The Tanuki Ramble

Cindy Sheehan--A Nation Talks Back

Cindy Sheehan + NPR--a perfect match, right? 

When I cued up the stream to listen to this Talk of the Nation spot on America's most publicized grieving mother, I thought I'd have to grin and bear the bias as I caught myself up on what this woman's all about.  I don't live in the States, and don't watch TV very often, so most of what I've been getting is through Internet news and editorials.  I wondered what I was missing.

After listening, my opinion of Sheehan has changed.  Whereas before, I thought that she was a naive yet sincere critic of an aspect of US foreign policy that has taken her son from her, I now see her superficial shill carried away by the sound of her own voice on network TV. 

Virtually every caller who commented on found her at best misguided, while others (some who have also lost children in Iraq) seemed to be genuinely hurt by her posturings.  I couldn't get over the dignity with which they spoke, and how shallow and contrived Sheehan herself sounded.  Perhaps she was caught at a bad moment, and NPR set her up by enlisting only those who disagreed.  But somehow, that doesn't sound like the NPR that I know.

Listen to the whole thing here.

The Instanuki Strikes Again

This time I'm really going to do it-- just make brief, hit and run link, suppressing the powerful urge to comment.

First--Hiroshima.  Usually the subject dies down the farther we get away from the beginning of August, but here's a good article and post, one on the anti-Soviet angle of the bombs and the other a meditative tallying up of an ethical nightmare by R. J. Rummel.  The consensus seems to be that by creating a chance for the Soviets to grab all of Korea--and possibly northern parts of Japan--would have been a horrendous mistake.  Thereby justifying a horrendous democide?  We'll never know.  And as Rummel implies, those who say they do know are idiots.

Next, here's ambassador Howard Baker on the importance of Japanese-American friendship--and judging Japan by its current behavoir rather than crimes long past.  Sounds right to me.

Why's it that Ikea, a mega-mega-megastore is looked upon as kinda neat while Walmart is the great Satan?  Cafe Hayek would like to know.

Meanwhile, how are the Japanese passing the long, hot summer?  Some by immersing themselves in innocent, childish pleasures, like watching stag beetle sumo, others hooked on stag parties of another kind.  No wonder the birth rate is plummeting here.

Meanwhile, do Chinese and Americans perceive things differently--I mean, fundamentally differently?  According to the latest research, the answer seems to be yes.

But then again, the difference may not last long.  Chinese TV is becoming 'vulgar and manipulative,' in other words, current changes are making Chinese boob tubes...swing, American.  (Older folks may remember the reference to the old jingle).

But lest you think Americans are getting the best of everyone in terms of putting their culture on...or over...everyone, this video reveals the shocking truth behind Japanese restaurants abroad, and as all fellow gaijin living here will tell you, it's all perfectly true.

Born To Be Guiled

I suppose the hero of my last post would swoon over the chance to make noble savages of us all, a folk untouched by the corrupting influence of a market economy.  Well, maybe we could use something more concrete and natural as symbols of wealth, say...cattle, like the picturesque Masai warriors of Africa do.   If Kawakami doesn't believe this, many Brits surely do.

The Masai embodied everything the English yearned to believe about primeval Africa; they were tall and slender and handsome, noble savages who looked the part, brave to the point of foolishness, peerless hunters and trackers.

Every Masai boy had to kill a lion as a prelude to manhood. They wanted nothing from the modern world, simply the right and the space to follow their cows and continue their simple and deeply spiritual pastoral ways. Lions would give even the small boys a wide berth.

Yup, there's a sucker born every minute.  A A Gill of the Times gives us a closer look at what he calls the Morris Dancers of Africa.

The truth is that they are nothing like as utopian as we want to believe. They dip in and out of the modern world as often as they change in and out of traditional dress and are as likely to be barmen in Mombasa as herdsmen on the Serengeti. Romantic westerners sigh: what a shame their colourful robes are made in China, their beads plastic. Their beads were always plastic. And before their tartan was made in China it was made in Lancashire and before that by client tribes.

