This week, LiveJournal began suspending the journals of a few hundred users whose self-identified “interests” in their online profiles suggested that they might be soliciting sex with minors. The crackdown eliminated some sites maintained by incest and rape survivors, others dedicated to literary criticsm of works like Lolita, sites that document the campaigns of roleplaying games and sites dedicated to the art of fan fiction.

The CEO of Six Apart (the owner of LiveJournal), Barak Berkowitz, admits “Well we really screwed this one up…” Not only did LiveJournal delete a wide swath of sites, far broader than the sites they meant to delete to “protect children”, they didn’t communicate their reasons for suspending journals to their users, didn’t give users a chance to change their profiles to avoid suspension, and communicated with the press before communicating with their users.

Predictably, the LiveJournal community rose up in revolt. They flooded the site’s news feeds with comments, organized petition drives, and urged members to move to competitive journal sites. Six Apart now appears to be backing down, restoring journals and generally eating crow.

There’s some interesting lessons in here for both providers and users of web community tools. One of these lessons is a need to recognize the norms of the communities that are built around a specific technical system.

The technology and the history of LiveJournal has led to a very different form of usage than we usually see on weblogs. LiveJournal makes it very easy to restrict your writing to a group of approved “friends” – a process called “friends-locking”. This makes LJ a particularly useful tool for closed conversations, conversations where the ground rules may be well understood by participants in those conversations, but misunderstood by outsiders.

For instance, when the founders of the Pornish Pixies community (one of the communities banned, and later unbanned, by LiveJournal) declare one of their interests to be “incest”, the members of the community understand that this is a community of fanfic writers who write fiction using characters from the Harry Potter novels, and that some of these stories explore sexual tensions or sexual relationships between fictional family members. You may find it strange or gross that people choose to write stories about what might happen in the dorm rooms of Hogwarts, and you may choose not to read these stories. The word “incest” in the profile is there to warn you off if this isn’t your thing. (And before concluding that no one should be writing about these issues, let me recommend kitsune13’s list of “trangressive sex” in literature, provided to demonstrate a wealth of great (and not so great) literature that deals with explicit sexual topics.)

Concluding that the fanfic authors who submit stories to Pornish Pixies are trying to recruit children for predatory purposes is a radical misunderstanding of the rules of this closed community. When LiveJournal reviewed the content of the Pornish Pixies group, they quickly concluded that these folks were writing fiction, not harming children, and restored the group. They had misread the metadata because they didn’t speak the language.

This, in turn, is something of a surprise. There’s a lot of fanfic on LiveJournal, and a substantial portion of that fiction explores non-traditional sexual relationships. You’d think LJ would know their userbase well enough to understand the inadvisability of simply deleting every community that mentioned “incest”. But LJ found themselves in an uncomfortable place. A group of activists calling themselves “Warriors for Innocence” reportedly threatened actions against advertisers on LJ. It’s likely that Six Apart’s response was, in part, a response to commercial pressures.

But by so badly treating some of their core users, LJ may have spooked the goose that lays the golden eggs – the users who create content and provide a reason to visit journals. Under-react and you spook advertisers, over-react, you spook your content creators – it’s a balancing act in the user-created content business, as Digg found out when it attempted to crack down on people posting AACS keys.

The LiveJournal revolt, following on the heels of the Digg revolt, demonstrates that users have power over the administrators of web 2.0 sites. But it’s also a reminder of the decision many web users have made to put their public or semi-private spaces in the hands of private companies. There’s a strong illusion of control in LiveJournal – you can determine who reads your posts, who can post to your community – but ultimately, Six Apart, like most smart companies, requires a terms of service that allows them to remove content for arbitrary reasons. (They’re hardly unique in this – at Tripod, we had a similar clause that let us remove any content, for any reason.)

It’s one thing to move your blog from Blogspot to your own Moveable Type install. It’s a very different thing to try to recreate a community in a space you’ve got full control over… especially when that community is largely psuedonymous, and no one may be willing to have their real name associated with a pastime which, on one level or another, builds on the copyrights of Scholastic.

