Raising Rockstar

Black Swan Theory was probably made most famous in recent history by Dr Nassim Taleb, Lebanese-American former options trader, quant, and sometime-consultant-employed-by-the-SEC during the financial crisis of ’08. The ’08 financial crisis and collapse of the US Housing Market (Big Short is a pretty good movie starring Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie and That Guy From The Office, about the use of derivatives) are some of the most well-known Black Swan Events. Blog posts Big Short Part 1: Mispricing: Do You Really See What You Think You See? and Part 2: Packages Of Risk And Reward here and here.

The term Black Swan revolves around the old belief that black swans did not exist. Right up until the first known reported black swan sighting in 1697 by Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh (in – where else? Australia.)Forever more after, you can’t believe Black Swans aren’t real (unless you believe pigeons aren’t real <nudge nudge wink wink>). Events that completely change your perceptions, beliefs and your future plans are therefore called “Black Swans”.

Dr Taleb’s book focuses less on prediction (you cannot easily predict the emergence of a game-changing Black Swan, even with absolute state-of-the-art tools if you have never seen one and there was no indication one would emerge, look what happened to the Titanic), so much as resilience in facing the unknown when it happens.

I think the internet was a Black Swan when it first came out. And Social Media. Life and growing up before and after these is forever changed. It’s why cultures all over the world rather abruptly experienced a rapidly accelerated amalgamation of practices and thoughts, our kids’ generation. The way kids socialise, learn and get in trouble before and after this Black Swan are forever changed…

The Chatroom is a real case that by now has, according to Youtuber “MrBallen*” whom I picked this up from, gone through the British courts whereby all media outlets were banned from revealing names. The story and cautionary tale however, remains. The presiding judge in the real court case would come out and say that “Well-schooled fiction writers” could not have come up with a better plot.

(*Just an aside about people who sign their name to what they say/write… and people who don’t (which will be especially significant later in this story)… “MrBallen” is former real life Navy SEAL John Allen. If you watch enough of his footage, there’s intro videos where he talks about his own high school life growing up: He was from a family who were pretty succesful students, but  had not applied himself fully. He also describes himself as having been rather full of himself in his younger days. He thought the rigours of SEAL training would turn him around, and it did. However 5 years in during a deployment in Afghanistan, a grenade went off next to him. Allen would describe how as he lay bleeding out fully expecting to die his biggest regret was he had put off having children. SO now he has 3, and a Youtube channel or two :D)

MrBallen’s material is CLEARLY MARKED if it is for MATURE AUDIENCES because some narrations describe violent acts and cruelty, others are of the superscary supernatural. It’s also fairly common to come across real life examples of anonymous writers of all kinds of nonsense, or who are basically stalkers, then creating all kinds of mischief, from getting people accused and sent to jail, to driving down property prices etc. So y’know, from finding so many real life stories of this sort, my default is – if anonymous, take it with a grain of salt.

Now Chatroom. I’ve summarised it in a way that’s less fantastical than the Youtube because if I include the more fantastical things some of the users were telling each other, one might be a lot more tempted to think, “I would be smarter than that. How are these kids so gullible?”

MrBallen’s narration is over 20 mins long. The actual case is 4 months’ worth of extensive teen-chatting 😀 (It’s also to be noted that within 4 months, two good kids – not aspiring gang members, not kids who were failing out, not kids who had disciplinary problems in school – two good kids went from attendance in a fairly innocuous chatroom (fashion, movies and sports topics – not porn, not even dating or gaming) to an attempted murder case.)

So my summary is deliberately more believable. And shorter. My point is some derivation of this can easily happen to almost “anyone”, by almost anyone.

“Mark” was at the time a 16 year old who was a mediocre student, from a loving family, and he had a good relationship with his parents. His family wasn’t very well-to-do, so he worked part time as a dishwasher for extra pocket money in Manchester.

“John” was at the time a 14 year old who was a straight-A student at a very prestigious school, incredibly intelligent, well-mannered, but from a broken home. His single mother struggled distractedly from failed relationship to failed relationship, and he had always assumed his biological father was one particular ex boyfriend of hers.

Mark would discover this popular chatroom and find that fellow teens enjoyed flirting with each other there. He got so into the chatroom and his online friends that he sometimes missed meals.

One day, Mark meets “Rachel” online in the main chatroom. When he eventually sees a picture of her, he’s smitten, and DMs (Direct Messages) her, not really expecting to get her attention. He’s overjoyed when she responds, and they spend the next few days chatting online incessantly. Around this time, Rachel mentions she knows this kid named John who’s a little younger than them, 14, but she thinks Mark and John will really hit it off and so Mark agrees to be introduced. Soon, the 3 become fast friends, creating a separate chat outside the main chatroom.

The online relationship between Mark and Rachel also blossoms, and the two 16 year olds soon realise they live close enough to make the commute and meet up. Mark chickens out repeatedly at the last minute, and then when he goes for it Rachel starts chickening out, until in the end they agree that what they have online is just too good to risk spoiling, by meeting up in person. John and Mark do meet however, and become best friends IRL (in real life).

One day about 3 months in, a new user “Kevin” joins the main chat. He introduces himself to the couple hundred other users as someone who enjoys “stalking” and “has a foot fetish.” Back in their little 3-member chat, John, Mark and Rachel are scoffing at what a poser this new kid is, how he’s obviously saying these things for attention.

Until that is, the day Rachel doesn’t log on. This is very, very rare, and Mark is immediately alarmed. Neither John nor the rest of the users in the main chat have any idea where Rachel is, and Mark had been contacted by “Attention-Seeking Kevin” the day before, whereby Kevin had said he knew Mark and Rachel were in an “online relationship,” and he was going to stalk Rachel.

Then Mark receives another message from Kevin saying Rachel is physically with him right now, and if he wants Rachel back, he (Mark) is to take a picture of his feet for Kevin’s collection (yes, really. His feet.)

Mark complies, eventually Rachel is back online and feels terrible about the prank and keeps saying she wants to meet up after all just to give him “a hug” (All very PG.)

This never happens in the end because when they finally get to arranging a meeting Rachel stands Mark up, eventually Rachel and Kevin both no longer log on anymore, and a rumour starts in the main chatroom about whether Kevin did something to Rachel. Or maybe they just lost interest in the chatroom? Did they start dating IRL? Maybe the “stalking” was just Rachel’s way of online-breaking up with Mark.

John and Mark are by now best friends, and John tries to delicately broach the subject of Rachel. Initially heartbroken, Mark refuses to talk about her. So John and Mark just carry on their own “bromance.”

It’s all good until the day “Janet” joins the chatroom. Janet will eventually contact Mark directly and tell him that she is not a teen like the rest of them, she is a 40 year old mum of 2 who works with the Secret Service (who would suspect a mum, right? And of two!) She says she’s there to keep an eye on Mark’s friend “John.”  

Janet will prove this irrevocably to Mark by providing very specific personal details about him, including things he’s said or done which she would otherwise have no way of knowing, unless the Secret Service had really looked him up. Also what he was wearing to school or to the mall, what he said during the day or right after he came home. “We have you watched, because you’re one of the good kids and we are looking to recruit some of you.”

Janet will go on to explain that “John” is in fact “James Bell,” who is sitting on a huge, huge trust fund. Huge as in it moves markets so the Secret Service keeps track of his friends – the more reliable ones are recruited to look out for him. (I cannot tell you how often I’ve heard this one – “Friends.” “Looking out for you.” By spying on you for someone else. Or, “Friends looking out for you” by removing your own direct line of sight regarding the subject, and colouring the information they give you to suit their purposes. Respect always, for the bosses who take a moment to see for themselves.)

Soon, Janet gives Mark a simple task: If you can escort John/James convincingly to his boring old dental appointment for the day without him suspecting anything, we’re interested.

Mark “passes the test,” by calling John up to hang out, then offering to tag along when John says he can only go to the mall after he sees his dentist. John is grateful for the company, they hang out at the mall after, and Mark starts to think This Is Great, We’re Already Friends, And I Could Be Setting Myself Up For A Summer Job, Maybe Even A Career.

Janet swears Mark to secrecy, even requiring he take an oath in the chatroom, and then will go on to dangle prospects in front of Mark, like an internship, an exciting sounding “initiation” ceremony into the Service, which he would need to attend in London. Even a girlfriend. She’ll put in a good word for him, recommend him for some youth awards…

Remember, Mark is a good kid from a not-very-well-off family. So “Your family would be so proud” really sells him. Mark bought into the whole youth award, jump-start career etc because he wanted to make his family proud. He does however question how he will get to London without telling his parents, and Janet will immediately reassure him the adults will let his parents know once he’s on the way over. “There’s just this one more task to get out of the way, before I book your tickets….”

That’s when the directive changes from protecting John/James Bell… to stabbing him with a kitchen knife.

Your beloved friend John, Janet explains gently, has an inoperable brain tumour. He’s going to die any day now. For the Secret Service to more easily access the fund, they need to be right there for the body, not risk it falling into various other hands, particularly those of terrorists.

So make it at this particular time and place, make it quick, make it like a mugging in an alley, say your goodbyes and then call the police when you’re sure he’s gone. “I’ll arrive with the police to explain the Secret Service’s involvement”, Janet assures him.

And so Mark takes his friend John to an alley, puts his arm around the younger boy, then plunges a large kitchen knife into his stomach and chest. He stays there fondly with John and when he thinks the younger boy is gone, he calls the police to report the “mugging”.

Janet does not arrive with the police. Also, they discover John is not yet dead and rush him to the hospital. He will crash and flatline two more times, but ultimately ER staff manage to save him. Eventually under questioning, John will tell police it was Mark who stabbed him. In police custody, Mark will repeatedly ask them to call Janet at the Secret Service to explain why he did it and surprise, surprise, there is no Janet at the Secret Service.

Now get this:

In the ensuing investigation into the chatroom, it is determined “Rachel”, “Kevin”, “Janet” and about 180 other user accounts were all created and solely controlled by John. By all means take a moment to read that again.

And here’s where I make blog (and you… other people can stop screaming about the boring old posts where I wrote about my own little kids’ haircuts and stuff YES I SAW THAT, THE POST IS SUPER OLD, I HAVE TOO MANY COMMENTS TO GO THRU EVERYTHING, NO I DON’T ALWAYS SEE THEM ALL this is a hobby):

14 year old straight-A student John appeared initially rarely as himself in the chatroom. To other users, he thus came across as not too interested, unlike Mark, who was an avid user of his one account. (Another thing to note about scanning through accounts – obviously John was busy being >180 other users, and scanning anonymous users tells you absolutely nothing about how many users are in there and how active they really are. Zilch.)

Mark’s online girlfriend and sometime soulmate Rachel – was John. (If you thought this was a cool trick to play on someone else, remember the principal of Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword. The more you get into this (spend time on it, engage users, spin webs – life of a swordsman sort of thing), the higher the chance you’re next.) How about playing videogames instead 😀 I’m just sayin’ <shrugs>

Kevin the Stalker and Foot Fetishist – also John (and created because John got jealous of Mark’s bond with Rachel and was looking for a way to get rid of Rachel.) Janet the Secret Service Agent and Middle-aged Mum of 2 – John.

Why did John as Janet ask Mark to kill him?

Because John had discovered that the man he always thought was his biological father wasn’t his father at all. His real biological father had abandoned him as a newborn and he had no idea who he was. That was the initial trigger. Unforeseen event, Black Swan he could not see coming.

Lonely, racked by guilt at all the people believing his lies, dreading the day his friendship with Mark would end when Mark found out what he was doing (again, Live By The Sword Die By The Sword – you are only human yourself, it will also eventually affect you) that’s the bit about building resilience by say, not spinning the entire web of lies which will eat into your mental health, John had decided to end his own life. Except he adored Mark, so he wanted Mark to be the one to do it for him.

Again: John is a good kid, strong student, made it into a prestigious school, never thought the first small step of lying online anonymously for innocent little kicks would snowball all the way.

He had no way of foreseeing that he would abruptly discover his biological father was not his biological father and someone he never knew had abandoned him and that this revelation would devastate him and make him more vulnerable. What he was feeling a little bad about, struggling to make right, became something he could no longer handle when a big fat black swan landed with a thump next to his keyboard. You now have John’s hindsight.

It could’ve been worse (this is where everyone starts screaming at me :D). But seriously – John could have manipulated Mark to stab someone else. “Why don’t I just put Mark in jail so I don’t have to face the music with him? My dad’s not my dad, I’m justified and entitled to this little indiscretion. Stuff hasn’t gone smoothly for me, so this is my right.” Very lucky that didn’t happen, right?

For all John’s control over Mark and perhaps a few other teenagers who might have stayed chatting more regularly, there doesn’t seem to have been pornography, extortion, backstabbing, blackmail (with the exception of Kevin’s request for a foot shot – in fact, John as Kevin only asked to see feet. And probably so he could eventually kill off the “Rachel” persona and continue the friendship with Mark as himself.) Again, the amount of things that could’ve gone wayyy more wrong all along the way is the real cautionary tale. We should milk this one for precautions all we can:

1) John didn’t need to have special access or be a computer hacker. He was not a popular Youtuber or videogamer with a loyal following and a tonne of views. He’s a 14 year old who simply created >180 user accounts in a chatroom, and strung a 16 year old along to be his friend, bodyguard and ultimately his killer.

The thing about reaching a certain stage in your acquisition for knowledge – usually if you get there with a coach/ instructor/ teacher/ tutor, the syllabus almost always includes ingrained “controls”. In dealing you must learn and pass regular tests on compliance rules. In martial arts or uniform units that require strict discipline you don’t get to progress if you are unable to exhibit sufficient maturity and control. Pick out any…. Samurai sword class say, and you will see the elaborate respect for the weapon that beginners have to learn first. What did whatshiswebface say, With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. The proverbial kitchen knife you buy from the supermarket does not come with say, mandatory safety training. Neither does the chatroom of anonymous users. The users may not be real… but the misinformation and risk is.

So when just “anyone” can create anonymous chat accounts and many others think they’re telling someone something private in a chat… 180 of those accounts would all have been John in this case. As such, someone more mean spirited could have convinced people to fight each other. Mark was telling John everything. Mark was professing his love for Rachel…. To John. Note that Mark never wanted to talk to John John about Rachel, how do you think he felt when he found out John is Rachel? That guilt ultimately sent John spiralling into a suicide attempt.

2)Mark, particularly coming from a loving and honest home, was no match for John. Mark could not conceive of such deception, because he had probably never been lied to to that extent before. The younger boy on the other hand, must have seen countless ex-boyfriends of his mother’s string her along, break promises, etc etc.

Consider the (albeit perfectly understandable) propensity of an angry, disillusioned teen who is devastated and hurting, to inflict the same on others. Bear in mind also that John came from a highly prestigious school. Kids were likely competitive. He doesn’t appear to have used the chatroom to erm, “eliminate competition” in school or really, anything else like that.

All John used his dominance in the chatroom for was to look for a friend. And in his despair, he had then manipulated his friend to take him out, staying by his side in what he had expected were his final moments. John’s lot is imbued with pathos particularly when you consider the amount of power he wielded which he mostly used to find friends instead of hurting others just because he was hurting. He really was a good kid with good prospects in school (he didn’t get jail time but apparently there was quite some head-scratching about the fact he had attempted to engineer his own demise with the chatroom).

So yeah, it could’ve been way, way worse. The fact John was convincing enough for Mark to fall for Rachel, he could’ve created way more mischief with relationships, blackmail, gossip. He could have humiliated other kids deliberately, convinced them to take their own lives, etc etc particularly if he was already suicidal.

And if you think that level of “power” is “cool,” remember, Live by the sword, die by the sword.

What if someone else in John’s position had shared Mark’s intimate exchanges with Rachel publicly? Not to mention Mark’s “foot shot” to Kevin (who was also John). It could have been a much more traumatic experience for Mark. As is, the “good kid with a close relationship with his parents who thought he had pursued a girl his own age and later was going to line up a job for himself and make his parents proud” ended up doing jail time for almost killing someone.

3) Someone you meet in a chatroom could literally be anyone. This seems obvious, but go back up and look at how “Janet” proved to Mark she was who she said she was. Mark apparently had asked for various means of proof Janet was who she said she was.

All the intimate details about Mark’s schedule, what he’d said or done during the day, what he was wearing…. NOW you realise why Janet had all that information? Because she was John, hanging out with Mark after school. Mark told John all those things.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do it. This is the biggest hole or backdoor into any secure system – the human user. It’s not the system, it’s not malware or viruses, it’s humans v other humans. The tools may warrant a Black Swan stamp, but an understanding of and ability to manage the humans in the system will always be crucial. Without this, the tech is nothing.

Mark would hear about what John did for the first time at the court hearing. (Apparently his jaw hit the floor and stayed there for the rest of the day.) He ultimately received 8 months of jail time because well he did freaking stab someone. Both boys don’t get unsupervised internet for years and erm, no chatrooms or contact with each other ever.

Ends

Starting with a quest for honour along the journey to become a better person, we get distracted by something darkly funny along the way to making better humans.

Arty-farty and over 2 hours of inexplicable scenes long, Gawain and the Green Knight (movie but also original Middle English poem with unknown 14th century author) is constructed so you see the shame and failure of heroes and kings, for they have resounding feet of clay, just like every other human.

Tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table inspire romantic views of deep seated honour, restraint, purity and love. Medieval commoners dreamt of a seat at the (proverbial and literal) table, meaning you were accepted, respected, revered by society. In truth, knights were thugs. They took what they wanted, when they wanted, and were just the biggest bullies with swords and armour. They were initially the pole opposite of what they were made out to be in folklore. The lore was to inspire them onto the straight and narrow.

On Christmas Day, The Green Knight walks into King Arthur’s court. For some, this might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but for us, more of an inside one 😉 The Green Knight’s challenge is this: Deal me a blow, but a year from now, be prepared to receive the same from me. Call it karma, if you will.

Most of King Arthur’s knights demur – the Green Knight is, very literally, green. A creaking, talking tree shaped like a giant man, who rides in on an impressive horse, also green. (Commentators have drawn the analogy to Nature And Humans’ Perpetual Mistreatment Of, until the day Nature decides to clap back, for green is the colour of living things, but also decay, as all earthly bodies eventually will; The Green Knight originated in the pagan cultures of Nature deities predating Christianity.)

Gawain, the King’s nephew and heir to the throne, an immature wastrel expertly played by Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame, is eager to make a name for himself in the easiest way possible, and therefore steps forward: Lemme Make A Name For Myself The Easy Way – By Taking Down This Dude. Because years of training and character building are too much – yuck – work.

Just prior to the Green Knight’s appearance (which btw is engineered in the movie by Gawain’s mother Morgan LeFay* by casting a spell), his uncle had asked him for a knightly tale of valour and honour for their Round Table gathering. Gawain had bashfully returned that he has none. This is a superb understatement because he has just spent Christmas Eve the same way he does most nights, at the brothel.

*Not every version of Gawain and GK has LeFay, an apprentice of Merlin the Magician, as his mother (more later). The choice in this movie adaptation is significant – Gawain is a most flawed youth who, via many tests of character (that he fails and experiences ever greater shame in knowing) eventually grows into the strength of character required of him. (This is also the opposite of the original written work from the 14th century thereabouts, where Gawain will pass all the lesser tests, only to fail in the end.)

King: What do you hope to gain, by facing all of this? Gawain: Honour.

An immature Gawain decides that “honour” shalt be obtained by beheading the Green Knight in a “Free Lunch” move, for dead men return no blows. (Like, why can’t they just fistbump?)

Also, King Arthur talks of the peace he and his knights have brought to the lands not because it’s true, but because it is what great kings do. Talk. Of peace. On Christmas Day King Arthur’s Rally His Knights Speech ticks all the boxes… and then later you see bodies strewn about the battlefield just outside (everyone who might oppose is dead, as the people of the kingdom then resort to scavenging and robbery to survive. Because we all know how Brutus Is An Honourable Man.)

As for the Green Knight, he picks up his severed head, reminds Gawain he must now receive the same blow in a year’s time, and rides off on his green horse. Laughing.

