Adam Hooper's Blog

Crazy

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:34:10 -0500

A five-foot-tall transvestite, dressed in drag, walks up to me at the Posta Mpya public transit hub late at night in Dar es Salaam, happily yammering words I cannot understand. I smile and shrug, and eventually he moves on to his next comic victim, never missing a beat in his monologue.

Ni mchizi yangu, a passer-by jokes with me: a Swahili pun, in this context straddling the line between, this is my buddy and, this is a crazy person. Out of the spotlight, I am free to look around: I notice that a crowd is laughing at my accoster.

This is yet another little moment from my life in Tanzania which recently rushed back to me when I least expected it. My reminiscing usually begins with smells, sights, or phrases; but this particular memory of Tanzania came from a crazy person in New York:

I was walking to the movies with a friend. We arrived at the pedestrian decision point between hurrying north to beat the light or waiting a second for the light to turn so we could head east. A man loomed towards us, eyes fixed on the sidewalk, and loudly asked: Y'avalight?

Sure, enunciated my friend, producing a lighter and igniting it near the accoster's mouth.

The man ripped the device away and flicked it viciously, focusing his entire existence on the transferral of fire to his cigarette. Once finished, he gave it back roughly, muttering, vowel-free, tks.

The traffic lights decided our next move: east. This man trudged in the same direction, at our exact pace: worried, we accelerated. As the man finally faded from our world, we detected that he had veered into the middle of the intersection. The last thing we heard him shout was, Apbtkd!

That was scary, we agreed, after gaining half a block of insulation.

There was something different about this man: something which set him apart. What was it?

This enthusiastic smoker was hardly the first person in New York to set off my ingrained normalcy radar. Walking home from work one day, I spotted a black cat perched on the head of a man who was strolling down the street. One week earlier, some coworkers and I ate lunch in downtown New York while a man outside the diner patiently teed six empty beer cans into a line on the street, pulled out a driver, lined himself up, and deliberately, one at a time, whacked each can into traffic.

I felt I gained some insight last weekend, as I discovered some people who seemed to blur a line between me and crazy: the coffee lady and the junkies.

The coffee lady came first. While trekking across a Brooklyn Bridge laden near collapse with tourists, I was perplexed by the common phenomenon of otherwise sensible people stepping in the extremely clearly delineated bicycle lane; even more comical were the reckless bikers who would yell, ring bells, shout warnings, and swerve, but who would adamantly refuse to decelerate to avoid their witless obstacles. As I approached the Brooklyn side of the bridge and the tourists (curiously averse to stepping past the centre of the bridge into a land unexplored by the gawking masses) receded, I spotted an approaching woman, eyes scanning the inches in front of her feet, mouth muttering incomprehensible phrases, with a coffee on her head. Two thoughts sprung to mind: first, that the wind was bound to blow this poor woman's coffee away; and second, that here at last I had found somebody who respected the bicycle lane.

The junkies appeared on my return to Manhattan, at the direct centre of the Manhattan Bridge footpath. Three of them were lolling over one another, backs against the side of the bridge, eyes dead. After months honing my ability to avoid subway screwballs and street psychos, I knew the footpath would bring me within a foot of these social deviants and I braced myself for the worst; but as I walked past them they gave me a completely normal New York greeting: eyes staring straight ahead, no words spoken, no sign of acknowledgement. And while they were doubtless well past the point of making a rational decision on the matter, I was nonetheless set aback by this one stab at normalcy.

I suppose the interesting feature common to the coffee lady and the junkies was their similarity to myself. Just like me, the coffee lady walked in the proper lane; just like me, the junkies observed social etiquette. Instead of being a different species, they became ordinary individuals with one bizarre twist: the coffee lady is normal except for the cup of coffee on her head (which, I assume, she replaces after every errant gust of wind); the junkies are normal except for the abnormal chemicals they recently absorbed.