There’s an interesting opportunity for fanfic communities on LiveJournal at this juncture – they could move, en masse, to another provider who pledged to project their rights aggressively, and to remove content only after review, and only in the more serious cases. Or Live Journal could attempt to win back the faith of their community by demonstrating that they understand the seriousness of the mistake they’ve just made. Will either happen? It likely depends on how comfortable fanfic writers are holding private conversations in the legal equivalent of the food court of a mall… or how comfortable Six Apart is hosting communities that they don’t understand.

How big is the fandom community on LiveJournal? The “fandomcounts” community, started yesterday, has 30,000 members already, and the explanation text for the page is available in 24 languages. That’s a big set of people, one that a company like Six Apart would be ill-advised to ignore.

(An explanation of the title for non-Harry Potter fans, as this is usually a blog about technology, media and Africa: The reference is to magic spells used in dueling – Six Apart casts a spell to try to make something disappear, and the fans respond with a spell designed to disarm their attacker… And no, I’m not a fanfic author, though some of my dearest friends are.)

At tonight’s Harvard Law School cocktail party, before Nicholas Negroponte arrived to give a talk about One Laptop Per Child, a friend asked me why I continue to attend Negroponte’s talks. “Given how many of these you’ve heard, what are you going to get out of this?”

The truth is, I learn something new every time Negroponte talks about the project. Even before he began talking, it was interesting to discover that he’s come equipped with almost a dozen “B2″ prototype machines. They’re open and live on tables around the room, for people to play with – that’s a big improvement from the last time I played with the machine, when the machines were still being hand-built, were in scarce supply and you needed someone to walk you through the Sugar interface.

Negroponte starts by reminding us that OLPC is an education project, not a laptop project. He traces his work on the project to Seymour Papert and to the learning process students go through in learning Logo. Debugging, he argues, is as close as we can get to learning how to think… and it works for skills like spelling, as well as for programming.

Much of the focus of his presentation is on the failure of schools around the world. He makes it clear that the reason for OLPC is for low-income countries where schools may not have buildings or teachers, not just for middle-income countries. He talks about a Nigerian classroom where the XO laptop is being tested – enrollment in the first grade class has doubled, because students came out of the woodwork to get to use the machine.

Students enter schools in first grade with wide, curious eyes, Nicholas tells us. By fourth grade, they’re bored and no longer curious. “We’re inoculating against ignorance.” That’s why the project can’t be incremental – you have to inoculate whole countries, not just a school or a village.

The landscape has changed around the project, as Negroponte acknowledges. He takes a swipe at Intel’s Classmate project, pointing out that the machine has a 65w power supply, while the XO generally draws less than 2 watts. “If Libya gave every student a Classmate, they’d have to build new power plants.” Answering a question about whether the machine will run Windows – it will, and it wouldn’t be open if it didn’t, he argues – he points out that Windows now has a $3 edition, in part in reaction to the OLPC project. “We don’t have to be in the laptop business.” If other projects can put a laptop in every child’s hands, the project achieves its goal, even if the laptop is not the XO.

Despite the enthusiasm of countries like Rwanda, Libya and Uruguay, all of which are entertaining the idea of providing laptops to every schoolchild, no country has yet written a check to the project. That includes Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine and Thailand as well, all of whom Negroponte lists as first-stage adopters of the project. It’s a big check to write – nations are being asked to invest in the laptop one million at a time. That’s $176 million for the machines alone, at current pricing, plus money for distribution and Internet provision – the actual price tag could be closer to a $200 – 250 million investment. As the project scales up, the price drops – possibly as low as $100 per unit in 2009, possibly to $50 per unit in the next decade. Quanta, which manufactures the machine, is ready to scale to a million laptops per month by year’s end. That doesn’t sound like much, Negroponte tells us, but global laptop production is only 5 million a month.

(In response to a question about whether laptops will be available in the US, Negroponte gives two answers. One is that there are some early discussions about making the laptop available in US schools. Also, it’s likely that end users will be able to purchase machines in a 1 for the price of 2 deal, where you can buy a machine, but subsidize one for students somewhere in the world. Negroponte makes it clear that OLPC won’t manage this project – they see it as too incremental – but they will allow it to happen and believe it will happen in the next 12 months.)