Merry Christmas, dumbass.

Also a shining candidacy for the Darwin Awards, that ubiquitous list named after evolution scientist Charles Darwin, of people who “do humanity a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool.” Awards recipients include bungee jumpers whose home-made bungee cord is longer than the distance they are jumping, increasingly nowadays the idiots who post footage of themselves dangling off hi-rise buildings and cliffs on social media for likes.

So yes there is method to my madness drawing attention to horrendous list of otherwise perfectly healthy people (you must be “free of mental defect and sufficiently mature,” for the decision to qualify as “stupid”) and YES A GIRL CAME UP WITH THIS (yes there are girls who make the list too.)

A graduate in molecular biology from U.Cal Berkeley, Wendy Northcutt went on to study neurobiology at Stanford, specialising in cancer and telomerase research. The Darwin Awards was what she did in her free time. There are a heck lotta smart girls (and boys) out there who don’t spend their free time bitching or envying on or doing stupid things for social media, I’m just sayin’<shrugs>.

The Darwin Awards may be almost 30 years old, but even that’s nowhere near where it all began – Greek philosopher Plato, also considered the founder of Western political philosophy, thought certain human beings should not be allowed to reproduce. To that end, he purportedly created a mathematical formula to determine who should be allowed. (mathsisfunmathsisfunmathsisfun).

Long before Guardians of the Galaxy (aliens and a racoon in their ranks! The racoon’s the smartest one, he’s a weapons expert and battle strategist!), there were Plato’s Guardians of the Republic, a book in which he insisted power needed to lie with the smartest and most moral. The most important subject in the syllabus was to be that which affects the soul.

.

This is FREAKING TRIPPY because HOW do you decide WHO is “smartest and most moral?” Like, onna scale of 1 to 10? Just the “and” in that sentence is going to blow your mind because HOW are you going to price in correlation? How correlated are brains to strength of character (“are smart people necessarily moral/noble? “Not at all” = Darth Vader, “Totally” = Luke Skywalker? Star Wars fans will already know why I picked the Skywalkers because Vader wasn’t Pure Evil With Brains at all, early on. Monte Carlo Simulation that whole family, right down to WhatshisScarface who had the audacity to stab Han Solo (thereby also myself) through the heart with the lightsaber. Children Shouldn’t Play With Lasers Please.)

.

Anyway. If you don’t want to think about inclusion for racoons, how about for doctors? Off on a further tangent that included a brief listen to the discussions on gene editing (a “better” way to select “smartest and most moral”?), what struck me was how field experts like Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee would sit down with Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna about CRISPR technology (to cure cancer, blindness, sickle-cell disease; also this article about a legally-blind-from-birth 55 year old having her vision restored with the technology), and when they opened the floor for questions from the audience, there were people who asked things like 1) whether the diseases cured first were those primarily experienced by white or by black people, and if 2) more people could be genetically modified to better adapt to life on say, Mars (Dr Mukherjee: he would like to cure cancer first, before sending more people to space.)

Referring back to Plato’s formula for reproduction rights, Dr Mukherjee also points out how he wouldn’t have been born either, because his second-degree relatives have a history of severe mental illness. His book The Gene: An Intimate History is dedicated to his grandmother whose life was consumed in protecting his uncles from the world, and which his older daughter read aged 13 (thereby learning her family history of said illness.) I mention as an illustration that what you do with the hand you are dealt can be much more important than the actual hand. True for life as well as for Uno. How many people strive to find cures, inventions, new ways of doing things because of as well as in spite of the hand they’re dealt.

SO, predicting improving futures by reading the genome and changing genetic information: Can we get another look at Plato’s “smart and moral” again, please? Maybe everyone gets to be racoons in the further future. O-r we could stay on Earth, have a lot more cures for existing ailments, and take that trip in the Metaverse. (Even Zuckerberg no longer thinks a “face book” is sucha good idea). AR/VR over Social Media.  

OK back to Gawain and the Green Knight. Because we don’t genetically engineer strength of character. Here lies the journey to integrity, responsibility and maturity, of the guy who would be the next King.

Why greatness, why is goodness not enough?

The line is spoken by Essel*, Gawain’s dalliance, a girl of lower class who is utterly in love with him, and whom he knows he will cast aside without thought when he claims the throne. For Gawain is not a good man, and his attempt at greatness is because he has no goodness within him. Greatness, his pursuit of, becomes his final attempt at justifying his royal lineage.

One of the central themes of the movie adaptation of this medieval poem is virtue as vanity. The pursuit of values (honour, morality) so they can be worn like a decoration, to make the nobility look good. Film footage pans to what he imagines life will look like as a ruler who is unworthy, and knows it.

Is it better to live in shame and dishonour, or to die honourably? Commentators have highlighted the obvious parallel to Japanese Samurai and their strict and elaborate code of conduct, of which death, before dishonour. (Yet while principles, it would seem, are for those who can afford them (everyone has a price. Cheap and low, or sky high, still a price), How ’bout a third option: Don’t take the high-risk, easy way out, keep honour intact. Walk away from idiot escapades, honour intact, AND alive. Also, watch more Darwin Awards for Stupid Things NOT To Try.)

Let’s not forget the Elephant in the Room. Bringing the Parent to the Party, Sarita Choudhury played Gawain’s mother so well that Lowery has said in interviews that he ended up expanding the part for her.

When Gawain beheads the Green Knight, his mother (who in the first place orchestrated the entire thing hoping her son would “grow up” only to have him do… that), then provides her son with the biggest out. She supplies a magic belt that will protect him from harm when he must fulfil his honour-bound pledge to receive the same blow (thereby defeating the whole purpose of the quest).

For story-teller and audience however, it is the eternal struggle a loving parent faces – we want our kids to grow up strong, resilient of both body and mind, of high integrity…. But our actively working towards this end for our kids ironically often risks achieving the opposite, we risk impairing the development of their “grit” (ref: Angela Duckworth). There is no safety net when Eagle Dad erm, Sends Little Eaglet off Into The Wide World (fine, pushes eaglet off cliff to fly or die). And where a parent stands on this is rarely binary, more like a spectrum. We’d just keep shifting back and forth, probably agonising along the way as well.

Morgan Le Fay illustrates this by doing something many parents can identify with – she tries to push her son into the deep end by summoning the Green Knight… only to balk when it goes too far. As Gawain draws closer to the Green Chapel, her voice (coming out of a wild fox, no less) will beseech him to turn back and come home to her.

In some poetic variation of Gawain’s own beheading challenge is also the role of the Ghost of St Winifred during one of Gawain’s lesser challenges. After being robbed (thereby also losing the Green Knight’s axe left behind for the 1yr term until he must deliver it and himself to receive its blow), Gawain comes across an empty house at one point and decides to spend the night, only to encounter the spirit. Unable to tell she has no physical body, guess what he decides to try, for she was a beautiful young girl in life.

For resisting defilement (Winifred refuses a suitor’s advances only to end up physically having to fight him off as well), her assailant returned in the night and beheaded her while she slept. The people then named her St Winifred, and it is her head/skull, thrown into a pond by her assailant, that she requests Gawain help her retrieve. Again, Gawain’s response is less than noble:

What will you give me, if I do this?

Her voice of his conscience shames him: Why do you ask me this?

What he receives after he recovers her remains is…. the Green Knight’s axe, which he had earlier lost when waylaid by the scavengers of his uncle’s “peaceful kingdom,” so he can proceed on his quest.

We know the ending, but how we get there is quite the trip... After many, many, many, many struggles and bumbles, Gawain will finally face the Green Knight’s blow – without the magical protection of his mother. Whether the Knight actually deals the blow is left ambiguous, because the point of the telling is not Did Gawain Die In The End, it is his choice to be accountable for his actions.

Gawain: Is there all there is?

Green Knight (holding axe): What else ought there be?

Ends.

ps: Happy Diwali, dears 😉

In the meeting of wills between Octopus and Human, there is, however bizarrely, a common ground. And for some, unique relationships and an unconventional form of therapeutic healing, in the bittersweet joy of falling in love with someone of such disproportionately short lifespan, for one of its sentience.

“Fish stress” is the odor of “heat-shock” intercellular proteins released by plants and animals initially associated with heat, but more recently other stresses as well. Stressy octopuses and jellyfish smell like geraniums, anemones smell salty-sour. The title line is spoken by senior freshwater aquarist Scott Dowd who gets worried detecting it around the cichlids who have just changed tanks. People who spend their working lives in aquariums can detect such smells, writes author Sy Montgomery in her New York Times Bestseller, the Soul of an Octopus, just as many of us unconsciously react to the angle of a horse’s ears, height of a dog’s tail, expression in a cat’s eyes.

Cover your eyes for just several days, and your sight neurons will already be repurposing themselves, becoming devoted to your sense of touch, writes neuro-scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in 7 ½ Lessons About the Brain. On one hand, this is a powerful illustration how far even simple stimulations can take our brains. Any neuron can do more than one thing. It is a brain’s special ability to configure itself into an enormous number of distinct neural patterns, says Barrett. (On the other hand, how many extra neurons are we employing for mindless cellphone screen scrolling nowadays, that might otherwise be deployed for other functions. There is enough yet unknown, enough potential, to provide for “miracle” stories (also science fiction featuring Scarlett Johannson and Bradley Cooper – quick digression.))

ScarJo is very, very convincing playing Lucy, the college girl abroad who dates the wrong guy in the early scenes (I showed the kids bits of it for an unrelated reason – Lucy knows she’s with the wrong guy, she keeps attempting to walk away, only to be manipulatively delayed j-ust a little while longer…. right until he handcuffs her to a briefcase in front of what turns out to be an HQ of the South Korean kkangpae, forcing her to deliver it in order to get it off her wrist. Her regret and terror at ending up in the situation from not getting away from the guy fast enough is a very powerful lesson expertly played by ScarJo, to Not Hesitate – WALK AWAY NOW!! (Also, Choi Min-Sik is super scary as the kkangpae boss.)

Already incriminated, she is forced to be a drug mule, then gets punched in the stomach fending off a thug’s advances, resulting in the sausage-like bags of the experimental smart drug she was carrying in her stomach splitting open, releasing lethal doses into her system. She becomes supersmart for a couple days, taking out the kkangpae, after which “Lucy” as we know her dies, her brain evolving into some kind of super computer.

Bradley Cooper’s Limitless portrays the increasingly disturbing side effects of smart drug use, but the happy ending is, being smart (:D), he eventually realises the first thing he should have done is figure out how to succeed without drugs. He ends up living his best successful life without needing to take anything 🙂 It was also a mini series for awhile.

Image from Why Limitless and Lucy are Medically Unsound article, and this is a quick clip that rushes through the 2 movies’ similarities.

A-nd now we’ve established No Free Lunch holds true in the matter of “smart drugs”, let’s go back to octopuses 🙂

How do you explain colour to a blind person? Ask the octopus.

While octopuses have 30-50 different patterns/colours at their disposal and can change colour, pattern and texture in 7/10s of a second, they are essentially colour blind, equipped with just the cones (cells that catch light and differentiate colour) that see black and white. But wait – like I used to say with new-fangled investment products, where’s the catch?

There is an old (popular) Tumblr account titled WTF Evolution by published science writer Mara Grunbaum with the tagline Go Home Evolution, You Are Drunk because of all the weird, whacky real animals that exist right here (not jumping on the Bash Bezos Bandwagon, but Aliens In Space: 0. Aliens On Earth: We Still Can’t Count Exactly How Many). Sure lots of these “aliens” are good to eat (sorry), but I strongly believe that is really not the only reason they’re on this planet. While we identify various animals carrying strains of diseases, I believe everything has a “good” and a “bad”, (that humans exploit or envy because of our flawed or limited ways of looking at things). Within living things lies the key to so many ideas we could employ that could make our world better.

I think a wider knowledge of how living things have developed efficient systems – dare I coin “Intelligent Design” (Grunbaum quips “Unintelligible Design”) – would greatly enrich the way we designed and built all manner of technology and artificial intelligence as well.

A human brain has 4 lobes. An octopus brain has 50-75 lobes. Octopuses have mouths in their armpits, more brain cells in their arms than in their heads, which also have their esophagus running right through it. Their arms may have different personalities. Research shows they may have “shy” arms, and “bold” arms). It was also found (by the Binyimin Hochner laboratory, according to the book Other Minds) that they took a lot longer to find food if the arm had to also rely on the brain/ eyes attached to it, in a special maze where the arm had to leave the water conduit and the animal had to navigate the final portion of the see-through maze the way a human uses his/her arms.

Some aquariums keep guide books handy for volunteers and staff to ensure the octopuses are kept entertained and stimulated. Mr Potato Head is a favourite for “Octopus Enrichment”. “Octopus Psychologist” is an actual vocation.

Prof. Jennifer Mather (I feel making the obvious “Real Dr Octopus” quip would not do her justice) taught Child Development Perception, Lifespan Development of Women, and Psychology of Aging (in humans) at the University of Lethbridge, before studying cephalopods in waters ranging from Moorea to Okinawa. Aged around 69 at the time of Montgomery’s Soul of the Octopus release in 2015, Mather’s work went from overlooked/ dismissed at a time when people neither believed animals had personalities nor that women could be capable field scientists, to widely respected and cited by neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neuroanatomists, and the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness which counts late great Stephen Hawking as a signatory.

“Over the past decades, we as researchers have struggled… Ethical consideration of animals has followed our general human-centered principle: the more they look like us, the more likely we are to consider their welfare…” – Prof Mather in Octopus, a Natural History.

Because cephalopods were not covered by animal cruelty laws in the past, the ways in which experiments used to be conducted on them could be quite disturbing.

Today, it’s official that electric eels dream (and shock things in their sleep), even lobsters have different personalities, turtles develop crushes (not necessarily on other turtles, leading to possessive nipping of fish competitors) and octopuses….. really get into all kinds of trouble. If you want a battle of wits with an alien intelligence, octopuses are a good (mental) trip…

“Did you ASK me first?”

Pre-vet students describe their study to measure cephalopod IQ by having small octopuses navigate mazes morphing into a seeming One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest-like conspiracy among test subjects to not cooperate. Instead of Mental Patients vs Nurses, it was Octopuses vs Students. The animals in the study made it extra difficult for researchers – they hid, stuck fast to the sides of tanks making it close to impossible to forcibly detach them (octopus suckers are unexpectedly strong, which is why aquariums caution against allowing tentacles on faces/eyes), or else feigned compliance… only to springboard themselves off capture nets and scurry off along the floor of the lab.

One choice subject chose the moment her student researcher was dressed in a nice suit and had just started the cameras rolling to film her thesis presentation, to hose her with tank water from top to toe. (Many different accounts of octopus encounters illustrate they use their jets to play with toys or mess with humans. These include destroying parts of experiments they don’t like – which is what one animal did when they tried to train him to pull a lever for food. Yes, he recognised the lever. No, he was not going to pull it. Every time he saw the lever coming, he hosed the researcher. Finally, he took apart the lever so they would stop bringing it.)

Back in 2000, the Seattle Aquarium placed an octopus in a huge tank with several 4-5 foot sharks. The average octopus in the wild is a solitary creature that spends 70-90% of its time hiding. Concerned for the welfare of the boneless, shell-less cephalopod, the aquarium provided ample hiding places for it, hoping it wouldn’t get too stressed by the large predators swooping about above it.

CCTV footage however revealed they should have worried about the sharks, not the octopus. They were right that the octopus did not like having sharks in its neighbourhood. However no one could have predicted that left with no further means of distancing itself from the potential predators, this particular octopus (for they vary greatly in personality), decided to systematically take out the sharks one by one. Before any sharks ever attacked the octopus, aquarium staff regularly found a dead shark at the bottom of the tank. (Sharks have to keep moving to breathe; if you immobilise them with tentacles, they drown.)

Remarks about the animal’s thinking processes include that we barely understand them enough to even test them. Yet the true accounts in Montgomery’s Soul illustrate how in the meeting of wills between Octopus and Human, there is, however bizarrely, a common ground. (Which is the other big reason I started inhaling octopus books.)

For some people in Sy Montgomery’s Soul of an Octopus account, unique relationships and an unconventional form of therapeutic healing are formed, in the bittersweet joy of falling in love with someone of such disproportionately short lifespan, for one of its sentience:

The New England Aquarium, the backdrop for the majority of Montgomery’s encounters, has a volunteer program that at time of telling coordinated some 662 adult and 100 teen volunteers pre-covid, contributing an estimated USD 2million worth of time and energy. Among the volunteers are Iran-born Wilson who attended boarding school in the UK followed by Colombia University in New York, where he studied chemical engineering. Now in his late 70s and a grandfather of nearly grown grandchildren, he divides his time between the aquarium (building octopus enrichment toys), hospice visits to his Russian/Polish/American wife, and recuperation from major back surgery.

“It’s not easy having a twin that’s like this…” Christa is 25, has an upper lip piercing, an advanced Biology degree, a part time job 4-5 nights in a bar, and is working to gain legal custody of her special needs brother (their parents provide a loving and safe home, but Christa describes feeling angry and upset her twin hadn’t been able to join her at college and has wanted to keep him with her since.)

Danny has pervasive developmental disorder, with at times disabling delay in acquiring basic skills, but he starts every morning just the happiest person. Christa’s 10 year plan is to score a 2-bedroom for them both near the aquarium, full-time employment there, and hopefully also a job for Danny in the gift shop someday. By the end of that summer she has secured the one full-time job that came up, beating 50 other hopefuls, in the aquarium’s education department.

“Going behind the scenes at the aquarium changed my life… The people here are as different from regular people as an octopus.” 16 year old Anna, enrolled in “special school” as she calls it, feels misunderstood, has an athletic male twin very unlike herself. Also Aspergers, ADD, migraines and a tremor that gets much worse when she is under stress, and requires various constant medications (she’s been bitten by an octopus when she changed medications much to the alarm of the aquarium and their medics’ careful attention – bites are very rare, and if an octopus, even a less venomous species, chooses to envenomate its bite and the human is allergic, it can be potentially life threatening. Anna’s bite was not envenomated (and a small scratch but they take even those very seriously because it’s coming from an octopus not a hamster), and her biggest concern was not being allowed near the octopuses after being bitten. She was still allowed, and not bitten again).

Anna initially enrolled in summer “fish camp” around 6^th grade. Her eagerness at camp had led to an invitation to see one of the labs, by an aquarium department head who used to teach high school. Unable to read an analog watch at the time and anxious she would miss the appointment, she had waited outside the door for the entire hour until the staff returned to show her around.

When an octopus touches you or even if you simply touch their water, their skin can taste the chemicals in your tears, differentiating between “emotional” tears (sadness or joy produces certain chemicals), the change in your body chemistry when you feel pain or switch medications…. And in Soul they appear repelled by the taste of pack-a-day-smokers, which Montgomery speculates is because nicotine is toxic to many animals.

When her best friend Shaira ended her life, Anna had tried to as well. Volunteering at the aquarium Anna, who had occasionally sought escape into drugs after losing Shaira, couldn’t imagine “using” around the animals. Tending her beloved friend’s grave site as well as curious young octopuses, she described the time “the worst summer of my life… but my days at the aquarium ..were the best.”

“I’ve learned that happiness and sadness are not mutually exclusive.” She has also learned the Latin names of every marine vertebrate and invertebrate at the aquarium.

**Updated 30 May 2021 – NOW Son plays Valorant, so he’s not on unlimited game time anymore 🙂

This started out as accessing Digital Asset market via more traditional derivative means, but I got distracted by VIDEO GAMES. Which do people want to read first: How To Access The Digital Assets Market Through Traditional Structured Investment Products Offerings, or How To Get The Most Out Of Your Kids’ Love Of Video Games. This is hard. So the story goes…

Practically every parent who has handed their cellphone to their child to play games on (and more) would understand how much we spend on in-game purchases without thinking about it. Roblox-playing tweens already trade in-game gifts – XP, skins/ avatars, virtual weapons/special abilities with a sophistication that may surprise you, if you ask your kid to tell you a bit more about their latest gaming purchase/ trade with their friends. (They also engage in all manner of wranglings to try to get each other to give them favours in the games :D)

Think digital version of what goes down on Pawn Stars from my previous post – instead of Samurai swords and cannons, now it’s superpowers and skins, dragon eggs and mutant cats. Don’t scoff – the most expensive Cryptokitty is named “Dragon” and found a new virtual wallet for the USD 172,000* equivalent of ETH (Ether, second largest cryptocurrency by market cap after Bitcoin, of the Ethereum blockchain). The next two runners up in expensive weird animals traded over USD 100,000 as well.

