiastical education and promotion, circumvent the restraints against social mobility and advance to positions of authority. Moreover, if they found the monastic life too encumbering, they could leave it and be ‘reborn’ into the secular world at a point higher than the one at which they had left it.

The Buddhist hierarchy was for the most part organised territorially in each of the Theravada countries, save that the more remote forest-dwelling (Arannika) monks were organised separately. Each district and province had its own chief abbot, who was subject to the authority and discipline of the supreme patriarch (sangharaja) in the capital, whose decisions and injunctions were given force by civil authority. In Siam the monkhood was carefully supervised by the crown, and during some periods prince-monks held high ecclesiastical offices. Royal patronage, steadily strengthened, had reached the point by the seventeenth century where the monarchy was fully supporting religious education through the sponsorship of royal monasteries, which became virtual universities for religious and secular studies. The teachers of noble and royal sons and preceptors of monarchs found it difficult to remain free of political entanglements.

Popular literature and chronicle accounts, however, suggest that on the whole the sangha was ultimately a strong and independent influence in Theravadan Southeast Asia. Monks could, and probably did, mobilise public opinion for or against kings and officials. They had so established their moral influence by the last half of the eighteenth century in Siam that no king could rule without their approval. As if to mark the success of Theravada’s rootedness and domestication in the region, monks from Sri Lanka visited Siam and Cambodia to obtain valid ordinations and copies of religious texts then lacking in Sri Lanka, the original source of Southeast Asian Theravadan Buddhism.

Vietnamese affinity with Chinese culture led to a predisposition to accept and adapt Mahayana Buddhism, because Vietnamese were more likely to read Buddhist scriptures and religious tracts written in classical Chinese than those written in Indian languages. Buddhism in Vietnam, moreover, intermingled with Daoism and with popular version of Confucianism and existed as one element in a religious compound the Vietnamese called ‘the three religions’ (tam giao). The Chinese and Vietnamese religious worlds overlapped so much in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that many southern Chinese priests emigrated from Guangdong (Kwangtung) and Fujian (Fukien) to Vietnam and developed large followings there.

This harmony, although an integral part of Vietnamese Buddhist political thought, remained an unattainable ideal in the eighteenth century. At that time the Confucian court feared Buddhism not as a highly organised political rival but as an indirect ideological influence that could undermine the court’s intricate bureaucratic order. The greatest writer of this period, Nguyen Du (1765-1820), under Buddhist influence, quite explicitly declared, in his ‘Song Summoning Back the Souls of the Dead’, that in paradise ‘the superior and the lowly of this world are reseated in rank.’ In his poem he also reminded the wandering souls of former court officials that ‘the more prosperous you were, the more hatred you accumulated… Carrying such a weight of hatred, do you really think you should seek to reincarnate yourselves?’

The court embarked on a policy of religious control, manipulating the recruitment of Buddhist monks and priests. To become a Buddhist ecclesiastic in Vietnam in the early nineteenth century, a peasant or scholar required an ordination certificate from the court. Applicants for these certificates had to travel to Hue, where they were given religious examinations. Furthermore, no Buddhist temple could be built in Vietnam at that time without the permission of the Nguyen court. The numbers of monks and acolytes at the larger temples were fixed by the laity, and the village chiefs who did not report surplus monks at local temples were punished. The court itself paid the salaries of the head monks at the major temples. It endowed important temples with their land and even gave them their names. It bestowed on them tea, paper, incense, candles, and medicinal drugs, which it imported from China. At its command, Buddhist temples would celebrate a ‘land and water high mass’ (in origin a Chinese ritual) for the souls of dead soldiers who had served the dynastic house. In addition to controlling existing temples, the court sponsored and financed the construction of new ones, usually in the vicinity of Hue, where they were easier to supervise. Hue’s emergence as a centre of Vietnamese Buddhism dated from this period of court patronage and control.

Considered purely as an organised institution, Mahayan Buddhism occupied a much more modest place in Vietnamese society than Theravada Buddhism did in Myanmar, Siamese, or Cambodian society. Needless to say, the heavily patronised Vietnamese sangha became little more than a political instrument of the Nguyen emperors. By itself it was poorly organised. There was no hierarchy of temples controlled by a central monkhood as well as by the court. There were no societywide Buddhist religious organisations to compete with the Confucian bureaucracy. The Vietnamese sangha of the early 1800s was small compared to those of the Theravada states.

The values of Confucian family worship and filial piety (which required the procreation of sons to continue the family and its ancestor worship) also made monasticism less popular in Vietnam than in neighbouring societies. Widows and elderly women, however, commonly joined the important associations of temple nuns in every village that possessed a temple. These women did good works, participated in temple worship at least on the first and fifteenth days of every lunar month, and paid rice dues to the temple in the same way that village men contributed to village communal feasts. There were also major sources of salvation conceptualised in female terms, such as the Goddess of Mercy (Quan Am).

