Cory Ondrejka and John Lester from Linden Lab, the builders of Second Life, were our guests at Berkman yesterday, which turned Tuesday into “virtual worlds day”. Cory walked us through a quick slideshow, giving a sense for the remarkable growth of this unique online space, one of the key early players in a field some are calling “the immersive web”.

Cory makes it very clear that Second Life is not “a game”, but much closer to a realization of “the Metaverse” or, perhaps more closely, the “Otherverse” from the Vernor Vinge short novel “True Names”. Rather than solving quests or killing monsters as they do in massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, Second Lifers build homes, businesses, complex avatars, toys and games in a shared, detailed 3-D environment. Then people chat with each other using avatars, explore each other’s buildings and creations and work together to build new parts of the world.

Near the welcome area in Second Life

The community is small, but growing rapidly. 89,000 users have signed up, and 60,000 have logged on in the past month, Cory tells us. The virtual world is now roughly 100 square kilometers, about the size of Boston and Cambridge (though much more sparsely populated.) Those 50,000 active users have generated 100 million items, 10 million of which are avatars, using the in-game 3-D object editor. The in-game economy – based on “Linden Dollars” – handles $4 million dollars (about $15,000 in real dollar terms) – per day in currency trades as players turn real currency into in-game currency, and vice versa. ($1 USD = roughly $270 Linden Dollars.) In addition, 3.5 million transactions between players – using virtual currency within the game – have taken place during the lifetime of the virtual universe.

The world requires 1600 CPUs to model – each 250m x 250m “cell” is served by a single machine. Cory didn’t get too far into technical details, but it sounds like aspects of the world – textures, text files perhaps – are served from Apache web servers, while other aspects – the wireframes and their movement – come from a custom server which talks to the client running on a user’s PC or Mac. The system backends to a MySQL database which keeps track of the properties of all objects, their place in the space, etc. Unlike many multiplayer online games, which have different servers – shards – for different groups of players, Linden Labs has two, one for adults and another for teens. On the adult server, spaces are PG or Mature, and include areas where your character can be “harmed” as well as areas where you’re immune to ill-effects.

It’s the ability for users to model and code their own objects that makes Second Life compelling, Cory believes. 25% of user time in the world is spent creating objects – because so many users are building objects at any time, there’s 7.5 “user years” put into build the world each day. Despite the challenges of writing in the Linden scripting language (the guide to the language is 129 pages of dense technical prose, starting with the user-friendly, “It follows the familiar syntax of a c/Java style language with an implicit state machine for every script…”), more than 30 million lines of code have been written in the world.

In other words, Cory believes he and his collaborators have found a way to get groups of users to solve some of the hardest problems of distributed content creation: 3D object design, programming and game development. Second Lifers have created vast castles, complex shopping malls, multi-level games as well as more serious projects, like a space that simulates the experience of schizophrenic hallucinations, or a memorial to the London bombings. Some of these creations “cross the magic circle”, building connections between the real and virtual worlds, as creators pipe video streams into Second Life or hold discussions with real-world figures like Thomas Barnett in a virtual UN.

Better yet, his creators are paying for the privlege of building the world. While membership in the community is free, owning property – which is neccesary to create buildings, or most complex structures – costs money. The smallest available plot of land – 512 square meters – costs slightly more Linden Dollars than you’re given as a newcomer to the game, requiring you to convert some real money into virtual money to buy it. Then there’s a monthly upkeep fee, which starts at $10 per month for basic land and increase as the amounts of land increase. Virtual real estate baron Anshe Chung, pays $16,000 a month in upkeep fees for the hundreds of properties she owns, reselling or renting them to other players in the game. (There’s speculation that Chung makes as much as $150,000 a year in real dollars from her Second Life activities.) Asked about the financial model for Linden Labs, Cory responded, “Land. We sell real estate.”

All of this raises an interesting question – who actually owns this stuff? Linden grants users intellectual property rights to everything that they create. That was certainly useful for Kermitt Quirk, who created a popular game, Tringo, in the game and sold it to a real-world game publisher. But it’s less clear what it means for someone who builds a beautiful and complex mansion filled with carefully scripted features written in Linden’s scripting language. At present, there’s no way to move the creation onto a non-Linden server – if you decided you didn’t want to keep paying Linden Labs for server space, you’re out of luck as your intellectual property is only useful in a Linden-owned space.

This conrasts rather sharply with the online user-created content efforts I’ve been involved with in the past. If you got sick of hosting your homepage on Tripod, it wasn’t neccesarily easy to move it to Geocities, but you could save the HTML files and JPEGs and upload them onto the new server and your page would, more or less, work. That’s because web servers and clients (browsers) use common, public standards to exchange content.

Cory explains that this is coming – “public protocols” first, where Linden Labs publishes an API that would allow people to build their own systems that are compatible with Linden’s, opening the possibility that, with sufficient time, I could write a Second Life server and invite folks to migrate from Linden’s servers to my own with their avatars and objects intact, or open a portal between our two worlds. Actually opening Linden’s codebase and allowing programmers to tinker with the server or the graphics engine on an open source basis is “farther off”. Cory explains that it requires a good deal of work for a non-open source project to clean up their code so that outside programmers can work on it, referencing the ugly, hard-to-understand code Netscape released when they decided to open-source their browser.