*Dragon’s sale caused some head-scratching, because she is a ninth-generation cat, ie fairly “new”. The other two kitties to exchange hands above the USD 100k mark are Gen-0s. And gamer reactions to all three trades are a good indication how our very human purchase preferences have not evolved since Pawn Stars – first edition Cryptokitties trading prices mimic that of say, first edition physical books – original and old, and therefore rare.

Well… better the weird virtual cats than the traditional stock market with Game Stop shares? (Mark Cuban told press his 11 year old son made money off the massive fundamental-light run up in Game Stop, and I was just wondering how many more billionaire’s kids are cutting their teeth in the stock market because I can’t keep up with actual data and analyst research, for the Reddit chatrooms.)

A little closer to “normal” parenting adventures, one of 13 year old Son’s closest friends dropped serious birthday cash recently to greatly increase his chances at achieving a coveted game level and special abilities for his game character. As in, given a choice of what he would like to spend his gift cash on, he did not choose clothes, comic books or even a cellphone – he chose to beef up his online gaming presence.

Except there was a glitch followed by an update, everyone got kicked off the server for maintenance, and he didn’t get to chalk up the hours playing That Purchase To Increase His Chances Of Achieving Coveted Game XP.

Call it “bad luck”, one of those unforeseen occurrences in the “market” that affects one of your “investments.” In this case, said investment was in a digital asset. (Completely understandable as well, if this illustration is one reason traditional Old Money in the Wealth Management space tends to be wary of accessing digital assets outright, for their investment portfolio.)

What happens next among Son’s friends is also vaguely familiar, except instead of a heated conversation with a bank relationship manager, we have a distraught 14 year old frantically typing messages to a server operator as his sympathetic friends closely watch this unfold (same difference :D) A lot of his purchase is not recoverable – the update no longer supports it. (This btw also parallels real concerns about Ethereum updates outside the gaming-verse, and how much of the older versions are supported by the upgrades. And then think whether it’s going to be easy currently to get a swap counterpart to hedge at least part of this, or insure it.)

After some serious inventory checking and pooling, the friends convert what in-game inventory they can spare (earned via mostly playing various challenges over the months), to lessen Birthday Boy’s pain. So Happy Birthday, Son’s Friend – you found out you have some real friends. Temporary loss of potential Gaming XP is a relatively low price to pay to find this out.

Somewhere in there is a story of unsung value from playing video games. We think the kids aren’t interacting, and sure they aren’t say, sitting around a café chatting (which is likely going to include a cellphone screen and social media anyways, nowadays), but the breadth and depth of what they learn about each other in game settings can be quite substantial:

Experiencing a Cheap Shot or Selfish Player carries a hidden value besides the obnoxious obvious: Someone who takes pride in a cheap shot, m-ight not have very much more to be proud of. Insecurity, in my opinion, is lethal. It makes people behave out of character, or else turns them into the worst version of themselves. Knowing this now, while playing video games, saves discovering you have a toxic teammate too late, when you have a school project and grade at stake (Not.. that it’s happened recently, I’m just sayin’<shrugs>).

That last is inspired by a trader in my former work life who once annoyedly typed in his inhouse market update (most traders disliked this chore and just wanted to get back to trading, resulting in some extremely candid and unfiltered remarks they rightly assumed would get cleaned up in the compilations for the bank sales teams to circulate to clients). So this trader mentioned one of his counterparts had once again dealt in a self-serving manner when the different houses were offloading various positions amongst themselves the previous day, and “when it’s (that counterpart’s) turn to need (a favour in the market)………”.

(On a separate note, that is also an illustration why I didn’t rush to write about ideas to theoretically hedge/ insure cryptos and other digital assets C2C via traditional derivative means – intuitively, without enough counterparts making a price or to potentially trade with, a potential insurer/hedger is likely to quote wide. There’s not enough players, let alone enough established players, in the crypto insurance market yet. There may “never” be, with current conditions once the hype dies down. There would have to be some major changes, because blockchain is like the anti-ESG investment – it uses a massive amount of energy. Said major changes then need some time to be tried and tested and accepted.

Between the attractiveness of Impact Investing (which many more traditional players in the wealth management sector can understand :)), the popularity of young activists like Greta Thunberg and the natural reluctance* of Old Money to trust technology, digital assets aren’t going to completely take over the investing world just yet. (*It is their money. If you cannot make them comfortable, they’re not buying. And the hacking of clouds and dodgy updates are bound to cause discomfort. If you push too hard, you risk mis-sell allegations. If your legal documentation hasn’t caught up yet, your own risk of mis-sell allegations is going to be higher… Then there is Deloitte‘s paper on tokenisation, which at one point likens it to traditional securitisation. Well to the extent securitisation can sub for tokenisation, there is then even less of a rush to get into the new and not yet tested/ sufficiently regulated platform right away, particularly if the original technology is increasingly widely recognised to have massive energy consumption.)

Architect and artist Chris Precht, formerly a large advocate of digital art assets, estimates that the amount of computing power needed to reproduce the 100 copies each, of 3 art pieces he was selling, equalled the amount of electricity the average European would consume in two decades.

Other independent researchers place the creation of your average NFT (non-fungible token) as having a similar-sized carbon footprint as 200 kgs of planet-warming carbon, or driving 500 miles in an American gasoline-powered car. Websites like CryptoartWTF share info about energy usage and environmental impact.

NYT story here.

This then means they need to find alternatives to the blockchain “proof of work”, for eg “proof of stake”… which then has its own limitations. Which means more updates. And that thing I said about updates accommodating older versions and insurers being willing to quote, not to mention where legal documentation and regulation is on these things. Think of a traditional Credit Default Swap (CDS) used to hedge bond exposure.

The legal definition of what constitutes a “default” that would trigger the swap in the Credit Default Swap required quite some work and experience, before relatively standardised documentation could be agreed on. That legal documentation became key, when things like too many CDSes had been written C2C, resulting in a shortage of defaulted bond to deliver when the swap was triggered. This then caused the bond after default to trade higher than it did before defaulting. (Geddit? People entered into CDS transactions to hedge part of their bond portfolio. The bond in their portfolio defaults, so theoretically they can deliver the defaulted bond and get the insurance money for it. EXCEPT, there was so much insurance bought/ traded that there was not enough defaulted bond. But there are still the legal contracts to be fulfilled. Hence increased demand for the defaulted bond, resulting in the price going up.

Now imagine what happens if you are deciding what to insure/swap in the digital space (don’t forget the updates), and what event to insure/swap against. (Also called Nerds of the World Rejoice! Fine. In the proper Engrish: Future very crucial area for techie-inclined lawyers. For now, here’s an obscure law that is becoming closely watched: Biometric Data Privacy. Protection of privacy for voice recognition, fingerprinting etc data. Do you have a right over your data, or does it then belong to the data surveillance company?)

Also, and this is true of any derivative contract or credit guarantee: Even if you made a winning trade, the guy who owes you may simply not be able to pay what they owe.)

But back to video games – another thing about taking a cheap shot in a game is the short-sightedness involved in the choice to instantly-gratify. It’s not that different from how little kids learn from sorting things out on the playground. And the Marshmallow Test. (All that’s just increasingly gone digital.) Just Google for more studies showing that the ability to delay gratification is correlated to performance. When it is cheap gratification, this is even more telling about whether this is someone you want to work with. Grownup traders absolutely think this way when they assist each other in a market (and then no one wants to take the time to type it :D)

We cannot work alone, we need teammates, colleagues, reliable contacts. From listening to and watching the kids’ video game interactions, I can tell you – the amount they can learn, about who is potentially toxic and who is a keeper, is absolute gold. Technology Strategist and Blockchain Educator Roop Singh talks about how very real the virtual/ video gaming space is to kids. Former options trader and 2008 financial crisis Fed advisor Dr Nassim Taleb said, “If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances…”

The semblance of anonymity from using online personas (which groups of friends nonetheless recognise among themselves) makes for even more tells than face to face interactions or at school, where kids increasingly learn very quickly to hide their “true colours”. But your character is your character – who you are online is a very good indication who you really are IRL.

With the level of sophistication among youth today, what with increasing competitiveness at school and in sports, plus the use of social media and the internet, street smarts are even more important. So is the ability to find – and keep – Givers and avoid Takers. I’m just sayin’ <shrugs>. Adam Grant, organisational psychologist, writes in Give and Take that “Takers” incur a higher cost to organisations than you might initially think, because one “Taker” pollutes the organisation by turning many more “Matchers” (people who match favour for favour) into “Takers”. Selfish behaviour particularly from someone who is quite smart, makes the person even more toxic. This implies of course that personality trumps raw ability. It is the difference between Anakin and Luke Skywalker.

(On an aside, it’s a pretty good theoretical illustration – Anakin’s propensity for the Dark Side is linked to resilience in his personality (or the lack thereof), which would imply that particularly in talented children (Mozart is a real-life eg of gift and vulnerability), character-building activities like martial arts, uniform units and sports are especially crucial for them, towards a more “rounded” development.)

When someone’s (big) in-game purchase disappeared, that particular group of Son’s friends became a lot more sensitive to the monetary value of some of these virtual goods. Which led yes, to them starting to buy-low-sell-high the things. They wait for in-game offers and discounts, or play challenges that have virtual prizes up for grabs particularly if they know someone is looking for it. How do they know what’s hot? Because when that group was casting about to help their friend replace what he had lost, they found other servers where people were posting specific in-game items they were looking for… and the price they were willing to pay for them 😀 If they can find it cheaper, they play for the virtual good. Also called arbitrage 😀 Currency of choice: not Ether, but Robux 😀 (Just for the heck of it, but sure it goes toward discounting their own in-game purchases.)

Next up is an obvious one: coding while gaming. Son’s first gaming account was set up by his extracurricular coding school. Just as Microsoft once developed the card game Solitaire for their PCs to get seniors used to the drag-and-drop function using a mouse, video games do get players accustomed to the syntax used in the various coding languages – Java, Javascript, Python et al.

(If you ask the kids who’ve been to coding camps why they start hopping between languages when gaming, they will say things like “Because Discord bans this function in JS but not in Python.” However, from typing game commands while playing, most kids who’ve never been to coding camps are already familiar with the basic syntax. Also, there are seriously good instructional Youtubes out there. Son has found some obscure ones that have like, 10 views, but are really useful. N-ot so much the very popular channels.)

In the fiction-that-could-almost-be-real world of Neal Stephenson, his 1992 Snowcrash features a computer virus that causes hackers’ minds to “crash”.

The premise was that computer hackers had trained their brains to register binary digits – ie they could read code, process information in binary form – and this allowed the fictitious terrorist/cult leader in the storyline to cause them brain damage because they couldn’t “unsee” or “unprocess” bitmap images carrying the virus. The solution to this was an “anti-virus,” or “vaccine,” also in code, that removed the hacker’s brain’s ability to process said bitmap, thereby removing the original virus’ ability to infect them. Quite simply, if someone says something horribly upsetting to you in a language you don’t understand, the words don’t hurt you.

(I’m just waiting for someone to find a way to develop that idea into therapeutic treatments for mental illnesses and some special needs. Snowcrash remains on the recommended lists of venture capitalist Naval Ravikant, and has been on Time’s 100 best English language novels of all time since 1923. Rather bewilderingly satirical of cyberpunk, the style of writing is not exactly my favourite to read, same as Tolkien’s Silmarillion. But their ideas are so inspired.)

A more basic real world application is already pretty common – there’s at least one company out there producing video games for little kids with lazy eye, so they exercise their eyes while playing. The Optometry Center for Vision Therapy describes the necessary hand-eye coordination and brain response to visual sensation as helpful to lazy eye (the game used in their study was Tetris). Here’s another study that candidly highlights that while patching remains the gold standard in treating lazy eye in little kids, compliance, or enforcement of said treatment is a hurdle, where action video games are not (imagine our surprise :D) We never actually consulted anyone (or at the time read any of this research), but certainly if we look back at Son’s pictures from when he’s a pre-schooler, he does have a bit of lazy eye. Over the years we figured he just grew out of it but now that we see the research papers…

Another real world product (and where Snowcrash author Stephenson also worked for a time) is Magic Leap (“Our ultimate mission is to amplify human potential”), the American startup which produces virtual retinal display which superimposes computer-generated images onto real-world objects by “projecting a digital light field into the user’s eye” and counts Alibaba Group as an early investor.

Which is to lead into the next sometime-overlooked value extracted from a video game: Go ask your video game-playing tween/ teen how they feel about Fortnight and their developer Epic Games’ acquisition of Rocket League 😀

(If you are a Gamer Parent, more the power to you. Maybe. I don’t think many in our generation can easily beat the kids at this stuff. If you are not a Gamer Parent, and are thinking to start when your kid is already heavily into it,good luck and Godspeed duking it out with these animals. Fresh Meat for the Lions 😀 O-r, you could work a conversation on strategic acquisitions…)

It somehow became fashionable to sniff at or downright revile the big games developer as well as the actual game Fortnight, albeit played by 250 million, doubly so when they went on an acquisition spree and bought the highly popular Rocket League in May 2019. More recently in March 2021 Epic Games then bought Tonic Games Group in a move expected to develop their own “metaverse”, the originally fictitious virtual shared space featured in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash novel as well.

Also, Chinese entertainment giant Tencent (0700.hk) owns 40% of Epic Games. (In 2012. As in, it became cool to hate Fortnite much later than that.) In fact, here’s a list of Chinese entertainment giant Tencent’s other gaming developer holdings. It’s a lot. (My own kids: Go and practice your Chinese please 😀 Everyone else: That was my way of saying there is already a very established way of accessing digital assets – via the stock market and its derivatives. And then we rather hope all the 11 year old billionaire’s sons who are cutting their teeth in the financial markets will be distracted by something shiny in ETH. Ethereum is fast-growing, but it’s also still being updated continuously. I do find the younger generation a lot more resilient, even impervious, to Update Carnage, compared to us Dino Parents. And if you are old enough to have a video gaming kid, I consider you a Dino Parent unless you actually work in that industry. Just look at your primary schooler swiping away at screens and downloading updates like a fish to water. It’s a completely different medium than anything we knew in our own childhood… which is also a potential for conflict in the family about screens and mindless playing. We’d had that too. More further below…)

Epilogue: Game XP is increasingly the new street cred. As with almost “everything” in life, it comes with good and bad. The bad is pretty obvious and regularly talked about. All the stuff re addiction (which I agree is real and needs to be closely monitored. Everything that’s worth anything takes work and practice – see below.) The good however… I think could be “good-er”…

To many of Son’s friends, it would appear he has a “free pass” when it comes to video gaming. Yes and no. Son plays hours and hours of video games most days – true. His video gaming hours are unconditional – not true.

“Absolute Freedom” simply does not exist – even if you are (former) President of the United States, Land of the Free, you can get your social media taken away from you for being too “free”. Virtually everything incurs some form of “price.” I had an ex-boyfriend who graffiti-ed a frat house monument with his buddies (no expletives/ slurs, just something like “frats are posers” – he sent me the picture). But after they took the pic he spent some time freaking out that they’d find out. (If you don’t want to end up potentially blackmailed by a friend-you-discover-belatedly-is-not, you should probably think about this next time someone offers you a can of spray paint.) Multiply that by 10,000 and the long, unforgiving life of the internet today.

There are underlying rules that we set in place from the very start that we worked to enforce, in Son’s case back when he was 8 or 9. While he knows they exist, he barely notices, because he has never known a gaming time without these boundaries: 1) No sex, violence or mindless games. (The last is debatable, but I mostly mean the lack of skill development from randomly spraying bullets or flame, and choose to derive amusement watching Son run around onscreen strategising as, most recently, a hamster. Because he thinks it’s hilarious for a hamster to be kicking serious butt in the game. (Daughter btw, is a moth.)

2) No screen time in the bedrooms (which has led to each kid carving out their own territory in our communal living space and me losing my own favourite space when Daughter is home, which is why I like being home when the kids are not :D).

3) If you have to game late at night (some games are most prolific in different time zones, you don’t get much sport playing in Asian time – kind of like waking up to watch English Premier League) make sure you catch up on sleep after. And the obvious one is you lose game time (especially precious late night gaming) for bad grades/ missed homework….

4) “Because other people are doing it,” is a very bad reason for doing many things (video games included). It will also likely leave you dissatisfied – because you simply have not listened to yourself, what you really want.

A schoolmate in my late teens picked up smoking from older friends. In a candid moment he told us he managed to quit because he ultimately loved soccer more – it was taking more and more work just to maintain his current level of performance in a game. He missed joining his buddies for a smoke, but he had them the rest of the time. And they were good friends – they didn’t make him feel bad for not smoking with them. Other times he had what he really wanted – his performance on the soccer field.

If you don’t know what you really want, how can you get it? My old schoolmate wanted to play his best game of soccer more than he wanted to smoke with cool older guys. If he had not figured that out for himself, he would be less happy. And still smoking.

5) Son doesn’t carry a working cellphone. Not our rule, his choice – he has a hand-me-down iPhone 6 with no line, that he rarely even brings to school, mainly for games like Brawl Stars when his friends want to play that instead of Roblox or Minecraft.) He says it’s distracting and he doesn’t want to get in trouble from not paying attention (and lose precious free gaming time at home). When he takes the MTR, he hears the affirming public message over the stations’ PA systems reminding all the commuting adults to stop looking at their phone when they’re getting off the train, and feels very good about himself 😀 so THANK you, Hong Kong MTR :D:D)

No whatsapp, no Instagram, no Facebook.This is not new – Son has always voluntarily given up social media* and working cellphone and watches virtually zero tv. (Yet as surely as Brutus is honourable, kids playing hours of video games (only) are “addicted” and/or “cannot self regulate.” This is like when everyone freaks out and beef futures tank because of a presumptive positive in Mad Cow, but in kitchens all over the world people put raw meat and fish on kitchen counters or wipe down with cloths rinsed with water (only) because Salmonella is somehow not frightening.)

*He seriously considered social media accounts last year, but decided it was too much work keeping up with it, when VIDEO GAMES. How much time do we spend on average scrolling social media, which we don’t even really enjoy but don’t think about it? So his friends both old and new know to look for him in games and catch up there.

6) Not all video games are equal. Son doesn’t play Valorant. This was not as easy a choice – it’s one of the hot games among his friends right now. The choice we gave him was between getting Valorant and having limits imposed on gaming time (because we received feedback from sources he also agrees with, that the conditions in that game are more addictive than the other stuff he usually plays), or not play Valorant and he can play ‘til the wee hours of the morning*, on games we are infinitely more comfortable with.

*Sometimes it’s to catch up with an old friend – during the height of online learning some were in different time zones. But sure, sometimes there’s just a hot game going late at night. Son wanted a free pass for that. Some prizes and game favours only become available at that time of night, depending what server he’s playing, which is another big reason late night gaming freedom retains so much value to him that he prizes this over many other “treats”.

One of the big attractions for Valorant among some of his friends is the chance to be selected for a Youtube gaming channel and get monetised. Since this is something Son is less interested in, he chose unlimited gaming time. (So you guys out there playing Valorant – that’s why you have limited game time 🙂 Yes he misses his gaming buddies when they’re in Valorant. But mining the select few games he has unlimited time on has given him a lot more freebies and game XPs and levels – which he was able to lessen Birthday Friend’s pain with, when friend’s birthday cash purchases were lost.)