Negroponte’s talk was fairly light on specs – two major changes that I noticed in his slides. Because of the rising cost of nickel, the machine is now using Lithin ion batteries instead. The decision to use nickel metal hydride was designed to allow batteries to be charged by human power as efficiently as possible – lithium batteries are more difficult to trickle charge.

Dr. Negroponte emailed to correct me: the new generation of machines will not be using Lithium Ion, but Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiPeFo4), a battery technology that is not yet in wide use, but has some characteristics which could be especially appropriate for the XO machine. Specifically, the batteries tend to deliver less heat than Lithium ion and are much more resistant to explosion if misused. It’s unclear whether they are easier to charge using human power than Lithium ion. Dr. Negroponte tells me that OLPC’s partners will be building a factory specifically to produce the LiPeFo4 batteries.

Flash memory costs have come down, however, and the machine currently features a gigabyte of flash RAM.

Negroponte closes with a story about the appearance of the machine, explaining why it’s green and white. The reason was Nigerian President Obasanjo’s enthusiastic embrace of the machine. After a cabinet meeting at Obasanjo’s villa, the President declared, “Professor Negroponte, I have one word for your project: enchanting.” Thrilled by the reception, Negroponte asked for the next prototype to be in the colors of the Nigerian flag – green and white.

It’s an enchanting project, and it’s more realistic every time I look at it. But it’s fair to be skeptical up until the moment a government signs that very big check.

I took an hour from grantwriting today to sit at the coffee shop in Williamstown and revel in the sociability of my hometown, before heading off to Boston, Arusha, Cape Town and possibly Ottawa over the next few weeks. I’d hoped to see some friendly faces and remind myself how lucky I am to live where I do.

Unfortunately, one of the friendly folks who dropped by had very sad news to deliver. KweYao Agyapon, musical director of the Williams College Dance Department passed away last weekend. He’d been struggling with illness for years and had been on medical leave.

KweYao was a percussionist, composer and teacher to several generations of Williams students. Under the leadership of Sandra Burton, the department has trained hundreds of students in West African dance and music – both Sandra and KweYao worked closely with Chuck Davis’s African American Dance Ensemble, and brought the energy, professionalism, creativity and rootedness of that company to the students they taught. I didn’t work closely with KweYao – he took over for my friend and mentor Gary Sojkowski, a remarkable musician who served as musical director for the Dance department until a stroke disabled him. But I’ve gotten to know KweYao over the past few years and have admired him as a musician and as a person.

Reading about KweYao online after receiving the bad news this morning, I’m filled with regrets. I knew about his work with figures in the African dance community, but I didn’t know about his career as a session musician with jazz greats like Booker T. Washington and Vernon Reid. Nor did I know about his inspiring work in the New York and New Jersey public schools with Artsgenesis, an organization dedicated to reaching hard-to-teach kids through the arts. When I last saw KweYao, I’d extended an invitation to dinner at my house, where I’d promised to cook Ghanaian food for him and his wife Wanda. If we had found the time, perhaps I’d have had the chance to hear about some of those chapters of his remarkable life.

Rest in peace, KweYao.

• Global Voices Online ? Belarus: Blogger br23/UÅ‚adzimer KatkoÅ­ski Passes Away
  Groundbreaking Belarusian blogger UÅ‚adzimer KatkoÅ­ski passed away at age 30 in Prague. Rest in peace, br23
  (tags: globalvoices activism belarus bloggers)
• Doing Business Map – The World Bank Group
  Excellent World Bank mashup showing the ease of doing business in different nations.
  (tags: business economics google maps statistics trade development)

It’s not every day that I get an introduction via video podcast. My friends Loïc LeMeur and Thomas Crampton used a podcast to introduce Rebecca, me and the Global Voices community to Jonas Birgersson, the chief executive of Swedish IT firm, Relakks. Relakks is a very interesting form of anonymizer, using technology and a business model that are somewhat unfamiliar to folks who work in the internet filtering and circumvention community.

Birgersson tells Crampton that he’s working on Relakks in part as a political statement. He sees some pending legislation – notably the “Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive” – as leading towards increased government surveillance to prevent the new crime of “aiding, abetting, or inciting” commercial-scale copyright infringement. By responding to this threat with a system designed to let large numbers of users surf the Internet in a way that shields their identity from some forms of surveillance, Relakks demonstrates that net users can respond to attempted surveillance by becoming very difficult to watch. In other words, law enforcement should consider saving surveillance for the important stuff, not just to catch copyright criminals.