This raises a question of whether Linden plans on being a technology or a hosting company. If “secondlife” becomes a protocol that is supported on different clients and different servers, does Linden make its money by building the best client and server (that didn’t work so well for Netscape when Microsoft started offering a web browser for free), or by hosting the coolest, fastest online spaces (the land model.)

Until “secondlife” is a protocol and there are multiple servers providing virtual land, Anshe Chung’s gamble seems like a risky one to me. What if Linden decides to institute a “Jubilee” rule where undeveloped land is distributed to the poor? Or what if Linden simply goes out of business? The virtual assets would disappear as well, unless Second Lifers found a way to recreate the world on another server. (This has happened in the past. When the graphical chat system The Palace went out of business, Palace devotees developed servers and clients to keep the world alive on a voluteer basis.)

While Linden is surely aware that a change like repossesing land would probably generate virtual riots, they’ve sometimes made other unilateral changes that have unintended ill effects. The winner of a Second Life games contest, “Primmies”, programmed by Jeffery Gomez, discovered that his game stopped working when Linden made some tweaks in their physics engine. This points to one of the key problems of creating property in someone else’s universe – if they decide, for perfectly valid reasons, to change the laws of physics, it’s quite possible that your creations will no longer function. (Linden points out that the new code is a “preview release” and that Gomez should have tested to see if his code worked in the new environment. Again, this is a little like warning people that the laws of thermodynamics are changing and they might want to see if their internal combustion engines will still work.) Gomez has recently written a long whitepaper, speculating on what a future virtual world specification might look like, attempting to solve some of the problems he’s encountered in writing in Second Life. In a passage about Second Life, he observes:

“Second Life also has no versioning standards, as all data is controlled and maintained within the system, which is in turn maintained by Linden Lab employees. Nearly all patches to the software must happen in all areas of the world simultaneously to function properly, a holdover from MMOGs (MMO-Based Games). This often breaks existing third party software, tasking all Second Life developers with an unpredictable moving target. Furthermore, prims do not work well for soft-modelled objects, forcing users to rely on Linden Lab for objects like trees, avatar meshes, and certain aspects of ground cover. The net result is a paradox: a highly sophisticated platform that only allows less advanced applications to work effectively.”

Gomez is raising an interesting issue here – if developers don’t have sufficient control over the world, will they build anything sophisticated in it? I raised a related, but different concern – is whether Second Life is currently working because “early adopter” players are willing to become programmers… later users might not be as willing to put in such a great investment of time and creativity. Cory had an excellent response – the next generation may not be creators, but might well be remixers, taking textures, objects, animations and sounds created by the first generation of users and building their own spaces out of these premade pieces.

Put new technology in a room filled with intellectual property lawyers and interesting questions arise. As a hosting provider, Linden Labs is a DMCA safe harbor – if copyright or trademark holders complain that their work is being used without permission and Linden takes the content down, they’re protected from liability. Part of my job at Tripod had to do with managing the hundreds of notices we might get in a day that infringing material was being hosted by our webservers, copyrighted content uploaded by users to their homepages. Linden has an added challenge – they’d need to find the content, which might be somewhere speeding around a virtual world the size of a small city.

For example, let’s say that lawyers for UPS encounter this photo, a screen capture of a virtual UPS deliver truck speeding across a Second Life landscape. They can send a DMCA takedown notice to Flickr asking the image be taken down… but the source of the image is still burning virtual rubber somewhere within Second Life. What does Linden do if they get a takedown notice regarding the UPS truck? They have to find the object within the world, find the owner and alert her to the “allegations” of trademark infringement. In a world of 100 million objects, this is probably a non-trivial challenge.

Clearly Second Life is a rich enough world that it’s generating some fascinating behaviors, not all of them desirable. Cory tells us that firebombings of nightclubs have become popular – while the fire doesn’t damage anything, the computational power required to render flames slows down everyone’s framerate and makes the clubs less fun to be in. Other “griefers”, as troublemakers are referred to in the world, have built replicating objects – ultimately 5.4 billion of them – that bounce around, fill rooms and make “cells” of the world unusable as all processor cycles are occupied moving the bouncing balls around.

But other behaviors are more interesting. The best way to keep up with Second Life is a blog called New World Notes, maintained by Wagner James Au, who uses the blog to feature news from within the Second Life community. But there’s also a muckraking alternative paper, The Second Life Herald, which specializes in scandal (like an alleged in-game Ponzi scheme) and griping about server issues. Like a town with two lawyers, a town with two newspapers is always more interesting than a town with only one.

