Charlotte and I went to Shanghai Stadium this afternoon to see the NFL's flag football league play on the practice fields outside of the Stadium itself. We didn't talk to anybody in depth, on account of the rain and Charlotte being anxious to leave. Some notes:

• About the time we arrived, a little after one, it began to rain lightly and the games continued unaffected.
• Play was smooth and all the players were good sports. The referees seemed to be unfamiliar with some rules, but were not afraid to ask for help so things stayed on track. There was one Chinese guy in black running around with a clipboard that seemed to be the go-to man for questions. There was an injury, but a first aid kit was on hand and play stopped while the player was being attended to.
• About 1 in 10 of the players were white; another 30% had Asian faces but spoke fluent American English. The refs were all locals, and included several women.

Overall, it was a very low-key event.

Tonight on a whim I went back and listened to the Pizzicato Five (P5) Happy End of the You remix album. The most notable thing about the re-listen was how my position relative to the album has changed since I first listened to it back in college.

The first time I heard the album was during my studies at Caltech. In college I pursued music, among other things, as an escape-valve for the incredible pressure I was feeling academically. In high school I had latched onto Pizzicato Five to supplement my Japanese studying; Shibuya-kei was more accessible than other J-pop genres in a pre-Youtube, pre-Napster time, because Matador Records distributed their albums and brought them to the US for tours. Eventually I joined the p5ml, a mailing list for English-speaking fans of Pizzicato Five. When Happy End of You came out I interpreted it as being a big deal to the list because here was a bunch of western DJs acknowledging and possibly having been inspired by Pizzicato Five. Still reviews of the album from the list were mixed; p5ml members had eclectic tastes that tended towards pop, rock and oldies (there was an overlap between prominent members of p5ml and the Exotica list, a list "for fans and collectors of weird and unusual music from the early LP era forward").

By the time Happy End of the World was released I was a P5 collector, so I picked up a couple of the vinyl releases of the individual mixes at Moby Disc in downtown Pasdena, and eventually the entire CD. My own reaction was similar to the list's: I preferred the more upbeat tracks and was disappointed by the slower, more unstructured mixes. I didn't have a good perspective on those compositional styles; my background so far had been pop and techno in Spain, hip-hop and rock in high school, and then some exotica and world music during college. The sounds I was hearing on these remixes were foreign and almost unconnected to anything I had ever heard.

How is my listening different now? In the years since then, influenced by my brother's progressive musical tastes, by DJ friends and classmates at Caltech, by the documentary on techno called Modulations, by Kraftwerk (through P5) and their influences, through Cornelious, the Plastics, the Boredoms, through "graduation" night from Princeton in Beijing 2000, through marveling at the curious club scene of Shanghai, and through the influence of Mr Zambrano, Mr Hogue and NoiShanghai, I've picked up a few things here and there about the more fringe, exploratory, theoretical facets of music and exposed myself to more ideas about what music can be. Listening to Happy End of Youd this second time around I find myself navigating the styles with a greater familiarity and being able to appreciate all of the musical extremes, from 808 State's bouncy synthesizer-packed remix of Trailer Music, to Gusgus's moody, building whomp-whomp remix of Porno 3003, to the dissonant plunderphonic remix of It's a Beautiful Day by John Oswald; they all have elements that I recognize or can categorize with other music I've heard and learned to enjoy.

I can't help but connect this to my thoughts about teaching. If my goal as a teacher is to make my kids more fully appreciate physics, my work has to include exposing them to memorable experiences that they can analyze using the scientific principles I teach them. But that's a topic to be developed on another day. It's time for bed now.

(One of my colleagues told me that today, Saturday, is Childrens' Day in India, and that her daughters are performing for thousands of Indian expatriates in Shanghai today. I am jealous.)

We had a delayed birthday dinner of sorts for myself tonight. Charlotte, Maryan and I met Jodi at People's Square after Jodi's Sunday afternoon classes and we walked to the 干锅居 at the entrance of Huanghe Rd. I had forgotten how good the Guizhounese restaurant is: we had the tea-mushroom chicken pot (茶树菇干锅), the spicy-sour greenbeans (酸豆角炒肉末), a honey-rice cake (风味小米喳), and a stir-fry of mixed vegetables (小炒皇). Even with the girls making messes and causing a ruckus I still enjoyed every bite. In fact, I felt like I liked it even more than before, having grown more accustomed to eating chicken off the bone and spicy foods. Although we didn't wait for a window seat tonight, in the past we've sat next to the glass and had a decent view of People's Square lit up at night, looking straight down Nanjing East Road. For the money, it's one of the better views of the Square. With our VIP card, the meal came out to RMB 90 for the four of us.