Relakks allows users around the world to adopt a Swedish IP and surf the web using that IP. This allows users whose governments filter the Internet – like Ethiopia, China or Saudi Arabia – to access the web freely… so long as their governments don’t start blocking access to Relakks. Governments have gotten quite good at blocking web proxy services like Anonymizer – it’s not clear how quickly they’ll learn to block a service like Relakks.

Relakks sets up an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) between your machine and a server in Sweden using PPTP, a protocol that comes pre-installed on Windows and Mac OS X machines. This gives Relakks a possible advantage over tools like Tor, which require installation on your machine (or require you to run the tool from a USB key using a package like TorPark.) The technique is similar to the one I use when I travel, logging into a Unix machine in Cambridge, setting up a SOCKS proxy via SSH, except that it’s easier to set up and doesn’t require you to install ssh on your laptop or have a Unix account.

That said, there are at least two major vulnerabilities of Relakks – one is that a determined government could shut off your connection to the Swedish servers via PPTP… or just blocking the TCP ports associated with the protocol. Or by poisoning DNS to make the pptp.relakks.com unresolveable via local DNS. Second, because all your traffic passes through Relakks, they’re capable of generating a great deal of information about your online activities. This is a vulnerability of most central-server anonymization systems, as well as systems like Psiphon, which require you to trust whoever is forwarding your Internet traffic. Tor protects against this vulnerability through the use of multiple servers and layered encryption, but that protection comes at a price: the system is slower than systems like Relakks.

(In the interview with Crampton, Birgersson makes it clear that his company will only release user data when compelled by Swedish law. That law specifies that data must be released in cases of murder or attempted murder, large-scale narcotics trafficking or threats to national and international security.)

I was impressed by the easy setup and speed of Relakks – it took roughly 30 seconds to configure the system for a Mac. The first couple of web connections I tried to make failed, but then connections were quite fast: noticeably slower than surfing the web through my direct connection, noticeably faster than Tor. I had one major problem – I could not access any of the Google family of sites – they simply timed out. It’s possible that this is a function of Google’s geolocation service, which may have trouble resolving the high port that Relakks uses to let users surf the web.

Relakks isn’t free – Birgersson and crew are charging €5 a month for the service or €50 a year. There’s an additional transaction fee if you’re signing up for a single month. These fees subsidize connectivity to and from the Swedish servers – Birgersson tells Crampton that he’s currently got 10 Gigabits per second of connectivity to his server cluster – which helps keep the service very fast.

Unfortunately, the service charge is likely to be a major obstacle for some of the people who’d most like to use the service. The price may or may not be an issue, but the need to use an online payment system is a major obstacle for many developing world users. A system that let users pay using their mobile phones, or which subsidized connectivity in repressive nations by charging users in countries with high credit card penetration might be a solution. The system already has 50,000 users, and has seen spikes in usage from Turkey and Thailand when those nations made steps towards constraining internet access – I’d observe that those are nations where average net users are more likely to have credit cards than in Ethiopia, for instance.

One of the most interesting features that Birgersson is promising is “country shifting”, which would let you choose a nation to proxy your connections through, giving you the chance to see the Internet through the eyes of users in other countries. The Blossom system has used the Tor network to achieve this same result, but that code is a bit tricky to use for the average user – with additional Relakks servers in different nations, the user would simply need to choose a different server to surf through a different nation.

It will be interesting to see what uses people find for Relakks. Many users have started using the Tor network for filesharing, allowing them to share copyright-violating files with a high degree of anonymity, but likely degrading the performance of the network in the process. Will filesharers move to Relakks? Terrorists? Internet gambling enthusiasts? Probably all of the above, as well as people in nations that constrain access to the Internet, allowing them to surf and publish in an unfettered fashion.