I’ve been simultaneously tempted to spend more time exploring Second Life and turned off by the sense that this world – at present – is pretty disconnected from the people and issues I’ve been working with through Geekcorps and Global Voices. I asked why Linden required a credit card to sign up for a trial account, a barrier which keeps a large number of non-US and European users from exploring the system. (The obvious answer is, “we’re in this to make money, and someone without a credit card isn’t going to become a paying user.”) Cory’s answer was that they’re using credit cards as a proxy for identity, making it possible to ban “griefers” by banning their credit cards and their IP addresses.

But he went on to point out that, since the system is only usable by people with high bandwidth connections and fast computers, the credit card wasn’t a real barrier for most Second Life users. In other words, it doesn’t matter very much that my Ghanaian friends can’t get onto Second Life because they’re going to have an awfully hard time accessing the world from Busy Internet anyway. Cory was surprised that I was able to interact in Second Life (painfully, haltingly) using my PowerBook 12″ (which is only 4 months old, but too slow to be a good Second Life client…)

Perhaps it’s stupid to be considering what it means that these new spaces are only open to people rich enough to afford high powered computers and to pay maintenance on virtual land… and lucky enough to live in countries with high-bandwidth connections to the Internet. But I got a lot of funny looks when, in 1994, I started asking whether it should be a priority for Ghana to get connected to the Internet. People in developing nations are already finding ways to make money as gold farmers, doing repetitive tasks in online games to create currency, which can be sold for real currency. I think it would be pretty exciting if unemployed kids in African cybercafes could get introduced to programming by building custom objects for wealthy Second Life users who don’t have time to create their own mansions. (You know, like me.)

Ultimately projects like Second Life interest me for the same reason blogs and wikis interest me – the beauty of the Internet is that anyone who can access the net can contribute to it, making it richer, more nuanced, more complex and diverse. But until Second Life – or an open, non-proprietary, distributed successor – becomes accessible to a wider set of users, it’s going to fall short of its potential to become a space where people from all over the world can meet and interact.

That isn’t to say that Second Life won’t overcome these barriers. I wrote a paper, “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower” that talked about the problems I had with the idea that cyberspace was going to be a space for political activism and change – until that space includes Africans, Central Asians, Eastern Europeans, etc., there are certain issues and types of change that we can’t expect to see happen. But the past year of work on Global Voices has convinced me that these barriers, while very real, are surmountable, and that cyberspace can be a space where people from througout the world have conversations and arguments.

Maybe it’s time to think about writing “Making Room for the Third World in Second Life”?

Better late than never, I suppose.

The editorial board of the New York Times used some of their space on Sunday to condemn Meles Zenawi’s increasingly dictatorial governance of Ethiopia and to ask Tony Blair to remove Zenawi from his Commission for Africa, where he serves in his personal, not official, capacity.

While I’m glad to see the editorial page of the “paper of record” taking notice of what’s going on in Ethiopia, the timing seems a little odd. There was widespread violence in Addis earlier this month, as Zenawi’s police and army put down street protests with live ammo, killing at least 46 people. As this weekend’s editorial writer puts it, “Has Meles never heard of tear gas?” This editorial would have been far more timely then.

Just a few days ago – November 18th – Times correspondent Marc Lacey offered an overview of “African-style Democracy”, in a piece titled “By Fits and Starts, Africa’s Brand of Democracy Emerges”. While Lacey is disappointed by the authoritarian tendencies Zenawi, Kagame and Museveni have been displaying, he’s careful to point out that they’re “holding together troubled countries”, and are better than their predecesors: “Mr. Meles, Ethiopia’s hard-line prime minister, is a far cry from the dictator he ousted, Mengistu Haile Mariam.”

That’s true: Mengistu was fond of detaining tens of thousands of members of the opposition and killing thousands at a time, while Zenawi “only” detained 11,000 and has released 8,000 of his opponents. And his kill ratio is quite low, slaying only dozens of protesters at a time. Still, we might choose to set the bar a little higher before suggesting that Zenawi might be “another type of leader” rather than a dictator. I’m guessing the four opposition figures who’ve declared themselves on indefinite hunger strike while in detention are having some trouble understanding the fine distinctions between Zenawi’s “African democracy” and tyranny.

With the defeat of the Kenyan constitution, there appears to be the beginnings of a movement in the Western press to question the leadership of the “new generation” of African leaders – those that President Clinton, visiting the continent, declared “Africa’s great hope”. As Simon Robinson points out in an excellent article in the European edition of Time, “Within months of Clinton’s visit, Rwanda and Uganda had invaded Congo, and Eritrea and Ethiopia had gone to war with each other. While some leaders — notably Museveni and Zenawi — still did enough to remain darlings of Western donors, even they have now begun to slide.”

Robinson goes on to point out that there’s some good news outside of East Africa, as Ghana, Senegal and Zambia have all had elections where the opposition has peacefully taken power. And the fact that Kibaki’s constitution was defeated without prompting any presidential intervention is very good news for democracy.

There’s a tendency, though, to try to attribute trends to a whole continent. With Zenawi showing his dark side and Museveni cracking down on the opposition, it’s too easy to conclude that Africa’s not ready for real democracy and that citizens wil need to settle for some sort of authoritarian “African Democracy”. People deserve so much more. And it’s important that we focus our attention, as people who care about Africa, on the successes as well as the tragedies, recognizing both for what they are.

