Greg Sanders

Review: Sinai Field Mission

I can't recommend Sinai Field Mission as a documentary. It is a video log of U.S. and U.N. efforts to build confidence in a treaty between Egypt and Israel. Emphasis on video log, there are scenes of driving around the desert, office parties, people drinking alcohol out of a boot and singing about Texas, people exercising, office life, and fleeting glimpses of diplomatic wrangling.

It could have easily been cut to a short and even then probably wouldn't be an award winning one. Aside from being in dire need of tighter direction, let alone editing, it would have also benefited substantially from a trick used in the documentary Restrepo: regularly label the personnel when they appear on screen. Following the workings of the office is all the harder when you don't know which organization people are working for. Interviews are also a standard practice for good reason when making this kind of movie. All that said, Director Fredrick Wiseman's intent seems to be to provide an almost anthropological accounting of the full range of the American experience which is a rather different set of criteria than the one I'm using.

Nonetheless, there are some interesting bits of history:

• There was a buffer zone in the Sinai that was strictly controlled by the U.N. There were then adjacent buffer zones with no tanks and an third zone with no missiles allowed. Each side also had an observation post which was limited to 250 people each who could not carry heavy weapons. Each side also got two reconnaissance flights a day.
• The U.S. had a specific submission, the Sinai Field Mission (SFM), that used an electronic sensor system to monitor movement across the most strategically valuable staging area in the dessert. This apparently had been somewhat unprecedented as it was a standalone single country command rather being under the U.N. The U.S. government side of this had been run by the State Department in cooperation with USAID and USIS.
• Surprisingly for the period, the vast majority of workers in the SFM were contractors with a company called E-Systems. I think I may have been wrong to have been surprised, I think overseas civilian agencies have been dependent on contractors for far longer than the military.
• What didn't surprise me at all was that there were certain tensions within the mission. I don't think this is necessarily a reflection of the U.S. government-contractor divide, turf battles show up with any medium sized organization. If anything I was surprised that there weren't more tensions with the U.N. Peacekeepers as they often used SFM facilities and I think the vast majority of them didn't speak English.
• The occasional diplomatic were trifling. Some complaints about a strict cut off for the last patrol of the day and some excitement regarding a medical evacuation by helicopter.

All that said there were a few paeans to the SFM staff and the U.N. Peacekeepers and  I'd say they were earned. They helped keep the peace in an often dull unromantic mission 7,000 miles from their home. (The mile count comes from a song performed by one of the mission leaders, presumably written by him too.)

Picture of Sinai Desert by Sonysan used under a creative commons license.

Review: The People vs. George Lucas

I've been attending a few films at the AFI's Silverdocs festival and have been quite enjoying them. Starting with one of the easier ones to review, the People vs. George Lucas is about Star Wars fans' love hate relationship with the creator of the saga. The film has an enormous amount of fan generated content contributed from the community including parts of a few films that look like they might be worth watching in their own right (e.g. a Misery-style story where a rabid fan has locked up Lucas and is demanding a new version). While there were a fair amount of raging fans on the whole the film was fairly sweet and ultimately stronger on the love than the hate side towards Lucas. There were a fair number of voices of sanity such as Neil Gaiman as well as even vitriolic fans capable of self-critique.

On the whole, I've got to say I ultimately came down on Lucas's side despite thinking he definitely did screw up with the prequel saga. I think the main place where they've got a case against him as an artist, rather than having produced some bad art, is that he 'lost' the original Star Wars reels during the special edition process. The tape of him leading the charge against Ted Turner's plans to colorize old films also serves as an argument against denying posterity the option to view the original. Aside from that case, Lucas seemed fairly good natured about the critiques, he makes sound clips and the like available to fans, hosts remix contests, etc. I'd have liked to learn a lot more about that part and how it compares with the approach taken by other creators.

I'd say this film would be the most fun for Star Wars fans who enjoy the products of the fan community. There's probably a lot to Google afterwards and it sounds like there's literally days worth of material they'll have to choose from as special features for the DVD release. The main weakness of the film was noted by Jen Chaney of the Post; much like Lucas the film could have used a tougher editor. The runtime could probably have been cut by a half while still covering the same ground. For example, Han Solo shot before Gredo did, I certainly back the fan consensus, but I only need so many clips of fans expressing outrage in a variety of ways. That time may have been better spent on old fashion journalism: tell us about how Lucas has supported and constrained the fan community, do more to explore out if kids actually like Jar Jar and whether the Ewoks were just as bad, learn what it's like to work within LucasArts or the like. Many of these issues were raised and discussed briefly by the film, so the creators had the right instincts, but I suspect they were so overwhelmed by the outpouring of material that they received from the community that they had to spend more time processing it than being able to find their own path.