I’m not likely to become a long-time Relakks user – I’ve got Tor installed on my laptop, and while it’s not as fast as I’d like, it is reliable enough for the moments I want to surf of publish anonymously, doesn’t require me to pay a membership fee and gives me a very high degree of anonymity without requiring me to trust anyone. I’m enough of a child of the 80s that I’d half-hoped to dislike Relakks so I could write a post titled “Relakks: Don’t Do It” in homage to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but I’m quite impressed with the system. If you’re in a situation where you need to evade a national firewall frequently, where you can afford to pay €5 a month and where you trust Jonas Birgersson more than your local Internet Service Provider, Relakks might be for you.

• Help Our Fight for Real Democracy – washingtonpost.com
  Wael Abbas talks about the Egyptian democracy movement, the involvement of bloggers, and asks Americans about Mubarak: “Is this the kind of regime you want your tax money to support?” via:Akwe
  (tags: egypt middleeast africa freespeech blogging globalvoices activism democracy uspolitics)
• Thomas Chatterton Williams – Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop – washingtonpost.com
  Stark indictment of hiphop culture as damaging to African American progress and identity: “Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with “keeping it real” are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive
  (tags: hiphop race identity uspolitics)
• Berkshire Eagle Online – Elms strike down Beaneaters
  Berkshire baseball kicks it old school – the Pittsfield Elms play by the 1886 rule book, with seven balls for a walk and a strike zone chosen by the batter. Cannot wait to catch a game at Waconah later this summer
  (tags: 413 baseball pittsfield)
• Dept. of Technology: Remember This?: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
  Gordon Bell is archiving every aspect of his existence, recording everything he sees, says and does. Is he a new form of archivist or an exhibitionist? Brilliant or a little nuts?
  (tags: blogging data memory science tech technology geek)
• Project Censored Media Democracy in Action
  Interesting – but sometimes overblown and exaggerated – stories that researchers believe were undercovered by mainstream media in 2007
  (tags: activism censorship media journalism)
• What are we going to say about “Cult of the Amateur”?. Many-to-Many:
  Clay does a great job of taking Cult of the Amateur just seriously enough to figure out what points are worth supporting and which are worth ignoring
  (tags: blogging culture internet journalism politics shirky web)

What sorts of the stories is the Internet good for?

Complex, multifaceted ones. Ones where lots of smart people have differing opinions. Like the crackdown on independent media in Venezuela by President Hugo Chavez.

It seems pretty obvious that Chavez shutting down RCTV, the country’s oldest independent television station, and replacing it with pro-government propoganda is a bad thing. Now the government is threatening Globovision, another independent station, accusing it of inciting anti-Chavez violence.

But this story is a bit more complicated. RCTV broadcast 64 days of anti-Chavez coverage during the 2002 general strike, including ads encouraging people to stop paying taxes. Chavez has accused the station of supporting the coup that briefly ousted him from power later that year. When Chavez regained power, none of the private stations reported the story – RCTV ran the film “Pretty Woman”. On the Media’s typically excellent story on the situation focuses primarily on critics of RCTV, assuming that most listeners will naturally be critical of anti-speech activities. One of the most interesting critics featured in the story is Andre Izarra, who runs pro-Chavez TeleSUR… but who formerly served as news director for RCTV.

Xeni Jardin with BoingBoing ran a post of a link suggested by a reader, a compelling video of RCTV employees wearing gags. Other BoingBoing readers sent comments critical of RCTV, and Xeni posted a followup piece this evening featuring their concerns about RCTV, reasons why reasonable people might support the station’s “shutdown”, and a reminder that the station has been removed from broadcast, but can still broadcast via cable and the Internet. (Broadcast is still where the majority of advertising revenues are in Venezuela.)

That’s what we’ve seen at Global Voices as well – a great deal of strong opinion on both sides of the story. Luis Carlos Diaz translates multiple comments from a 2000-post thread on blog directory to2blogs.com, both in support of RCTV and challenging their past actions. I’m very interested to see whether opinion shifts if Chavez goes after Globovision as aggressively as he’s gone after RCTV.

I don’t know what I think. I’m inclined to be deeply suspicious of any action that takes voices off the air. But there are some people who’ve got good reasons to be very concerned about RCTV’s actions in the past, and I’m glad I get to hear from them as well. Thank you, Internet. (Which, by the way, is the only way I get to hear On the Media.)