The Masai think it is beneath them to do any work but herd cattle, but will happily do a bit of male escort work at the weekend and the photo shoots. As overgrazing erodes the pasture they are coming into conflict with farmers and game reserves and are hiring lawyers. Like most pastoralists they have a robust loathing for anyone who farms. They have a violent, arrogant self-belief and disdain for their neighbours that if it were espoused by anyone in the West would swiftly put them in court, are innately racist and organically fascist. They were proud, pretty, arrogant and vainly fearless. All attributes the English would like to have awarded to themselves.

The Masai were, they thought, nature’s raw Englishmen. Pre-colonial Africa had been an uneasy balance of farmers and herdsmen. When the English turned up they despised the poor peasant subsistence dirt grubbers and took to the bullies. They despised the men and women who washed their clothes, tended their gardens, made their beds and looked after the children but admired the aggressive, arrogant nomads. So they took to the Masai and the Zulus and their cousins the Matabele in Zimbabwe.

Colonialists like their savages savage in a romantic mould. There is a streak of masochism in having your material world dismissed by people who have little but vanity and some sick cows. Colonialists want to believe their subjugated people were worth conquering.

Scratch a utopian loather of modern society and more likely than not, you'll find someone too lazy to do the sociological math to figure out that the way we have it is far from perfect, but far better than most other ways...and/or an elitist wannabe who really and truly believes in magic.

The unpleasant, syrupy, simplistic Third World eugenics has continued with people like the late John Aspinall getting all moist about the ubermasculine Zulu ideal and Anita Roddick and assorted Greens ahhing over Amazonian hunter-gatherers with 30 endangered species in their hair. The Rousseau romance has a wooden heart, and the fallacy of all this is the belief that the people who know the least magically have the most to teach us. Being backward and impervious to progress and resistant to change excuses a culture from responsibility for its behaviour and belief; infant mortality rates, draconian tribal justice, witch doctor hokum, superstitious violence, subjugation of women and wilful ignorance are all excused in the name of natural cultural purity.

Classic.

This is not to say the the Masai are a contemptible and unredeemable people.  They are, like all societies, imperfect, and yet they are idealized for clinging to some of the same attributes that earn nothing but attack in western society.  What is the source of this strange loathing of one's own culture? 

Gill also write of the middle-aged British women who sometimes become enamoured with dashing Masai warriors.  It would seem that Japanese women, as well,  are not immune to their charms.  Let us wish them the best.

Kawakami Kenji

                                                                                                

          I am a closet Chindoguist. I cannot suppress a inner squeal of delight, a feeling of bandit revolutionary glee that out-Gueveras Guevera when I see the inventions of Kawakami Kenji.   

If there truly exists such a thing as conceptual art, Kawakami is its unacknowledged master.  More so than any dung wielding sculptor, professional naked people, or copycat iconoclast, this Japanese nut case (who makes a living off people who believe he's a Japanese nut case of an entirely different stripe) is the real deal.   A brilliant satirist whose ideas dance upon the head of a pin-like fulcrum, on one side, absurdity, on the other, nitty gritty practicality.

I wonder if Kawakami would agree.  Some of his contraptions seem genuinely useful, like the double-headed toothbrush that allows you to scrub uppers and lowers at the same time, or the portable subway strap that gives you something to hang on to when all the handholds are taken.

Like any good jester, Kawakami is equal parts genius and genuine fool.  This Asia Times article highlights his subversive qualities.

"I'm an extremist," he said. "I believe we have to do extreme things to make people think about this society and to question common sense. I want people to question everything because they don't think and analyze any more. How else could they have elected a president like that in the United States? He's an idiot. But I think my generation failed to change the world. I don't regret fighting the system but I regret that we ended up fighting ourselves. We set a bad example for the young, which is why today they don't have a clue about what is going on."

Although most of his radical energy now goes into his inventions, Murakami's hatred for America, and its subservient Asian ally, is undimmed. "In Europe they treat me as an artist, a new Dadaist [after the early 20th-century art movement that held irrationality and anarchy as the only rational responses to a world gone mad]. In Australia and Canada, I'm called a scientist. In China and Hong they wonder why I don't try to make money from my inventions. But in Japan and the US, they consider me a maker of party goods. People have been trained not to think in Japan and America. I think it's quite natural to hate America, its lack of logic and its brutality. But Japan is pitiable, too, the way it follows everything the US does."    

Before knocking together conceptual bombs to lob at society, Kawakami was content to use more conventional ones, as this JapanInc. article from a few years reveals.  This jester is, in part, in dead earnest.

