Rhetoric, politics, and the freedom to remain silent

Allow me to go on record as saying that I can't wait for this presidential election to be over.

It's only the beginning of September, and already I am sick unto death of the nasty political rhetoric.  Not the stuff coming from the candidates and their sponsors; I've come to expect that, given our money-driven, whatever-it-takes-to-get-elected system.  What makes me ill, on almost a daily basis, is the ugly invective you hear and see from ordinary citizens and voters.

That sort of thing has become easier to broadcast in the past few decades.  When I was young, if you had a message (nasty or otherwise), your only free choice was to write a letter to the editor.  Otherwise, you had to purchase radio or television time, or rent a billboard.  Now, the entire internet (especially social network sites like Facebook and Twitter) have become the sounding boards for anyone with something they'd like the whole world to hear.  And in an election year, what a lot of people have to say is (1) irrational, (2) rife with overgeneralizations, and (3) just generally unpleasant.

Let me give you just the briefest sampling, from my Facebook page.  Note that the vitriol is coming from both sides of the aisle:

• The top slogan of the Democratic Party is "Bitterly Clinging To Taxes and Abortions."
• Republicans have consistently cut disaster relief in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and for big corporations.
• Please don't vote us out!  None of us can do real jobs!
• The only way you could vote Republican is if you lack a heart, lack a brain, or both.  So which are you?  The Scarecrow or the Tin Man?
• You lost a debate to a conservative? Time to yell "racism" and blame Fox News.
• The conservative agenda is to make government smaller so that the big corporations have room to move in.
• Democrats want to stick around in America just long enough to see how it ends.
• The Republican Party has no interest in protecting the rights of anyone who isn't an entitled, wealthy, white, heterosexual Christian man.

I usually try to stay out of political discussions -- it's almost always frustrating and almost never accomplishes anything -- so I generally don't respond when people post this stuff.  But I broke my own rule a few days ago, and I responded to one of the above (which one is irrelevant; they're all equally ridiculous) by saying, "Oh, come now.  This is a bit much.  You really think that 50% of the United States actually believes this?"  Within five minutes, there were three responses, to wit:

• Sounds about right to me.
• I love the sarcasm and the parody -- and the point.  This is awesome.
• This is great.  Sharing.

To which I responded:  "I give up."

I honestly do not understand the motivation that drives this stuff.  Yes, both the Democratic and the Republican Parties have a few people who are extremists, whose views are pretty clearly in the "nutjob" category.  Both have elected officials who have broken the law, who have taken bribes, who have committed sexual indiscretions.  But the vast majority of the actual voters -- the people who are the Democratic and Republican Parties, not just the officials they elect to represent them -- are ordinary people, who want the things that all of us want.  A home, a job, security, a safe place to raise their children, food on the table, the freedoms guaranteed them by the Constitution.  Most of them are decent human beings, who would be interesting to sit down and have a beer and a bull session with.  Damn few of them on either side want to "tear down America" or "sell the US to the corporations" or "turn the United States into the Soviet Union" or any of the thousand other things that the purveyors of toxic rhetoric would like you to believe.

Of course, everyone is entitled to state his or her opinion.  That is one of those "freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution" I mentioned earlier.  However, just because you're free to do something doesn't mean that you should.  You are also free not to speak when it does more harm than good, a freedom that more of us should exercise.  The poisonous messages currently flooding social media do nothing but drive people apart, break down dialogue, and spread the message that if you don't agree with me, you must be either deluded or evil.  I fail to see what positive end any of this could possibly accomplish.

Now, don't get me wrong.  By saying, "why can't we just get along?" I'm not saying, "why can't we all agree?"  Liberals and conservatives do differ, if not in what their basic goals are, in how best to achieve those goals.  There are very real points of debate on issues that deserve time, energy, and effort to resolve.  But ugly invective is not debate, and it muddies the water rather than clearing it.  So to those people who share this stuff, and thus keep it alive online, I am respectfully asking you to knock it off.

Woo-woo workshop weekends

A frequent reader and contributor to Skeptophilia sent me a note asking if I'd heard about the Exeter (New Hampshire) UFO Festival happening this weekend.  I hadn't, and (unfortunately) can't attend because I have other plans, but I thought I'd check out the website.