So like everything in life and structured investment products, you find the best possible combination or “package” of goods and bads that you can afford given household rules or market conditions 🙂

Even then, we had one conflict in our household. Big one. Because the Hot Hub after a heavy work event forgot Son had just completed the gruelling 5-week NCSS Coding Challenge at intermediate level with a high distinction, when he found Son playing video games at 4am one Saturday night. So next morning he gave the Ah Boy Why You Lidat You Will Fail The Big Exam And Ruin The Life speech, prompting the Ah Boy to respond with the What Talking You, You No Idea What I Yam Doing rebuttle <clap of thunder> <me doing all manner of diffusing as the kids’ pets watch with detached interest>.

(Daughter had the best reaction – without a word she turns on her heel and retires to her loft to read Goddess Girls, closing all the doors leading to the kids’ play area behind her. When the dust settles in the living room and I come in to check on her, she looks up from her book, “Oh, are they done?” Sigh. Which wise person once said that screaming at each other is still a form of communication and indicates you care enough to be upset?)

This was originally going to be a Digital Asset-themed post with a huge nod at finding value in video games, but as I researched accessibility and potential risk hedging (originally for some freelance work), pricing, particularly C2C (customer to customer) became quite a thing. The very human process by which a ready buyer and seller come to an agreement on a price doesn’t change, and watching History Channel’s Pawn Stars, now in their 18th season, seemed a good low-tech way to illustrate that, before we bring in technology and financial derivatives instruments.

“The best part of my business is working with my family. The worst part of my business is working with my family.” -Rick Harrison

Pawn Stars revolves around the buy-sell adventures of the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas, started by Grandfather Harrison who uprooted his family after running up a USD 1million housing investments debt.

Four guys, no girls, no skin – except what’s in the game 🙂 Name of the game? Cash is King 😉

They pay cash upfront for weird, wacky and wonderful collectors’ items, thereby scoring finds for 20-50% discounts off retail prices. You may think that’s a scalp, but it’s all above board – a valuations expert in the field often comes in to provide a retail price in front of the seller, and then the Harrisons agree on a discount with said seller, as compensation for bearing the risk the item will not sell, auction fees and hassles if they go that route to sell it etc, while the seller walks out with cash. Or, the seller walks out with their item, if no deal is struck. Plain and simple, I absolutely love this. NO subterfuge. Biggest irony ever, it happens in a pawn shop in Sin City. All the well-dressed self righteous hypocrites in the nice office buildings (Imma embedding Big Short clips, next!) take note, please.

Another thing I really like is how this pawn shop handles antique firearms sales – they ask the respective experts to date the items to ensure what they buy is compliant with firearm regulations (for eg in the cannon clip further down Rick turns down a purchase he otherwise really wanted, because the expert cannot guarantee the item and potentially replaced parts were all made before the 1900s.)

Anyway, both Rick (dad) and Corey (son) started in the family business back in primary school. Then around the age of 18, if you watch enough of their haggling footage, it would seem Corey is the toughest negotiator – of the 4, he appears to give the worst starting price to the seller. But then there’s an episode where he describes how when he was starting out someone sold them (through him) a fake Rolex… and very quickly word must have got out that he was an easy touch because throughout that week several more sellers then came in and sold him a few more. So you do see little indications early on in their series where he’s quite conscious about whether the dad will trust him with big deals. (No, it’s not the time he tests out a vintage collectors’ item toy and ends up shooting his dad with it. Big black eye.)

The dynamic with son’s friend Chum is also interesting, he’s been there over a decade, he snarks at the boss (the dad), they rib him hard… but he gets the biggest gift of all of them, each Christmas. AND he now runs the candy store across the street from this pawn shop as well – you can find him on Instagram here.

It being Vegas (tourists), the shop must’ve had many more interesting items because they certainly have a lot of people selling weird, old, rare or historically significant items. This one’s a Samurai sword:

And then you see how human nature really hasn’t changed and technological advancement just alters their methods (but not their motives). One example is when you watch the appraisal of rare and ancient coins. At one point Rick tells how in olden times people would nick a bit of the precious metal off the edge of the coin, eventually having enough little bits to make a whole new coin:

There’s a version of this done with technology that’s been around since before even I went to college, called “Salami Slicing”.

Someone got the bright idea of writing a program on top of their employer’s existing accounting program, which would round UP all the costs… and deposit the few cents’ difference from the rounding into their own account, figuring customers wouldn’t bother to go searching for the few extra cents. There’s of course all kinds of variants, but I think the consistent bit is where the cyber attacker skims off an otherwise negligible amount from each account. Hence “Salami” like the thin slice of sausage/pepperoni/other processed meat on the pizza that you skim off the main piece).

From Pawn Stars in authenticating items, “If people find a way to fake it, they’re gonna do it. Always have, always will.” So they call in the experts. The original Salami people eventually got caught and went to jail (which is how they were a first case study in my IT Security 101 college course) but not before racking up enough salami to otherwise have retired on a beach sipping drinks with little umbrellas in them. Researchgate has a paper on mitigations.

To price the items and determine a good starting point to haggle at, the Harrisons have numerous experts come in (far below is a Youtube on the experts, the majority of whom selected by the History Channel) and they are as diverse as all the guest stars on Friends. You will be like, There’s People In The World Who Are Experts In This? You’d learn a lot more about people from the things they sell (and buy) – the Harrisons offer better for American sports memorabilia, get stumped by products they don’t understand (even for highty valued items)… there was a dad who played Pokemon with his two sons – he says then the boys grew out of the card game, but he never did:

And then this one’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic. Ever met the co-creator of Ninja Turtles? In this clip he confirms it started as a joke, “If Bruce Lee was an animal, what would be the stupidest animal?” and he even starts signing his own name with a Turtle after that. (uh.. Lee grew up in Hong Kong and ninjas are Japanese 😀 not to mention I cannot read either language, but in some sword footage (there was a lot all over Youtube) I THINK some of the samurai swords coming in had papers in Chinese. The Japanese expert is never shown with those papers though, he always examines the actual sword).. And on another note, it’s probably not at all uncommon that the creator of Ninja Turtles doesn’t know what his autograph on a first edition of his work is now worth and so they have to call in another guy 😀

It’s valuable, but note the seller was hoping for USD 60,000, after observing a similar one that wasn’t signed went for USD 50,000 at auction. Instead, the expert places a retail value of USD 11,000 on it. And so I picked this item not just because of the Ninja Turtles but because of the massive difference in price on exotic and illiquid items. (Another way of looking at it however, is someone took the risk of paying for auction and made a killing on their copy :).

Liquidity, the chance at having other options, carries a premium. Whether that premium is a fair price in itself is yet another choice to be made. There are quite a number of sellers of otherwise valuable items on the show who choose not to sell, preferring to hold on to the item and wait for it to appreciate. If they hadn’t been liquid enough to sit, they’d risk having to make that unfavourable trade.

Which brings me to this shocker (and further note of caution about gambling beyond your means) of a trade where a guy walks in with a coin he says he accepted as a gambling debt. He asks for USD 20,000 for it (which implies he probably took the coin in lieu of payment of a gambling debt that was in the vicinity of USD 10-15k). The expert values the coin conservatively between USD 50,000 – 100,000, with a last done auctioned price on a similar coin in slightly better condition having exchanged hands at USD 100,000.

The seller of this one, who was originally hoping for USD 20,000, walks out with USD 80,000 in cash. Which is to say that the guy who traded it in exchange for gambling debt lost big – he either had no idea what it was worth (implying he had walked into the casino not expecting to gamble it away), was high on something or else was desperate. That’s a “bad” mistake.

Here are some “good” mistakes, when a “bad” note or coin is made – certain flaws and imperfections greatly increase the value of the piece:

The Pawn Shop explains often, that they bear the risk of not moving an item and having it sit in the shop indefinitely (though they do also bring things to auction to sell, and they move most of the good stuff pretty fast – I couldn’t even find the vast majority of the first edition books featured on the show.)

To thine own self be true. Know what you don’t know, and call in an expert 🙂 So who are the experts the Pawn Stars rely on to come up with a price? Found this clip (don’t know what’s with the “shady truth” clickbait image. None of em are “shadey” (though a couple have faced controversy/criticism. And then there’s show favourite Rebecca Romney, old book and documents expert, who is also daughter inlaw of former US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, something she’s apparently known for being quite discreet about. In later episodes she’s seen happily coming in to work during her pregnancy. Good for her :)).

Epilogue: The way I feel about pricings is that they govern everything. Everything in life has a price. Whether it’s HKD 1, a cup of coffee, an opportunity cost for a relationship or “priceless”, it’s still a price. In the same way to remain undecided is to choose indecision. (No escape, we are accountable for every. Single. Thing. We just never noticed :D) And if indecision is also a decision, then if you don’t agree on a price, Just. Say No. Wait for a better price. Which is what a fair number of sellers do. And buyers too. We should strive for that choice, not find ourselves desperate enough to have to make a bad one. As musician, author and philanthropist Peter Buffet, son of Warren Buffet says, true privilege is getting to choose. Whether that’s the path of least resistance OR the one of bountiful potentiality, they ALL bear a cost. Accept the cost, and dis truth shall set you free. To play video games. 😀 Coming up next…

‘The (affluent) old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in it – but their children believe ..for an entirely different reason ..because they have been indoctrinated to believe.… Some never challenge it.. others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy. Which path do you intend, …conformity or rebellion?’

‘Neither… Both are simple-minded… They are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction or ambiguity.'”

Author Neal Stephenson wrote The Diamond Age in 1995 to several literary awards and a general consensus that this was an apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction. While his meticulously described technological inventions may be fictitious for the moment, Stephenson has a reputation for “being able to see the future” (Naval Ravikant). Devices and technology in his stories have predated yet resembled actual inventions like Google Glass and Bitcoin. Stephenson has also married computer viruses with Sumerian mythology in other works.

“It’s easy to look at war-torn parts of the world that are just a mess and think that those places are just different or they went down the wrong path… But I think we’re always one or two generations away from being a failed state. Maybe that time is getting closer.” – Neal Stephenson, 2019

So. Does Pseudo- or Articifial Intelligence exist? Sure, it’s been here for awhile now. Just.. not in the evil-computer-taking-over-the-world way they like to make doomsday sci-fi movies of. AI is unlimited in potential… forever lacking in humanity. Stephenson has said in a 2008 interview with Gizmodo, “…there are many, many examples of scientists who espouse some form of religious faith, so I don’t see any essential hostility. …I grew up in a community of church-going scientists and engineers.”

“A Turing machine…. is still a machine… it has no soul.” – Nell’s thought on the Primer, as she searches for the human being the Primer has engaged in her raising, all her life.

At a time when the landscapes of healthcare and kids’ education could be greatly affected for the foreseeable future, I thought reading Stephenson’s Diamond would be interesting…

Neal Stephenson doesn’t come from a long line of writers and literary greats. Instead, he grew up with electrical engineers on his dad’s side and biochemistry professors on his mum’s. Several years after the Diamond Age, he went to work for Jeff Bezos in his space program, spending 7 years on “novel alternate approaches to space, propulsion and business models,” until Blue Origin went mainstream.

The story of the Primer is a good one to be sure, but as some commentators say, the story and writing style doesn’t keep you addictively having to keep turning pages, the way some other writers get you hooked. Stephenson’s skill is a different one – that of creating technologies within his stories that are j-ust this side of “fiction”. You read him, and expect some of these things to be in early stages of research & development somewhere.

So the story goes…

Far in the future and a stone’s throw from Shanghai, Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, doting grandfather and eccentric and powerful Equity Lord of New Atlantis, one of the most influential philes made up of corporate oligarchs priding themselves on elaborate etiquette and culture, expresses his dissatisfaction with how his three children have been raised and educated. Not wishing for his only grandchild to grow up similarly lacking, he commissions the brilliant bespoke engineer John Hackworth to develop a device titled A Young Lady’s Interactive Primer.

“Finkle-Mcgraw couldn’t prevent Elizabeth’s parents from sending her to the very schools for which he had lost all respect; he had no right to interfere. It was his role as a grandparent to indulge and give gifts…(so) why not give her a gift that would supply the missing ingredient in schools?”

The Primer is a Pseudo-Intelligent (ie AI) computer in the form of a book, picking up all that happens around it not unlike what Siri already does today, except it further imprints on the first little girl who opens it. From then on, the book reacts to everything in its environment in relation to the child it is bonded with, designing personalised stories and situations to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself, teaching her what she needs to know to survive in her surroundings.

Alongside being a top-performing engineer with an unlikely penchant for English Literature that leads the Lord to choose him over his colleagues, John Hackworth is also a doting father, with the sorts of anxieties and hopes we can all relate to as parents. Alongside professional success and personal ingenuity are yet rather illogical dreams for his daughter that illustrate his true (unstable) emotional state – when the little girls of New Atlantis’ uppermost crust attend Princess Margaret’s birthday party – where bespoke engineers (including Hackworth) have been engaged to construct a new (and pink) island in the middle of the ocean for the party of impeccably-dressed and impossibly well-mannered girls to explore with their governesses, he hopes his own daughter might become fast friends with the parasol-twirling Princess herself. “The air became Fiona, desiring – no demanding – love….”

Even as newswires furiously post This Just In! The Parasol Is Back! and Fiona’s mother idly observes she has forgotten to pack one, then promptly also forgets that she has forgotten, having ascertained Fiona is dressed presentably enough to attend the party regardless (I like her mother :D)…

As the years-long Primer project reaches completion, Hackworth makes elaborate arrangements to smuggle out the design of the precious Primer for his own daughter. (This part always bothers me – he is quite well-to-do, their family has several maids including a personal trainer, he certainly ends up rebuilding the thing over and over again tailored to various little girls throughout the course of the storyline, describing it as a fairly easy thing to do, why in the world did he have to illegally copy Elizabeth’s version??)

On his way home from re-assembling the stolen data via collaboration with a “reverse engineer” – a breed of technical expert who focuses on rebuilding and reinventing – Hackworth is mugged by street kids trolling for components to sell in the black market. One of the boys fights off the others to bring the Primer home intact to his 4 year old sister Nell. It will be years before he realises his gang had first been engaged to pop over this particular engineer by an influential crime lord made aware of the Primer’s existence following the employment of aforementioned reverse engineer. (The Primer however also comes with obfuscating nanotech, hiding its true physical appearance from the boys, resulting in them not recognising it as the object their employer had been looking for.)

The Primer in the meantime prepares Nell for the day her brother Harv already knows will come: When his leaving her in better hands will be the best thing he can do for her future, as his past misdemeanours, albeit for the two children’s survival, will otherwise hurt her chances at acceptance into a phile. This is probably the most heartbreaking part of the story, because Harv is not that much older than his sister, plagued with childhood consumption, and has terrible beginnings as well – beaten, neglected, yet still repeatedly showing more strength of character than pretty much every adult he’s had around him in the slum of the tribeless Leased Territories.

It is during the worst time of abuse the children experience, that Nell bonds with her Primer (to be exact, when her mother’s boyfriend-of-the-moment is hitting her with it). The Primer weaves her few threadbare soft toy friends and the room she is locked in into the storybook adventures that help her cope in order to survive.

“Princess Nell understood that (the removal of her mother’s boyfriend) was a terrible thing for the Evil Queen, for her mother was weak and helpless without a man…“

In the meantime however, the authorities catch up to Nell and Harv soon enough. Despite the rigid class laws and severe penalties in place for mugging those of a higher station in life, various law enforcement officials who pride themselves on their professionalism, strength of character and Confucian Justice, will look the other way, recognising that the stolen technology is the little girl’s only chance at a better life, an opportunity the entire system these upstanding professionals have built their honourable careers on has failed to provide, to too many unwanted children.

Crime lord: …I have already prepared my signed confession… You may now take me, and the crew…, to prison for the crime of baby-smuggling. I trust you can find qualified caregivers somewhere within your jurisdiction…

Judge: For some time I have been contemplating a change of career…

The collective epiphany of society’s unwanted children leads crime lord and morally upright judge of impeccable standing to form an alliance, compelling Hackworth to reproduce the Primer for tens of thousands of orphans (this number eventually reaches about 300,000).

At some point, Lord Finkle-Mcgraw will discover this and…….. go along with it, discreetly making other arrangements as well, so that the casteless Nell will end up going to the same school as his own granddaughter Elizabeth and Fiona Hackworth, daughter of his rogue engineer – who is allowed to give her a copy of the Primer he risked everything for, if he then fully immerses himself in calibrating the future Primers to suit unwanted little girls from different tribes speaking different languages as well.

Before Hackworth leaves Fiona to embark on the project, he ceremoniously presents her her own hard-won copy, speaking aloud for her Primer to pick up, and so Fiona’s version will come to personify her absent father as though he never left. (Now everyone wants one 😀 )

“In education, there should be no distinction of classes.”

“In your Primer, you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. …all must consider the cultivation of the person (as) the root of everything…”

The story is also a sociologist’s or psychologist’s dream fiction – there is a lot of opportunity for plot development in the Primer being used by 3 girls from very different levels of society – a (seemingly) extremely privileged sort whose influential grandfather is trying to stealth-educate. An upper-middle class daughter whose father vows to provide the best for her at any cost. A girl of the lowest caste who is often just one step away from further abuse from her mother’s various boyfriends. Guess which girl-and-Primer combination goes the furthest? Yet it might not be for all the reasons you imagine… 😉

Hackworth designs the Primer’s Pseudo-Intelligence along the premise that as long as the society the child is intended to fit into is fairly homogenous and the very loose general assumption fits, “all” children in a particular caste of society will have similar experiences. He describes the design as an “easy” one to come up with – a pseudo-intelligent computer that maps these otherwise “universal” experiences onto the unique psychological terrain of the one child, adjusting its responses to what it hears around the child in its “Siri” position.

This is the delicious irony of many things in life – we overthink, and then think it’s because we have “underthought” 🙂

Hackworth’s Pseudo-Intelligence pulls from a massive communal database of publicly available lore, facts, teaching techniques and child psychology studies (sound familiar? I think I’ve heard of this one in our world – it’s called the internet) to write its stories and lines tailor-made to the child it has bonded with. However, it still produces its content consistent with the original prevalent culture of “racting” for entertainment – employing a human “ractor” to read/act out its script. “Ractors” also have some options of improvisation available to them.

The “racting” past time of this cyberpunk world is not unlike the enhanced interactive experience depicted in Ready Player One book and movie:

The major difference in Stephenson’s world is that it is nanotechnology that connects you, and sometimes you are unaware of it because you can get “infected” by rogue mites in the same way you pick up a virus (scroll all the way down for another illustration from BBC’s Dr Who.) Naturally, then there are countermeasures, also in the form of mites, that serve purposes of medication or vaccines. Basically, nanotechnology in Stephenson’s world replicates in machine form the things Nature has evolved as an actual life form, for the purpose of being programmable. With code. 🙂

“If someone had handed me a script and told me what part I’d be playing, I’d refuse it…… I’m raising someone’s kid for them..”

“…I’ve incurred all the disadvantages of parenthood, without actually getting to have a child…“ – Miranda, the young woman aspiring to be a highly-paid “ractive,” who starts to recognise Nell’s usage pattern

After a few years as the main randomly sought “ractor” by Nell’s Primer (the program initially simply seeking out higher paid “ractors” who have more experience in children’s entertainment), Miranda will figure out what the Primer really does, and make it her life’s quest to find the child she is raising virtually, adjusting her working hours to remain available for Nell’s Primer to engage her, as Nell’s usage patterns change around school (after she has escaped the house she is locked up in) and other activities.

(One of my favourite Adventures of Princess Nell stories is where she has just escaped the Dark Castle and is repeatedly approached on her journey to safety by friendly strangers in various forms, saying many different and seemingly perfectly logical, reasonable (and nice) things that all involve her leaving her companions to follow the stranger. Nell realises that once she agrees to follow the stranger in the story, there is nothing she can do (within the story) to change the outcome. Every path after Princess Nell agrees to be separated from her friends leads to capture and imprisonment. Which is how by-then 6 year old Nell IRL learns not to follow strangers by herself no matter what they may say.)

After the 3 girls are older (and each has turned out very differently) however, it is determined that their lives/ circumstances greatly influenced the usage patterns of their Primers, which in turn influenced how each girl turned out.