Kawakami, who studied aeronautical engineering at Tokai University before he took to lobbing Molotov cocktails at police in the early 1970s as a leftist radical, says the art of chindogu is a rejection of the strait jacket of capitalistic utility, an anarchic antithesis to 21st-century consumer culture that can enrich people's lives and bring them closer together.

Perhaps it was the violence that he so abhors that drove him from more typical versions of leftist protest of his 60s and 70s youth.

The key issues were the Vietnam War and Japan's subservience to capitalist America, but after years of guerilla-style violence against the authorities, the movement eventually became dominated by small leftwing sects and turned in on itself, consuming dozens of former radicals in deadly sectarian disputes.  About 100 activists were killed in what was called uchigeba, or internecine warfare among the sects.      

Kawakami's current form of protest is infinitely more gentle.  However, he clearly has no clue about the ying-yang nature of human aggressiveness and creativity, and seems to have no tolerance for the material side of democracy.  Freedom includes economic freedom, the freedom to make, buy, sell and even profit.    Perhaps he is even a totalitarian at heart, who would, if he could, experiment on society the way he does with toilet seat covers or toothbrushes.      

Oh, his heart is in the right place, no doubt about that.  Although he opposes the profit motive, he made an exception for a recent TV show based on his work.

Although it may violate one of the Ten Tenets of Chindogu, Kawakami is willing to allow the show, if successful, to commercialize chindogu contraptions because some of the proceeds will go toward the removal of the estimated 4 to 7 million land mines in Cambodia.

"It's our duty as rich industrialized nations to help poor ones," says Kawakami, who conceives new chindogu while eating yakitori. "I'm very concerned about the gap between rich and poor countries. If you think about the magnitude of the problem, the political and economic mess in Japan becomes a minor issue."    

He's got that right.  But one of the reasons why Japan's issues are minor ones is the aggregate competitiveness and hard-work ethic of the Japanese people.  Their workaday common sense, concern, for the well-being of their families, etc., has made a kind of workers' paradise in which a guy like Kawakami can live pretty well by selling books with pictures of 'unuseless' inventions to folks with the disposable income to buy them and be amused by them.  Or to take him seriously. 

I suspect that, in spite of all the high-minded rhetoric and pseudo-spiritual political thought, Kawakami is just a guy who gets these great but goofy ideas--and has the know how and drive to turn them into reality.   And the joy that most people derive from his inventions is a recognition of how they are useful, yet at the same time, reveal something about human vanity.  Yeah, the car-top clothesline may be ingenious, but how uncool would it be to drive around with our boxer-briefs in the breeze?   

Anything that makes us take ourselves a little less seriously has got to be a good thing.  Ironically, Kawakami justifies his wacky genius by insisting his umbrella ties or mechanical rotating spaghetti forks art are political art, but that's OK.     To me, he's a jester on the order of Chaplin, who for all his pretensions about politics, couldn't help but create an art that was so broad in its appeal that people of every country and every age could get a kick out of it.                                                                        

Silly, Mean and Green

   Silly... (Japanese and Egyptian global warming protesters burying their thinking ends in the sand)

Or dangerous?  (Beware the green terrorists among us)

Political terrorism, exemplified by 9/11 and most recently in London, may pose the greatest security threat facing most nations. But other terrorists also lurk among us, mostly in the guise of animal rights and environmental activists.

They "see themselves in a war against the entire government and industrial democracy itself," explains Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. Frankie Trull, president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research, notes: "These are unbelievably mean-spirited people" who "operate in a classic terrorist organization mode."

Over the last decade the Animal Liberation Front has committed 700 criminal acts in America, according to the FBI. ALF activists recently broke into a pharmaceutical executive's wife's car, stole her credit cards, and charged $20,000 in charitable "donations."

I would guess both.   I simply do not understand folks who can't help but break the third commandment whenever the possibility that an all-powerful and benevolent deity may exist...and yet, indulge themselves in the pathetic fallacy in regards to nature the The Earth.   