The home page promised great things, with a banner header showing photographs and drawings of UFOs, aliens, and prominent images of Betty and Barney Hill, famous as the first well-publicized UFO abductees.  In fact, it is certainly the Hills that explains the location; Exeter is in the same county as Portsmouth, the Hills' home at the time of the incident.

The conference itself looks like it will be awesome, if by awesome you mean "weird."  Which I suppose is to be expected.  Here is a sampler of the talks that will be given:

• Extraterrestrials: They are Here Now.  It's not just Interesting.  It's Important.
• Remote Viewing and Accessing Higher Consciousness
• UFOs for the 21st Century Mind
• ET Contact: Implications for Post-Contact Advancements in Science and Technology

So you can see that I'd fit right in, except for the fact that I'd probably get thrown out for guffawing, especially at the Remote Viewing workshop.

But I needn't be upset at missing the festival; a brief search turned up a whole host of other events I could attend.  If any of these are near enough to you, and strike your fancy, I encourage you to go and then report back here what happened:

The Atoka (Oklahoma) Cryptid Fest, on September 8.  It's being held at McGee Creek State Park, and will feature an appearance of the "professionals from the cast of The History Channel's Monster Quest."  There will be "Bigfoot excursions throughout the day."  And if anyone shows up at the event and sneaks around the grounds in a ghillie suit, it was definitely not my idea.

A Certification Course in Mayan Shamanic Healing and Crystal Therapy, on September 21-23.  It's being held at the Aquarian Book Shop in Richmond, Virginia.  Here we will be taught the "Mayan Healing Modality" wherein we will learn how to do the following:

• Cleanse your crystals properly.
• Use obsidian arrows for healing.
• Activate quartz crystals to restore health.
• Lay jade stones on the body.
• Use rose quartz for heart or emotional healing.
• Work with 20 major energy centers on the body healing.
• Do a basic diagnosis of the client.
• Stand in simple shamanic animal postures for healing

We will also learn a variety of important principles, such as Polarity As An Axis Of Energy And Manifestation.  Whatever that means.  We are also told that in preparation for the event, the shop is offering a "10% discount on pendulums."

Oh, goodie.

For my readers in the UK, you might consider The Psychic Fair and Pamper Day, on Saturday, September 29 in Colchester (Essex).  There will be ghost hunts at the beginning and end of the fair, on Friday evening and again on Saturday evening after the fair closes, and tickets for those are £ 40, but otherwise the fair itself is free.  There will be a great many booths offering services and items for sale, including:

• Angel Therapy
• Aromatherapy 
• Astrology 
• Aura Photography
• Crystal Healing
• I Ching
• Iridology
• Numerology
• Psychic Artist
• Psychic Medium Readings
• Rune Reader
• Tarot Readings
• Theta Healing

Besides this sounding like a table of contents for the New Age Nonsense category of The Skeptic's Dictionary,  this one might be well worth attending because (1) it will represent an amazing assortment of goofy stuff, and (2) it's free.  I'd definitely attend if I was in England.

So, that gives you some choices as consolation prizes if you've missed, like I have, the Exeter UFO Festival.  And that was just from September.  The availability of woo-woo workshops is limited only by your time, money, and tolerance for bizarre ideas -- and, as we've seen over and over in this blog, some people seem to be overly endowed with all three.

Chinese alien research station

New from the "Harmless If It Amuses You" department, today we have a story about a retired Chinese military man who has built what he calls an "alien research station" in his back yard.  (Source)

Xiang Kuansong, 79, of Mayang, Hunan province, has worked 17 years on the project, which shows if nothing else amazing determination.  He said he was told to build it by two aliens, who said, "Don't be afraid.  We are not ghosts or god.  We are people from another planet who want to help you."  So Xiang decided to create a site that would memorialize the encounter.  The aliens, he said, are from the planet "Dongsheng," are 1.95 meters tall, and wear clothing that makes them invisible to everyone else but him.  They've been back to talk with him many times, and requested that he build this "way station" so they would have a place to rest on their intergalactic travels.