The May basho at Ryogoku Kokugikan ended yesterday with a clash between two profoundly talented rikishi. One was Asashoryu, who has been the sole Yokozuna – grand champion – of the sport since Takanohana retired in 2003. The other was Hakuho, who held an Ozeki rank (one rank below Yokozuna) and defeated Asashoryu to win his second Emperor’s Cup in a row. (The match was truly one for the ages – very much worth the ninety seconds it will take you to watch it.)

The criteria to be promoted to Yokozuna aren’t exact, but it is generally accepted that winning two tournaments in a row as an Ozeki is sufficient for promotion. So unless the Japan Sumo Association does something very expected – shrugging off the recommendation of the Yokozuna Deliberation Council – Hakuho will be named Yokozuna, and sumo will have two Mongolian Yokozuna.

This is very, very good news for sumo fans. There’s been a stunning degree of predictability to sumo since late 2003, when Asashoryu became Yokozuna – he won five of six tournaments in 2004, all six in 2005, and went 4-2 in 2006 – he was forced to withdraw from one of the 2006 bashos with an elbow injury. Basically, there were three years where you could expect Asa to win every match he fought, where his few losses were worth watching closely to see what had happened.

Some of Asa’s dominance comes from the fact that he’s an utterly remarkable wrestler. He’s quite light for a rikishi – about 148kg – and wins his matches with a combination of speed, technique and strength. For those of us who watched huge wreslers like Akebono dominate sumo through their sheer size (Akebono’s fighting weight orbited around 235kg), Asa has been a revelation to watch, tangible evidence that sumo is an art form, not overweight men running into each other. But Asashoryu has also looked good because so many of the Ozeki have looked really, really bad – Kaio and Chiyotaikai in particular have probably held their rank too long, and Bulgarian rikishi Kotooshu has dissapointed since being promoted in January 2006.

My hope is that Hakuho, five years younger than Asashoryu, roughly the same mass, and still polishing his technique, will threaten Asa in many basho to come, giving fans a possible rivalry to follow. But sports rivalries aren’t just about great athletes – they’re about great storylines, and it’s unclear what storyline will prevail in the Japanese media.

Asashoryu isn’t very popular in Japan, to put it bluntly. He’s viewed as an anti-traditionalist: he’s been known to show emotion on the dohyo when winning matches, occasionally displaying a minor fist-pump; he pulled the hair of Kyokushuzan in the July 2003 tournament leading to his disqualification; he has been photographed wearing a suit (yes, this is considered a major transgression for rikishi). Asa’s strong Mongolian identity has helped cement the ire of some Japanese fans – some foreign rikishi have become figures in Japanese popular culture, becoming sumo commentators or entertainers. Asa has refused Japanese citizenship and caused something of a scandal when he chose to get married in Mongolia rather than in Japan. (This argument centered on the obligations a rikishi has to his oyakata – the “stablemaster” of a sumo training stable. Traditionally, the rikishi gives 60% of all earnings to the oyakata… and those earnings include wedding gifts. Asa’s oyakata demanded his share of Asa’s wedding gifts, despite the fact that the wedding was held in Mongolia, leading to an apparent confontation between the wrestler and his management.)

If you believe the Japanese press, Asashoryu is a rude, abusive drunk with no respect for sumo’s tradition. More to the point, you’d be led to believe he’s a cheat. One set of accusers claim that Asa has been paying opponents $6,500 a match to let him win bouts. Another set claim that Asa has been paid $25,000 by Hakuho to throw matches and let him become Yokozuna. A flurry of defamation suits have been filed against Shukan Gendai, a controversial Japanese weekly which has published the majority of these accusations.

The problem with sumo, of course, is that there can be a note of truth to these stories. Steven Levitt and Mark Duggan published an extraordinary paper with an econometric analysis of the final matches of sumo tournaments – they found evidence that wrestlers with losing records lost far more often than you would expect in their final matches against opponents who are “on the bubble” – i.e., with 7-7 records. This wouldn’t suggest that Asashoryu – who’s basically never had a losing record – would throw matches to Hakuho, but it opens the specter of match-fixing in a sport where there’s always a backstory to the action in the dohyo.