I knew a woman once who claimed she felt much more edified spending a morning at the beach than shut up in a crowded old church being droned at by a whitehair in robes.  Or something to that effect.  Nature...She is the true teacher, the source of all wisdom and our spiritual home.  As I write this, I listen to the fluttering wings of a cicada which was caught by a robust praying mantis on my peach tree outside.  Ms Mantis has been slowly but doggedly nibbling at her bug eyed victim from the bottom up.  Last time I checked , it was about half gone, although the forelegs still waggled and sought purchase on the bark of a limb just out of reach.

Of course, as we deify nature, we have to take man down a few pegs, as the only one of nature's creatures that somehow has the power to act outside of nature.  Interesting paradox, that...if we are just a chimpanzees with sharper tongues and cleverer thumbs, how is it that our actions transcend...oops, that's not pejorative...transgress nature? 

They just do, that all.  Shut up and go to the zoo where there are now people on display to prove that a primate is a primate is a primate.    But judging from some of the verse that won the applicants their place in the animal kingdom...maybe the keepers have a point.

I'm funky like a monkey and as cool as a cat,

talk more than a parrot, up all night like a bat.

"I got a laugh like a hyena but get the hump like a camel,

so cover me in fig leaves as I'm the ultimate mammal.

Come to think of it, the composer should be returned to the herd while those that selected this doggerel be penned up for closer observation.

UPDATE:  There seems to be no end to the things people are willing to do for their new god, Ecovah.  Remember the Norwegian couple caught doing the horizontal bop perpendicularly on stage?  Now they're selling films of themselves resprising their routine--proceeds to be forwarded to environmental causes, or as they put it, FFF.  Article by Dalrymple, by the way.

Bush Number One in Nampa

If the Japanese had a Jay Leno or Letterman (do they?...I'm not aware on one), he'd be all over this. (From the venerable small dead animals.)

Speaking of Letterman, this post is a stupid Gaijin trick.  All others refer to  this.

Sometimes It Doesn't Pay to Pay

As Japan's quest for a UN Security Council seat fades slowly in the west (for Japan, that means somewhere in China), it continues to pour cash into the world's most cynical institution--to the tune of, according to this article, $346.4 million this year, or nearly 20 percent of the U.N. budget.  That's more than anyone else except the U.S., which pays its UN bills when it feels good and ready.

On top of that, Japan's donates freely to the nations most susceptible to monetary influence in exchange for a favorable vote.  But that doesn't seem to be helping either.

Tokyo's policy of showering poorer countries with aid in exchange for support of its bid also has had mixed results.

Japan won backing last week from seven Central American countries after promising millions of dollars in aid. But renewed pledges from the Japanese government to increase aid to African nations could not secure their support.

Matsumoto sees Chinese influence at the root of Japan's U.N. troubles.

"China commands more influence in Africa than Japan realizes," he said. "Many African Union nations don't want to jeopardize their relations with China. They recognize China as a major political power, and that holds more sway that Japanese aid."

Incredibly, Japan is often criticized for being stingy--although, as everyone knows, it's not the thought that counts.  But perhaps Japan should be faulted for being too 'generous.'  As David Howell writes,

Criticisms aimed at Japan for not giving a big enough percentage of national income in aid, or for including relief for debts that were probably never going to be repaid anyway in the overall aid calculation are wrongly directed. The whole campaign for bigger aid flows, as promoted at the recent Group of Eight meeting in Scotland last month, and as asserted in the so-called Millennium Development Goals, is sadly flawed and misconceived anyway.

What matters is not the volume of aid handed out, it is the way that aid is distributed at the recipient end. Bitter experience confirms that the promise of lavish aid flows all too often props up indolent or oppressive governments. Thus it prolongs suffering and puts a stopper on innovation and new enterprise.

Aid flows to governments can have the same effect as huge oil revenues. They simply remove the incentives to encourage grassroots development and new business. That is what has been happening in the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf -- although some wiser ones have now sought to diversify -- and that is what has been happening in Africa, the recipient of gargantuan aid donations over decades past, with largely negative results.

So no apology or hesitation is needed on this front at all. Japan should meet foolish criticism with wise actions, including the recognition that development and relief of world poverty are not "solved" by bigger and bigger aid checks, or higher percentages of national income paid out in overseas aid.

These fundamental ills are overcome, as they can be, not by crude demands for "more aid" but by a sensitive mixture of trade easement, encouragement to good governance, carefully targeted technical assistance and, of course, short-term humanitarian relief where disasters occur -- as currently and tragically in Niger.

