Note: The title is a little language joke to help me feel a little better about the somber mood that’s hovering over all of humanity recently. “Virii” is an incorrect plural of “virus” and despite its wrongness, I prefer it over “viruses” which, really, is just totes boring. Aren’t we glad we just have a single virus to deal with instead of virii?
In case someone is (hopefully) reading this decades from now and has no idea, the planet is currently in for a bit of a viral pandemic hysteria. SARS-COV-2, The Novel Coronavirus (I imagine an English virologist holding a monocle up and exclaiming “how novel!” as he looks through a quaint microscopic), and the resulting illness, COVID-19, is currently playing the bongos on people’s lungs and, kind of like HIV leads to AIDS, causing thousands of deaths every day due to complications like pneumonia.
As we all sit on our butts and read social media and news reports and, in my case, refreshing the USA pandemic Washington Post article every day at 6pm while nervously picking at my fingernails, I’ve seen brave-faced posts reminding us all that we’re part of a historical event now, and we should write about it for posterity. If all goes well and this pandemic burns itself out in a few months (or six months… or a year… etc) then our descendants might be curious about how we early 21st century internet-addicted dummies handled this mess.
Christine and I have both been working from home for over two weeks now. I last was in the office on Friday, March 13th. I can’t believe it, but I miss going into the office. I always wanted to work from home more, but 100% is just too much. At least I brought my 10 year old, coworker hand-me-down spider plant home to hang in my guest bedroom (i.e. “makeshift office”).
I feel really bad for Christine. She was supposed to go to Mexico with her mother from the 16th through 20th, but as the rumblings of upcoming doom got worse in late February, her mother decided not to go (she offered to transfer her plane ticket to me, which was very sweet of her). Christine and I initially thought about taking the trip (“how bad can this thing be? SARS and H1N1 weren’t nothing!”) but the rumblings turned into outright proclamations in early March. By the time the 16th arrived, my first working-from-home day, Christine admitted that it was probably a good thing that we cancelled – and it seems like most airlines are doing fairly okay by people in terms of cancellations and credits.
In reading the Washington Post’s favorite stories of 2018 a couple weeks ago, I was struck by one in particular – Suzanna Walter’s “Why can’t we hate men?” article on why women do indeed have every right to hate men, if they want to. The article starts out slowly and builds steam, and then in the final paragraph, comes what struck me immediately as “bait”
Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this.
In my case, of course, hindsight didn’t need to be 20/20 because WP also posted Ms. Walter’s followup article right afterward, which she wrote about 3 months later, “Mob misogyny is nothing new. I have the death threats to prove it.” The curtain pulled back, the bait revealed – why wouldn’t a sociology professor take an opportunity to prove her point, that the kind of men she was rallying against would react in an obvious way – with calls for her firing and of course, because the kinds of men who do this can’t just stop at firing, with her murder.
She points out that she got negative feedback from both men and women, but while “some of them [were] critical of my position [….] none of them [were] threatening.” Women don’t feel the need to call for the deaths of people they disagree with, apparently. But Walters’ obvious bait caused alt-right men to froth at the mouth and see nothing but red.
So, well done, Walters’ – your duo of articles; the setup and the reveal, were masterfully executed. When I read your first article, my main thought when I reached your purposefully-incendiary final paragraph was to frown slightly, shake my head, and say “huh, well, that’s a little much isn’t it? I’ll vote for whoever I want, thank you very much.” Then immediately afterward, think to myself – “ah-hah… I see what you’re going for.” Any sane and normal man would have a reaction similar to that, or even more mild, or possibly even completely agree with her; “I’m a man, and she’s right, I’ll never vote for a fellow man again!” – fine by me, your vote is your vote; go for it!
But as expected, the internet is filled with entitled, wimpy man-children that simply are incapable of handling even reading the words of a random woman on the internet, that they’ve never met and probably (ugh, hopefully, for her safety) never will meet, either. Why are they so thin-skinned? Why can’t they simply shrug and say, “well, I disagree, but whatever” and then move on and read another article?