“It’s All Sermon Prep to Me”, comment by rpage:

I read a story recently about a desert father who was visited by a hermit who had heard of the abba. The hermit began to talk about scripture and theological things. The abba turned away from him. When the hermit asked the mutual friend who introduced them, the friend asked the abba why he ignored someone who had traveled hundreds of miles to talk with him. The abba said that he knows little about scripture or theology. If the hermit wanted to talk about the internal life that loves and needs healing, he would be happy to talk with the hermit. The abba and the hermit had a long and mutually satisfying conversation after that. I have looked upon the sermon as a way to reflect on how God is present and healing in lives and what the scriptures collected by the church tell us of these things in the past to help us understand the present in faith terms.

This is pretty close to how I see it.

George Orwell, from "Homage to Catalonia":

In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on.

I think this applies to teaching as well.

Tonight I finally set the stage for an evening of "Sidewalk Astronomy". The place: the square outside the Science and Technology Museum subway station, for its high evening traffic and wide-open sky. The time: right after dinner on October 26, about 8pm, when Jupiter and the half-full moon were less than 15° away from each other.

On the way there I think I scared some people on the subway. First, the telescope I use belongs to the school so I carry it home in a long, black bag that looks just about the right size for carrying a firearm. I actually felt pretty spooky carrying it around, with my hoody and black jeans on. Second, I also brought along a homemade accelerometer and took some measurements of the subway acceleration and deceleration going from Longyang Rd to Century Park. It's just a piece of cardboard with a protractor made of paper taped on it, and a metal nut on fishing line hanging down, but I had placed it up against the wall and was staring at it intently trying to line it up to 0° as people were getting on at Longyang Rd, so it probably looked strange. The good thing is that the top acceleration I calculate based off the measurement falls within the ranges I found online; 1.2 m/s² is between 1.0-1.5 m/s².

At the Science and Technology Museum square, I set up just off the bridge where people cross over to walk toward the taxi line. The spot was central-ish, away from lights, and off to the side from where bikers and rollerbladers tend to ride. When I pulled out the telescope I immediately drew a small, curious crowd, which I satisfied with some conversation and a chance to look at the moon through the telescope and binoculars. Then when things settled down I lined the scope up with Jupiter on the higher power eyepiece and demonstrated what we were seeing in Stellarium on the laptop. Most of the people who stopped by were either older couples or families with kids; usually they drew near and smiled, at which point I asked them to take a look and they universally accepted. This usually lead to a bit of chit-chat about why I was there, or about astronomy. One grandfather was very cute; as his wife and their son and grandaughter walked away he ran back with… "One more question. Why can't we see so many stars these days? When I was young the sky was filled with them!" so we chatted a bit about the atmosphere and light pollution. Another man visiting Shanghai from Fujian got to talking about the time he had spent up north in Heilongjiang and how the sky up there was so vast and yet so near, the he felt like he could have reached up and touched it; he also recommended getting out of Shanghai and shared with me about how, American is great and all but, his dream is to first go to Tibet to find peace for his heart. By nine o'clock I was spending a lot of time on the laptop and practicing navigating the sky with the binoculars, and visitors were getting less frequent, so I closed up shop and took the subway/bus home.

Overall I consider the trip a success, but felt like the major advantage of the site, a wide open sky, was lost to the fact that light pollution (and a possible light cloud cover) washed out pretty much the whole sky, especially near the horizon. With that kind of sky I could just as well go to a more peopled site like People's Square or somewhere with more buildings, as long as I had a clear line of sight to the interesting objects for that night. This is a success I'd like to repeat.

Signs that "Maryann (our one-year-old) Was Here":

1. Cucumber crumbs on the floor.
2. Magazines stacked on the bathroom stool.
3. A particularly stinky trash can.
4. Shoes strewn around the entryway.
5. The remote control is missing.