He has hung a sign over the door saying, "The Harmonious Way to a Foreign Planet," and has stones marking the places that the aliens have appeared.  Otherwise, the place looks, according to the source, more like a temple than a research station; there is a model of a spaceship, presumably to make the aliens feel at home, but there is no scientific equipment.  Xiang evidently doesn't need to rely on clunky radio telescopes for his extraterrestrial contact; they simply come to him, which I have to say is pretty convenient.

What immediately jumped out at me about this story, being of a linguistic bent, is that the planet has a Chinese name.  Doesn't that strike Xiang as kind of unlikely?  You'd think that whatever language an alien race might speak on their home planet, it wouldn't be Chinese (or English or Lithuanian or Swahili or any other language found on Earth).  And just like when two human cultures have been in contact, the things that tend to retain their original morphology the longest are personal names and place names, you'd think that the name of the planet would be more... well, alien-sounding.  Of course, the same thing happens with contactees from other cultures.  I think it's a bit of a coincidence that when English speakers are contacted by aliens, they (and their planets) always seem to follow the Star Trek naming convention of ending in either -us or -a depending on whether the name in question is masculine or feminine, a morphological constraint adopted from Latin.  (Without even trying hard, I found accounts online of contacts with aliens called Tibus, Mytria, Manus, Vertra, Boratus, Lorcus, and Bellatria.)  Of course, there are exceptions.  This website, which (sadly) does not appear to be a parody, tells of contact with aliens called Quetzal, Semiase, Sfath, and Ptaah, and then has pencil sketches of three very human men and one woman who supposedly are inhabitants of the Pleiades.  (Yes, yes, I know.  The Pleiades is a star cluster, and you can't inhabit a star cluster.  Just play along, okay?)

So even though the names sound marginally less human (you have to wonder about Quetzal, however, given that it's the first half of the name of a Central American god), here the aliens themselves are clearly three middle-aged guys with  beards, and a sexy young woman with a seriously come-hither expression.  The whole thing seems pretty suspect to me.

Of course, your alien abduction devotee would probably object that the aliens, being superintelligent, converse with their human contacts in the language the contact speaks, and in a form that wouldn't immediately scare the contact into having a brain aneurysm.  So this explains why people always hear the aliens speaking, and using names, clearly derived from human languages familiar to the speaker, and take (more-or-less) human form when appearing to us.

Me, I think if there are intelligent aliens out there, any languages they speak are much more likely to sound like the guy in my favorite clip from Men in Black (watch it here) in which Will Smith talks to an alien masquerading as a postal worker.  (How they filmed that scene without laughing is beyond me.)  Our languages evolved to be speakable, and comprehensible, based on our biology, and there's no reason to suppose that an intelligent species with a different biology will have languages at all analogous to ours -- or perhaps, even readily recognizable as language at all.

So, anyway, that's our story for today.  I wish the retired Chinese soldier best of luck with his alien research station, and hope he gets lots of visits from "Dongsheng."  As for me, I think I'm going to sit here and practice making the sounds that guy made in Men in Black.  I'd like to be able to do that.

Species, types, and the No True Scotsman fallacy

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the No True Scotsman fallacy.  It gets its name from an almost certainly apocryphal story, in which a serial rapist and killer is being pursued by the police in Glasgow, and a Scottish MP encourages the police to search amongst the immigrant population of the city.  "No Scotsman would do such a thing," the MP said.

When the criminal was caught, and turned out to be 100% Scottish, the MP was challenged about his remark.

"Well," he said, drawing himself up, "no true Scotsman would have done such a thing!"

The crux of this fallacy is that if you make a statement that turns out, in view of evidence, to be false, all you do is shift your ground -- redefine the terms so as to make your original point unassailable.

Very few other fallacies have such a capacity for making me want to smack my forehead into a wall as this one.  Someone who commits this fallacy can't be pinned down, can't be backed into a corner, can't receive his comeuppance from the most reasoned argument, the most solidly incontrovertible evidence.  The dancing skills of a master of the No True Scotsman fallacy are Dancing With The Stars quality.