My good friend Tomas Krag just posted a thought-provoking observation about travel. Like me, Tomas has spent a good piece of the last five years on the road, working on ICT for development projects around the globe. According to his latest post, he’s starting to feel the need to take a few steps back from this crazy lifestyle:

“I feel a subtle change in me, especially when i’m on the road. More and more, the time away feels like time away from my life. As if, at home, was my stable base, my girlfriend, my sports, my family, my home, and as if being on the road means being away from all that. I still have fun, but not quite as much as I used to. I still have most of my best friends spread all over the planet, but I feel more of a need for an intimacy that is not available in those relationsships.”

Much of what Tomas has to say rings true for me. The more I’m on the road, the harder I’m finding it to embrace what’s great about traveling – new places, new people, new food, new sights – and the more I find myself missing the big and small pleasures of home. And the longer I’m away from home, the harder it is to get back into local rhythyms. My friends in the Berkshires no longer even pretend that I really live here anymore. They’re surprised to see me and are wondering when I’m leaving again, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a very real acknowledgement of my transiency.

Home for nine days between the last two big trips of 2005, I find myself looking at my calendar and doing the math. Between February 1st and today, I’ve spent 148 of 300 days on the road, including the days I drive to Cambridge and back in a single day. I’ve flown over 125,000 air miles in that period, more than five times around the circumference of the earth, and put over 10,000 miles on my truck. I’ve been to seven countries I’ve never travelled to before and another half dozen that I’d visited before. I’ve travelled by bicycle rickshaw, trishaw, camel, train, plane, metro, ferry, bus, car and foot. I’ve had food poisoning in three different cities on two continents.

It’s been a blast. And I couldn’t be happier that it’s going to stop for roughly five weeks and give me a chance to catch my breath. At which point, I suspect I’ll be flat out thrilled about the next trip (Dubai and Qatar, in late January.)

As much as I miss being home – keeping track of friends in person rather than through their blogs, talking to my wife face to face rather than on a cellphone, watching the hills turn orange in the fall and purple and white in the winter – when I’m here more than a few weeks, I start missing the road. My other tribe of friends – the ones I see in the coffee shop in Schipol airport, not in the coffee shop on Spring Street in Williamstown – don’t stop moving when I sit still. And I’ve gotten to the point where I miss many of the friends in Accra, Budapest or Amman as much as I miss the folks in Williamstown and North Adams.

Another friend – one who travels even more than Tomas or I do – recently went in the other direction. He briefly gave up having a permanent residence, living on airplanes, his offices, hotels and basically wherever the rhythyms of his job took him. He and I were talking about the seductive pleasure of business travel when he noted his favorite part of a trip. “It’s that moment when the plane door closes, when you switch your phone off and you realize that, for the next week or so, the real world is going to have to cut you some slack.” In other words, it’s one thing to be inundated with email and unanswered phonecalls when you’re home at your desk – it’s another entirely when you’re on the train from Jaipur to New Dehli. In the first case, it’s your fault for being overcommitted and overwhelmed. In the second case, it’s still your fault, but it’s socially acceptable – laudable, even – as you’re trying to keep up despite the challenges of global nomadhood.

I found myself thinking about this notion of travel as socially-acceptable addiction. The message on my mobile phone often sounds something like this: “Sorry, I’ll be hard to reach for the next n days as I trompt around the following m countries. Leave a message if you like, but I may not get back to you.” The message is roughly equivalent to, “Sorry, I’ll be on a drinking binge for the next n days. Feel free to leave a message, but I may be too drunk to respond.” Is travel my coping mechanism for overcommitment, a symptom rather than the cause? If I didn’t feel perpetually overwhelmed by projects half-completed and phonecalls unanswered, would I be as willing as I am to spend 150 days a year away from the places and people I love?

Addiction or not, I’m not ready to take a big step back from travel. (I’d like to circle the earth fewer than five times next year, and spend more than half of the nights in my own bed. But that’s a low bar to limbo under.) In a very real way, the things I’m fascinated by, that I write about, study and try to explain – the globalization of atoms and bits, the questions of what we do and don’t pay attention to on a global stage, the ways in which technology widens some gaps and narrows others – can’t be studied from the snow-covered Berkshires. I’m not sure that moving to New York or London would help either. The things I want to study are happening in server rooms in Accra, in cabs in Cairo, in shipping containers in Taipei.

And, most of all, they’re happening in airports. One of my favorite sights to this day is the arrivals and departures board at Schipol Airport. Hundreds of flights heading to places I love, places I loathe, places I’ve never thought of visiting, places I can’t stop thinking about visiting. Every line on the screen represents dozens or hundreds of people crossing boarders, visiting families, making new friends, trading goods, taking photos, eating strange food. Every line on the screen means that the world is a little more interconnected, a little bit smaller, simulataneously less foreign and more weird.