Event write-up: An Uncertain Future: Women's Progress in the New Afghanistan

If the Taliban are not going to be defeated outright, will the progress made on women's rights be traded away? Three experts took a crack at this question with Robert Lamb, CSIS senior fellow with the Post-Conflict Reconstruction program moderating.

• Gayle Temach Lemmon, Journalist and author of forthcoming the Dressmaker of Khair Khana.
• Farishta Sakhi, Afghan who had worked with UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and ea variety of NGO experience.
• Ambassador Karl F. Inderfurth, now a professor at GW.

All agreed that progress had been made during the occupation, but not as much progress as one might have hoped. Education of both women and men is the key to further positive moves. Even so respect for women's human rights was under threat from the peace process and those, such as myself, favorably inclined towards a rapid exit. These fears were widely expressed by women they spoke to inside Afghanistan. Feelings towards the negotiations were mixed but it was widely agreed that women need to have a literal seat at the negotiation table. On this point, Lemmon argued that "half the country isn't a special interest group." Religious leaders should also have a seat at the table, although Sakhi did argue the national solidarity program provides a good model by incorporating mullahs but making sure the events are led by people with strong democratic credentials. Beyond the negotiations, other threats to women include rampant crime, an informal justice system biased against them, and a lack of services that has left Afghanistan with the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world.

Lemmon had went to research female entrepreneurs, some of whom had managed to support their households even when the Taliban was at its height. Critics say that she focused on exceptional cases, but she argues that programs on gender relations comes from the exceptions.. The panel was supportive of aid in an attempt to empower females, particularly entrepreneurs, but as always seems to be the case was not impressed with how it was delivered. One notable program that Lemmon had described and written up in a NY Times article was a popular local sourcing  initiative that had brought local women onto a military base to educate them on how to navigate U.S. contract regulations. That said, on a different point, Sakhi mentioned that a weakness of PRTs was that going onto U.S. bases was stigmatized.

Ambassador Iderfurth mentioned some interesting numbers on female progress. Females made up 430 of the 2500-some candidates for the parliamentary elections, and he'd been highly impressed by outspoken female parliamentary candidates. In monetary terms the budget for female-focused programs is 153 million in FY09 but the surge of new troops was accompanied by only a small jump to $179 million in FY2010. Lemmon: Education, for both women and men. She's often accused of profiling the exceptions. But the exceptions make the rules.

The event is being recorded and will be available on the CSIS website.

Daily round-up experiment

Not sure if I'm going to do these regularly, but they seem pretty popular and it may be useful for people that read my blog but not my shared items feed. I'll have to check with some of my friends that I regularly have comment discussions with about whether and how they want to be quoted, that would probably get to some of the real value added of such a round-up.

Dan Drezner linked to an article by Sharon LaFraniere in the NY Times about just how screwed up the North Korean economy is post-currency devaluing. Key anecdote: party officials wives get part-time waitressing jobs in China. I wonder whether the brainwashing of totalitarianism will be enough to overcome the heightened coup risk when you are stiffing your inner circle.

Kevin Drum discussed whether both variants of "I couldn't care less could be valid." This makes sense to me, so long as you make sure your voice drips with sarcasm when you use the version with out the not.

Ezra Klein explores the logic behind near-miss challenge to Sen. Lincoln. I think her finding religion on the financial regulation bill already shows the merit of the primary challenge, good job labor.

Ta-Nehisi Coates covers more civil war history. Apparently Sherman was racist. Also, all this discussion of slaves being the best fighters makes me continue to ponder whether we should step up efforts to get women into security jobs in Afghanistan.

Matt Yglesias encourages calm regarding Turkey's Islamist turn because ultimately democratic countries with religious populations reflect that in their politics. I tend to agree, although I give some credence to Dani Rodrik's worries about government tactics. I've gotten some good advice about where to read up on Turkey and it's time I took it.