Perhaps the smoker just needed a cigarette really badly, and perhaps we caught him at an unfortunate time as he tripped and thus stumbled into the middle of the intersection accidentally.

And come to think of it, why do I refrain from wearing a cat on my head, driving empty cans into traffic, and dressing in drag at a bus stop in Tanzania? These may not be normal activities, but when I give the matter a bit of thought, they sure seem like fun.

Part of me feels inclined to wait for the first snowfall, strip to my boxers, and run down Broadway shouting, I like pizza! at the top of my lungs. Call me crazy, but I somewhat doubt I would be the first to do it, and I suspect several so-called normal people would agree with me.

Engineering Blog-y Thing

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:19:33 -0500

There seem to be two aspects to my world these days: real life and engineering. Both vary from stressful to challenging to, at times, rewarding.

Most people who read this blog, I suspect, read it to find out about real life, not about engineering. But I feel I have a fair amount to contribute in the latter category, so I hereby announce the grand opening of The Engineering Section of my website, catering to a new potential group of readers with wildly different interests.

My engineering section is blog-like, but is completely separate from this, my actual blog. I encourage interested software engineers to subscribe to the feed in my Engineering section, as I encourage my current readers to stay tuned here while I write my next proper blog post involving a guy wearing a cat as a hat.

Why I Hate Men, Parts 2 and 3

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:55:57 -0400

I was planning another blog post today about New York, but with the world the way it is, I cannot bring myself to write it.

In Democratic Republic of the Congo, a new French word is born: reviolé. Rebel forces plunder all they can from the villages they attack (with an insinuation of the word plunder more evil than most people can fathom). Government soldiers, defeated, extract everything they can from the people they are paid to protect as they retreat. Atrocity rates are so unfathomably massive that women who have been raped in several, unrelated incidents is becoming a nonzero demographic. The Congolese government looks in the other direction while its own employees commit atrocities; the UN peacekeepers (the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world) cower in impotence, other international bodies are powerless to interfere, ordinary Congolese men are brushed aside, and Congolese women have no recourse: they must suffer, repeatedly, disgusting humiliation I can scarcely imagine.
Not to be outdone, a 13-year-old rape victim in Somalia is stoned to death on adultery charges by one of the many groups hoping to become a government, in a stadium packed with a thousand murderous men.

My heart goes out to the victims of this most base, evil, vulgar, and despicable crime: especially those women honest and well-meaning enough to shed their dignity and publicize their suffering. I am sickened by the existence of masses of men in the world who are so unmoved as to lower themselves to rape and murder... and by the fact that I have something in common with them.

I wish I could chop theirs off.

Kisambaa

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 02:08:31 -0400

My website, for whatever ludicrous reason, comes up as the #1 Google Search result for Kisambaa.

Since I am now considered the authoritative source on Kisambaa, I should explain a bit about it: it is the native language of the Sambaa people in Tanzania, who live east of Arusha and just across the border from Kenya. How are you? in the afternoon is onga mshi, and the correct response is tiwedi. I do not know the formalities for morning, nighttime, thanks, or farewells. In fact, I know practically nothing about Kisambaa.

I found a website called Ethnologue Report which says 664,000 Sambaa people exist. I would take that website's information with a grain of salt, however: its entry on Swahili suggests that Kiswahili only has 540,000 mother-tongue speakers, while in reality Zanzibar alone accounts for 1,000,000 Swahili people and I expect a significant subset of the younger population of Dar es Salaam (population 3,000,000) also speaks Kiswahili better than any other language.

Factoid: most native Kisambaa speakers know Kiswahili as a second language.

Factoid Number Two: Since I am writing English, I should really be writing Sambaa instead of Kisambaa (for the same reason I would write French instead of Français); but if I had done that to begin with my website never would have been the #1 search result.

Yonkers

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:27:31 -0400

What does gambling mean to you?