This of course drives home the extent to which execution matters.

You may have the sharpest tool in the box, but without care or skill in using it, much of its effectiveness will be diminished. (Rather a waste of resources and an additional risk to your investment, to pay top dollar for the best system or education or research or infrastructure for your child, only to leave the execution of the so-carefully prepared instruction to a less than competent person.)

I also liked to say in my former life in derivative financial products – it’s the same knife (or derivative investment product), but it does something very different, whether you give the knife to a sushi chef practiced in humility and restraint as well as trained in skill…. or a freaking monkey 😀

Is the tool more important, or is the human holding the tool more important? (Anyone else feel this way about derivatives: arrogance gets you killed in the market. And the humble person is the most secure one in the room – not needing to prove anything to yourself or anyone else will save your portfolio.)

Anyway. Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, the girl everyone assumes has everything in life handed to her on a platter, with parental hovering and numerous social expectations and heavy restrictions leading to overly-strict enforcement of rules and etiquettes and bedtimes (at times right in the middle of an important Primer lesson that surfaces when the occasion calls for it) ends up being allocated numerous human “ractors” who are completely unable to “get” the whole picture. Part of it is because the random interferences of various caregiving adults makes it more difficult for the Primer’s design to work – Too Many Cooks (or in this case “parents” or “tutors” second-guessing each other) affects the quality of her interactions with her Primer.

Elizabeth will finally throw a big nutty in class at the senseless enforcement of repeated copying of old textbook lines (8 hours a day for 8 Saturdays – she made it to the 7th, I think it was) as punishment for not upholding quite the right classroom demeanour, resulting in further Primer deprivation and her horrified very proper parents removing her from the school entirely. Years later, Nell will discover Elizabeth has left the New Atlantis phile altogether, taking up with a “triad” or rebel organisation.

“I suspect Lord Finkle-McGraw sees all the hypocrisy… and that he upholds it anyway, because that is what is best in the long run…. he has been worrying how best to inculcate this stance in young people, who might not understand as he does, its historical antecedence…”

Fiona Hackworth, during her father’s physical absence, is placed by her mother under the charge of a nanny who enjoys the discretion awarded her in the disciplining of her charge a little too much – it also results in interrupted sessions with the Primer that limit its effectiveness, and Fiona develops mild depression to boot, as her parents’ marriage falls apart.

(John Hackworth gets unconsciously embroiled in what appears to be a swingers’ club, The Drummers, for the next 10 years due to nanomites injected into his bloodstream by his crime lord employer that, while serving to make him the main “ractor” in his daughter’s Primer – he will eventually realise he has memories of being with his daughter all the times she has her Primer with her – also remove his awareness of his immediate surroundings. Because of his nanomite “infection,” picked up by the surveillance technology of his phile, his wife is informed and promptly divorces him.)

The divergence in original storyline around the girls allows for the exploration of the concept of mites designed to seek each other out, exchanging genetic material and data packets with thousands of similarly implanted Drummers. It becomes clear towards the end that Hackworth is steered into the group in order to “seed” thousands of Drummers with his mental abilities.

(What’s infinitely more bizarre is the extent to which organised crime and law enforcement realise they are on the same page, when it comes to saving the world by educating it. :D)

Furthermore, the potential of the Drummers’ seemingly mindless pleasurable past time with their use of a particular form of nanomite has the ability to link and engage thousands of human psyches, unbeknownst to themselves while in “racting” experiences, harnessing their collective mental capabilities to crack encryptions in the same way throwing enough computing power to run infinite permutations and combinations may eventually yield success. The entertainment industry of the future (and also organised crime) decides this would be absolute gold to harness.

In Miranda’s quest to find Nell, hitherto deemed nearly impossible for the otherwise sheer breadth and depth of deliberately scrambled random data in the population’s “racting” pastime, she agrees to work with financial backers and hackers looking to crack the system for monetary and regulatory gain by joining the Drummers.

A near grownup Fiona Hackworth “escapes” her nanny and embarks on a journey of self-discovery with her beloved father. They eventually experience the participatory theatre of the Dramatis Personae, the dirty, slightly hypocritical little secret entertainment of abandonment discreetly sought by otherwise “respectable members” of their very proper New Atlantian phile. The formerly staid John Hackworth turns out to be “quite the hit” among phile-mates, but as Fiona turns out to be an even bigger one, she abandons her father to continue his journey on his own, herself pursuing her “true calling,” among the ranks of the Dramatis where she feels she has finally found social acceptance and can be herself without fear of faux pas.

The story is also rife with various other concepts of nanomite use – programmed to seek out infections or repair tissue damage, stimulate muscle fibres in athletes, perform birth control (by seeking out and destroying an ovum in the womb), change the appearance of both animate and inanimate objects.

Stephenson is not the only person high on something when he devised nanotechnology that alters appearance or behaviour – here’s a similar concept in the Dr Who episode, The Empty Child (9th Doctor):

(Dr Who’s Empty Child episode with the storyline featuring nanotech drew about 7 million viewers back in 2005. It absolutely matters, how you use the tool, in this case, the idea of obfuscating nanotech 😀 . <pause> And can someone make a real TARDIS, please!)

Princess Nell reaches her final quest in the Primer, and meets the Man Behind The Curtain (or in this case King Coyote)…. “What is your purpose for coming here?” “…..to discover whether Wizard 0.2 really is a Turing Machine…”

“Well, you have your answer… most certainly it is the most powerful Turing Machine ever built… the Land Beyond.. all grown from seeds… is not controlled, but managed by Wizard 0.2…. (and) controlled by me.”

“King Coyote” explains that messages are picked up and relayed from all over, but ultimately a human reads them and writes the replies, for the raising of a child still needs be by a caring, loving human being. In his castle is a library. Within it are the rules for programming Wizard 0.2 (which is of course the Primer), and the plans for how to make atoms attract other atoms, …and build themselves into machines, buildings, whole worlds…

“Now you have conquered this place Nell, you will find it rather boring… It is your responsibility to build new worlds for others.. there is plenty of white space out there.. and I have my own quest. I am no longer King Coyote – call me John.”

Nell will lose herself for a time in the vast library of knowledge, learning, feasting, on Hackworth’s database of blueprints and plans accessed through the Primer until she notices first one, and then thousands of little mice in highly organised platoons. As she flings open the doors of the library, making Hackworth’s knowledge available to all, the grateful mice reveal their true form – girls not much younger than herself, all connected virtually through their Primers in orphanages. Inexplicably to everyone else, the girls like to call themselves The Mice Army.

Nell will return to the slum of the Leased Territories to bury Harv, who has died of consumption (having been quite sick for a time as an adult, Nell bringing him food and treats when she could venture out of her school), and then go in search of Miranda through hostile phile territory, she’ll find her in the end, but not before being attacked and captured, then rescued by the girls of the Mice Army connected and alerted through their Primers.

“In simple Pudong clothes, streaked with the blood of herself and others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the Barbarian Princess, with her book and her sword.”

The End.

Epilogue:

The acclaimed Game Designer Will Wright, now in his 60s, has quoted The Diamond Age’s Primer concept during lessons on the future of Game Design, “Alongside Augmented Reality, AI is going to make the biggest impact by far. …Not intelligent opponents, but an intelligent Game Master/ Designer. …a master game designer very rapidly re-programming the game around you to make it more interesting (specifically) to you… If an AI could understand you to that degree, it could also find other people that are that similar to you, and push you into a shared experience.”

“Can we build an AI that is trying to understand the player at a deeply fundamental level? In some ways it scares me – something like that could be so addictive, if it was effective… That would be the most interesting, disruptive, fundamentally game changing thing that’s going to happen (in the field of Game Design)…”

Wright met the investor Jeff Braun back at a pizza party in 1986 when the latter was looking to get into video games – they formed the company Maxis, and made SimCity in 1989 (which has undergone many evolutions since then), still credited as one of the most influential computer games ever made. The “revolutionary” concept at the time was player empowerment. The Sims, once referred to derisively as The Doll House Game (“and girls don’t play video games!”) focused on home rebuilding and quality of life of the home owners as a benchmark for success in playing the game. Released in 2000, it had earned investors a cool billion by 2006.

Wright started down the Sim journey that led to his then-biggest professional success ever, after losing his own home to the 1991 firestorm in Oakland that devastated 2843 houses and 437 apartments.

We all care greatly who our kids spend the rest of their lives with. How far would you go to do something about it? How honest would you be about how far you would go? Even to yourself… 😉

Indian Matchmaking is produced by Smriti Mundhra who, in her 20s, hired Sima Taparia, the matchmaking professional from Mumbai, featured on the show. Mundhra’s mother whom she describes as otherwise “progressive,” had at one time still been convinced her daughter would be best served in a marriage with someone of similar Hindu Marwadi background. (Mundhra ultimately married a Brazilian Irishman she met in college.) Taparia also features in Mundhra’s earlier documentary effort with Sarita Khurana, A Suitable Girl, which follows 3 educated, financially independent middle-classed Indian women who face mounting pressure to get married.

The overriding theme is, regardless how “progressive,” or not, (and certainly even when we are not Indian), a part of us would feel more comfortable “departing from tradition” only after at least having explored how much we can keep to.

“Sima Auntie” doesn’t just travel around India, she looks for Indian matches from all over the world. Participants on the show include lawyers and high school teachers, businessmen, designers… at least one arrived in New York when she was a little girl and now a refreshingly honest lawyer, emphasises she would like to be paired with a North Indian man who is an American citizen, like herself. (Read: Indian girl who spent at least part of her childhood in New York. Career woman who went to law school. Still making an effort to remember her Indian roots.)

This is what I truly find fascinating – the impossibly complex blend of old traditions, wisdoms and roots with further education, careers, and the influence of other cultures. Also the wide spectrum of where youth and parents land on this position. We may not all be Indian, but many of the questions in the (otherwise “fun”) clip below aren’t specific to only Indian culture. The internal (at least mild) struggle we have to figure out where we stand in preserving some of our original culture, while recognising how the world is changing, starts off a very personal one. And like it or scoff at it, this brand of “reality tv” still provides talking points and an education…

(For a more in-depth look at the show and its concepts however, see Al Jazeera’s interview with producer Mundhra, Sunil Hiranandani, CEO of SirfCoffee who runs a dating site for Indian professionals worldwide, and Parul Bhandari who did her PhD on matchmaking practices, far below.)

Show producer Mundhra is not surprised about the strong reactions that came about in the wake of Season 1, and the reason is that she believes Indian values and traditions are “very much in flux this generation, in a way that hasn’t been the case in the last 5, 6 generations” (what does everyone else think? Our cultures too? Quite possibly, and I think it’s because of the internet and social media.)

UK-based Hiranandani (who used to work at HSBC in London btw) brings up interestingly that more women from smaller cities in India than men use his dating app (which tweaks the original traditional criteria – rather than horoscopes, height and skin colour, there are questions about whether a marriage partner likes cold weather, eats meat, wants children, etc) hoping to escape the limited prospects of her locally arranged marriage. Also, “The option of walking away with everyone none the wiser is very compelling.” (Woman’s real right to choose*? 🙂 )

Also found some Indian Youtubers commenting about the show. Tanmay Bhat thinks Sima Auntie should be using a spreadsheet, “Just because the thing you’re doing is from ancient India doesn’t mean the way you do it also needs to be ancient”. (Ok caveat when he switches away from English I can’t follow….. but I love his irreverent cackle!)

Behensplaining’s Shrishti Dixit and Kusha Kapila ……don’t appear to have noticed Sima Auntie’s apparent lack of spreadsheet expertise:

“Hi. I’m form number 2266 and I’m looking for a suitable life partner within my own caste.. because I want to carry forward the systemic injustices and inequalities that are caste based in our country and have been propagated for generations in my own family as well.”

“What’s up ladies, I’m form 1941. ….I like all things vintage.. just like my ideologies… Because tradition, bro – like my father… grandfather… I don’t have enough personality to do things different than them…. arranged marriage is my only resort… ..two things should always be pure. Firstly your heart. Secondly, your bloodline.”

(In case you’re wondering, Kusha, Ms Savage I-Like-All-Things-Vintage impersonator, is married to another popular Indian social media star, Zorawar Singh Ahluwalia).

<pause> OK there are comments after their video, asking if “Whatsapp Group Where All My Friends B*tch About Their Husbands And Mothers Inlaw” really exists. And then there are replies, “Yes they exist, I am part of one.”

<cough> Next subject please! Show producer Mundhra does qualify that from her parents’ perspective, women followed the tradition whereby the wife moves from father’s house to father inlaw’s house – and so the easiest transition for their daughter would be to marry within the same caste and background. “Meat eater marrying into family that doesn’t eat meat” or vice versa would make it harder to adjust… “You want your daughter to feel as comfortable as possible..”

Hiranandani of the SirfCoffee dating app for Indians adds his own theory, that the “progressive parent” who has sent their child abroad to study still expects them to rein it back in when it’s time to marry. Their child maybe has “3 vetoes,” before they settle down. In other words, if you’re on your fourth match, you’re probably not going to get out of the marriage anymore 😀 (That’s what he says in the interview below)

Some participants on the show became popular on social media post-show, but I don’t think anyone got married in the end. Sima Auntie’s comment about Nadia Jagessar (pics below from her Instagram), “Nadia is beautiful (and 5ft 9″)… very good family values, very good natured… but she is Guyanese, it will be difficult for me to match… with a traditional Indian boy.” I had to Google it. And still ask one of my Indian ex-colleagues – he explains the majority of Guyanese Indians are from the Dalit caste.

Then there’s Akshay Jakhete, aged 25, Mumbai-based businessman from an upper-middle class family and dubbed the “Momma’s Boy,” and Radhika Somani, Chartered Accountant from Udaipur, who probably came closest to tying the knot.

Observers of the show noted the intense familial pressure Akshay was under to get married, because the initial “plan” was his older brother (who had arranged-married not too long ago) and wife would then conveniently have their child and buckle down to take care of the baby after Akshay’s wedding, which everyone expected was going to be a blowout affair. (Obviously Akshay’s family sincerely thought this plan was fine, otherwise they wouldn’t say it openly right). But then they didn’t do the big party, everyone managed to rein it in in the end. I think that deserves some respect too. It’s very easy for people who do not put themselves out there to watch….. and judge. But truth is these families (who btw are upper middle class and don’t exactly need to get rich and famous and subject themselves to the criticism of every netizen) allow people like us to observe… and learn something, about how other cultures are also changing with the world.

It’s highlighted several times on the show and in subsequent interviews and Youtuber comments when Akshay’s mum keeps showing him her blood pressure readings as she tries to get him to marry someone. My Mum’s Blood Pressure Is Fine is almost a meme now 😛

Akshay went so far as a pre-engagement ceremony, but pulled out after. In post-show interviews, besides repeatedly saying it’s nothing to do with Radhika or her family, Akshay makes a very good point about where his cold feet and Sleepless Night Before came from – he said it occurred to him he had had practically no conversations with Radhika that were not on camera and he had been very uncomfortable getting to know someone he would spend the rest of his life with that way.

(Nadia says something similar – that off-camera “changes the dynamic between myself and the matches… it helped me learn more about myself and what I’m looking for in a future partner.“)

At which point I’d like to highlight participants really do take marriage very seriously, they really do see it as forever. Indeed, when asked by Al Jazeera (far below) why there were no Muslim candidates, Mundhra explains that it was already very challenging to find participants who would sincerely try to be themselves on the show and agree to put such a private traditional process on camera.

So y’know, people really put themselves out there. It wasn’t easy – sweet Nadia gets “ghosted” twice on camera, by a guy she appeared to really connect with, and it’s humiliating, she cries about it. After that he apparently tries to contact her again and she stops responding (he says this in post-show interviews).

There’s another “potential mother-inlaw” whose go-getter lawyer daughter is matched with a dashing 6ft 2″ businessman and published author with his own podcast, whom she then calls…. a “loser”. Which is maybe horribly frightening to a lot of men out there 😀 But well, she says unapologetically that ever since they arrived in New York when her daughter was very little, she has demanded of her own daughter, “Don’t ever let me down, don’t ever let me look bad in our community… I don’t ever want to see a B on a report card… I don’t want 2 (college) degrees, I want 3…” I mean, it’s intimidating – I’m scared to date her – but it’s not hypocritical, y’know? It’s not like My Kid So Capable And You Not Worthy and then actually the kid is…. umm, not.

Meantime, Sima Auntie famously calls lawyer daughter Aparna Shewakramani “too fussy & stubborn,” not wanting to provide her with too many choices. Aparna calls her out on it, saying she only ultimately rejected a couple guys (while still staying in touch with some of them, just not y’know, actually marrying them), whereas there were male clients of Sima’s who went through over 150 bios without wanting to meet anyone.)

Ok back up a bit and this where I open mouth, insert foot: Please do not neglect the possibility that so-called “scary-parent” who wants her son to marry the girl she approves of could be far more supportive of said girl than a parent whose son (or daughter) chooses someone the parent really doesn’t want. Or for that matter if they think you are just the luckiest person in the world, that their kid should deign to show interest in you, and they are therefore doing you a huge favour by nodding in your direction.

All I’m sayin’ is, “scary parent” in your corner is not all bad right… Oh, oh no. Woman Doth Protest Too Much Syndrome. Everyone’s gonna think I’M. Scary Parent.

ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ANYONE YOU MIGHT KNOW IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL. 😀

I know no one. No actually I do know someone. I’m trying to find old friends anyway, so here goes. Back then, decades ago, he’d been openly gay since we were about 18. We were at Catholic Junior College together, but not in the same class. (I think he was born into a Christian family, but not Catholic. And I was from a relatively staunch Buddhist/Taoist upbringing.) He went to NUS while I went to NTU. He was going to study law. He is brilliant at English Lit and Language. And he beat me out to the GP prize in JC 😀 Leaving voice messages “Hey — When we going to complain about men again?” always got me an enthusiastic call-back.

Here’s the parenting story – I met his mum when I attended his birthday party at his parents’ house. His younger brother (who was around 16 at the time) and I were the only people at the party who were straight. My friend had not wanted his younger bro there at all: “I’m very worried about him. He has looked up to me in every other way. But he’s not like me in this, so I need him not to want to be, just because he thinks it’s cool or something.” (Both brothers are nice to be around – polite, kind, younger bro is a very cheerful kid..) Their mum – very nice to me. HANG ON I’M NOT DONE.

I remember something else at this party – someone asked my friend if his mum was home and he said “Yeah, upstairs.” And then this older guy (there were a few obviously older guys at the party, while the rest of us were college-aged) snarked, “Probably crying her eyes out.” Everyone either pretended not to hear or else kinda laughed uncomfortably.

Until today I have a lot of respect for my friend’s mum and consider her to be a pretty strong person. It is much easier to “be a parent” and appear to be a “good” parent when your child comfortably fits into all the societal norms. It is infinitely harder for those who don’t fit nicely.

Some guys weren’t very nice to my friend in school, and he increasingly found friendship and acceptance among other circles, particularly once he was in university. His mum had him have his birthday party at home where he invited all his friends, and she stayed home that day. (And they sent the bro out on errands, but I remember him being very determined to come to the party and so he finished early and hurried back. I believe my friend greeted him with, “What are you doing back so soon? Out. Now.” When his bro insisted on staying, my friend announced to the party, “Everyone. This is my younger bro. He is barely 16. And he is very straight.“)

This friend and I didn’t exactly just drift apart. The last lunch we had together, he was starting a serious relationship with an older guy, while I had a college boyfriend. He looked so happy as he gushed about his new relationship. “We talked about it. I know I want children someday. ...It would mean a lot, if our surrogate is someone close. Someday, would you…?”

On one hand, I can count the number of times I have received compliments that are that sincere, powerful and heartfelt. On the other hand I did not know how I was ever going to do it. Not my family, not my boyfriend, no boy I had ever dated, not even my “crazy” ex who married someone 2 months after they met at a demonstration in Ecuador – don’t scoff, they’re still happily married today with 2 kids and they live in Toronto – would be supportive of me doing a Phoebe From Friends. Even if it wasn’t triplets. I had never thought about it**, didn’t know where I stood and didn’t know what to say (and that’s pretty much what I said).