Village religious life tended to be more stable – and more parochial – in the north than in the south. Pilgrimages to religious shrines in the agricultural off-season were a feature of Vietnamese rural society. But such pilgrimages were especially popular in the south, in regions like Ca Mau and Rach Gia, where there were few long-established temples to cater to worshipers or where the monks did not yet have sufficient prestige.


*Animism and the Localisation of World Religions

Unsurprisingly, the world religions that enjoyed such a powerful presence in eighteenth-century Southeast Asia – Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity – found it necessary to accommodate themselves to pre-existing beliefs about the natural and supernatural worlds, and to the life and culture of environments and societies very different from those of India, Arabia, and Europe, from which they had spread. Everywhere in the region a wide variety of spirit belief and practices had long characterised the daily and seasonal life of most communities, marked by the precariousness of climate and harvests, sickness and bereavement, personal misfortune and occasional good luck. Such complexes of folk beliefs, not confined to Southeast Asia, were first termed ‘animism’ by mid-nineteenth-century Western social theorists, from the Latin word anima, meaning breath or soul. Animists, in this sense, believe that departed ancestors and everything in nature – from plants and animals to features of the landscape – are inhabited by spirits or souls through which they can influence human affairs, making them amenable to human supplication and propitiation.

Though the purpose of animistic ritual was less to adorn life than to try to control the conditions in which it was lived, it led to rich and colourful accompaniments to mundane existence in Southeast Asia, in ways that helped to unite communities as well as safeguard them from misfortune. Life-cycle rituals ensured that the passage into and out of life, birth and death, were appropriately marked, and the agricultural year was punctuated by seasonal ceremonies aimed at ensuring good harvests, placating the soul of the rice during harvesting, and acknowledging the power of sea and river spirits over the fortunes of fishermen. Illness and emotional disturbance, in societies with little in the way of elaborate medicines or understanding of the causes of disease, required the intervention of specialist healers and shamans to deal with the spirit possession of those affected. Belief in the power and presence of spirits and the need to cajole, reward and placate them led to the development of song, poetry, invocation, and dance-drama directed toward praising the spirits and reciting the virtues of the community.

Rather than being seen as in conflict with Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity, many animist practices, and sometimes even the beliefs that underlay them, were perceived by most eighteenth-century functionaries of the established religions as at least akin to their own and capable of a measure of acceptance – as part, indeed, of a single continuum reflecting humankind’s attempts to grasp and come to terms with unfathomable and unseen powers. Theravada monks in the lowland villages of Myanmar, Siam, and Cambodia, while maintaining the primacy of Buddhism, also provided essentially the same assistance as shamans did in the uplands. …

Only later, mainly toward the end of the nineteenth century, did the doctrinal and scriptural concerns of reformist movements prompt serious attempts to purge religious belief and practice of local, noncanonical elements associated with animism. …

My friend came up with this on her Facebook profile:


Five fun things to do in an exam hall when you have no hope of passing:

1. Bring in a large cumbersome idol and pray to it often. Consider making a small sacrifice.

2. Flip over the paper, look horrifed and say "HUH?" really loudly, before proceeding to write the answer. Repeat for every question.

3. Quietly and with an air of great industry, eat your paper. Then raise your hand and ask for another one. When asked what happened to the paper reply remorsefully "I eated it".

4. Place a radio antenna over your head and point it at the person beside you. Act as though you are listening intenly before jotting down the answer. Consider making buzzing sounds.

5. Set free a small rodent on your desk and vehemently deny its existence.

Fearing Stigma, US Soldiers Hide Mental Problems: Study

AFP, Thursday, 1 May 2008
On Yahoo! News
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080430/tts-us-health-military-972e412.html

WASHINGTON (AFP) - - A majority of US soldiers who have done tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan say they suffer from stress-related troubles linked to their deployments, a study showed Wednesday.

But most keep their psychological problems to themselves for fear of being stigmatized or seeing their careers take a nose-dive, the study conducted by Harris Interactive for the American Psychiatric Association (APA) showed.

Nearly six in 10 US military members said their deployment in a war zone has caused them to suffer from ‘negative experiences’ associated with stress.

But a mere 10 percent have sought treatment for mental health concerns, according to the study, which surveyed 347 members of the US military and their spouses.

Just over 60 percent said they avoided seeking help for mental health problems because they feared doing so would impact negatively on their career.

Fifty-three percent said they felt others would think less of them if they were to seek help for psychological troubles resulting from their deployment.

Two-thirds of military members said they rarely, if ever, talk about their mental health with family and friends.

Nearly half (48 percent) of the soldiers said they had difficulty sleeping, half reported feeling depressed, and one-third reported a lack of interest in daily activities, the study showed.

All of those problems are symptomatic of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which, along with major depression and traumatic brain injury, afflict nearly one in five of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a separate study released by the RAND Corporation earlier this month.

In the APA study, around two-thirds of military spouses said running a home alone while their partner was deployed caused them stress, and more than half reported stress related to being a single parent while the soldier-spouse was at war.