That’s what I want to be part of. Even if the price of entry is 50 nights a year of sleep in coach airline seats, eight currencies in my wallet and a very confused housecat who doesn’t quite know who I am.

It’s the end of autumn and the beginning of winter here in the Berkshires. Usually, this is the time of year I’m arranging my schedule to ensure I catch as many Green Bay Packers games as possible. But with the Packers playing abysmally – 2-8 – I’m consoling myself with my other favorite sport played by very large men: sumo.

The Kyushu Basho, the sixth and final tournament of 2005, finishes this Sunday. Mongolian wrestler Asashoryu – the only Yokozuna (”grand champion”) active in sumo today – is 12-1 in his first thirteen bouts. With yesterday’s victory over Kotomitsuki, Asashoryu tied a 27-year old record for the most victories in a year’s worth of sumo – 82 victories. (Rishiiki compete in only 90 matches a year. With today’s loss, Asashoryu was defeated only six times this year.) With one more victory, he will likely win the Emperor’s Cup for the seventh time in a row, making him the first sumo in the modern era to win all six Bashos in a single year.

Looking at recent sumo history, the only Yokozuna who compares to Asashoryu in statistical terms is Tamanoumi, who now shares the 82 win record with Asashoryu. To find a Yokozuna who scores “yusho” – a tournament title – as often as Asashoryu (75% of the time), you need to look back to Yokozuna Jinmaku, who last fought in 1867… and that’s only because Jinmaku fought in, and won, a single basho, giving him a 100% record.

With such a champion for the ages, tickets must be scarce at the tournaments as people line up to see a great champion in the flesh. History is being made. Records shattered. It’s a golden moment for sumo!

Or not.

Actually, sumo’s undergoing something of a crisis in Japan. Arenas are half-filled as fans age and new generations are forsaking sumo for more “modern” fighting sports like “K-1″. One possible explanation why sumo’s having such trouble attracting Japanese fans? It’s not easy to find great Japanese wrestlers to root for.

Over the past ten years, foreign-born wrestlers have been a major presence in sumo. In 1992, Akebono – originally named Chad Rowan – became sumo’s first foreign-born Yokozuna – he was born and grew up in Hawaii. Because Akebono was so physically dominating (he stands 6 foot 8 inches (2.03m), and his wrestling weight was 525 pounds (240 kg)), his success in the ring was attributed as much to his mass than to his wrestling talents. (There’s little shame in losing a match to a man who outweighs you by 100kg.) Similarly-sized Samoan Musashimaru was viewed much the same way – more as a force of nature than as a fellow sumo wrestler.

Asashoryu is different. When he entered professional sumo, his wrestling weight was 120kg, making him one of the smallest competitors in the sport. He’s subsequently bulked up to 145kg – still slightly below average weight for top-ranking rishiki. Asa wins matches through a combination of strength, speed and technique, sometimes lifting much larger men out of the ring, sometimes quickly throwing them over a shoulder. There’s no way to argue that he’s got a natural advantage over his opponents, like Akebono or Musa. He’s simply better than his peers.

Increasingly, his peers aren’t Japanese. They’re from around the world, especially from the former Soviet Union. One of the most promising up-and-coming rishiki is Kotooshu, a Bulgarian wrestler who will likely become the fourth Ozeki (sumo’s second-highest rank) after this basho. (After beating Asa today, Kotooshu is 10-3 and will likely receive promotion with one more victory.) There are now two Russians and a Georgian in sumo’s top ranks, as well as 6 other Mongolians wrestling in the top Makuuchi division.

But don’t hold your breath for Japanese sumo to become a fully globalized sport. According to today’s Japan Times, the Japanese Sumo Association is sticking to a policy where each sumo “stable” can have only one foreign-born wrestler. Four of the 54 stables have said they won’t be accepting any foreign wrestlers, and there are currently 50 foreign born wrestlers in the sport. In other words, the doors opening sumo to the world currently appear to be closed, despite dozens of Bulgarian, Mongolian and Russian wrestlers who’d like to join the ranks of professional sumo.

It’s easy to dismiss boneheaded policies like this as racism or xenophobia – what’s next, a great wall around Japan to repel the Mongol hordes? But that misses a critical fact: sumo’s not just a sport. It’s a religious and cultural ritual, something that becomes apparent as you watch five minutes of ceremony, including a sprinkling of salt in the ring to ritually purify it, before a match that might last only ten seconds. There’s a widespread perception that some of the foreign wrestlers – notably Asashoryu – don’t take the entirity of their role as rikishi as seriously as they should.

Listing some of Asa’s ritual transgressions, Howard French (who writes as brilliantly about sumo as he does about African politics) notes that Asa uses his left hand to throw salt into the ring (instead of his right), has been photographed wearing a suit (instead of a traditional robe) and tends to follow his (numerous) victories with decidedly un-sumo displays of enthusiasm. No, we’re not talking Terrell Owens pulling a pen out of his sock to sign a football – we’re talking about a discrete pumped fist – but that’s been enough to put some members of the press on permanent Asa-scandal watch.