Also from Yglesias, a few suggestions about what we can do about the around 40k of driving-related fatalities per year. One commenter pushed back on the merits of congestion pricing as a fix, I'm not sure to what extent congestion causes more crashes. Market rate parking I think would definitely make a difference as finding a parking spot can just be dangerous. Getting people into mass transit instead is a terrific solution and one that I employ myself as a someone that is likely a below average driver (I'm too easily distracted).

Game Mini-Review: Master Labyrinth

After playing Minotaurus the other day, I broke out Master Labyrinth at the next available opportunity. Quick game play summary: there's a maze made of tiles with every other row and column capable of being shifted. Each turn you shift the maze and then can move as far in any connected corridors as you like. The object is to pick up spell ingredients, numbered 1 to 20, in order. The way this effectively shakes out is that you've got to weight setting yourself up with a shift versus denying the next player access to a ingredient you can't get in a single turn. The fact that each component is worth progressively more points keeps the game moving by making it rational to risk losing the next one in order so you can get a future one on your next turn. Similarly there a three secret ingredients per player that are worth extra points which mean you're often not focused on the next available pick-up.

On the whole, there's high production values and it manages to be rather computationally intense without getting highly complicated. The ordering thing feels a little arbitrary but it works, as does the rule that you can't pick up an ingredient if your start your turn on its tile. The only change I'd make is to include a default starting configuration. As is the start of the game can really drag as few of the corridors may link up. Interestingly enough, the self-organizing nature of the game play fixes this by the time you're a third of the way in, but there's no reason to have a slow start unnecessarily. Since the distribution of the components is random, having some tile standardization at the start shouldn't take out too much of the variety.

Game Review: Minotaurus

Minotaurus is one of a new line of Lego games that's inspired by the myth of the Labyrinth of Crete. [Here's the boardgamegeek review for the record.]

As you'd expect, the board and all the pieces are made of Legos, although there's a lot more green pieces than you get in the average set. The assembly of the board is rather simple, they give you a stencil to lay on the base board. The scale is a bit small for standard lego micro-figs and instead tiny 1x1 pieces represent the heroes and the minotaur is a little model in his own right made from a dozen pieces.

The game play is fairly straightforward and has the goal of getting a microfigure to the center of the maze. Each turn you roll the dice. If you roll a 3-6, move one of your pieces that distance; if you roll grey, place or move a 2x1 grey wall to block an opponent or clear your path; if you roll black, move the minotaur eight squares and possibly send back an opponent's piece.

Rolling black or grey is possible because of one of the cooler pieces included in the set, a six sided Lego die. Each side has a 2x2 set of studs and there's flat pieces included that give various options for what to put on each side. One rule variant mentioned in the instructions is to replace the '3' side with a green piece and upon rolling green to allow one of your guys to jump over a hedge. The die itself has rubbery edges and is great fun to roll on a solid surface, if it can be bought separately I expect it might be popular with a wide range of gamers (assuming they also sell sides for "1" and '2" which aren't included in the game.

I've only played the game once so far and it was fairly fun and quick paced. It didn't feel especially deep but does seem like a reasonable party game if you've got a younger audience or a bunch of Lego fans. One modification I think I'll try out is to allow rolling twice each term with the condition that you can't move one of your microfigures twice. I think that would make it less likely that you'll have a turn that feels wasted and would also encourage having more microfigures in play at any given time.

Overall, I'd call this game a worthy start at exploiting the possibilities Legos offer board games. I think a next step might be to try out development oriented games like Catan where building up the map is a core part of game play. Alternately, there may be more interesting options for customizing the board, I'm now tempted to break out my copy of Master Labyrinth which has a maze made up primarily of shifting tiles. I like the way the instructions encouraged customization, I hope they'll collect some of the better variants somewhere.

Image from the Lego Store

Pacific Coast Highway, Santa Monica, and the garden at night (2010-05-16)

A first trip to Los Angeles without seeing the Pacific Ocean seemed like a waste, so on Sunday evening we drove from East Los Angeles over to Pacific Coast Highway and up to Malibu. This incidentally made watching Iron Man 2 a week later more fun as it was the quite plausible locale of Tony Stark's mansion. Our end point was the Solstice Canyon hike, after which we drove back to Santa Monica looking for food to recover our energy. A bit of smart phone searching for a Mexican restaurant found us the Border Grille. Given the name and Tex-Mex affiliation I was a bit worried that it would be a higher-end Chilis but happily it didn't have a generic vibe at all and instead was a bit experimental and more gourmet.  (Kate adds: The variety of salsas presented as a freebie with chips was a nice touch.)