I sent an email to author Benjamin Orbach a few days ago telling him how much I enjoyed his book, Live from Jordan. He wrote back thanking me for the input and with some links to some programs he works with, like America’s Unofficial Ambassadors and Creative Learning, that are aimed at encouraging interaction between the East and West.
Click the picture above to go to the Amazon review page with the video
I made a video review for the book at Amazon. It’s the first time I’ve ever made a video review for anything, and although it took me quite a few takes to make it look like I wasn’t brain dead and a gibbering idiot, I think it turned out okay, thanks to the magic of Windows Movie Maker (which is actually a terrible program and an embarrassment to the otherwise-great Windows Live suite of programs).
One thing that we Americans always can count on is our ability to take sides in the admittedly-petty battle of “Pepsi versus Coke.” With the exception of sponsor-bought restaurants and county fairs, we know that any store we go to will sell either one of the dark brown soft drinks and we can have our pick. It seems that no matter how old we get, everyone takes a side in this and most are quite proud to admit a clear favorite between the two. It tends to be a family thing. If you drink Coke, it’s because your father drinks Coke, and his father did too, and his grandfather drank Smith-Willington Fortified Bubbly Tonic Water (guaranteed to prevent diphtheria!) or something like that. The Heises have always been a Coke family.
But Coke is not common here in Jordan, even though the penetration of tiny 6×6 meter mini-markets into Amman, called “dukkans,” is incredibly high, at a rate of probably around 3 per city block. Without fail, 9 out of 10 of them will stock only Pepsi, their beloved “Beebsee.” I don’t know why they had to pick the one that has two instances of the letter that doesn’t even exist in Arabic. The Tulip family has heard me ponder this lack of Coke before, and gave me some possible theories.
Decades ago, back when all sorts of international trade deals to bring Western products to the Middle East were being signed, Israel and Coca-Cola became affiliated together, and Pepsi went to the Arab countries. Now, with Palestinian refugees and their descendants making up over half of the residents of Amman, old grudges die hard and Coke is still seen as a symbol of Israel. The industrious Palestinians are known as the merchants and importers of Jordan, and own a disproportionate percentage of the dukkans that provide soft drinks to the citizens. I’ve asked about the lack of Coke, point-blank, to some of my local dukkanjis, such as Marwan. Without fail, the response is always “The people don’t ask for Coke, they only want to drink Beebsee.” It’s a classic example of chicken-and-egg. When the markets only sell Pepsi, and the buyers are all either Palestinian or grew up around Palestinians, it’s easy to see how this one-sided market got started.
A Coke can with Hebrew writing, from last month's trip to Nazareth. And I thought the Arabic script of كوكا كولا was hard to read!
I’ve found myself craving Coca-Cola for the past few weeks. I think I can attribute it to my trip to Nazareth in northern Israel/Palestine in mid July, where I was surrounded by the usual unsubtle signage of the Middle East; massive billboards advertising for Coke that I hadn’t seen in months. I know one dukkan in my neighborhood that sells Coke, and I’ve been buying a two liter every few days. I have been watching his fridge stock and can tell that I’m the only one who’s buying the bottles so I know exactly when to clear my throat politely and remind him that he needs to buy new stock. I guess there’s one advantage to being the only Coke drinker in the neighborhood.
I was in the Shemeisani district yesterday afternoon, killing some of my copious summertime before the third choir practice of the season in the evening. Astute readers may remember that I wrote about the bustling business and banking region of the city in late 2008, because Entity Green had its first office in a tall building on its main thoroughfare. I had just finished eating a particularly salty kebab at the Damashqi Schwarma (Damascus) stand, and although they of course had Pepsi available, I decided that I needed a Coke. I wandered down the familiar main street of Shemeisani, looking in the dukkans I used to frequent for an elusive red-labeled bottle instead of the never-ending lines of blue.