Assume for the moment that Asashoryu wins one of the next two matches and sets several records in the process. Assume Kotooshu is promoted to Ozeki. Assume that Bulgarian and Mongolian kids start dreaming of a future in sumo, while Japanese kids play video games. (In French’s article, Asa argues that Mongolian kids – who grow up on horseback, following herds across the plains, end up tougher than Japanese kids who grow up on Nintendo.) Can sumo survive globalization?

America’s chief ritualized sport – baseball – seems to be doing quite well in a global environment. Sure, the alleged “World Series” pits US teams from teams as far away as Canada. But Ozzie Guillen, manager of this year’s victorious White Sox team, declared his success a victory for his native Venezuela. Many of the best players in the game are Dominican, Japanese, Korean or Cuban. Steroids, labor strikes and the designated hitter aside, baseball still looks more or less like it did in 1900… just a lot more colorful.

Is sumo really different? Is the sport so Japanese that it won’t be recognizable as sumo if many of the heroes come from overseas? Or will globalization make the sport better, more exciting, more relavent to a new generation of fans, inside and outside of Japan.

You know what I’m rooting for.

Asashoryu won. Won big, as is appropriate for a rishiki. Asahi Shimbun starts their article on his victory as follows:

“Yokozuna Asashoryu, sumo’s most dominant wrestler ever, won yet again Sunday to close the Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament with a 14-1 record and an unprecedented seventh straight title.”

Never thought I’d see a major Japanese paper acknowledge Asa’s dominance quite so directly. And without even mentioning his Mongolian heritage in the lede… great to see him getting the respect he so richly deserves.

Photo from AP Photowire

Thanksgiving is both the simultaneously the simplest and most fraught of major American holidays. On the one hand, it’s a very straightforward holiday. You get together with friends and/or family and eat a (surprisingly ritualized) meal. Easy.

And yet, it’s not.

For some, the complication is the family. For others, it’s the food.

I’m lucky enough to have a (mostly) uncomplicated family situation, so it’s the food that’s sometimes the problem. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year, and a few years back, I seized control of it in a bloodless coup, wrangling agreement from my sister and parents that Rachel and I could be the default hosts for Thanksgiving. As I love to cook, this is generally a good deal, as far as I’m concerned.

But Thanksgiving is notorious for throwing one a culinary curveball. Everyone who cooks for guests knows that the menu doesn’t always turn out the way you expect. You throw dishes out and pretend you intended to serve whatever it is you actually put on the table.

This doesn’t work at Thanksgiving. If you don’t have a turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and pumpkin pie, people grumble. Blow any one of those dishes and you’ve got problems.

My mother tells the story, every year, of the first Thanksgiving she cooked as a married woman. In a small apartment in Chicago, she cooked a turkey for her mother-in-law, brother-in-law and husband, using careful instructions from her mother, an accomplished cook. An hour into roasting, the turkey was an ugly shade of black, and my mother called her mother to figure out what had gone wrong:

“What temperature is the oven?”

“350 degrees, just where you told me to set it.”

“Yes, but what temperature is it actually in the oven?”

Turns out the oven was miscalibrated and had “flash-baked” her turkey at 600 degrees. For reasons she finds hard to explain, she soldiered on and tried to bake a pie in a 600 degree oven, hoping she might complete it in 15 minutes… Needless to say, this did roughly as well as the bird did.

I don’t face this problem, as I generally smoke my Thanksgiving turkey over a wood fire on the back porch of the house. While the turkey tends to turn an ugly shade of black, it ends up extremely juicy and flavorful. Last year, smoking the turkeys also saved my Thanksgiving dinner from a power failure. While the electric stove was offline, I was able to finish cooking the potatoes, squash and brussels sprouts over an open fire, letting me feel extremely competent and macho.

This year, however, the fire was more problematic. One of our guests this year keeps kosher, so Rachel had purchased two kosher turkeys. I woke up early, split some wood and made a roaring fire despite a minor snowstorm dumping a foot of snow on the porch as I worked. I put two lovely birds over the fire around 8am, assuming they’d be done around 2pm, when guests would arrive. And I went on to prepare the pies, the veggies, the rest of the meal.

Around 11am, I checked on the birds – browning nicely – and ran out to the local market to pick up a few more things for the meal. I was gone twenty minutes in total, and came back, slipping and sliding up our snow covered driveway. As I got out of the truck, I smelled the unmistakeable odor of burning meat.

I ran through the kitchen and out to the porch. Flames two feet high were leaping out of the smoker. I threw the lid open and discovered that the smaller of the two birds was actively on fire, flames shooting from the body cavity (which I’d stuffed with pears and sage). As I grabbed it with tongs to take it off the fire, it split into pieces – I rolled the biggest of them in the snow to put the fire out. Then I took the burnt – but not actively on-fire – larger bird and rolled it in the snow as well. I poured snow on the flames in the smoker and came back into the house, smouldering bird in hand.

“None of you noticed the turkeys were on fire?”