To me, gambling is a lark. Last night I won sixty cents on a horse named Pacific Flora: my tactic was to select the horse with the slowest-sounding name, and after searching the big book of small numbers in vain for a name along the lines of Bro-Can Leg, I decided seafaring algae might be comically slow as well. Pacific Flora somehow managed to evolve its way to first place.

Then I saw the slot machines.

Insert $1 to $100.

I inserted $1; I pushed a button a few times; I eventually lost every penny; and I went to a different machine.

I inserted $1; I pushed a button a few times. This time, I did not even bother looking at the screen. I already knew how the story would end, and the flashing lights and electronic sounds were distracting me from a conversation I was having. Sure enough, after pushing the button a few times, the machine diplomatically encouraged me to pay up or leave, refusing to illuminate its bet button.

Bored, I decided to walk around.

But I could not walk: I could only swim in a sea of slot machines. I came to realize I had been gambling at the fringe of a venture 5,000 machines across. As I delved deeper into the building I lost sight of all landmarks: only row after row of blinking lights and losing betters greeted my eyes, stretching to infinity—a financial infinity for those shrewd enough to design it.

I got lost.

Twice.

Ordinary people devise systems to beat these machines: simultaneous bets, fluctuating antes, and strict, superstitious mathematical formulas, hopelessly created to compete with mathematical formulas which (and you would think committed gamblers would pause to consider this at some point) are invariably designed by smarter, more educated, wealthier people who themselves do not bet with their creations.

At the corner of the complex, adjacent to the exit, sits a small, underused row of counters labeled REDEMPTION. It lent a biblical tone to the evening: with deliverance so convenient and well-advertised, evidence suggests the vast majority would prefer to sacrifice money, time, and sometimes souls to mechanized thieves and their devious designers.

What does gambling mean to me? In this instance, it means the aggregation of poor people's money in rich people's pockets.

But I am still missing a sense of scale. In the coming year, Yonkers Raceway will triple its number of machines, effectively tripling its ability to accept $1 to $100.

Neighbours

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:48:32 -0400

People are different across streets and alike across oceans.

My Code

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:42:01 -0400

Though I have not spent much effort recreating my old website, one small accomplishment is my "My Code" section. This lets you view some source code I have written for school projects and pet projects. It is ideal for university students and people interested in learning to program. Most of the code was written in C, Java, and Python; and at the time I write this, all of the code was written at least two years ago.

Check it out at http://adamhooper.com/code.

Website 2.0

Mon, 26 May 2008 01:51:57 -0400

I am busy rebuilding my website. The new version is better. It is built using Ruby on Rails, which deserves a plug. The hacker in me couldn’t resist writing a blog engine from scratch.

Don’t mind the mess. Not all links behave as they ought to, and I will be putting more content in soon. I figure a website like this is better than one of those animated “Under Construction” websites from the 1990’s.

Photos

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:45:00 -0400

My adventures and frustration at slow Internet made me leave my blog by the wayside for the past few weeks.

I am now back in Canada, and I have uploaded a photo album online. It is massive, only because it squishes eight action-packed months of my life into a mere 70 megabytes.

Here it is: My photos of Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Switzerland.

Congo Cast of Characters

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 04:18:57 -0500

Cargo ship captain: stays out of the way after charging the boarding fee.
Cargo ship crew: become more and more friendly, even calling Adam by his name towards the end of the five-day journey.
Ex-refugees: populate the village of Moba for roughly a year before Adam's arrival. Tell interesting stories. Are very poor.
Burundian passengers: take Adam under their collective wing on Adam's trip to Bujumbura (Burundi).
Congolese workers: load the boat at Moba, chanting to gather strength and resolve.
Congolese passengers: board in massive numbers at Moba and sleep absolutely everywhere.
Congolese port officials: collectively extract over $30 through cons and bribes.
Congolese Important Official, Uvira: swears to get Congolese port officials fired and phones ahead at the Burundian border to allow Adam passage and special treatment.
Adam: experiences all of this rather passively.