All of this comes up because of an online discussion that I read, and (yes) participated in, a couple of days ago, on the topic of the demonstrability of evolution.  Someone, ostensibly a supporter of evolution but seemingly not terribly well-read on the subject, was using such evidence as the fossil record as a support for the idea.  A creationist responded, "The fossil record, and fossil dating, are inaccurate.  You evolutionists always think that bringing us a bunch of bones and shells proves your point, but it doesn't, because no one can really prove how old they were, and none of them show one species turning into another.  You can't show a single example, from the present, of one species becoming another, and yet you want us to believe in your discredited theory."

Well, of course, I couldn't let a comment like that just sit there, so I responded, "Well, actually, yes, I can.  I know about a dozen examples of speciation (one species becoming another) occurring within a human lifetime."

Challenged to produce examples, I gave a few, including the ones that I described in an earlier post (Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice, February 9, 2012), and then sat back on my haunches with a satisfied snort, thinking "Ha.  That sure showed him."

Well.  I should have known better.  His response, which I quote verbatim:  "All you did was show that one grass can become another grass, or a mosquito can become another mosquito.  If you could show me a mosquito that turned into a bird, or something, I might believe you."

Now, wait just a second, here.  You asked me for one thing -- to show one species turning into a different species, in the period of a few decades.  I did so, adhering to the canonical definition of the word species.  And now you're saying that wasn't what you wanted after all -- you want me to show one phylum turning into a different one, in one generation?

So I sat there, sputtering and swearing, and not sure how to answer.  So I said something to the effect that he'd pulled a No True Scotsman on me, and had changed the terms of the question once he saw I could answer it, and he'd damned well better play fair.  He humphed back at me that we evolutionists couldn't really support our points, and we both left the discussion as I suspect most people leave discussions on the internet -- unconvinced and frustrated.  So I was pondering the whole thing, and after taking my blood pressure medications I had a sudden realization of where the confusion was coming from.  It was from the idea of a type of organism.

Most people who aren't educated in the biological sciences (and I'm not including just formal education, here; there are many people who have never taken a single biology class and know plenty about the subject) really don't understand the concept of species.  They think in types.  A bird is one type of thing; a bug is a different one.  If you pressed them, they might admit that there were a few types of birds that seemed inherently different; you have your big birds (ostriches), your medium-sized birds (robins), and your little birds (hummingbirds).  I've had students that have thought this way, and when they hear I'm a birdwatcher, they seem incredulous that this could be a lifelong avocation.  Wouldn't I run out of new birds to see pretty quickly?  When I tell them that there are over 10,000 unique species of birds, they seem not so much awed as uncomprehending.

I suspect that the source of this misapprehension is the same as the source of the general misapprehension regarding the antiquity of the Earth and the origins of life: the bible.  In Leviticus 11, where they go through the whole unclean-foods thing that eventually would be codified as the Kosher Law, they split up the natural world in only the broadest-brush terms; you have your animals that have hooves and chew the cud, various combinations of ones that don't, creatures that have fins and scales and ones that don't, insects that jump and ones that don't, and a few different classes of birds (which, to my eternal amusement, included bats).  And that's pretty much it.  Plants were sorted out into ones that had edible parts (wheat, figs, olives), ones that had useful wood (boxwood, cedar, acacia), and ones that had neither of the above (thorn bushes).  And these distinctions worked perfectly well for a Bronze-Age society; it kept you from eating stuff that was bad for you, told you what you could build stuff from, and so on.  But as a scientific concept, the idea of "types of living things" is pretty ridiculous.  And yet it still seems to live on in people's minds, lo unto this very day.

So, anyway, that was my brief excursion into that least useful of endeavors, the Online Argument.  It gave me a nice example of the No True Scotsman fallacy to tell my Critical Thinking classes about, when we hit that topic in a few weeks.  And it really didn't affect my blood pressure all that much, but it did make me roll my eyes.  Which seems to happen frequently when I get into conversations with creationists. 

eBay, metaphysics, and caveat emptor

In what can only be called a puzzling move, online clearinghouse eBay has announced that they will no longer allow selling of "paranormal services."

From the 2012 Fall Seller Update, we read the following:

The following items are also being added to the prohibited items list: advice; spells; curses; hexing; conjuring; magic; prayers; blessing services; magic potions; healing sessions; work from home businesses & information; wholesale lists, and drop shop lists.