Blank stares from my mother, my wife and my father. To be fair, Mom just had a root canal and is in pain; Rachel’s fighting off a cold. Dad was clearly distracted by his eighth time watching “The Natural”.

“The two-foot high flames? The scent of burning flesh? None of that caught your attention?”

Evidently not. I’ve smoked countless birds before – and a number of turkeys – and no one thought to watch the smoker very closely, as it usually takes five or six hours before the birds are in danger of being done. But the kosher birds, as it turns out, are very fatty. The melted fat from the bird dripped onto the hot coals and created a grease fire hot enough to peel heatproof paint from the outside of the grill. Had I been out another five minutes, I suspect the flames would have spread from the smoker to the siding of the house. Perhaps this would have caught my family’s attention. Or not.

It’s now noon on Thanksgiving. Twelve people are expecting Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings in about three hours. The local market – which doesn’t carry turkeys and rarely even has fresh chickens – has just closed. I find four kosher chicken breasts in a freezer, put them in the oven to bake, and hop in the truck, frantically driving on unplowed roads to cosmopolitan Pittsfield, MA… and discover the two 24 hour supermarkets in town are both closed.

My friend Doone shows off my new signature dish, Turkey a la Pompeii. She’s holding the drumstick.

My mother has called my sister on her cellphone and dispatched her to drive east before driving west and pick up a few chickens from Boston Market before driving to my house. In the meantime, she and I start picking through the two birds, which have been christened “The Pompeii Turkey” and “The Boy Who Lived”. Pompeii yields a cup or two of edible meat, the other a pound or two of unharmed breast meat under a crunchy outer shell. As we offer each other incinerated drumsticks and start knocking back glasses of wine before 1pm, laughing like hyenas, it’s clear to me that I’m living through a story my mother will be telling for the next 40 years, immediately after the 600-degree oven story.

It all worked out. It always does on Thanksgiving. Liz, her girlfriend and family brough four small – but very much unburnt – chickens. Alongside some very dry turkey and some kosher chicken breasts, we had a table groaning with garlic potatoes, spicy collard greens, butternut squash, creamed onions, brussel sprouts with pancetta, and half a dozen other good distractions from the firey destruction earlier in the day. Good food, good people, good reasons to be thankful.

And next year, a good reason for serving hamburgers.

Recipe: Turkey a la Pompeii

Take one 14 pound turkey. Remove neck, giblets, innards. Soak overnight in salt water.

In barbeque pit or smoker, light a large hardwood fire.

Stuff turkey with fresh sage, whole apples or pears and rub the skin with salt.

When hardwood has burned down to coals, place bird over fire to cook in the resulting smoke.

Mix a half gallon of 180 proof alcohol and corn oil in a one to one mixture. When no one is looking, open grill and pour mixture over coals. (Warning – this will likely cause an explosion and possible grievious injury. Don’t actually do this.)

When two foot high flames leap out of the firepit, check to see if your family or any invited guests notice.

Once the turkey is actively on fire, seize it firmly with fireplace tongs. Roll it in snow until the flames are extinguished.

Place turkey on platter. Don’t eat it. Go out for dinner instead.

Serves: none.

Anyone who knows Rachel as well as they know me will be unsurprised to discover she has a divergent, but equally valid, take on this year’s holiday, seeing the bright side of the smoking wreckage that was this year’s turkey.

My colleague Jerzy Celichowski just brightened my day by pointing me to his bridge blog. Inspired by last year’s Global Voices meeting at Harvard, he decided that he’d blog about his life in Hungary in his native Polish. I don’t speak a word of Polish, so I can’t vouch for the contents of the blog, but given the fact that Jerzy’s a bright, funny, observant guy, I have to imagine it’s worth reading.

One of my big hopes for this year’s Global Voices gathering is that we’ll start talking about ways for Global Voices to reach beyond English. Bridgeblogging should be about more than bridging between English and other languages – we should be finding ways to feature bridges between Latin American nations in Spanish, and blogs like Jerzy’s, building links across Central Europe. I don’t know if this points to a polyglot GV site, or a new crop of regional, language focused-aggregators… or something else entirely. Should be fun to find out.

Someone needs to teach the Germans to write headlines. The lead for their story today on the 2005 weblog awards: “Best Weblog of 2005 Goes to Overweight Woman”. Uh, okay – perhaps you want to tell me something about the blog other than that author needs to eat less and exercise more?

As it turns out, the overweight woman in question is fictional – Mirta Bertotti, the mujer gorda behind “Más respeto, que soy tu madre”, is a character created by Argentine journalist Hernán Casciari, who’s using a weblog to tell a serialized, very funny story of Argentine life. Casciari won this year’s Deutsche Welle Best of the Blogs prize for Best Weblog. No word on whether or not he’s overweight.

And we – that is to say, Global Voices – won their prize for “Best Journalistic Blog in English”, a prize we could not be happier with. And while I could certainly lose some weight, most of our team is quite fit.