It was heartbreakingly not Yay! Imma Have My Gay Friend’s Babies Someday! Friends And Family Forever! It would have been so easy to lie. It was impossible for me to lie. It was too important to him. The question was a powerful reminder particularly back then, almost 2 decades ago, how we came from very different worlds and had very different growing pains. He stopped calling me back.

Isn’t that just the most ironic thing, one of the most beautiful compliments I have ever received is also how I lost one of my closest friends. Life sucks, that’s the beauty of it, every single thing is a package of goods and bads, nothing exists in this life that is only good or only bad and you only really not feel any pain or stress or discomfort when you’re dead. 😀

OK that… was my sincerest attempt at not just sitting back and doing a Lookit Dat – They Matchmaking! post. (Blog be no true telling without putting some of yourself out there.) Like I said, we all. Struggle. With the mix of modern and progressive, and tradition and family ideals.

<pause> Ok I feel like I have to also put it out there that I believe in saving something exclusively for marriage. Yes, I have 4 tattoos, 8 piercings, have wine almost every night, and have also never been drunk and believe you must share something exclusively with your intended life partner only. It’s because I believe marriage to be one of the hardest things in the world to maintain. Even if you “get it all correct” the first time round by picking the “right” person (and family), there’s an entire life journey ahead of you – significant life events (or trauma) are going to inevitably change you both. You will need all the help you can get. If there is something you have only ever done with your marriage partner, I believe it contributes to helping you keep from drifting too irrevocably far apart.

It was T.S. Eliot who said “The love of (2 people) is only explained and made reasonable by the higher love, or else is simply the coupling of animals.” No it was not easy (for me either), because peer pressure (I married the 10th guy I dated btw). But think this: If you ever intend to spend the rest of your life with just one person, you do not want to increase your own risk of maybe someday thinking, Damn, But That Other Person Was So Much Better And Now I’m Never Going To Have That Again. Ah Well…

Back to Matchmaking.

*”Women’s “real” right to choose”.. Aparna Shewakramani, the driven and ambitious 34-year old lawyer on the show with what is dubbed “extreme honesty,” explains that practically the only family member one will ever get to choose is their spouse. Post-show, she developed a following among women inspired by her confidence in holding out for the right guy, getting calls from women thinking of ending bad relationships, or having second thoughts about going through with their own marriages.

Good for her. As a fresh grad who only knew that she really, really wanted a career, I planned to freeze my eggs if I hadn’t met The One by the age of 30. Just to remove the biological clock factor from consideration. (At their births, we had the kids’ cordblood harvested and stored with cordlife as well.)

And here’s the interview with show producer Smriti Mundhra, UK-based Sunil Hiranandani of SirfCoffee, and Parul Bhandari, PhD scholar of matchmaking practices in India:

**My kids know this story – How I Became A Mum. Partly because Daughter has started asking whether she should have kids etc. As I said indirectly with the egg-freezing and the cordblood harvesting, technological advancement provides you far more options today, and they DON’T have to only be the ones that may cause you concern about whether you may have compromised your personal moral compass or values.

Sima Auntie can use that spreadsheet, no?

Yet there will always also be a factor that is unknown, no matter how “clever” humans and technology get.

Obviously this story is with the kids’ permission..

In the wake of the ICBC (1398HK) IPO of 2006 I had lost about 8kg off my (already slightly underweight) frame due to unprecedented deal volume and the craziest stock market run-up at the time. As in, because the market is running up, the options you just executed for your RMs keep knocking out and their clients keep re-locking in. It’s good commission for your RMs, you have to keep moving fast but… it’s not something that should be done indefinitely because what goes up…. if you don’t know when to stop and wait it out (and this is not easy), you get trapped where the price is too high and you then start losing a lot of money as the market corrects. I mention so you know how different my past life was, and how different my priorities were.

On several weeks’ break to regroup (and already in the middle of other job interviews – this is normal for the industry, the headhunters call you and do everything Because Commission and you just have to agree to show up where they tell you to, and not be a monkey in interviews), I tested pregnant. Now, I have a mild medical condition that makes it pretty hard to conceive without getting off the medication I had taken steadily for about 5 years, so you can imagine how unexpected that pregnancy was.

Leaving the gynea’s office for the first time, Kings asked what I thought, and I said “About what? It’s a peanut“. Don’t they all look like peanuts on the ultrasound at that stage. It’s hard to imagine, if you’ve never thought about it before, that those could really grow into people someday.

Today, you know one such “peanut” as the guy who used to go by “Rockstar” on this blog.

Obviously, “What If” has crossed my mind before. At the time when I tested positive my life was very, very different than it is now. What If I hadn’t taken that double bar on the pregnancy test (that I bought “just to rule it out”) quite that seriously at the time? All I knew before that was a completely different life. I was right where I wanted to be. But it was also clear I should probably not go back to the job where I weighed barely 45kg on my 5ft 6″ frame and couldn’t seem to get my weight up. But it was “only” a “peanut”, after all…

pps: And if you’re still here…

Kings and I were pretty broke when we wanted to get married.. London School of Economics is an expensive school, Kings had a lotta study debt as well… We paid USD 750 to drive round the Strip in a cadillac with the top down, and Elvis in attendance. Other than that, everyone took their time on the other stuff…

My mother and my mother in-law each had their own blowout dream mother-of-the-bride/groom wedding parties in different parts of Malaysia (our hometowns are 5 hours apart) that we showed up to as “the wedding couple.” I still think that’s the best way to go – everyone gets the party they want, and it keeps them busy and happy…) I remember at “one of our weddings” (:D) we were introduced to some very well-dressed little kids, “and here are your flower boy and girl!” and we had ZERO idea where those kids came from 😀

We played our Elvis Wedding At Little White Chapel on video. In it, there is a bearded guy in a beanie sitting with his girl in the pews. We pulled them in off the street to be our witnesses. (I know I tell it flippantly, but caveat: a wedding like that – still legal. And their pastor – is a real pastor. Almost no one else in our families was Christian. So now you know why we really got married at the Little White Chapel 🙂 )

My grandma told me supportively she thought Elvis was very handsome. Yes, and he told me his hair and makeup took longer than mine did. (Ok, mine didn’t take any time at all haha) After our gig he went on tour in Taiwan.

Even later still… For our own colleagues and friends we had a zero-traditions fusion dinner at Flutes At Fort Canning. The best food and wine we could afford to treat them to. My “wedding dress” was a USD 78 embroidered satin bustier from Victoria’s Secret which I wore with a tailored circle skirt because I thought keeping an actual white wedding dress spotless through the ages would be too difficult, but somehow I didn’t want to “borrow” one either. My other outfit – separates from Anteprima. Oh, and I eventually picked my engagement/wedding diamond off a spreadsheet. (Hear that, @Tanmay Bhat? Colour, Clarity…) The setting is high-end, but the stone – well, GIA certification is the same the world over, and you can save up to 40% on the actual diamond. On the same stone with GIA certification (you can get it certified separately). Mine came from a trader in NY.. People just happen to trade them on spreadsheets in round cuts and per carat <shrugs>. Unless of course you want the romance story that comes with the little blue box. That’s your choice, it’s your wedding, but at least know that is what you would pay for <shrugs again>...

“Do not laugh! But once upon a time… I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend….. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien

The Silmarillion is J.R.R Tolkien’s creation that precedes the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It’s the next book Tolkien geeks recommend, when you’re done with the aforementioned 4. It’s also arguably not easy to get through. Tolkien had a fascination for languages from an early age, being literate at 4, studying Latin in his primary school years, and it shows. I would call him the Mozart of the world of High Fantasy Writing, except perhaps in writing more than music, a person’s character as affected by their childhood and life experiences fleshes out their work particularly when they create their own fictional characters. From Bloom to Brown, Gaiman to Sorkin, you cannot truly write without committing more of yourself, laying bare more of your personality, than you would ever personally be comfortable with (I believe it was Neil Gaiman who actually said that).

First however, the more obvious – Tolkien’s original writing can be hard to digest because he delves with such relish into crafting a most elaborate language and culture of the different peoples, particularly the elves, that it’s easy to get lost. Hardcore fans actually speak Sindarin, Quenyan etc for real. There are practice workbooks for Elven languages for sale on Amazon. If you Google even minor characters, you will likely find specific notes for which Elven dialect (and why). More major characters come with writeups about their name origins in European mythology, not to mention some like Gandalf change names several times (Olorin, Mithrandir, Gandalf – all refer to the same “Maia spirit” that takes the form of an old wizard). You will be impressed Tolkien exercised such restraint in naming his own kids John, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla 😀

Tolkien begins writing the Silmarillion as a young adult in his early 20s, around college, marriage, service in the First World War, and will constantly revise the book throughout his life before it is finally published posthumously. He will describe Luthien, a later major character, as inspired by his life-long love Edith, naming himself Beren, Luthien’s love interest. <pause> OK I have to say it – being attracted to someone, “falling in love”, that’s easy. Staying in the relationship, through the endurance run that is Life, that’s the incredibly hard part. I know someone who says 25, 50 year anniversaries should be the Biggest Celebration of Achievement Ever, not the initial wedding. <shrugs>

Anyway. Born in 1892 in what is now South Africa, a 3 year old Tolkien travelled to England with his mother and younger brother for an intended long vacation, only to lose their father to rheumatic fever back home before he can join them. Their mother will proceed to raise the 2 young boys, schooling them in botany, English and Latin while battling Type 1 diabetes, eventually succumbing (effective treatment having not yet been invented) when Tolkien is 12.

Life is relatively uneventful with school and a conservative guardian until aged 16, when Tolkien meets 19 year old Edith. A romance blossoms while sitting in Birmingham tea shop balconies throwing sugar lumps into the hats of passersby in the street below. (When the sugar bowl was emptied, one friend described of the two teens, they would simply move to the next table 😀 ) Tolkien’s guardian will disapprove of the older girlfriend and tell him not to contact her again until he turns 21. Tolkien describes this as “extremely hard” on them both, but nevertheless honours the instruction, and later proceeds to mess up his first year of college. (He has to change his major in the end.)

On his 21st birthday, Tolkien writes Edith and proposes. She breaks off her engagement with the brother of one of her closest friends, who is understandably “dreadfully upset at first,” and the boy’s family writes to her guardian saying, “I have nothing to say against Tolkien, …but his prospects are poor in the extreme. Had he adopted a profession, things would be different…”

In January 1913, after a long day catching up following their years apart, Edith formally agrees to be engaged to Tolkien (her guardian would later tell her to move out). Tolkien graduates with First Class Honours in English Language and Literature from Exeter College, Oxford, July 1915. Around the same time he is commissioned as temporary Second Lieutenant, undergoes 11 months battalion training, and is posted to Somme.

Ever the humble bookworm who finds himself commanding enlisted miners, factory workers etc, he will be quoted from personal correspondence, “The most improper job of any man … is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”

As his battalion is about to attack the Regina Trench, he contracts quintan fever, is deemed unfit for further active service, and spends the rest of the war between hospitals and garrison duty, often emaciated, but alive. He writes, “by 1918, all but one of my close friends was dead.”

So the world begins…

The Creator of Everything is Eru Illuvatar, who thinks into being various Valar (spirits that vaguely resemble Greek gods or angels) and imbues them with the power of creation with which to craft the world. The principal ones are Manwe, Aule and Ulmo, Valar of the sky, earth and sea, respectively. There are also Valar of death/judgement, dreams, nature, hunting, harvest, et al. To assist them are Maiar, lesser spirits/angels, that still carry more clout than your average elf or dwarf. Gandalf and Sauron from the Lord of the Rings are Maiar. So are the large horned Balrog demons carrying whips, and any dragons or wizards.

(pics of Gandalf and Sauron from deviantart.com)

Before Lord of the Rings where Sauron is the personification of Evil however (Melkor having by then long been vanguished and the Valar then stepping back), the most powerful and multi-talented of the Valar, Melkor (who will come to corrupt Sauron, originally a Maia assigned to crafting/building the earth), wanders too far away, and comes to develop thoughts that are not in harmony with that of the other Valar. The Creator initially allows it, even mildly approves, for the discord increases the depth and breadth of the Music of Creation. Light after all does not look light except when there is dark to contrast it.

Eventually however, Melkor’s motives are shown to be too self-serving and destructive, born of jealousy and pride. The original “fight” is thus born between Good and Evil for the Flame Imperishable, the power to create life. Evil is never able to obtain said ability for itself (an important clarification/ edit by Tolkien later in his life), and therefore sets about destroying or corrupting Good’s creations. These are first the 2 Lamps of Arda – Illuin and Ormal. Melkor destroys these out of spite, then hides from the rest of the Valar, who prioritise fixing the mess and creating 2 Trees of Light in Valinor, where they live on earth/Arda, named Telperion and Laurelin.

 

(pics of one of the Lamps and the Two Trees from deviantart.com)

Then Illuvatar creates the elves, and the Valar invite them to come live with them in Valinor, their home on Earth/Arda. The Noldor elves will set up their own capital, Tirion, within Valinor. And that’s where all the politicking starts:

To the influential and much-loved Noldor King Finwe is born a particularly powerful and talented son (Curufinwe), nicknamed Feanor for his fiery spirit. Feanor’s mother dies soon after, and after a very long time of grieving, Finwe remarries and has two more sons (Fingolfin and Finarfin).

Feanor comes to craft 3 magical power-enhancing gems called Silmarils, pouring into them part of his spirit as well as taking some of the life-giving light of the 2 Trees. The Silmarils are so remarkable and sought after that the rest of the long and eventful plot of the Silmarillion will revolve around procuring or keeping others from procuring these gems. Not that unlike how everyone comes to fight to procure or keep Sauron from recovering the One Ring of Lord of the Rings. Except the Silmarils are supposed to be so pure and good that nothing unclean or evil can touch them without being burned. (That’s important in the story line later).

Melkor, at some point captured, imprisoned for a long time for trashing the Lamps and then released after completing his sentence, fakes repentance and soon sets about spreading rumours that cause unrest among the Noldor. While Feanor hears “The Valar Want The Silmarils For Themselves and Fingolfin Wants To Usurp The Throne”, Fingolfin and Finarfin hear “Feanor Doesn’t Like You Brothers Of Different Mothers And Your Dad Loves Him Best.”

All 3 elf princes are exposed to rumours designed to bring out the worst in them. Feanor is the only one who really reacts, and to his own detriment.

Feanor begins to train his followers in weaponcraft, storing up supplies for battle, and starts speaking out against the Valar, asking the Noldor to follow his lead out of Valinor. King Finwe gets worried (also, he was one of the original Chosen, who first led the Noldor into Valinor) and holds court with his advisors to figure out what to do. Which is when it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

Fingolfin comes bursting in and basically says Father Why You No Stop Older Brother. And then Feanor also comes barging in and, seeing Fingolfin standing there, blows up with How Come He Is Here And I Am Not Included <draws sword> Younger Half Bro You Get Out Nowww! 

Fingolfin actually takes the high road, politely bows to the assembled court and walks out without another word, but Feanor is still not satisfied and follows after him, holds the sword to his chest and says You Ever Try To Usurp Again I Kill You. It is this final very public action in the high elven court that sees Feanor banished from the capital by Mandos, Vala of Death/Judgement. After 12 years if the assembled elves can forget the misdemeanor, he may return.

Fingolfin immediately says Let’s Just Forget Everything Now, but Feanor still storms out. He proceeds to huffily move out with his 7 capable and strong sons. Now get this – King Finwe then abdicates his own position for the 12 year period his favourite son is banished, moving in with Feanor in the distant hills, and leaving Fingolfin to reluctantly take over the throne in the resulting power vacuum. (He is also depicted as not letting it get to his head while he rules.)

This is why this story is sooo entertaining: After this court drama, Feanor, for all his off-the-charts abilities, immediately thinks The Rumours Were Right About My Little Half Bro! They Are Probably Also Right About The Other Valar Wanting My Silmarils! Fingolfin who has just seen their father totally favour (maybe even “spoil”*) his much older half brother doesn’t think These Rumours About My Father And Brother Are SO Right! Even though they are. 

*In fact, King Finwe doesn’t appear to correct Feanor’s jarring misdemeanour, only the Valar step in to do so. How much does this scene imply this is not the first time? Later on, Tolkien will narrate Finwe as saying, “As long as Feanor my son is exiled, I consider myself unkinged.” Within the safety of the fictitious realm of Tolkien’s elves, everyone can now say Oh! Parenting lesson! 😀 For real though, this particular “weakness” of Feanor’s character is not inherent in the other two much younger brothers.

It begs the question, since inflated senses of superiority like Feanor’s often hide inferiority/insecurity (eg Would People Still Like Me If I Don’t Have This Talent/Money/Looks/Whatever? or else TOTAL DENIAL): 1) Did their father Finwe choose to leave the court with his errant eldest son because he spoils his favourite son (which would make it at least partly Finwe’s fault Feanor is a lot weaker at resisting Evil’s rumours – and y’know, there are always going to be rumours where there are communities, and you are always going to have to choose carefully what you decide to listen to), OR 2) Did he actually leave his second son Fingolfin in charge because he knew Fingolfin was the more emotionally stable one, while Feanor would need his dad more?

Anyway, the rest of the tale continues –

While Feanor is living in exile, Melkor and his ancient evil ally Ungoliant (who spawns all the monster spiders in the books and movies), sneak back into Valinor and kill the 2 Trees. The Valar then turn to Feanor for the Silmarils which contain some of the original light of the Trees, so they can try to revive them. Feanor is described as “feeling like he is surrounded by enemies and attacked,” (what did I say? Insecure!) and says no. (The Valar will strive in vain to restore the Trees, eventually managing to salvage a final perfect fruit and flower before the Trees are gone forever. The fruit and flower become the Sun and Moon for the world/Arda.)

While Feanor fiercely accuses the other Valar of being just like their fellow Vala-turned-evil Melkor, news arrives that said Melkor has now sacked Feanor’s home, killed his father Finwe (who had refused to flee and tried to defend their gems), and made off with the Silmarils. At this stage Feanor forever refers to Melkor as Morgoth.

Feanor then leads his 7 sons, all strong elf-lords who follow him faithfully, into swearing a terrible oath: With non-negotiable enmity against any being that should keep a Silmaril from their family, they vow to recover the gems at any cost. 

It is this vow that will see them do many terrible things in the name of “recovering what is rightfully theirs”. Bear in mind that except for Melkor/Morgoth, all the other Valar and elves are otherwise irrevocably Good. (They’re not Orcs, Balrogs, Fell Creatures, Goblins, Trolls or anything else that makes up the Forces of Evil.)

The irony is Tolkien’s Elves are supposed to be “better” than the Dwarves or Men, which is why they were granted immortality, and the Valar invited them to leave Middle Earth to the other beings and come live in Valinor (like “paradise” on Earth/Arda) in the first place – and they will end up killing each other and banning their descendants from using each other’s Elven dialects etc because of this terrible vow by the most influential, capable and ambitious of the elven houses.

Feanor’s band of Noldorian elves will alienate themselves from the Valar whom they come to paint with the same brush as Melkor/Morgoth (since “everyone” asks them to fork over the Silmarils that are their family’s right anyway), leave Valinor for Middle Earth, in the hope of exacting vengeance against Morgoth and yes, recovering the Silmarils. Which they don’t actually let anyone use.

When they reach the great sea separating Valinor from the rest of Middle Earth, they ask the seafaring Teleri dwelling by the shore to lend them their ships, so they don’t have to brave the Helcaraxe, a freezing and treacherous icy mountain passage that is their only other way across.

The peace-loving Teleri are the elves who loved Middle Earth, loved the sea, loved the Valar, loved their fellow elves who didn’t make the trip over (especially the Sindar or Grey Elves), and therefore set up their kingdom right at the border, so they could have the best of all worlds. Ulmo, Vala of the sea, develops an affection for them and teaches them to craft ships and sail back and forth between the realms. Olwe, Teleri King, therefore tells Feanor that their ships are to them their life’s work and treasure just as much as gems imbued with magic are to the Noldor, and they do not want the fruit of their labours to be used in this way, what with the Valar repeatedly entreating the Noldor not to take up this crazy quest chasing after Evil.

