I still wish somebody would post a missed connection looking for me.

This is a real-life, word-for-word assessment someone made of a Japanese restaurant, not only ascertaining whether it was racially authentic enough for him to patronize again but freely sharing it with complete strangers in the apparent belief that he had absolutely nothing to be ashamed about:

- menu is too anglicised... "chicken don", "yellow tail roll" among other things
- the Japanese waiter had a lengthy casual conversation with one of the sushi chefs in English...hmm
- the 2 sushi chefs have hardly any Japanese mannerism, and they don't look like Japanese. My Japanese is not good enough to tell if the 2 Japanese phrases uttered by the other sushi chefs are accent-free
- they are extra friendly and patronising with the guests like you're in a Chinese restaurant
- no native Japanese customers I ran into
- their "beef don", the way they do it, is not something you can find anywhere in Japan
- And finally, they serve butter fish/so-called "white tuna"/oil fish/escolar as sushi or sashimi

I loathe this city and its racist, xenophobic sushi fanatics.

You knew I'd get to this eventually.

Nero Burning ROM, a program that writes data to discs, has the Roman Colosseum in flames as its classic logo. I've always liked it; It meshes modern technology and familiar memories from classical history in a cleverly tongue-in-cheek way. But it's really a bit odd for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is the straightforward problem of chronology. The construction of the Colosseum was initiated by Nero's successor, Vespasian, between 70-72 CE. The fire so infamously linked to Nero occurred in 64 CE -- six years before the Colosseum was even begun. Nero himself never saw or conceived of the idea of the Colosseum, because he stabbed himself in the throat and died in 68 CE.

The second reason is ideology. The Colosseum, as a political idea, was built expressly in opposition of Nero and his policies. Vespasian wanted to define himself as an animal quite apart from his predecessor and this intention was most bluntly conveyed by demolishing Nero's works and replacing them with his own, often on the very same physical sites.

The Colosseum was in fact planned for the location of Nero's own palace, where he committed so many atrocities. The palace, called the Golden House, was particularly offensive not only because of its sordid history, and not only because its gross opulence offended the Roman ideals of austerity and modesty, but because it had been built on the ashes of Roman homes that had burned down during the Great Fire. Many of Roman's oldest aristocratic families had lived there, so they hated him especially for this insult.

In contrast, the Colosseum, while massive, was a public and religious building. It embodied piety and civic duty, both virtues deeply at odds with the self-interest and hubris Nero flaunted during his life. It not only paid service to the gods, but it symbolically returned the land to the people.

Want to play "Chinese Whispers"?

Up until today, I wasn't aware that Chinese Whispers was an alternative name for the game known as Telephone. If you haven't heard of that, Telephone is a game where people line up and transmit a message between the first and last players via a series of whispers along the line. The idea is that the message is inevitably garbled a little more every time it's told, and the fun is the final revelation, where the last player repeats the crazy nonsensical concoction aloud for all to hear. Purple monkey dishwasher!

The interesting thing is how many have found nothing wrong with the name. It's not terribly offensive, but it is offensive. It's not because we, the offended, are a collective of anal-retentive whistle-blowing teetotalers with giant sticks up our rectums, but because it only takes a second thought to see where the offense lies.

The object of the game is to create gibberish; the players' delight lies in the magic of error, in both speaking and listening.

The defense argues that gibberish is simply defined as "meaningless sounds", and thus, to an English speaker, Chinese may legitimately be called gibberish.

The trouble lies in how culturally self-centred this view is. There is a difference between identifying actual gibberish (which, in the game, is English, but in error and confused) and acknowledging a real language, with its own particular order and vocabulary, which you may not have the capacity to understand, but which does mean something to an educated speaker.

Calling the game "Chinese Whispers" is to say that Chinese, spoken correctly, is equivalent to a screwed-up, silly, garbage version of English ... which is, yes, a little offensive.

I watch TV as part of my job. Rather, I really leave it on in the background, keeping one ear on it while I check out newspapers online. The channel I watch is a local news station of middling calibre, which means I've been hearing the trailer for Confessions of a Shopaholic every twenty minutes or so. It's particularly meaningful because for some unfathomable reason, the studio behind Shopaholic budgeted to air a trailer that runs sixty rather than the standard thirty seconds. One minute every twenty from between nine a.m. to five p.m. is a lot of time.