Five minutes of walking through the sultry afternoon heat became fifteen as I re-circled the streets, trying to find more dukkans that had either sprung up like unruly dandelions in my absence or that I’d missed two years ago. My mind was now grimly set towards Coca-Cola, and I cast a baleful eye over the rows of 7-Up, Pepsi, and the Arab-made soft drink called “Shani,” which like most things here contains enough sugar to render a camel into diabetic shock. Three dukkans became four, and then six, and as I walked farther and farther up through the dusty blocks, finally eight dukkans. The owners, sweating in the heat and slumped in lawn chairs under dirty old fans, regarded me curiously as I gazed into their refrigerators. “Beebsee?” they queried me helpfully, and then politely apologized when I asked them if they had Coke hidden in some other cooler. “Beebsee is best!” a few reminded me with a friendly smile.
I knew that somewhere in the heart of Shemeisani there was a full grocery store and mall, but I’d never been in there before, and the large residential zone I was in now on the far edge of the district was utterly unfamiliar. I asked some lounging Egyptian construction workers crouching around a massive bowl of fu’ul whether they knew where the store was, and although they did, a passing young man offered to take the finicky foreigner straight to it. The man was a few years younger than me, in a stiff looking suit, and with a briefcase under one arm. He told me that he had just graduated from university, and I correctly guessed that he was touring the banks and looking for a job. We had only been a few blocks away from the Food City supermarket, and with his guidance, I was inside the blasts of the air conditioning within ten minutes.
I had been walking for almost fifty minutes now in this mad search for the fabled Coca-Cola of Jordan, and I rasped at the security desk. “SOFT DRINKS.” A tall man immediately leaped up and took me directly and proudly to a Pepsi product display located in the center of the store, making a Vanna White-esque gesture towards it. “The other brand,” I told him in Arabic. “I need Coca-Cola.” Startled, he led me to a second, smaller display in the back of the large supermarket with the familiar red highlights.
I picked up a two liter and cradled it lovingly. The man probably thought my brain had melted in the heat and he gently tried to put the bottle in a plastic bag for me right there in the aisle, which I equally gently prevented him from doing. I have searched for this bottle for almost an hour through eight dukkans, I told him. “But Beebsee is better!” he protested, then “…are you an American?” “Yes.” I replied. “My people need Coca-Cola to live.”
I recently had an eye-opening look at the differences between standard biology theory in the west versus the east. One of the teachers I know here recently had some inpatient surgery, and told all of us that she was going to “demand that the nurses don’t take my plants out of my hospital room at night!” Everyone who had lived in Jordan for awhile chuckled at this, but we new teachers were confused. Why would Jordanian nurses take plants out of the rooms of sick people?
Our elders explained that it was a common theory in the Arab world that at night, plants start taking in and using oxygen and compete with humans for it. Because of this theory, many people here make sure that they remove all the plants from their bedroom at night and put them outside in the hall. I confirmed this with a friend of mine here who has a bachelor’s degree in nursing. “Of course you put the plants outside of the room, especially in a hospital,” he said. “Otherwise, they might suck up all of the oxygen in the room.”
I was completely dumbfounded by this. Now, I can’t speak for all of the countries in the west, or other states besides Wisconsin, or even other school systems besides the ones I went to. However, I’m pretty sure that it’s a standard part of middle school biology classes that we learn that plants = good for oxygen, regardless of the time of day. On that same topic, I learned that there are old superstitions here that walking through a forest at night can be harmful to your health, for the same reasons.
I had to find out where this completely contradictory idea came from.
In my completely scientific research process of “searching The Google” I came across some pretty interesting articles, the most credible of these being from “Yahoo! Health Expert” Doctor Maoshing Ni. I checked his credentials – he’s a specialist in Chinese medicine and anti-aging research.
To get through the night, most plants reverse the process of photosynthesis and breathe, like you and I, by burning carbohydrates and oxygen while producing carbon dioxide and water. So surround yourself with plants during the day but remove them from your bedroom at night when you sleep.
On this Yahoo! Answers question thread, I found the back-and-forth between people to be particularly interesting. The reactions of most of the question answers that you can see if you scroll down the page (that the asker did not select to be “best answer”) were the same as mine – incredulous that someone would even ask the question (also note the citation on the “best answer” selection is Dr. Maoshing’s article).
Finally, the page that I found to be the most helpful was this one from the Aroid Forum. After establishing that yes, plants do shut down photosynthetic reactions at night, I learned that yes, that does mean that they need to carry out simple respiration at night, same as humans. Maybe it was just my school, but strike one against me: I was wrong. I don’t recall ever learning that plants carry out human-like respiration in the absence of light.