My reason for calling this "puzzling" is twofold.  First, they have a whole category called "Specialty Services," and it would seem that such things would clearly fall under that heading.  And as such claims are bogus from the get-go, it would be hard for a purchaser to file a claim under eBay's stated policies for sellers:

As a seller, you're expected to:

• Charge reasonable shipping and handling costs.
• Specify shipping costs and handling time in the listing.
• Follow through on your return policy.
• Respond to buyers' questions promptly.
• Be helpful, friendly, and professional throughout a transaction.
• Make sure the item is delivered to the buyer as described in the listing.

And all of this would seem to be well in line with what these sellers are doing.  All they were selling was a prayer or a hex or whatever; there's no guarantee it would work, just as there's no guarantee that if you ask your religious friend to pray for you (or your wizard friend to cast a spell for you) that it'll produce results.  The only difference is that here, you're being asked to pay for it.

Now, the hopeful side of my personality is speculating that eBay is pulling these offers because they know them to be inherently fraudulent, and they don't want to have any part in ripping off the credulous.  But my second reason for calling this change "puzzling" is that if this is the reason, it's hard to explain some of their other listings, such as:

• A Haunted Fairy Drawing Spinner Pendant, which comes with "five garden fairies included."
• A Real Witchcraft-Coven-Owned Secret Book of Shadows, which comes with a "broom and a wand stand."  (This thing is handwritten, and has a starting bid of $550 -- and currently has seven bids on it.)
• A Seal of Solomon Pendant that allows you to "command a legion of powerful entities."
• A 6" Feng Shui Crystal Ball, that will help you to "channel energy through the house."
• An Enchanted Pin, that will "amplify effectiveness of spoken spells cast."

So you can see that even though they are eliminating services having to do with woo-woo bullshit, they are still fine with selling stuff that has to do with woo-woo bullshit.  My only conclusion is that they don't want to have to mediate between buyers who purchased a magic spell that (amazingly enough) didn't work, and the seller who sold it to them.  But since, other than the policy that (1) the purchased item be delivered promptly, and (2) that the delivered item is as described on the eBay site, there seems to be no basis for a complaint, you have to wonder why they are backing off from what surely is a hell of a deal both for eBay and the sellers.

In any case, that's today's lesson in critical thinking and the principle of caveat emptor.  Me, I wonder if I missed my calling.  If I could make $550 (or more) handwriting a book of spells, and selling it on eBay, and have people trampling each other to buy it, I could retire from teaching and move somewhere warmer.  Spend a couple of hours a day writing out spells, have my wife do the illustrations (because my drawing skills maxed out somewhere in third grade), and spend the rest of the day on the beach soaking up the sun and drinking mojitos.  There's the inevitable downside of knowing that I was taking money from people who possess the critical thinking skills of road salt, but hey, if eBay isn't going to worry about that, why should I?

Bigfoot sightings, ghillie suits, and the Darwin Awards

I try to be compassionate, I really do.  I mean, schadenfreude only gets you so far in life.  So when I read the news story a couple of years ago about the health food enthusiast who was giving a lecture on the dangers of high-carb diets in a local library, and while leaving her talk was hit and killed by a bakery truck, my laughter was tempered with a dose of sympathy for the victim and her family.

Sometimes, however, it's hard not to dissolve into guffaws at the misfortunes of others, particularly when they brought said ill luck on themselves.  And this brings us to today's story, from Kalispell, Montana, where a guy was killed while trying to create a fake Bigfoot sighting.  (Source)

The man, who has been identified as Randy Lee Tenley, 44, of Kalispell, was wearing a military-style ghillie suit.  What is a ghillie suit, you might ask?  I know I had to ask, because I didn't know.  It's a camouflage suit worn by snipers and other people involved in covert military operations.  But it's not your typical patterns-of-leaves type camouflage, the kind worn by hunters; it's covered with ropy fake vegetation.  Here's a picture of a ghillie suit from (I am not making this up) TheGhillieSuits.com:

Which brings up two points: (1) this would only count as camouflage if your area has many human-sized furry lumps with arms, which would seem to limit its usefulness, and (2) there are enough civilians who actually want ghillie suits that there's a website that sells them?  I'm not sure that this last-mentioned isn't the scariest thing about this whole story.