At several points in this trailer, the lead actress -- who comes off as a poorwoman's Amy Adams -- wails. I spent days wondering exactly how to describe the noise she makes; it's no piercing scream or jagged shriek. It's this long, continuous, wordless wail. It barely varies in tone or pitch and doesn't carry any articulate noises, no recognizable sounds -- not because there isn't anything to articulate (although it's close). It's because she can't.

She's too simple. Complex emotion is beyond her. The urge to buy a purse, the sight of her credit card -- stimuli that people ignore or adroitly manage -- are so primal, so overwhelming to her faculties that she can only produce this endless, meaningless sound as a way of relief; it's the wail of a child, or an unfortunate simpleton. It's the wail you hear when she, faced with the peril of losing a pair of Gucci boots, unleashes as she claws at a stranger's face like a threatened puma.

What I find really offensive about movies like Shopaholic is that there is invariably a correlation between consumption and idiocy. She racks up debt because she's an air-headed moron. Never mind that many intelligent, educated people with  high-powered jobs that demand intelligence and education -- often because they are in such intense, responsibility-laden positions -- fight battles with alcohol, drugs, and yes, finances, all the time. It utterly glosses over the more interesting psychological complexities of compulsive behaviour, murkier waters bypassed for something transparent and easy.

And anyway, alcohol and drugs are offensive, (gender-blind) adult addictions. Shopping is fun. It's funny. It's glamorous. It's a destructive behaviour that's easy to trivialize, since its primary characterizations is the unchecked acquisition of bright pink handbags and stilletto shoes while sipping bikini-tinis.

The crowning scene in Shopaholic's trailer, I think, is probably the one the lead finally earns the first professional respect of her life. On paper, it probably read as a self-affirming scene, one where their heroine has used her female brains (brains!) to impress a roomful of superiors -- and, incidentally, her attractively British love interest. Isn't that progressive? Isn't that empowering?

The problem is that she does this by entirely unfeminist means. In the scene, she's being feted for marketing financial advice to women in the context of shoe-shopping -- for understanding what "how women think," as one executive proudly puts it. Every woman! All of them, for they are an amorphous collective, indistinguishable as individuals. (Can anyone picture the Borg in Prada?)

(I'd take this idea better if I knew that this magazine also thought men were somehow intellectually unreachable via any means beyond the context of driving fast cars and fucking pussy, but I'm sceptical.)

Never mind her admirers are all men (What? Women executives at this company?); I'd call it a telling sign, but clearly the writers perceive no irony in a woman being complimented by everyone except other women.

The only comfort is that the same station airs an ad (although nowhere near Shopaholic's rotation) for a debt agency. Its opening montage features a spunky young blonde trying on clothes, flipping over dress tags of hundreds of dollars, and loading up shopping bag after shopping bag. As she comes home laden on each arm, the bags drop to the ground like stones. The camera cuts to reveal a bright yellow "EVICTION NOTICE" on her apartment door. Debt is manageable.

You mean reckless spending doesn't land me a plum position at a magazine, invitations to media cocktail parties, and a charming British fiancé?

*wail*

Moment of nerdery #32: I have now named my second city Iskenderun, where there is no museum of antiquities. 

Faith, in every sense religious and not, is belief in the most basic sense of the word. It does not rely on proof; indeed, it is the very lack of proof that faith demands for its definition. It is the essence of religion and the antithesis of science, though this does not necessarily make them enemies, because religion claims to know what the scientific method cannot discern (and does not seek to).

Agnosticism is an impure mix of faith and non-faith. It asks that in order to legitimize atheism, proof must be presented for the lack of a god, or gods. It asks for what science asks, yet in the service of faith.

It is impossible -- or terribly near -- to prove something does not exist. Nowhere else in humanity's body of knowledge do we "hold off" on something's existence until its existence is "disproven."

Nowhere in atheism (except perhaps among its most fundamentalist) does it say that it is closed to evidence contrary to its principles -- should it present itself. There is simply, at this moment, no evidence; ergo, no occasion for persuasion.

The idea of agnosticism, with its chosen distinctions, creates the mistaken notion that it is somehow distilling the atheistic principle into something finer and purer. Acknowledging that one could, in the future, be wrong does not mean we need a new name for it, a new ideology.

It wrongly implies that science is rigid and dogmatic. Science tries to know what can be empirically proven and demonstrated -- but it can change and on countless historical occasions, it has. There has never been a separate creature that was Science with an Asterisk. To suggest otherwise is erroneous and dangerous in its ignorance.

That is why agonosticism, on every occasion, provokes my scorn and contempt.