Feanor and his followers don’t see it that way, feign retreat, then attack the Teleri. (Because by their Terrible Oath, the Teleri are now standing between them and their recovery of the gems. An oath which, ironically, was born out of Feanor’s original abhorring of Evil, something all elves and Valar share. As poet Jasmine Mans puts it, “Don’t become a monster from fighting one. Or loving one.”)

When the larger host of Noldorian elves arrive under Feanor’s reluctant step-brothers Fingolfin and Finarfin (who are following only because their people get swayed by Feanor’s arguments, one of which being on Middle Earth they are some of the most powerful beings but on Valinor they are the weakest; their own followers had then pushed the two younger princes to come rule them on Middle Earth because they don’t want to be ruled by Feanor), the battle is already underway and they have no idea what started it. Some of them mistakenly think the Teleri attacked first because the Valar asked them to stop anyone from leaving. Regardless, in the battle chaos when they see some of their own Noldor dead, they simply rush to join in the fight.

When the dust settles, the Teleri, less-skilled in weaponry, have been utterly decimated. The more moderate of the Noldor are horrified and curse Feanor for starting everything. Mandos, Vala of Death/Judgement, appears and pronounces his doom upon all Noldor. Youngest prince Finarfin (ever the most peace-loving and soft spoken of the 3 princes) turns back to Valinor with his followers, is pardoned, and eventually becomes High King of the Noldor who stay behind in Valinor (just 1/10th of the entire Noldor – just 1/10th of the most influential and ambitious race of elves, the Noldor, manage to agree with Oh Sod It, The Hotheads Are Idiots And I’m Going Home To Regroup, but back when Feanor was rallying them to leave, a lot more of them were swayed by his blustery We Shall Be Top Of The Pecking Order In Middle Earth etc etc because Pride)..

In the end Finarfin goes to Middle Earth only much later, to fight as part of the Elven forces in the War of Wrath where Melkor will finally be defeated forever, and Sauron will take over as the Force of Evil to Beat, in The Hobbit and LOTR stories. Finarfin’s eldest son Finrod however travels widely, discovering the first humans and acquiring a taste for hanging out with them, and will assist human lord Beren’s attempt in meeting bride price for Luthien later on..

Meanwhile, Feanor moves his loyal followers quickly aboard the ships immediately following the slaughtering of the Teleri. The sea rises up in fury and retribution, and more lives are lost.

After the first group finally makes it across, Maedhros, Feanor’s eldest son, asks who to send back to ferry the rest of the Noldor, his best friend Fingon (who is in Fingolfin’s host) included. Feanor instead orders that the ships be burned, ie the large majority of moderate Noldor who don’t support him anyway be left behind on the Valinor shore.

Seeing the fire far on the other side of the sea and realising what Feanor has done now, Fingolfin finally loses it. Instead of then going back to Valinor like Finarfin (who is eventually dubbed the wisest of the 3 princes except no one ever listened to him in court because he just wasn’t loud enough), Fingolfin then decides to lead his host across the icy Helcaraxe that no one wanted to attempt in the first place. 

(pics of the Helcaraxe from tolkiengateway.net)

Because Fingolfin now insists on confronting his crazy older step brother, he leads his followers, the largest group of Noldor, through the worst route to Middle Earth, losing even more lives along the way. And btw, before all this, he never wanted to go to Middle Earth to begin with.

Meantime, Feanor presses on, eventually engaging with Morgoth’s dark forces. Following an initial strong victory (which to be fair is quite an achievement since his host of aggressive loyal Noldor are always heavily outnumbered) however, he then hotheadedly pursues the fleeing remnants of the Orc army too far back into their own territory, and is hopelessly overwhelmed by Balrog (Maia serving Morgoth) reinforcements pouring from their stronghold.

Feanor’s 7 sons catch up in time to beat off the demons and spend his final dying moments with him…. only to have him remind them to uphold their Terrible Oath, and curse Morgoth with his dying breath. 

(This thing as the story wears on will become a real albatross round his sons’ necks, particularly for his 2 eldest, and has been described by commentators as so much potential for Good, then “kept in chains, ultimately crushed by cruel injunction.” Indeed, while 3 of Feanor’s middle sons are also quite hot-headed and the 2 youngest twin brothers are mostly blind followers, Maedhros and Maglor will come to be the most tormented by the Oath. Tolkien takes care to emphasise Maedhros’ huge potential as a great hero and leader, but he will “have no life” – no wife or kids, no chance to be his own person, from the burden of being Feanor’s eldest and the terrible guilt-ridden and misplaced sense of duty forcing him to uphold Feanor’s Oath legacy.)

It is why the Corruption of Feanor, not the destruction of Lamps or Trees, is told as Evil’s Greatest Achievement. 

Upon Feanor’s death Maedhros assumes leadership of the clan. While highly capable, the little army is still far outnumbered by the dark forces, and he is captured and ransomed. No one believes Evil would honour their words, and so he is written off for dead. The Orcs attach him by his right wrist to a sheer cliff, where he is left to die slowly.

Meanwhile, Fingolfin’s host (what’s left of it, after their unnecessarily treacherous journey) finally arrives in Middle Earth, and Fingon, Maedhros’ best friend, sets about looking for him immediately. Finally finding him chained too high out of reach, the two friends agree on a fast ending with an arrow, but in a last ditch effort Fingon supplicates the Valar.

Despite the Doom of Mandos and vow by the Valar to cut off all Noldor who fought Teleri and then stubbornly traipsed through Helcaraxe and high water in pursuit of Silmarils or Morgoth or Feanor-because-they-want-to-confront-him, Manwe, Vala of the skies, sends a great eagle (whose name btw, is Thorondor). Fingon frees Maedhros by cutting off his hand, and the rescue largely repairs the relationship between the Feanor followers and the Fingolfin followers.

Maedhros rather unnecessarily begs forgiveness for abandoning the Fingolfin host on the shore back in Valinor (although really, that was the dad’s fault), and also waives any claim to rule the Noldor (it’s speculated by fans that it’s possible given the large age gap between Feanor and Fingolfin and elves living for millenia unless killed in battle etc, that Feanor’s eldest son is older than Feanor’s step brother), deferring to Fingolfin – in contrast to Feanor’s behaviour with his younger half brother in the dramatic court scene that started everything (an effective illustration Maedhros upholds his father’s Oath out of pure sense of duty, without enjoyment or ego of his own, or blood thirst, unlike some of the younger sons who really like to fight).

Maglor, second son of Feanor, is also popular among fans with good reason. In a later battle when they are again pursuing the Silmarils, the twin half-elven sons of their opponents end up orphaned. Maglor, never proud of what the Oath holds him to, adopts and raises the boys to adulthood.

Maglor’s adopted twins are Elros and Elrond, who grow up to be given the choice by the Valar of living their lives Elven or Human (the biggest difference being a limited lifespan – death is described as the Gift of Men – along with well, facial hair 😀 ). Elros chooses humanity and moves out of the elven realm, Elrond becomes elf lord of Rivendell, marries Galadriel’s daughter, and himself fathers twin elf boys who appear briefly in The Hobbit and LOTR, and yes, the famed Arwen played by Liv Tyler 🙂

Speaking of which, back in the Silmarillion, one day a human Lord named Beren comes across Luthien, daughter of elven king Thingol, dancing in the woods. (Tolkien has said this scene is inspired by a real life encounter between himself and his wife Edith, and he names himself “Beren” to her “Luthien”.)

Beren romances Luthien, but another elf who desires her tells on them to her father, who has Beren brought before him in the elven court. When Beren brazenly asks for Luthien’s hand, King Thingol, who doesn’t like humans and wishes to be rid of this one sets as her bride price, a Silmaril. (Which is basically his way of telling Beren “Forget It.”)

Except Beren actually attempts to get into Morgoth’s stronghold with the help of Finarfin’s eldest son Finrod, gets captured and imprisoned (Finrod is killed saving him from a Fell Wolf, and then resurrected back in Valinor because of his selfless sacrifice), and has to be rescued by Luthien. Luthien btw has some special powers because she is half elven and half Maia (King Thingol had fallen for a powerful Maia spirit assigned to Middle Earth duties, which is why he and his followers never move to Valinor with the others. Visiting with his kingdom was one of the trips the seafaring Teleri made before they got slaughtered, their King Olwe was his younger brother. So you can imagine his fury when he finds out what the Noldor have done – he bans Noldorian speech within his realm.)

Luthien enlists the help of Huan, a Maia in the shape of a large white dog who brings her into Morgoth Territory. Of all things, the pair have the gumption after escaping to return (well initially Beren does on his own and Luthien catches up) and attempt to pry a Silmaril off Morgoth’s crown while he sleeps – and they actually succeed. All the clan wars and treacherous journeys undertaken over the possession of the things, and these two who just want one so they can get married decide to try their luck, and manage to get away with it. 

At the gates however, Luthien’s spell runs out and this time Carcharoth, Morgoth’s pet werewolf, attacks Beren before she can renew the spell. Beren holds up his hand with the Silmaril, thinking its original power of pure good might repel the evil hybrid wolf, but Carcharoth bites off his hand and swallows both the severed limb and the gem. Then he goes mad and runs off into the night because the gem burns his insides.

Back in Thingol’s castle, Beren’s valiant attempt to meet the bride price for his daughter suitably impresses the elven king, who gives his blessing for the marriage, even as the hunt for Carcharoth and the Silmaril in his stomach begins. They find the beast frantically lapping river water in vain to cool his burning insides, but Beren gets himself killed in the ensuing skirmish. Luthien dies shortly after, from grief. In a modified version of “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Mandos shows pity on Beren and Luthien (not to mention they will turn out to be instrumental in the eventual salvation of Middle Earth) and evicts them from his Halls of Death/Judgement, sending them back to earth.

News of the recovery of a Silmaril reaches Feanor’s sons, and Maedhros writes King Thingol, asking for its return to his clan (before you think this is chutzpah, consider also that Maedhros has endured the most torture in the name of recovering this thing made by his father, having been captured and attached to the edge of the cliff for some 30 years and then losing his hand, all for a big clan fight he doesn’t actually believe in, while King Thingol and his people have had the privilege of his powerful Maia wife’s protection through the ages (she even creates a force field around his entire kingdom that wards off all evil), whereupon he then sets Beren to the task not even really wanting the gem or expecting Beren to deliver. And he ends up holding the gem instead.) Thingol ignores the request, at least in part because the Noldor slew his kin.

Maedhros mostly puts a pin in it (Thingol in the meantime gets killed by Dwarves over the Silmaril) but after Beren and Luthien pass away naturally and their son Dior inherits the gem, the sons of Feanor renew their pursuit, which ends in a second kinslaying where Feanor’s middle sons are killed, along with Dior, but Dior’s daughter Elwing (who later also marries a half-elven named Earendil) escapes with the Silmaril. The couple eventually deliver it to the Valar who turn it into the brightest star, even as her twin half-elven sons Elrond and Elros are left behind at the mercy of Maedhros and Maglor in the process.

It is with all this backstory that Maglor adopts the boys with Maedhros’ support (particularly as the last time there were newly orphaned children from all the in-fighting, Feanor’s deceased middle sons’ servants abandon the children in the woods as a twisted form of revenge for their lords’ demise, and Maedhros belatedly then goes searching all over the woods but never manages to find them.)

And now that this fleshes out the extent to which Feanor’s Oath has come to destroy the huge potential and the very lives of Maedhros and Maglor who are shown to be forced into this because of the Corruption of Feanor…. the War of Wrath occurs, and Melkor is finally brought down. The other 2 Silmarils in his crown are recovered, and now Maedhros and Maglor argue over whether to finally steal them from the forces of Good and fulfill the Oath. (Maglor says Let’s Approach The Valar To Release Us Of This Oath, Maedhros says They Can’t, The Oath Was Sworn To The Creator Himself And We Will Lose Our Chance To Finally End This.)

They are caught by the forces of Good. Although supplicated not to take the Silmarils, they are allowed to leave with the gems if they insist. They do. And when each remaining son of Feanor finally holds their father’s greatest, holiest creation in their hands, they are burned by the gems. For they are no longer pure and worthy, after all their terrible deeds.

In despair, Maedhros casts himself into a fiery void, ending his own life and taking the Silmaril with him. Maglor flings the third Silmaril into the ocean. The last remaining son of Feanor spends the rest of his days wandering the sea shore in sadness and regret (and at least one fan has composed music about it) – this one by Cheyenne Van Langevelde:

 

ps: If you acquire a taste for Tolkien, I found the Men of the West channel really helpful.

In the many months of looking at Pet-tubes in our spare time leading to the opportunistic adoption of Son’s Bearded Dragon Giffin from the SPCA, we discovered the trippy and somewhat bizarre world of the Exotic Pet-tuber.

There’s Guy With A Gadzillion Tarantulas in tupperware whose multi-million-views channel appears to be lots of footage of talking tweezers feeding hairy legged creatures and changing their water.  The things often have very different ways of webbing up their lairs and digging tunnels. (Welcome To Aileen’s World Of Useless Knowledge. I Type Stuff No One Cares About Just For You!) For real though, this one’s a thank you to the random kids who’ve been teaching my kids cool stuff (from making sushi out of the paper cones in the water dispenser to various native language (clean! 😀 ) phrases to the safe Ryze tricks and everything in between), legit. And as for Spiderman (sorry) he then had his channel taken down for awhile, something about not having enough warnings in case little kids stumble upon his millions-of-views footage of Spiders Attacking Tweezers, for the moment though it’s back up now.

Alex Green of Goherping however is probably our favourite. I picked the clip below because he unboxes axolotls in heavily leaking, filthy bags, packed in standard cardboard. And they don’t die. Also, the whole Mailing Animals Around The Country totally amazed me (now I know why Flat Stanley tried to travel the world in an envelope!) because I mail stuff all the time and standing in line at the post office it just cracks me up imagining a conversation with the good people of HongKong Post that involves putting a freaking snake in their delivery system using their standard cardboard boxes 😀

He discloses what he receives, including the handful of “dead on arrivals” (I’m including the ones he buys off Craigslist; for the ones in the mail it’s mostly when the sender doesn’t check the weather report before putting the animal in the mail and it’s too cold, there was a python who arrived loopy because the heat pack that should be taped securely to the top of the box fell on it), or animals with conditions so inaccurately described they’re in too bad shape to be saved and die shortly after arrival (in which case the sender is obviously not supposed to ship the animal.) Yes it’s heart breaking when he loses animals. He addresses that too.

The comment section also opens up a whole new world of understanding – there’s people saying “Oh, I’m so glad to see that (the animal they sent) arrived alright,” or “I was so worried you were going to ream me out on Youtube for not packing it properly,” and then others will reply the comments saying kind things like, “He was obviously well loved and cared for, you must have been so sad to have to give him up…”

Alex started doing animal videos when he was a little kid, also a nature blog that he says when he was 12 he dreamed of one day taking on National Geographic with, then built a reptile business with a partner (when he was 17), driving around the country picking animals up, using his parents’ car in the beginning before he could afford his own electric car, then had the “usual-ish” business partner issues whereupon they split the company assets including the website and name, once got stranded in the middle of nowhere in the cold and dark and kept a lizard alive by putting it in his coat (and then deciding to keep it)…. He’s very open about how much he makes from selling the animals documented on his videos. Like this one.

(Don’t scoff. Sir Richard Branson’s first business was selling Budgies. The hot hub’s was wild-caught fish in the river behind his house and ice lollies. Mine was silkscreened stationery supplies to establish an Interact Club in secondary school.) This more recent one below then goes back to ages 10 to 13, and then all the way up to 19 (he’s now 20), detailing when he first tried various ways of making money. This includes attempts with crypto. And Minecraft Servers. And halfway through the video he starts talking about buying stuff from China and drop-shipping it on Amazon “because basically everything from Amazon is from China anyway.. Actually Target’s stuff too” 😀 )

Why we really like Alex however is because he invites people to send him their unwanted animals including the ones with issues. His reason quite simply is, the more problem animals he gets to work on, the more he will learn (and thanks to his channel, this is how all of us get to learn as well and that indirectly saves animal lives too.) Another thing if you watch more of his stuff – he’s taking delivery of sick animals on New Year’s, a lot of the animals arrive filthy or in relatively pressing need of a cleaning or swabbing with disinfectant, sometimes he decides to finish filming the last bit of a video at 5am.. The one below is a meatier video about a 10yr old Beardie left in a large pet department store his entire life in incorrect lighting, who was expected to live another 6 months tops when Alex first took him and they’re now going on 2 years. And yes, sick old neglected animal complications come with. His name’s Stan 🙂

 

It’s hard work nursing the animals, blending all kinds of gunk to feed them in syringes, cleaning enclosures… His “animal-flipping* business” pays for vet costs (which he also discloses). S-o the flipping business makes a small profit after covering lots of its own costs, and then Alex’s “real” income is from Pet-tubing. (But he hates being recognised in person, he’s mentioned several times.) And then there are the Facebook Groups haters. Because Newton’s Law Of Social Media states that For Every Halfway Popular Action On Social Media There Is An Equally Proportionate Number Of Haters. No Matter What You Do.

*”animal flipping” – first time I ever heard the term used on animals – buy low(er), fix it up, sell for higher price, keep the difference. So much more common for property.

From what we could tell skimming commentaries and other Youtuber posts, Alex used to be in some Facebook Groups about animals, where he then got shish-kebabed and set on fire, then when he tried to defend himself he got kicked out. Y’know, so people could carry on skewering him in peace without the inconvenience of him being there (caveat to all the kids who want to get famous doing this stuff), carried on focussing his energy on the actual animals to be cared for. I found footage of other people posting their own (tens of thousands of views) videos describing that particular group as “very disrespectful. They call people names.”  NO I DON’T KNOW THE NAME OF THE FB GROUP THOUGH IT SHOULDN’T BE TOO DIFFICULT TO FIND BUT WHY WOULD YOU WANT THAT. Learning more about taking care of animals and constantly getting better at it is a very different hobby than that of bitching <shrugs>. God forbid an animal freaking dies while you’re preoccupied with bickering about how to care for it on Facebook.  

Alex’s website (emeraldscales.com) includes disclosures if a reptile for sale has issues (for eg “MBD” = Metabolic Bone Disease which means deformity usually due to poor feeding/ lighting – also another reason I don’t want to get babies – the risk is higher that without the right nutrition/ lighting, they develop deformities for life. AND it’ll be your fault.)   

OK next Pet-tuber. Cold Blood Creations is the father-and-daughter, occasionally-also-other-family-member Youtuber team who I first got Beardie diet advice from (especially the one where the dad says if his own kids don’t want to eat their dinner they go to bed hungry so if your adult Beardie is otherwise healthy and doesn’t want to eat his veggies…. 😀 ) It comes from how baby beardies need a diet ratio of about 4:1 bugs to veggies growing up, and then when they’re adults they’re supposed to get used to a diet that’s the other way around, 80% veggies and fruits and 20% bugs. Eating the way they did as a baby is bad for them as an adult. Switching over however can be hard. Even our Giffin who is a pretty good veggie eater just looooooves his bugs.)

–

–

–

Third and final Pet-tuber for now (because this one’s long. And quite heavy going): Taylor Nicole Dean. Probably the most well-known. You’re about to read why else she’s famous…

Here’s one of her feeding videos when she was about 17 or 18 and before the bad boyfriend and drug addiction (after which the way her look changes can be quite scary – the makeup, tattoos (fake and real), if you don’t already know she was following a heavily tattooed and drug-taking rocker musician on tour etc before going to rehab and cleaning up. She explains that some of the makeup is because when she was on drugs her skin got really bad, necessitating very heavy makeup..) CAVEAT the video below still has various dead mice that she’s feeding her snakes and things with:

She is very candid about being a recovering addict and having been emotionally vulnerable (she’s described herself as “very co-dependent,” always needing to be with someone). At which point lemme mention straight off that she’s not a “typical” kid.