Be that as it may, Tenley obtained a ghillie suit, and decided (possibly under the influence of alcohol, which seems likely) to stage a Sasquatch sighting alongside Highway 93.  So he donned his suit, and proceeded to run about along, and eventually on, the highway.  But evidently the ghillie suit's capacity for camouflage exceeded my expectations mentioned in the preceding paragraph, and Tenley was struck by a car.  He was thrown into the middle of the road, where he was struck by a second car, killing him.

I've always claimed that woo-woo beliefs were potentially dangerous, and by that I have usually been thinking about quack medical practices like homeopathy, which are sometimes sought out by people who are ill in place of treatments or remedies that actually work.  But here we see a case where a man was actually killed not because of his own woo-woo beliefs, but because he was trying to encourage others in their woo-woo beliefs.  All of which is rather ironic.

The upside, of course, not that Tenley will be around to celebrate the fact, is that this should be a clear contender for the 2012 Darwin Awards, a yearly contest whose prizes go out to the people who have taken themselves out in the stupidest possible fashion, thus improving the gene pool for the rest of us.  If Tenley isn't an odds-on favorite, I don't know who would be.

So, anyhow, that's today's story, the object lessons of which include the following: (1) running around in camouflage makes you hard to see, (2) if you jump into a highway, you're likely to get hit by a car, (3) staging Bigfoot sightings can be dangerous, and of course, (4) alcohol does not lead to clear decision-making processes.  So I think we can all thank Tenley for his bad example, and if this post has dissuaded one person from donning a ghillie suit and dancing on the highway, I think we can consider our time here well spent.

A study in tropical colors

As my regular readers know, I just got back a couple of days ago from a two-and-a-half week trip to Malaysia.  I thought it might be interesting to step aside for a day from my usual agenda of lobbing verbal bombs at the woo-woos, and give a few of my impressions of this country.

I was drawn to Malaysia by the birds.  I am a fanatical birdwatcher, an avocation that I am more and more beginning to think of as being some kind of benign mental disorder.  The trip was an organized excursion put together by Birdquest International, a UK-based company that specializes in taking people to where the birds are.  So everyone on the trip shared my obsession -- all seven participants, and the two guides.  We shuffled along the trails in a tight, silent little pack, binoculars in hand, scanning trees and underbrush, listening for unusual calls or songs -- and then launching into action like a SWAT team when one was seen:  "Bulbul!  Olive-winged!  Large tree with round leaves, in foreground, nine o'clock, moving left!"  And everyone would swivel around to find the bird, and one by one you'd hear, "Got it, thanks!" and every once in a while a "Dammit!  It flew!"

But the birds were spectacular.  The grounds of the lodge where we stayed in Taman Negara National Park were frequently graced by four or five Crested Firebacks, a pheasant species that looks like it's ready for a fancy costume ball.  Not all of them were that easy; it took us several hours of work to locate the elusive Garnet Pitta, a bird that has been called the Jewel of the Rain Forest (photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

We never, ever were without our binoculars, except when we were sleeping.  We wore them at meals, during rides in the van from one locale to another, and when we were hauling our luggage around.  And all it took was the cry of "Bird!" to stop us from all other pursuits and hoist the lenses into the air to see what might have flown in.

Of course, it's not that that was the only attraction to Malaysia.  It's a stunningly beautiful country, with huge stands of pristine rain forest, enormous trees draped with lianas and ferns.  A botanist would go mad here from the diversity of plant life.  I pride myself on my knowledge of plants, and I only recognized perhaps 10% of what I was seeing.  Take this strangely-shaped leaf for example:

No idea what it is, other than "cool."  Because of the thin soils, most of the trees have these sculpted buttress-roots, that never failed to remind me of Old Man Willow from The Lord of the Rings:

Besides the biology of the place, there's the culture.  The food was always interesting, and often delicious.  We had a hundred different takes on curry, most with coconut, a food I heartily approve of.  I finally got to try durian, the famous spiky (and smelly) fruit of Southeast Asia.  Durian has such a pungent smell that it is illegal to open one on public transport or in a hotel room, and I found first-hand that the smell clings to your skin and clothing for hours.  What does it smell like?  Let me quote food writer Richard Sterling: "Its odor is best described as pig shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock."  Anthony Bourdain, even though he likes the stuff, says that after eating it "your breath smells like you've been French-kissing your dead grandmother."  So, of course, I had to try it.  And... I thought it was delicious.  The flavor is kind of indescribable -- musky, sweet, creamy, a little oily.  But definitely wonderful, and like nothing else I've ever tasted.