Our friends Manal and Alaa (both quite slim) were awarded Reporters Without Borders special award for blogs that promote freedom of expression. The photo of the two of them featured on the site is especially adorable.

Odd headline choices aside, I’m grateful that Best of the Blogs has done such a good job of featuring weblogs from around the entire world. It’s great to see a set of weblog awards where not every blog listed is one I’m already familiar with, and where new experiments in ways of using blogging, like “Más respeto” get the respect they deserve. Thanks for choosing us!

A good friend works for the US government. He’s an uncommonly bright guy and does amazingly complex technical things for a government agency you’ve never heard of (not one of the sinister ones) at a facility somewhere near Washington DC.

(He is, as you may have gathered by now, trying fairly hard to protect his identiy for reasons that will be, momentarily, obvious.)

Like many of us, good friend was moved by the images he saw of Louisiana in the aftermath of Katrina and wanted to help out. As a government employee, this was easier for him than it is for some others – with permission of his supervisor, he was able to ask to be “seconded” to FEMA (the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, for my non-US readers) for some period of time.

Friend had hoped he’d be quickly deployed to New Orleans, hoping to use his vast technical knowledge to help with the communications infrastructure, or perhaps be immediately useful on the ground, handing out relief supplies. Instead, he waited. For weeks and weeks.

And then a couple of weeks ago, he got an email, asking him to drop everything and come to Florida. So he did. And he’s now perhaps the most overqualified data entry technician, helping victims of Hurricane Wilma (two hurricanes post-Katrina) somewhere near Orlando.

Here’s the thing – as an OFA (”other federal agency”) FEMA staffer, friend gets paid his regular US government salary and regular government overtime for being in Florida. Given that said friend is a (deservedly) well-compensated employee, this ends up being one whole hell of a lot of money. As he puts it:

But we are severely overstaffed, and we spend too much time playing solitaire. We aren’t cheap, either: most of us OFAs are GS-11s or higher, and we get time-and-a-half for overtime and weekends. You do the math; I’m kind of afraid to.

(A quick bit of translation – GS-11 is a pay ranking in the US government – as the numbers get higher, the salaries and benefits get higher as well…)

It wouldn’t be so bad if there were lots of work for my friend to do. There’s not.

The problem is, the people of Florida aren’t showing up. When I got here on Thursday we logged about 50 people, five an hour for our ten-hour day. I helped six. Friday we got 40, and today we barely hit 30 before closing early for rain. Probably a quarter of these people just want tarps for their roofs. My friends at the site to the south say the same thing: barely anybody to help, even though they’re pulling 12-hour days.

In an email I got last night, friend says that yesterday he and nine other OFAs worked a ten hour day, collectively helping FIVE people. In other words, American taxpayers paid 150 hours of high-salaried government employees primarily so FEMA can make the case that it reacted to Hurricane Wilma more effectively than it did to Katrina.

Fortunately, friend is using some of his copious free time to maintain a blog, titled “Heck of a Job”. The title is a reference to President Bush’s vote of confidence in Michael Brown, former FEMA director: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

So far, it’s a heck of a blog, though for all the wrong reasons. Friend had hoped to offer an account of what federal employees are able to do to help communities recover from natural disasters. But so far, it’s largely a chronicle of frustration at a bureacracy that seems to do a very bad job of allocating its resources. Very much worth a read for the next few weeks friend reports from his position within FEMA.

I usually try to blog conference sessions I attend, because it’s rare that a journalist will provide a full blow-by-blow of what transpired. But Mithre Sandrasagra, writing for Inter Press in Johannesburg did an astounding job of summarizing our session on NGO security, filtering circumvention and anonymous blogging at WSIS. Thanks, Mithre, and thanks also for the closing quote about the difficulties we had holding both our sessions:

The Tunisian authorities attempted to shut down the ‘Expression under Repression’ panel Thursday, Margreet van Doodewaard, Programme Officer for Information and Communications Technology at Hivos, told TerraViva. “Rita Dulci Rahman, the Dutch Ambassador to Tunisia and a high-ranking International Telecommunication Union officer intervened and luckily we were able to keep things going,” van Doodewaard said.

Talking with friends about my time in Tunisia now that I’m safely at home in the US, people keep asking me whether I was worried about my safety. The answer is an unambigious “no”. In most repressive societies, it’s not the outside agitators who are likely to be directly threatened by security forces, but the citizens of the country they meet with.

Ben Walker, blogger, radio producer and friend, has an account of an evening he spent in Tunis with my friends Hossein Derakshan, Nart Villeneuve and some new Tunisian friends. The evening ended very badly for the Tunisians, who found themselves detained by security forces, who may have been following Nart and Hossein. His account has me more than a little worried for the Tunisians we met with during the course of our workshops.

Rebecca had a significantly more pleasant night in Tunisia on Friday, attending a blogger dinner held by our friends Subzero Blue and Aqua Cool. I really wish I’d been with them, rather than spending Friday night on the tarmac of the Tunis airport (our plane had mechanical trouble…) Marwen (Subzero) also has a great account of the evening with some photos.