(My favorite, completely non-confirmable and wholly undocumented backstage story: According to one of the rowdy, unreputable sumo sites I read, Asashoryu attended the celebration of Hakuho’s wedding in Mongolia and promised the crowd that he would give Hakuho an unusual wedding gift: a GAZ-69 jeep. While these former Soviet-army vehicles are quite popular in rural Mongolia, it’s likely that Hakuho already has a much nicer car, leading to speculation that this was code for Asashoryu “giving” Hakuho the title as the 69th Yokozuna. Since Asa came into the final match yesterday at 10-4, with Hakuho at 14-0, there was no need for a “gift”… but sumo fans will speculate that Asa might have thrown the playoff match in the previous tournament, which gave the victory to Hakuho…)

Hakuho seems to have a great deal more support in Japan that Asashoryu. His backstory may help out – he was so small (62kg) when he first came to Japan that no sumo stable would accept him. Kyokushuzan, a widely-respected and pioneering Mongolia rikishi, intervened and found a place for him in his stable, coaching him through some of his early matches. Unlike Asa, he got married in Japan, and has made it clear that he wants to be “a yokozuna that everyone loves.”

Good luck with that. The Yokozuna many Japanese fans want to love is a Japanese-born rikishi. But given the poor quality of Japanese wrestlers, and the increasing dominance of the foreign born, it’s likely that Japanese fans may need to settle for a more loveable Mongolian, at least for a few years to come.

Bonus links: Banzuke.com has video footage of the first 14 days of the May basho – I’m anxiously awaiting the 15th day, so I can see the match between Asa and Hakuho. I recommend Hakuho’s defeat of Kotooshu on day 12 as a useful introduction to his skills. (Hakuho’s on the left – the Bulgarian is the tall guy on the right.) While you’re at it, watch my main man Ama bully the big Bulgarian on day 10…

Bruce Wallace with the LA Times has the definitive Asashoryu profile, as far as I’m concerned.

My friends at Radio Open Source are doing an online fund drive to keep their brilliant radio show on the air. The show marries Chris Lydon’s conversational genius – he’s one of very best interviewers in the business – with the power of the web to open discussions. Days before a show does on the air, the show’s staff post the idea and solicit ideas for guests, questions and discussion topics. The conversation continues after the show as well, and the most interesting shows generate vast and fascinating comment threads.

The show has had a rocky road, especially in its relationship with NPR – it’s not syndicated as widely as one would hope, and it’s been hard for the show to fundraise, due to NPR politics. (NPR asks shows to ask their listeners to support their local stations. But little of that money gets back to Radio Open Source.) The show was launched with expectation that it would receive core funding from UMass Lowell – that funding evaporated when the school changed chancellors.

Radio Open Source is what I’d like radio to be – it listens to its listeners, engages them, involves them with building shows, not just reacting to them. They’ve been great about giving voice to many Global Voices contributors and covering subjects many radio shows won’t touch. If you haven’t listened yet, please check them out. And if you feel as warmly about the show as I do, and you’re able to, please write them a check – I just did.

At this time of year, I’ve usually got a list an arm’s length long of projects I need to work on around the house. Eight years ago, Rachel and I bought a house that hadn’t been occupied for over a dozen years. While we got a great deal on the property, we also got seven summer’s worth of projects. This isn’t a bad thing – my favorite weekend passtimes involve hammers, paintbrushes and wheelbarrows, and I have been half-considering buying a Greek Revival farmhouse in Cheshire just so I could have more home renovation projects to work on.

But our house is in pretty good shape these days. Last year, I repaired a large section of roof, and with help from a contractor friend, replaced two large windows and 30′ x 20′ wall covered in clapboard. This year, there’s little more than cracks to fill in the driveway, a coat of paint on the chimney, the lawn to mow…

Except.

There’s one beam in the kitchen that looks on the verge of falling from the ceiling. It’s the victim of a pernicious roof leak that I haven’t been able to eliminate, despite dozens of hours of work, the intervention of several skilled professionals, and thousands of dollars in abortive roof repairs by a charming but ineffectual Irish carpenter. The problem, ultimately, is that no one seems to be able to determine where the leak is coming from. Three rooflines could be causing the leak. Or it could be one of two walls, or an internal plumbing leak. Or gremlins. Basically, all we know is that it shouldn’t be happening and that we don’t know why it’s happening.