I also ran face-first into sambal ulek, which I have renamed "Malaysian Death Sauce" because I had no idea how freakin' hot it was until I had slathered it all over my breakfast.  Now, I'm from southern Louisiana, and have a very high (probably genetic) tolerance for pepper, and this was hotter than anything I've ever eaten.  It was only my hatred of losing face amongst comparative strangers that kept me from dumping my plate and taking a second serving with three drops (rather than three heaping spoonfuls) of the stuff.

And speaking of hot: Malaysia is also the other kind of hot.  The temperature varies from blazing hot, all the way up through sauna and right into the realm of pressure cooker.  I was constantly wringing wet with sweat, and I usually have a high tolerance for hot weather.  In the highlands (we spent four days at Fraser's Hill in the Cameron Highlands of central Malaysia) it was a bit cooler, but that's like saying that "compared to a blast furnace, a bread oven is comfortable."  It was still near 100% humidity, and I think the temperature only dropped below 80 F for a brief time at night.

The heat and humidity also encourage a variety of animal life, and not all of it is of the oh-look-at-the-cute-little-monkey type.  Malaysia has leeches.  Terrestrial leeches.  These live in the leaf-litter of the forest floor, attach themselves to your shoes, and then crawl up your pant leg in search of dinner.  Most of our party got bitten at least once -- I was one of the only exceptions, probably because I daily doused my boots in high-strength insect repellent, to the point that by the end of my trip my boots were composed of 5% shoe leather and 95% DEET.  If I ever get rid of those boots, I will probably have to file an Environmental Impact Statement.  But I didn't get bitten, unlike poor Linda, a retired nurse from Oakland who got bitten about a dozen times and constantly had large bloodstains on her socks, pants, and shirt.

One of the most curious things about Malaysia was the pervasive role of religion.  61% of Malaysians are Muslim; we saw many veiled women, and daily heard the chanted call to prayer broadcast over speakers.  But 61%, although a majority, means that there are plenty of other beliefs; there are substantial numbers of Hindus (whose brilliantly-colored temples were often seen on our van trips), Buddhists, and even a few animists amongst the Orang Asli, or aboriginal settlers of the peninsula.  But the Malaysians are, by and large, a people amongst whom the adherence to some religion is taken as given, and who have a big focus on decorum and morality.  I saw a few tourists who were showing more skin than was considered proper -- women in short-shorts, men who were shirtless -- and saw more than one skew glance being given to them.  I wore shorts on occasion (while not actively birding in the forest; wearing shorts in the Malaysian forest is like waving a sign in front of the leeches that you're open for dinner) and wondered if the tattoo on my leg would attract any negative attention.  I didn't notice any, but you have to wonder what the more conservative citizens think of some of the foreigners they see.

Last: Malaysia is far away.  It took over 24 hours in the air to get me there, and it is exactly half a day off from my home time zone; when I Skyped with my wife, in the places where wifi was available, I was always had the vertigo-inducing awareness of being on the opposite side of a giant spinning ball.  When it was day in New York, it was night in Malaysia, and we had to plan to meet -- as she was getting ready to head to work, I was getting ready to head to bed.  On the way back, I took the longest nonstop flight in the world -- Hong Kong to New York City/JFK.  Sixteen hours in the air.  And although I had no travel mishaps whatsoever -- not so much as a five-minute departure delay -- I do wish I had not been on the special Screaming Toddler Flight.  I've never been so glad to get off a plane.

So, anyway, those are a few impressions of my first visit to the continent of Asia.  I came away with an impression of a friendly people, a commitment to protecting their beautiful environment, and 199 "life birds" -- species I'd never seen before.  I survived sambal ulek and durian, and all in all, had a wonderful time.  Still, it's nice to be home, where the temperature is mild, breakfast sauces don't burn your face off, and you can walk in the woods without being bitten by leeches.