But that's not what gets votes in the U.N.  One wonders if Japan this will nudge Japan a few more inches closer to supplementing their soft power with the other kind.

Bradley Martin vs Ian Buruma, et al

A few days back I posted about an Ian Buruma article in the New Yorker (Kimworld) in which he reviewed two books on North Korea.   Although I didn't touch upon this in my post, Buruma implied that the author of one of the books, Bradley K. Martin (Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader), was soft on Kim and wanted us to be just as indulgent.  Two passages from the article that Martin objects to are:

Bradley K. Martin, whose “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty” (St. Martin's; $29.95) is the heaviest tome to appear in English on the subject, has spent decades penetrating the mysteries of North Korea. He paints a grim picture in exhaustive detail, backed by many first-person accounts. But, though he is no apologist, he is perhaps fair to a fault. “There might be two sides to the story,” he cautions. Kim Il Sung possessed “considerable personal charm that only increased with age and experience.” The same goes for his son: “I would describe him as an often insensitive and brutal despot who had another side that was generous and—increasingly as he matured—charming.”

And...

Even if we follow Martin's advice and refrain from demonizing the Kims, we might be excused for dismissing their moments of charm as an irrelevance. Martin's notion that “people could still muster loyalty for the elder Kim” because “he came across as an engaging figure” is politically naïve. A warm handshake will not explain why an entire people submitted to his whims.

Martin isn't having any of it.  He's on a campaign to clear his name, even descending into the lower levels of the blogosphere (yours truly) to do so.  In the interest of fairness, I'll pass on a bit of the release that Martin sent me regarding the above passages:

To imply that I saw the rulers’ charisma as somehow offsetting evil deeds, he lifts a phrase, “there might be two sides to the story,” from my argument against unnecessary demonization of Kim Jong Il. This he mendaciously juxtaposes with a remark about Kim Il Sung’s personal magnetism, which appeared nearly 500 pages earlier in the context of the elder Kim’s pursuit of women. So that he can cluck that it is “naïve” not to realize that a “warm handshake will not explain why an entire people submitted,” he deceptively paraphrases the middle of a sentence in which I wrote that Kim Il Sung’s engaging presence was one factor that inspired loyalty. Deleting “one,” so that this appears to be the only factor, he ignores my chapter-length exploration of other factors including the biggest, the indoctrination system. As for Buruma’s suggestion that I struggled too hard for “balance” (the quotation marks are his) in evaluating the Kims’ regime, I actually wrote, “There was precious little on the positive side of the ledger page to balance the horrors” of the gulag. Ultimately Buruma, objecting to my refusal to frame the history of

North Korea

as a simple morality tale, seeks to portray me as a pushover for smooth-talking despots.

Is Buruma being too hard on Martin?  Is Martin not hard enough on the Kims?  It's hard to imagine anyone being too hard on the Kim dynasty, so perhaps Buruma has a point.  Buruma is not the only reviewer to note that Martin seems to praise Kim by faint damnation.  As Mike Mochizuki in the Washington Post notes,

...But Martin writes that Kim Jong Il is not a "total monster" like some other dictators' children (for instance, the late, unlamented and sadistic Uday Hussein). While he acknowledges that Kim is an "often insensitive and brutal despot," he also sees him as having developed a more "generous" and "charming" side. (This was certainly the image projected to South Koreans during the historic summit between Kim and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in June 2000.)

Nor is Buruma the most scathing.  The National Review's John Derbyshire, naturally, uses even harsher terms to describe Martin.

Yet not even a leftist, Vietnam-addled American journalist of Bradley Martin's stripe can fail to grasp the essential nature of the North Korean regime after 30 years of observing it. Martin is anyway on the rightward side of the opinion spectrum in the narrow little world of Kim-ology. His book includes several quotes from the appalling Bruce Cumings, who has argued, for example, that Kang Chol-hwan's book The Aquariums of Pyongyang, a hair-raising account of Kang's ten years in a North Korean labor camp, proves that the regime isn't so bad, since after all Kang survived to write the book!

Derbyshire, like Buruma, goes on to call Martin 'naive;' and yet Martin and his critics agree upon the basics.  It would be best for all if Kim could be removed, but far too dangerous to take him out by force.  Martin deserves our respect for his research and presentation of Kim's atrocities and all options and opinions need to be considered in so important and risky a endeavor as freeing the people of North Korea from the one man whose power and extravagance balances on their helplessness and suffering.