But is the Eastern World right? Let’s look at the math from Aroid Forum. (Bold emphasis added by me)
I asked a friend who did his doctoral work on plant respiration and got the approximation that the emission of CO2 in the dark is unlikely to exceed 4 micro moles per square meter of leaf surface per second. This is the same as the O2 taken up. Say our plants have a leaf area of one meter. Let’s say for the sake of argument that both upper and lower leaf surfaces emit at that rate, so our plants use up 8 micro moles PER SECOND (please excuse the upper case, but when we think of a whole night the seconds really add up).
In an 8-hour night, we have the 8 micro moles/s x 3600 s/h x 8 h = 230400 micro moles of oxygen the plants take up. That is only millionths of moles, so it amounts to 0.23 mole. That got the number back down in a hurry.
How much oxygen was in the room to start with?
A room 4 m x 4 m x 2.4 m has 38.4 cubic meters of air. That is 38400 liters.
At room temperature, a mole of gas is about 25 liters, so the room has 1536 moles of air.
If we say the air in the room is 20 % oxygen, we have 307 moles of oxygen to start with.
How much of the total oxygen in the room did the plant use? It is 0.23/307 = 0.075 %.
What about our oxygen-starved sleeper?
A person breathes out about 900 g CO2 per day or about 300 g in an 8-hour night.
CO2 has a mole weight of 44.
300/44 = 6.8 moles CO2 emitted = moles O2 taken up by a person in the night.
The 6.8 moles of oxygen used by the sleeping person amounts to only about 6.8/307 = 2.2 % of that available.
How do the plant and the sleeper compare? The plant uses 0.23/6.8 = 3.4 % as much.
With all the guessing (“approximation” in science-speak), none of the numbers has any meaning unless it’s rounded off to only one digit. You can insist that a sleeping person uses less oxygen than an active one, the room is smaller and the plant larger, but that doesn’t change anything. A good-sized plant surface won’t reduce the oxygen content of the room by much more than a tenth of a percent, and that is only about three percent of what the inhabitant uses up.
So, that takes care of that. To summarize, no one has been getting the complete picture so everyone’s a little bit wrong.My American school never taught me that plants consume any oxygen at all, and Eastern schools don’t mention exactly how ridiculously small the amount of consumed oxygen is.
And bottom line: how many of us sleep in completely air-tight sealed rooms, anyway? Eastern science really needs to take that into their considerations, otherwise they’re ignoring the question of how humans don’t just kill themselves off with the amount of CO2 we use up in one night. Or, for that matter, why a husband and wife who sleep in the same bed don’t suffer from oxygen deprivation. Unless you sleep with your head in a plastic bag (in which case you probably have bigger problems, my friend) that plant next to your bed, or even an entire roomful of them, isn’t going harm you a single bit.
For the first time in a year and a half, I mounted a bicycle today with the purpose of traveling to my place of work instead of for recreation. With the Dead 2 Red just around the corner and a week and a half away, I want to make sure that I’m in the best shape possible. I’ve just finished making a new version of Cycling Jordan’s website, which I will probably unveil in about a week, or whenever Sa’ad tells me to do so. In return, Sa’ad is allowing me to borrow one of his road bikes for my training purposes until the Dead 2 Red, something that I plan on using extensively as often as I can!
Why not make your breathing mask fun? You're going to get stared and hollered at anyway; might as well go all the way.
Biking in the streets of Amman is nothing like biking back when I was in college in Madison. For one thing, you fear for your life a lot more, either from being pancaked into the grille of a Hummer or from being asphyxiated by vehicle fumes. It’s a common joke here in Jordan that most of the heavy transport trucks seen around the city were purchased on the cheap by local companies from Europe because they simply wouldn’t pass European emissions laws. Well, Europe’s garbage is our treasure here in Jordan, I guess, because these smog-belching vehicles from the last century are quite prevalent. Whether you’re on a bicycle or in a car with an open window, you can always tell when one of these beasts is coming up behind you, because somehow they’re so foul that their pollution actually precedes them, causing eyes to water and vision to blur.