After dining we walked through Santa Monica and out to the Pacific Ocean. The final stretch had an eccentric mix of homeless people and a college student model/photographer pair doing a tea party on the stairs down. Once we crossed the last street, the trek out to the ocean itself was fairly unremarkable aside from the view of amusement park on a nearby pier. However, it was quite satisfying to get Kate to the Pacific Ocean for the first time (particularly after seeing Once Upon a Time in the West).

Finally we went back to the hotel and ventured into the garden at night. It was a bit darker than expected as the promenade dining with Christmas lights was not in use. However, there was certainly still enough light and we had it almost entirely to ourselves which was neat in a different way. If we come back and don't stay at the Kyoto Grand we'll have to visit to see them when the restaurants reopen.

Solstice Canyon Hike (2010-05-16)

After seeing the Huntington Library Gardens we drove out to the coast and up the Pacific Coast Highway. We'll cover that in a future post, but first, a hike in Malibu. Solstice Canyon was an interesting natural setting with a variety of man-made ruins to add to the sight-seeing.

The trip does benefit from having a map [(PDF map added from the NPS website on Solstice Canyon)]; we didn't have one initially and might have turned back early had we not encountered a friendly set of hikers on their way back. The views of the hills were limited by the fog, although on the upside it meant that we could easily see the outcome of the past fires without having to worry about overly dry grasses. The ruins included one isolated house and far more interestingly the skeleton of a resort spread over a mix of elevations by a small waterfall.

For the path back we took the high ground, although had to hurry a bit as it was beginning to get dark and the gates would close for the night. Happily, after a series of majestic views, we got out without any trouble and I must say that the ranger we met was very nice and helpful. On the whole, we'd probably recommend taking the high ridge route in just to get the dramatic approach to the ruins. The level route has its own merits although taking the ridge both ways makes sense if you're up for it. The main feature you'd miss by not taking the level route would be some of the rocky stream crossings, which are always a plus in my book.

[Update: Links to the hike review and NPS website for Solstice Canyon added. I also added a link to the map (PDF) and am a bit embarrassed that I hadn't found it on my smart phone.]

Bonsai forest: Huntington Japanese Garden (2010-05-16)

While the Chinese Gardens at the Huntington Library were new and expanding, the Japanese Gardens had an older, established feel. A serene wooden house held court over a spring valley that offered a multitude of meditative resting places. Koi also inhabited these waters, but were not nearly as frantic as those fighting for bread crumbs near the bridges in the prior garden. We were both quite taken by one particular fish sporting almost wing-like fins.

The next part of the garden could be approached by bridge or by a shady bamboo-lined path that we were both quite fond of despite the obvious risk of ninja attack. Beyond either approach, and past a rock garden, there was as impressive a collection of bonsai trees as I've ever seen. At first I was trying to document them all, perhaps a reasonable approach given that a few of the most impressive specimens were displayed outside of their specific corner of the park. Even so, many of the remaining set merited a display in their own right and we tried to capture all of our favorites from at least one angle.

Huntington Chinese Garden (2010-05-16)

The Chinese style garden at the Huntington in [San Marino]is fairly intricate and  covers all of the classic elements:

• Craterous standing limestone rocks. I've actually seen in Guilin the lots that some of these come from. There were quite a number.
• Water, typically a koi pond. The botanical garden has done an excellent job stocking the pond.  It wasn't just a school of koi, it was a large state university. More importantly there were also ducks, and the fish and ducks would compete for food.
• Traditional Chinese architecture, specifically bridges, walls, and small pagodas and other sitting areas. The eaves are typically decorated with semi-cylindrical tiles, the walls are whitewashed, the cross beams are wooden (although not painted in this instance), the gates are circular, and the courtyard has an interesting floor.

I rather liked it, although having wandered the Summer Palace in Beijing it now takes a lot more to really impress me. There are signs that the garden is to steadily expand. What I saw seems to be about only a third of the ambitious design depicted in models. My favorite outside of China for now is still in Montreal, but I'll have to come back to the Huntington Botanical Garden when the works done. Also, I think most gardens benefit from age, particularly given the high kitsch factor inherent in the fancies mentioned above. Nonetheless, I don't mean to damn with faint praise; it was a lovely setup and I think it's worth taking the opportunity to see one that is still expanding rather than a completed piece.