Adam Minter just posted a photo and a question about a game he spotted being played in an older Shanghai neighborhood. Since my research turned up a real Shanghai connection I thought it'd be good to put it here and just share the link back.

Photo by Adam Minter.

I replied on his post that I knew the game as Carrom from playing it as a kid in the US, but looking at his photo I suspected something deeper because of the workmanship that went into the board; the ones I'd played had always been flimsy things mounted on tripods (though I'd seen some more durable ones at a park near my grandparents' house in Buena Park, California). Wikipedia has this to say about the history of Carrom:

The origins of carrom are uncertain, although western sources suggest that the game is of Indian, Portugese, or Burmese origin.[1] Variations of the game played with a cue stick similar to those used in billiards-type games may have independently developed in several cases as a mixture of billiards and shuffleboard.

The game is very popular in India, and in Punjabi it is called fatta. Similar games are played throughout the world, and may or may not share common origins with carrom. In Denmark a similar game called bob is played with cues rather than fingers.[citation needed] There is a carrom-like game also played with cues in China. Games similar to carrom appear all over Asia, for example vindi vindi in Fiji and szhe szhe in Israel. Some variants make use of discarded objects instead of fashioned playing pieces; bottle caps are used for games similar to carrom in both Mexico and Java.[citation needed] Various North American games bear a resemblance to (and may be related to) carrom, including crokinole, pitchnut and pichenotte.

The Japanese Wikipedia page for Carrom yielded the Chinese 康乐棋, and googling with that phrase turned up 康乐球. That last variation combined with 上海 turns up a lot of links that suggest that Carrom is embedded in and particular to the local Shanghainese culture. Among the search results was the blog of one 露香园, who had this to say about the history of Carrom in Shanghai:

康乐球始于民国时期。康乐球借用桌球的一些用语，早些还有形似桌球六洞布局的康乐球。这两点都说明康乐球出现在桌球之后。据资料记载在印度殖民统治时期，驻印度的英军官发明了桌球，不久又从印度传到中国。是不是模仿桌球的康乐球也跟着传到了中国呢，还是中国人见了桌球而自制了康乐球呢，现在还没有可以肯定的说法。上海开埠较早，也是国内最早有康乐球的。有位老上海说早年老北站附近的康乐路上一家木器店老板制作了击打棋子状木子进洞取乐的木质方盘。当时参与的人都觉得很好玩。为了说话方便，就以路名来给这玩艺儿起了名。在康乐路上打球成了打康乐球。这可能就是康乐球名称的来源吧。在那个年代，桌球是贵族的游戏，而康乐球当然是平民的游戏了。

So it seems likely that the British brought it over to Shanghai from India, either in the form of Carrom or as its predecessor snooker (Wikipedia confirms the Indian origin of the latter). The "Kangle Rd" theory seems like it may hold water, but I'd be interested to know if the game has another name in Shanghainese that might sound closer to the Punjabi "fatta" mentioned by Wikipedia, or some other Indian variant. Another site talks about the rise in popularity of Carrom in Shanghai after the closure of snooker halls in the 1950s, roadside Carrom rentals as sources of income for the unemployed, and the organizing of neighborhood Carroom tournaments during the SARS quarantines.

康乐球在上世纪40年代传入上海，因其不登大雅之堂而未能传开。而到了50年代后，由于弹子房先后关闭，康乐球一度成了上海娱乐的主角，当时一只普通的康乐球盘约15元，仅相当于一个普通工人三分之一的月收入，高档的红木盘约60元。无业的居民或无所事事的家庭主妇花些钱购几只盘，就可沿街设摊了。当时租盘以“盘”（即一方胜局为一盘）算，小盘每“盘”一两分，大盘三四分，老板娘有两只盘，一天收入三五元是不成问题的。

The site also attributes the 康乐球 name to the English "cornerbool", a word Google says is used exclusively by Chinese manufacturers trying to sell Carrom equipment to English-speakers; so I'm not too sure about that one.

In any case, it appears that Carrom is indeed a Shanghai institution. SMG's Sports TV channel did a short report on it, interviewing a Mr Li who credits it with keeping him healthy and improving his sight to the point where he stopped wearing glasses. The report does note that the average Carrom player is 50 years old, so this is likely an institution in decline. Which means that now is a better time than any to order yourself a custom-built Carrom/康乐球 board, only RMB 1200 and made in Shanghai.