Nearly twice as many poll respondents -- 65 percent -- said they were unfamiliar with the warning signs of mental health problems that might result from being in a war zone as those who said they knew what to look for -- 35 percent.

The mental injuries US soldiers are bringing back from Iraq and Afghanistan have been dubbed the ‘invisible wounds’ of war.

The RAND Corporation study estimated the cost of treating soldiers diagnosed with PTSD or depression in the first two years following their return from Iraq or Afghanistan at up to 6.2 billion dollars.

MOSCOW - For nine decades after Bolshevik executioners gunned down Czar Nicholas II and his family, there were no traces of the remains of Crown Prince Alexei, the hemophiliac heir to Russia’s throne.

Some said the delicate 13-year-old had somehow survived and escaped; others believed his bones were lost in Russia’s vastness, buried in secret amid fear and chaos as the country lurched into civil war.

Now an official says DNA tests have solved the mystery by identifying bone shards found in a forest as those of Alexei and his sister, Grand Duchess Maria.

The remains of their parents — Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra — and three siblings, including the czar’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, were unearthed in 1991 and reburied in the imperial resting place in St. Petersburg. The Russian Orthodox Church made all seven of them saints in 2000.

Despite the earlier discoveries and ceremonies, the absence of Alexei’s and Maria’s remains gnawed at descendants of the Romanov dynasty, history buffs and royalists. Even if Wednesday’s announcement is confirmed and widely accepted, many descendants of the royal family are unlikely to be fully assuaged; they seek formal ‘rehabilitation’ by the government.

‘The tragedy of the czar’s family will only end when the family is declared victims of political repression,’ said German Lukyanov, a lawyer for royal descendants.

Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. They were shot by a firing squad on July 17, 1918, in the basement of the Yekaterinburg house where they were being held.

Rumors persisted that some of the family had survived and escaped. Claims by women to be Anastasia were particularly prominent, although there were also pretenders to Alexei’s and Maria’s identities.

‘It was 99.9 percent clear they had all been killed; now with these shards, it’s 100 percent,’ said Nadia Kizenko, a Russian scholar at the University at Albany, State University of New York. ‘Those who regret this news will be those who liked the royal pretender myth.’

Alexei was one of the more compelling of the victims, drawing sympathy because of his hemophilia. His mother’s terror of the disease and fear that he would not live to gain the throne were key to her falling under the thrall of the hypnotic and sexually ravenous self-declared holy man Rasputin, who exerted vast influence on the royal family.

Researchers unearthed the bone shards last summer in a forest near Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was killed, and enlisted Russian and U.S. laboratories to conduct DNA tests.

Eduard Rossel, governor of the region 900 miles east of Moscow, said tests done by a U.S. laboratory had identified the shards as those of Alexei and Maria.

‘This has confirmed that indeed it is the children,’ he said. ‘We have now found the entire family.’

‘The main genetic laboratory in the United States has concluded its work with a full confirmation of our own laboratories’ work,’ Rossel said.

He did not specify the laboratory, but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process. Evgeny Rogaev, who headed the team that tested the remains in Moscow and at the medical school in Worcester, Mass., was called into the case by the Russian Federation Prosecutor’s Office.

He told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he delivered the results to Russian authorities, but said it was up to the prosecutor’s office — not him or his team — to disclose the findings.

‘The most difficult work is done and we have delivered to them our expert analysis, but we are still working,’ he said. ‘Scientifically, we want to make the most complete investigation possible.’

The test results were based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material passed down only from mothers to children. That DNA is more stable than nuclear DNA — the material inherited from the father’s side — especially when remains are badly damaged.

In this case, the bone fragments were so shattered and burned that Rogaev’s team first had to determine whether enough uncontaminated genetic material still existed for testing.

The delicate work proved that, indeed, useful DNA could be extracted from a very small amount of the material — a critical fact, since they wanted to preserve as much of the bone fragments as possible out of respect for the victims.

The researchers also compared DNA from the remains with those of Empress Alexandra, who was a granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria and a distant relative of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II.

With the mitochondrial analysis completed, the team is working on the nuclear DNA analysis and comparing the samples to paternal relatives of the czar’s family.

That information, along with conclusions already delivered to the Russian prosecutors, eventually will be submitted to a professional journal for peer review and publication.

It was unclear if the Russian Orthodox Church will recognize them as genuine. The church’s press service said no one could comment on Wednesday’s announcement.

It was also unclear whether the descendents of the royal family would accept the identification. Lukyanov said neither he nor his clients had received confirmation.

Lukyanov’s efforts to get the government to declare the royal family victims of political repression have been repeatedly rejected by Russian courts, which have said the family’s killing was premeditated murder, not a political reprisal.

He said Russia had much to do to overcome its tortured past.

‘They say that as long as the last soldier remains unburied, the war continues,’ Lukyanov told AP. ‘So long as the last victim of Bolshevik terror and the Communist regime remains unrehabilitiated, the repression will continue.’