It’s cryptogenic.

Because we don’t know what’s causing the leak, it’s very hard to eliminate it. I’ve caulked roof seams, replaced siding, used expansion foam and silicone to close holes that might allow water into the skin of the house. Nothing works, and I’m running short on theories to test next.

On the whiteboard in my office, where I list the projects I need to complete, there’s a year-old entry: “replaster kitchen beam”. But why replaster when I know that the next major rainstorm is going to cause another leak, dropping my carefully-applied spackle onto the kitchen floor? The ragged, unplastered beam is a constant reminder that, contrary to all other indications, everything is not okay here. There’s an unsolved problem here, one that ultimately is going to damage this part of the house if I don’t figure out how to solve it.

This is not a post about home repair.

Last Christmas, Rachel had a stroke. While we sat on the couch watching “Little Miss Sunshine”, the left side of her field of vision disappeared. A month later, most of her vision returned, and since then, she’s been in apparent good health. But the more we’ve looked, the more mysterious the Christmas stroke gets.

For one thing, it’s one of three strokes that she’s apparently experienced. Those strokes were all in different parts of the brain, and all the likely explanations for stroke in a young women (like patent foramen ovale) have been eliminated. As we’ve moved from local medical experts to nationally-recognized stroke experts to the experts those nationally-recognized stroke experts consult with, we’re starting to see a difference of opinion in doctors. Our family doctor, a dear friend for many years, has been urging us to accept that we’ll never know why the strokes occurred. The stroke experts, on the other hand, are tracking down different genetic factors, trading theories and eliminating conventional wisdom.

We went to see a new stroke specialist yesterday, hoping he’d tell us the stroke was cryptogenic and that we should focus on staying healthy in the future. Instead, he explained why all the possible explanations offered by other doctors don’t make sense. Long term use of birth control pills? Nope – associated with strokes in the veins, not in the arteries. Sudafed use? Again, a loose correlation to strokes in the veins, but not a good explanation for arterial stroke. A staph infection inside the heart? We’d see scarring on the mitral valve.

In other words, the explanations we’ve been getting our heads around – high blood pressure + birth control pills + sudafed = stroke – isn’t accurate, if this expert is to be believed. Which means the mystery is still open. Which in turn means that there may be some underlying condition that causes the strokes, which we might or might not be able to treat. Or that the next round of tests leaves us where we were before yesterday: cryptogenic stroke.

I’m a strong, smart, hard-working guy. If I know what needs to be done, I will get it done. Not knowing what to do? That’s hard.

There are moments in life where you’re facing enough similar challenges that it’s easy to conclude that God / the universe / chance / higher-power-of-your-choice is trying to teach you a specific lesson. This lesson seems to be about living with uncertainty. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m going through a series of laser treatments and drug injections to preserve my vision from damage due to diabetic retinopathy. Those treatments aren’t working as well as we’d like. Why? No one knows. What should we do next? No one knows. Why am I, a reasonably healthy guy who takes care of his diabetes, dealing with these complications? No one knows.

Over the past four months, Rachel’s had several MRIs, two TEEs, a contrast MRA and endless bloodwork. I’ve had three laser treatments and an avastin injection. We’ve both had more than a few sleepless nights. For the most part, I think we’re holding up okay – we’re both getting up and going to work every day, making it to meetings and conferences, seeing friends, watching bad TV.

But the unplastered beam is visible, too. We haven’t sat down to pay the bills for two months, and I haven’t sent any of the invoices I need to send so we can pay those bills. We haven’t folded the laundry in months. And I’ve got a steady low-grade panic about an upcoming trip to Tanzania and South Africa. If something happens and Rachel needs to go to the hospital, it would require 24 to 36 hours for me to get back. I can tell myself that nothing’s going to happen… but nothing was supposed to happen when we sat down on the couch to watch a movie five months ago.

I can’t fix the roof leak, but I can plaster the beam. That’s the first project for tomorrow. It won’t solve the underlying problem, but it lets me get through the day without worrying about it. Sometimes that’s all you can do.