Check Out The Gays, etc., in the Dutch Libraries

This sounds like something I would have thought up--and been gernsorkled at, justifiably so.  From the Spiegel, reproduced here in its entirety.  (You can follow the link, but you'll have to scroll down to the very bottom.)

Rent-A-Stereotype

A Dutch library has come out with a new plan to combat stereotypes: In addition to lending books, the library is lending out people. Visitors to the public library in Almelo can now borrow gay people, gypsies and Muslims for an hour and talk to them about their lives, reports the Dutch news site Nu.nl. The library's director, Jan Krol, said one of his assistants came up with the idea and everyone loved it. "It's a good way to challenge stereotypes. Clients can lend out a Muslim woman in a head scarf and ask her the questions they wouldn't dare to if they met on the street." Currently, 10 people from various backgrounds have agreed to be "lent out" -- or taken to a nearby pub for a chat.

Don't they already have places in Amsterdam where you can 'check out' real, live people, albeit for a fee?  I hear browsing there is a big tourist attraction.

But seriously, who gets to choose the categories?   Do they use the Dewey Decimal System?  Will liberals get to check out conservatives and find out that they're not all soulless plutocrats hell-bent on suppressing minorities (if you throw in women, non-heterosexuals, etc., that would be minorities other than themselves), and familiar with no other reading material than the Bible and Sports Illustrated?  Why, I love flowers and Faure.  I read haiku.  Choose me!  Choose me!

How about the ultimate Dutch prejudice--will Hollanders get to know Americans up close and personal?  How about neo-cons?  Can we reserve a chat with Paul Wolfowitz and discover what a charming, cosmopolitan--should I say sweet?-- neocon he really is?

Will the Dutch libraries screen the loan-stereotypes so that borrowers with negative prejudices won't wind up having their suspicions confirmed on occasion?  Remember, as Chesterton warned, sometimes travel narrows the mind.

Daddy, What Did You Do During the Canadian-Danish Oil War of 2015?

While it's unclear whether the earth is getting so warm that catastrophe will follow, to what extent man is responsible, and if so, whether there's anything he can do about it, this much seems certain: parts of the world are getting warmer   There are those who feel compelled to speculate about the relation of global warming to virtually any irregular occurrence (take, for example, the appearance of whales near Wales), and there are others who see it as a golden opportunity.  Canada, for one.  As the northwest passage clears up, Canada wants to make sure everybody knows whose surf and turf it is.

From the Telegraph.

Canadian warships were sailing towards the Arctic yesterday in the latest act of gunboat diplomacy over control of the frozen wastes there.

Ottawa has launched a series of Arctic sovereignty patrols to assert its territorial claims and fend off rivals, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States.

Its scramble for the Arctic is a consequence of global warming and the retreat of the polar ice. This has raised the prospect of once-inaccessible areas becoming available for oil and mineral extraction. It has also revived the dream of a "North-West Passage" for shipping, linking the Atlantic and Pacific.

Talk about the law of unintended results.  Wouldn't it butter the biscuits of the Seventh Day Environmentalists everywhere if one of the first results of climate change is huge new reserves of oil and coal being freed up?  Of course, there might be some conflict among those eying the same pieces of thawing tundra.  What if Canada and next-door absentee landlord of Greenland, Denmark, cant sort things out?  Apparently, there's a not-so-friendly bout of plant the flag going on up there.

Denmark, which rules Greenland, was angered by the unheralded arrival of Canada's defence minister, Bill Graham, on disputed Hans Island last month.

He stayed for a short while, examining a new Maple Leaf flag planted by Canadian servicemen there, and an old flag left by a Danish naval party three years earlier.

Denmark dispatched the naval cutter Tulugaq and threatened to land more men. However, as tensions rose, the two Nato allies had second thoughts, and the rival claimants agreed to discuss the dispute at the United Nations next month.

Hmmm, sounds a lot like the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.  It's rumored that Canada will propose waiting until the straights freeze up again next winter, then having a massive, winner-take-all hockey game over Hans Island.   At any rate, it's certain that things will heat up before they cool down.