Firstly, she has Ehler-Danlos Syndrome (if I recall correctly she’s said her joints dislocate easily and she’s susceptible to bad injuries), which led to her being home-schooled since Grade 5. Because of this, she didn’t socialise much or go to a lotta parties growing up and I’m guessing she doesn’t get to play a lot of sports either (which I always think is really important for kids). Secondly, the guy who gets her hooked on heroin is 10 years older, has a history of abuse allegations, and the general consensus is while it’s still “her fault, her choice” to take the drugs the “balance of power” in the relationship was clearly in her older boyfriend’s favour. So this is a Pet-tuber who has a helluva drama in her back story.

As a teen Taylor Nicole appears to already have some money (I’m not completely sure if it’s as a Youtuber after quitting a job in Petco (which she took to have access to more animals) but she does have a big following). She then keeps paying for her rocker boyfriend’s big expenses, including extensive dental work, and when her parents stage an intervention, she is sent to one of the best rehabs in the country.

Her daring to put all this out there helps many more people. She’s described how having a popular Youtube channel increased her insecurities about whether she was liked, whether she was doing things “right”. (There’s a popular Singaporean couple who created successful Youtube channels as well, and the husband ultimately decided for a similar reason that he didn’t want to be part of the couple anymore because of the intense pressure the Youtubing placed on the marriage. So now they’re close friends and business partners, but no longer married.)

Anyway. The part I really wanted to mention re Taylor Nicole Dean is how she says she got into drugs. She describes that when she met this guy online she was very taken by his musical talent. She also admits there were “red flags” even from the beginning that she chose to ignore. She says what kept running in her head was, “I don’t think I’m going to find anyone else who likes me.” 

She talks about how this guy knows exactly how to appeal to her in her current state of vulnerability. He says he is nothing without her. That she makes him happier than he’s ever been in his whole life in just the two weeks they’ve been together.

Then one of her reptiles (his name is Kronos) has respiratory infection and she is given preloaded syringes from the vet. Her boyfriend sneaks one from the freezer (for the needle, not the animal drugs). When she tries to talk her boyfriend into getting clean, he basically says, “I’ll go to rehab tomorrow. Tonight, let’s do this together as a couple.” There is footage where she describes her initial reaction as dumbfounded he could think that’s a good idea. But – guess what? She eventually caves and lets him inject the stuff in her.

They never make it to rehab together in the morning. 

“He’ll be better in the morning. He’ll be the boyfriend I want again, in the morning.”

Taylor Nicole will keep telling herself this, eventually disappearing from Youtubing at the height of it. While she follows her boyfriend touring with his band, he will keep encouraging her to use cocaine so she’s off his back about quitting heroin. The justification is that since she doesn’t “become a scary other person” on drugs, it’s ok for her to take it. While still on tour, his drummer quits in protest.

Several times, Taylor Nicole is still able to stop using cocaine. She says this is why she initially doesn’t understand the concept of addiction. She doesn’t understand people saying addiction is a disease and that when you find your “drug of choice,” you will not be able to put it down. The night she catches her boyfriend taking the needle meant for Kronos and he gets her to try heroin is when she is no longer able to stop.

When she comes back, she documents her journey as a recovering addict. Oh yeah, and she dumps the guy who got her into it, checking into rehab without him. Not commenting or encouraging any other possible issues about her (way too much footage out there but commentary is generally supportive of her), given her original personality of emotional and possibly also mental weaknesses, I do think she deserves credit and encouragement for breaking free, not simply stigma. Stigma keeps people who need help from getting it. Not getting help causes their loved ones pain.

Since Imma mummy blog, here’s the parenting story – at the very start, Taylor Nicole’s mom tells her she thinks the boy is bad news, but that her daughter is too old (about 20) for her parents to stop her seeing him. Therefore if her daughter insists, she is not to come home anymore. Taylor Nicole does move out. OMG. Note to self – DON’T TRY THIS WITH THE KIDS. Since we don’t have that large a tank to lock them in though, restraints will have to do. Near the snacks, of course. <pause> This is about when my kids’ friends start telling them their mom is blogging about chaining them to the fridge.

Taylor Nicole finds a nice place, pays for the guy’s air ticket and he moves in with her a week later. He also tells her he is a heroin addict. He is incredibly charming and vulnerable about it. She says on the one hand she felt she couldn’t leave him because he needed her, and on the other hand she felt she would never find better than him. 

At the height of it, one of Taylor Nicole’s friends sends her mom a picture of her bathroom strewn with needles. The mom goes over to her place and convinces the boyfriend to stay away from her for a week. It’s not mentioned how she did it, but bearing in mind the guy is described repeatedly as a “scary terrifying other person” when he’s using, I do think it took some guts for her mom to do that. Without the boyfriend to inject or supply her, Taylor Nicole goes into terrible withdrawal. Her mom stays with her, and then brings her to the rehab.

“I’m sick and going to have this problem for the rest of my life.”

I’ve mentioned long ago that the reason I’ve never even taken an experimental puff of a cigarette is that I’m scared – in my early 20s I read an essay by a young woman recovering from addiction, who described watching others drink or smoke. She said that if you have never smoked, you will never understand the craving. S-o… I had a former life in pricing and execution of derivatives that went up to USD 10 mio per transaction for equity, USD 20+ mio for interest rate or currency swaps (which means if you are slow and the price moves or if you make a “small” mistake, it can translate to a lot of actual money lost because the transaction size is big: 0.0001-sized mistake X USD 10mio)… and then when things slowed down in the wake of the last financial crisis I went looking for action elsewhere which is how I went to jump out a plane (shout out to SkyDive Lake Wanaka whose tagline at the time was, very fittingly, “Adrenaline Is Legal”… but what “scares” me is ever having the craving of an addiction.
The thought of potentially never again feeling (or believing you can be) as “satiated” except by something you know to be very bad for you. 

Taylor Nicole describes how on one hand are the physical symptoms – those can be treated with medication (she went to one of the most reknowned rehabs in the country). But you cannot so easily escape the addiction that is in your head.

Now, I do drink moderately, and have done so ever since I “could.” By which I mean my dad was terrified of me ever drinking, and then one day in college I fell down the stairs going to class wearing 3 inch platforms and the first thing he said when I told him was “Were you drunk?” And I got so offended (apparently it’s easier to believe I lack control, than that I just wear stupid shoes) I often kept alcoholic soda in my dorm fridge AFTER that 😀 (What? They sold it on university campus in Singapore, and to this day I have never been drunk in my life. I have a glass of red almost every night (if it’s going to be alcohol it may as well have resveratrol) but have virtually never gone beyond two full drinks even in high pressure work/social situations (worked in quite a few dealing rooms remember? Also, I read somewhere the female liver can handle up to two.))

Taylor Nicole describes getting addictive cravings and terrible withdrawals after sipping vodka, I’ve never had that and drank alcohol before realising that could happen, so in case it happens for me with smoking, I don’t try that <shrugs>.

Ends.

ps: here’s Taylor Nicole’s vid: I’m a heroin addict. (The truth about everything).  And here’s a pretty good commentary about it: Taylor Nicole Dean’s Fall From Grace. It includes a freaking spreadsheet of Taylor Nicole’s animals. Some of her mistakes highlighted were when one of the lizards she got was not the species she thought it was (implying he needs different care), adopting too many animals too fast (like, 12; she’d arranged for various animal “experts” in the area to keep checking on the animals, and she has an assistant btw).

 

“The beauty of a woman is not the clothes she wears, the figure she carries or the way she combs her hair…. (It) must be seen from in her eyes because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides..” 

“…for beautiful eyes, look for the good in others.” 

– the late Audrey Hepburn, UNICEF ambassador and humanitarian

So the story goes…..

In 1912 London outside the Covent Garden Opera House professor of linguistics and phonetics Henry Higgins develops a morbid fascination with the accent of a common flower girl, following her and taking notes as she speaks, until she clocks him and makes a scene. He then goes on a self-righteous (if poetic) rant, “Why Can’t The English Teach Their Children How To Speak? This verbal class distinction should by now be antique… …By right (flower girl) should be taken out and hung, for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue….” 

Thus is born the wager between Professor Higgins and fellow linguistics enthusiast Colonel Pickering, himself only just having returned to London, from studying Indian dialects: That manner of speech is the single most powerful factor in defining social class, and a simple lack of proper speech deters one from finding better station in life. Higgins wagers that in 6 months he can take a girl of the lowest societal class imaginable, successfully teach her to speak properly and thereby pass her off as high-born.

(*Pygmalion was the Greek sculptor who fell in love with his most perfect creation. When Aphrodite overhears Pygmalion wishing at a party to find a wife who most closely resembles his sculpture, she brings his statue to life.

Now, the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology are notably flawed, known for their all-too-human judgements and pettiness, but I do consider Pygmalion’s statue an act of kindness on the part of the Greek goddess of love – she saved some hapless woman from potentially falling for someone and being in a relationship where she would be held to an impossible standard. (Like, how’d you like to compete with a statue for compliance and agreeability 😀 Of course, a partner whose judgement is so biased is not exactly “perfect” himself <shrugs> yet if no one compromised ever, we as a species would be extinct, and oh how entertaining are the fictitious works of yore, how welcome their distractions….)

The general Stepford Wives storyline goes a bit further, husbands replacing their wives with robots. NOT AI. Robots that cook and clean and dress nice and wear the Wives’ faces. 

Compare this with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, famously made into a 1967 Rom-Com starring Dame Elizabeth Taylor (Katarina) and Richard Burton (Petruchio):

(In real life btw, the on-screen “feuding” carried into the two leads’ marriage – from passive-aggressive publicity posters bickering over who is the more famous, to getting married, divorced, remarried, with some very large diamonds involved… Including a 33ct engagement diamond that was bought in 2011 by a South Korean businessman)

The story of Shakespeare’s Shrew goes, that a father has a fiery older daughter no one wants to marry, and a sweet, gentle younger one with many suitors. The father decrees the younger isn’t allowed to marry before the older, and so the younger girl’s many suitors find someone to fall on the sword for them to step up. That’s in the form of Petruchio, who makes no secret of the fact he’s in town to obtain a rich wife. Katarina is not dubbed the “shrew” simply for speaking her mind, however – she hurls furniture, breaks windows and courting her is like being inna WWF championship match.

“Sweet and obedient” younger sister Bianca (who turns out to be self-absorbed and manipulative) on the other hand conforms to “every man’s ideal” on the face of it, including her father’s – he runs to protect her at every turn, and also almost predatorily negotiates her dowry with her suitors – something he does not inflict on Katarina’s husband. Petruchio is seen to almost be doing everyone a public service by “taming the shrew” (to do this btw, he will deny her food and rest, saying he “loves” her too much and the food and bed in his home are not good enough… TBC at end of the post)

For now, back to My Fair Lady. Prof Higgins goes from “Why Can’t The English – ” to Why Can’t A Woman – (see a pattern here? 😀 ) and something about What Happens To Men Who Let A Woman In Their Life

https://youtu.be/iQGH9zereFc

So the story goes Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, sent out to fend for herself in the markets by her alcoholic ne’er-do-well father, volunteers for Higgins’ experiment in the hopes that with a better accent and manners, she will be able to secure a job in a florist’s shop. Which means she’s basically cooped up with Anal-retentive Jughead of the Academic World who, to be fair, points out he is equally rude to most people regardless of their station in life (but in reality is a little less so to his household staff, colleagues and his reluctantly supportive mother who might’ve preferred grandchildren, to Yet More Social Experiments With Linguistics :D)

What ensues is a hilarious yet surprisingly real 8 Academy Awards-worthy adventure where the incredibly fierce taskmaster seeks to make good on his boast. Some critics have accused the character of “emotional abuse” in his methods (please ignore Youtube title):

Rex Harrison’s portrayal of Professor Higgins is deliberately callous and chauvinistic, but you will also find articles like Time magazine’s about how that was a chauvinistic era, and the movie therefore portrays this accurately.

Eliza’s father soon shows up at Higgins’ door to “collect”:

Doolittle: So, what’s a 5-pound note to you, and what’s Eliza to me?

Colonel Pickering (Higgins’ colleague): I think you ought to know Doolittle, Mr Higgins’ intentions are entirely honourable.

Doolittle: Well of course they are – if I thought they wasn’t, I’d ask for 50.

(Higgins had instructed his (female) housekeeper to clean Eliza up and burn all her clothes off the street, buying her all the clothing items needed for her stay, is what Eliza’s father is referring to below when he makes a fuss about the inappropriateness of her not asking for any of her clothes from home):

https://youtu.be/-qHDYU1-viM

OK I can’t resist mentioning this – Higgins says no more about the meeting with Doolittle Sr and appears to carry on with huge preoccupation with his “experiment”, even as Eliza imagines doing away with her accursed tutor by firing squad:

https://youtu.be/2-eVcI2veK0

At the end of the movie however, she will return to the market largely unrecognisable and discover that Professor Higgins has set her father up to be moderately provided for, for life. (Roughly, what Higgins did was to write in his professional capacity to recommend Doolittle receive a small portion of a deceased wealthy man’s estate (said rich man having consulted the good prof on how to put his surplus funds to good use) – professor Higgins makes the recommendation as an injection of spending into Doolittle’s community, and the idea is sometimes dubbed “Doolittle Economics”. Doolittle is not exactly miserly, and is shown generously spending his new income on clothing and eating out, and tipping restaurant owners etc.)

But back to where Eliza is still working on lessons. Eventually at 3am one night:

https://youtu.be/uPSG3QcZanM

All stoked by this, Prof Higgins makes a first attempt to fool the English gentry at his socialite mother’s box during the Ascott races (yes the dubious Mrs Higgins agrees to play along though she mildly disapproves. She is also aware in the scene below that as yet Eliza can only speak about Health and the Weather.. It goes horrendously wrong (but with the perfect accent), and then of course there is the coup de grace at the end:

(My Absolute Favourite Part as a child was not of the elegantly dressed Eliza screaming at the horse, it was when the lady standing nearby “tastefully faints” at the screaming 😀 (Like, is that not just the funniest thing?))

The Golden Retriever-esque Freddie Eynsford-Hill (from the clip above) who has led a privileged but sheltered life quickly falls for the “refreshingly different” Eliza. Absolutely smitten, he will go on to write her pages and pages of letters every day. Eliza briefly considers marrying him, when she chafes at Higgins’ egotistical crowing after his own success in winning his wager (6 months to successfully pass her off as high-born, which he does at the Embassy Ball, pictured at the beginning of this post. She is pronounced by “experts” to be a Hungarian princess, because her English is now “too good,” too schooled, to be native).

When at the end of the 2-hour movie Eliza chooses to return to Higgins, finding him listening to her old Cockney-accent audio tapes, it is an indication he misses all of her – including the crude-speaking flower girl part. When caught, he then welcomes her back with, “Where are my slippers?” and critics are dissatisfied with the way the show ends. Yet here are two people who know themselves well, do not hide who they are to each other, and have chosen partners who know and accept their failings.

No Bull.

End.

 

Audrey Hepburn spent the final decade of her life working with UNICEF in poverty stricken African and Asian countries. Her deeply personal reason for doing so, detailed on UNICEF’s blog, is that she herself was a former hunger-stricken child in Holland who survived malnutrition due to UNICEF aid.

–

*Re Taming of the Shrew.. Interpretations for the “taming” are varied, reflective of interpretator’s own biases and dispositions – transformed by marriage (and apparently love) into the most cooperative and “obedient” of the three wives being discussed, much to the astonishment of her many detractors including her own father, Katarina (particularly the Elizabeth Taylor version) appears to give a swoonsome speech about the duties of a wife in obeying her husband. (THE Elizabeth Taylor, bowing before her husband, humbly asking for his hand to hold and dressing the other two wives to be more obedient and supportive because husbands work hard to provide! Now it’s the men’s turn to swoon 😀 )

One Man’s Meat….. I first came across The Unicorn In Captivity via the Metropolitan Museum of Art (they sell merch like the journal below btw). It is something that first defined my idea of marriage as a young adult, before I became a Christian. See, the unicorn of the European medieval ages was depicted as invincible, with medicinal properties in its magical horn (leading to market sellers doing things like passing off narwhal horn for unicorn).

In Unicorn in Captivity, the “captive” mythical creature is sitting contentedly within a fence that is obviously low enough to jump over, and with a “collar” round its neck that is not secured. The idea is that the unicorn chooses to be there, that its “captivity” is a happy one 🙂 The image is an analogy for happy marriage.

“Happiness,” “joy,” can be very personal to define. Too often we see people in seemingly “bad” situations we think we would never want to be in, and yet they somehow find joy in their circumstance (such people are the kind you want to be around! Don’t ever let em go…! 😀 ) On the flip side are people who are never happy.

My personal interpretation is the crafty Petruchio succeeds in making Katarina fall for him because he has understood her core nature – she initially chafes at the traditional role expected of her. Shakespeare’s writing of it includes Petruchio slowly injecting the most ridiculous demands, like insisting Katarina agree with him that the sun is the moon, and Katarina eventually hides the beginnings of a smile. And so they go from the roof-destroying, leg-sweeping, window-pane shattering, deprivation of food, sleep and well, reason that is their “courtship” and “honeymoon”, to the shrew deciding that other role in this role-playing game is intriguing as well. The one of the obedient wife. Some notable directors had the actress playing Katarina wink wryly at her husband while bowing to him and declaring her undying obedience and loyalty. (It’s a part of Eliza Doolittle that sadly for Freddie, he would not easily know how to speak to, and why the unicorn may have chosen to return to Higgins.)

Did playing Shrew Vs Rogue spill over into the Taylor-Burton marriage, or did the Taylor-Burton union make for a very entertaining performance of Shakespeare’s work? Pr-obably a bit of both. They were pretty batshit crazy tempestuous. They were, after all, movie stars. Performers. The rest of us mere mortals can surely watch 🙂

There is a high school romance flick from the ’90s that is loosely based on Shrew:

(It gets fun from min 1:25):

Unlike in the original Shrew storyline, in the modernised 10 Things, Kate (above pic in red, aged 18) started off popular just as Bianca (in green) now is. (It doesn’t come out until close to the end why Kate is “shrewish” and then only very briefly in the sisters’ conversation, so I’ll mention – newly coming of age, Kate made a mistake she terribly regretted – as The Popular Girl In School, she succumbs to peer pressure, sleeping with with The Popular Boy as the rather socially expected thing to do if you were part of that cool crowd, y’know? (Uh, not.) She then really, really regrets it, deciding that the price is too high to pay for remaining “popular” to fit in (not to mention Popular Boy turns out to be self-absorbed, shallow and insincere). She becomes so disillusioned with the pursuit of popularity that she vows never to do it again, over-compensates (including picking colleges particularly far away) and becomes the Anti-Popular Girl. To the cool kids, “The Shrew.” The same shallow Popular Boy then tries to date her newly popular little sister……

Want more? Some verbal sparring with Popular Guy (no, he’s not “Petruchio”, that’s the long-haired Heath Ledger who comes in late, hears Kate’s rant, and promptly leaves)…

And Mr Morgan’s rapping Shakespeare’s Sonnet 141

(He follows the above with “Now, I know Shakespeare’s a dead white guy, but he knows his sh*t. So we can overlook that…” The rap was his intro to an assignment for the kids to write their own version of said Sonnet – Kate’s will be titled 10 Things I Hate About You.)

*Actor Daryl Mitchell who played Mr Morgan sustained an injury that left him paralysed from the waist down when his motorcycle skidded on gravel, 2 years after 10 Things.

Mitchell continued to receive steady acting work with the support of fellow actors like Denzel Washington and Chris Tucker, started the Daryl Mitchell Foundation to raise awareness of spinal cord injuries, and is also a spokesperson for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (Yes, Christopher Reeve who played Superman, fell off his horse and was paralysed from the neck down… then becoming even more of a Superman in his real life).

Mitchell has said, “It isn’t about my skill, it’s about my personality.” He has 2 sons and a daughter, all high school athletes.