Ironically, the opposite quality of vehicle is proportionally just as prevalent in Jordan. There are Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Hummer dealerships all within a few kilometers of each other near Mecca Street where Cycling Jordan has its shops, and it seems as if drivers here have a mindset that the nicer their car is, the more right they have to crush you like a bug if you do something as foolish as obey common traffic etiquette rules.
So yes, fearing for my life was how I started out the morning. I had successfully made it back from choir to my house last night, even without my helmet, a light, or any reflective clothes. But that was a 3 minute drive at 10:00 at night when the roads were comparatively empty. My heart sank at the thought of biking 22 KM to work, all the way in Ayn al Basha, and then coming back up the hill. I left home at 10:25 in the morning, but immediately ran into problems when I discovered I couldn’t shift into the lowest gear on my front set. Not a huge deal in the Jebel Amman area with its moderate hills, but there’s a 350 meter climb from Ayn al Basha back into Amman and I knew that would be impossible without that low gear. I decided to head to the shop first to have the specialists look at it.
It was an interesting trip, just like I knew it would be. Amman during the work week is much busier than the silent Friday holy day, and my colorful yellow and green jersey, helmet, and facemask got a lot of stares and calls from peanut gallery. “HELLO WHAT THIS? WHERE YOU GO?” was a frequent phrase bellowed at me from the sidewalk. Bikers here just learn to smile, wave, and ignore everything else… “Polite Indifference” is the best way to deal with gawking hecklers. Then there are the busloads of soldiers who whoop uncontrollably at you, the drivers that play chicken with you, and the aforementioned black smoke following behind 15% of the vehicles on the road. But of course there are the fun parts, like when little children stare at you from their driveways, awestruck, and rush out to the edge of the road, jumping up and down with huge smiles, waving and crying “HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!”
Hussein, the lanky young Egyptian man who manages the shop for Sa’ad, looked me up and down and chuckled as I entered. He’s a wizard with bike maintenance and had the gears readjusted and a new water bottle holder installed in 5 minutes. He asked me where I was heading, and raised his bushy eyebrow when I said I was going down into the Ayn al Basha region. And you’re going to go back up the hill then, too? he asked, to which I merely replied, “insha’allah!”
Of course, the ride down that magnificent hill wasn’t without problems. A hidden pothole got me as I was only a few hundred meters from the bottom of the hill, causing the handlebars to slide downwards a little bit. The bike itself was completely undamaged (although I almost had a heart attack after narrowly avoiding being struck by a manure truck) but I knew that before I would attempt to return up this hill, the handlebars would need to be re-aligned. My coworkers found my getup to be hilarious, especially the mask and shorts. Shorts are an article of clothing that just isn’t worn in Jordan unless you’re a child or on the beach. One of the other teachers asked to buy the bike from me for reasons I can’t fathom (Taher’s never biked a day in his life) and our janitor, Wusam, wanted to know if he could join the Dead 2 Red team.
Khalil drove me back up to the top of the hill in his truck, after Wajih and Aaron derided me for not biking the behemoth instead. “Next time!” I told them, “when the whole bike is working in perfect condition!” The sun was going down by now, and I suddenly realized that just because I was in a desert country in February didn’t mean that it wasn’t February. I was wearing a biking jersey and shorts, and I was cold. Jordan doesn’t usually have much wind chill (or wind for that matter, except for about 50 days in April and May) but that becomes moot when you’re biking down a highway at 30 km/h.
Honestly, regardless of the small mishaps of the day, I really enjoyed re-introducing myself to the practicality of a bike. I joke about how terrifying the drivers can be, but actually they were a lot better than I was dreading. I’ve never biked in New York City, but I imagine that this is how New York would be for bikers if they didn’t have nice things like emissions laws and biking lanes. And the time saving! It normally takes me 50 minutes to walk from 6th Circle back to my house, but on the bike going along the same route I’m able to do it in 15-20 minutes. I’m going to be sad to give the bike back to Sa’ad after the Dead 2 Red is over…but maybe this experience will be the thing that pushes me in the bike-owners category!
